Simple – The agency behind the South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas’ future

As the final votes were tallied on Labor’s historic South Australian election result last month, industry eyes started turning to the agency behind the much-talked-about campaign, Simple.

For Labor, the landslide victory saw Peter Malinauskas become the first Opposition Leader to oust an incumbent Premier since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the first in nearly half a century to unseat a South Australian Government after just one term.

But for Simple, it started as just another brief for the busy integrated marketing agency.

Simple’s managing director, David Stocker, first met Malinauskas in 2020 over lunch at Parisi’s, a short stroll from his King William Road studio. At the time, Steven Marshall was riding a pandemic high, with universally positive approval ratings and every expectation his Government would breeze into a second term.

Like most South Australians, Stocker wasn’t aware of the name Peter Malinauskas. And that was the problem.

The pandemic had focused the state’s attention on Premier Steven Marshall, along with chief public health officer Nicola Spurrier and Police Commissioner Grant Stevens.

Malinauskas commited his bipartisan support, which was respectable, but left him out of the media spotlight.

When it came to the brief, campaign director, Reggie Martin, said: “It was clear from the start that we needed people to know Peter. They needed to know him to trust his policy platform.”

Says Stocker: “I’ve never followed politics closely. I’m a swing voter, and voted for Steven Marshall in 2018,” he added. But Malinauskas immediately struck him as different.

“He was statesmanlike, but refreshingly relatable. We quickly discovered we shared a birthday —although Peter has a few years on me— and chatted through topics ranging from footy to our upbringings.”

“Peter was everything I expected a politician not to be.” And so the campaign was born.

(Pictured above: Simple managing director David Stocker and South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas MP. Photograph: Matt Schirripa / Simple)

While the pandemic was the focus at the time, Stocker questioned the relevance it would play come the election in 2022, still 18 months out at that point. Thinking South Australia would be through the worst of it and, if not, that the state would at least be tired of it, the natural focus for the campaign became the future.

Says Stocker: “In its most basic form, the campaign positioning was ‘familiar, but fresh’. We presented the same SA Labor Party its voter base knew and aligned with, but a reinvented version of itself that was worthy of a fresh look by undecided voters.

The first initiative, “Meet Pete”, targeted young and largely disengaged voters, inviting them to ask Peter anything — about politics, or literally anything else. Over 1,000 questions were posed, with Malinauskas taking countless hours out of his busy schedule to film short answers on everything from his favourite footy team (it’s the Power) to his position on pineapple on pizza (which he’s sheepishly okay with).

Says Stocker: “This provided the electorate with an early glimpse into Peter the person, while providing me a glimpse into Peter’s relentless energy, and his unashamedly open book approach to politics. This carried through the campaign, and his private wedding album is still sitting on my desk after using it to source imagery of his life.”

The ad —“I’m a husband, a father of three, a weekend gardener, a pretty average footy player and Leader of the South Australian Labor Party… Hi, I’m Peter Malinauskas”— and its effectiveness is now history, drawing parallels to Kevin Rudd’s famous “Kevin 07” campaign.

The ad launched on Australia Day, almost 3 months before polls opened, and immediately put Malinauskas into the hearts and minds of South Australians.

The morning after the ad first aired, Malinauskas was stopped on his way into the office and ribbed about being “a pretty average footy player”. His first thought was that the person had been a plant to give him confidence about the ad, but this soon became a daily occurrence for Malinauskas.

As the Marshall Government navigated a range of issues —from scandals within the SA Liberal Party, to community pushback on November 2021’s border reopening— the campaign remained positive, and relentlessly focused on what research consistently showed to be the biggest issue to South Australains: health.

The one component of political campaigning that’s most unlike traditional marketing is ‘comparative’ —or negative— advertising.

Says Stocker: “We don’t typically get the opportunity to build our clients’ brands, while simultaneously attacking others. However, we were intent on delivering a positive campaign, so we stepped lightly here.

“We knew Labor didn’t have a perfect record in health. Peter Malinauskas had been Health Minister under the past Labor government’s damaging “Transforming Health” agenda, and had been associated with the closure of the Repat. But our relentless focus on the future helped to deflect the Liberal’s attempts to mar Malinauskas.

“The other thing that helped us were the facts. The health system was in bad shape, and ramping —the visible manifestation of the failing health system— had never been worse.

In an election that was decided on health, “Ash the Ambo” proved the campaign’s pièce de résistance.

With the Marshall Government’s final days shrouded by claims it was doing more to silence than support the ambulance service, this ad was simple in its strategy: buy ad spots, and allow Ash, a real-life paramedic, to share her cry for help. The same cries that had been chalked on ambulances for months, and that spoke of a dire situation that culminated in the deaths of 5 South Australians waiting for delayed ambulances in the fortnight leading up to the election.

It proved the most controversial ad of the campaign, attracting a complaint from the Liberals and ultimately a finding from the Electoral Commissioner in the campaign’s dying hours that the line “ramping is worse than ever” was misleading.

Says Stocker: “The attention this ad received correlates with its devastating effectiveness. The reality is that data can be framed in different ways, and while the independent umpire found the ‘worse than ever’ line misleading based on one specific data set, South Australians knew from their own lived experiences that the ad’s message was true.”

For Simple, it wasn’t just a contest of Labor vs. Liberal, but one with cross-town rivals KWP who were behind the Liberal campaign.

Says Stocker: “I have a lot of respect for KWP, but we have a healthy rivalry. They ran a surprisingly negative campaign, but we didn’t see anything we hadn’t considered, tested and prepared for.

“It was a huge effort, with most of Simple’s 30+ team touching the campaign at some point.”

While polls can be precarious, David was always quietly confident.

“As a strategist that cares most about results, an election campaign provides one in the most absolute terms.”

With the industry talking about the overwhelmingly successful campaign and historic election result, Stocker’s now looking to the future.