Gruen delves into new Roy Hill ad: “If you don’t support mining, I won’t support athletes, and we won’t do well at the Olympics.”
Gina Rinehart’s new Olympics commercial for Roy Hill came under fire in last week’s episode of Gruen on the ABC. The new Roy Hill commercial promotes Rinehart’s support of the Australian Olympic team but also pushes the contribution the mining industry makes to Western Australia.
Gruen co-host and former CEO of Leo Burnett Australia, Todd Sampson, summed it up with “The problem with advertising is that you can buy it”.
Sampson points out that Rinehart and Clive Palmer have used advertising for their own political means.
“I’m ok with there being an ad that’s promoting mining and there being an ad that promotes the Olympics, but she’s (Rinehart) conflated these two things together, and it makes it super irritating. It’s referred to as ‘sports washing’. It’s been around for a long time. People use sports. You see fossil-fuel companies disproportionately use sports in this country. So, coal, oil, gas, they’re all over our athletes. They’re all over the jerseys, they’re all over the grounds and the reason is it’s an association strategy. So what they want is they want to pull the goodness of the Olympics, the goodness of athletes training and overcoming barriers, the goodness of winning, and they want that to wash away some of the negatives that they have as businesses. And this is a kind of horrible example of someone overly using that.”
Sampson said what irks him the most about the ad is the threat at the end.
“Let’s be clear on what she means, because she’s not. The ad, for all its horrible execution, it is fairly clear, which is that if you don’t support mining, I won’t support athletes, and we won’t do well at the Olympics.”
Gruen co-host Russel Howcroft also weighed in: “I think that’s a really important part of the big Australian mining businesses and the other big businesses as well. They should invest in Australian sports, etcetera, and Australian culture. And I’ve got no issues with them advertising, I think that’s a good idea.
“But at some point in time someone has got to knock on the door and say, Mrs Rinehart, no, this is not a good, this is not a good execution. Because you, in an advertising sense, you’re competing against BHP. BHP do some really good advertising. Like, you know, it’s up there. Rio Tinto is now advertising. Their advertising is up there. And of course other corporate brands, like a Shell for example, they do very good advertising.
“So, there’s an advertising competition element to this as well, which I think has been ignored by Roy Hill and those that are advising Mrs Rinehart.”
Click here to view the Gruen episode on ABC iview. The discussion on the new Roy Hill ad begins at the 25:20 mark.
9 Comments
maccas sponsored da olympics for yearz
Horrible scumbag human advertising something that doesn’t really belong to her at all. We should advertise nationalising the mining industry. Look at Norway. That’s how it’s done.
How was this even allowed to run with all the blatant misrepresentations. You’d think CAD would have scuppered it.
She thinks she is our saviour leader queen
Since when we do Gruen reporting here?
Who made it?
In house by all accounts, including the terrible script. Promoting your sponsorship of our Olympic athletes is one thing, but using them to segue into a propaganda message about mining that ends in a not even thinly veiled threat is appalling. Who in their right mind would think this would be good for Hancock Prospecting and its brands?
The talent is bang on! The quasi-aristocratic accent of Australia’s richest person in tandem with a Saffa CEO.
I’m convinced! Dig away, my mining overlords.
No credits is always a giveaway. Whoever did it has no idea. Rule one, don’t have your Supers up while you’re VO is saying something completely different. And that’s the least of the mistakes.