Increase election awareness and voter participation

Election voting is compulsory in Australia. While voting participation rates remain relatively high, various issues have combined to challenge the election landscape.



The Electoral Commission of Queensland (ECQ) is a state-based independent commission charged with facilitating local and state elections in Queensland. ECQ appointed New Word Order (NWO) to their creative services account in 2023. In early 2024, NWO produced a highly rated local government election campaign. Later in the year, an even more substantial project was required.



2024 was the year of a crucial state election in Queensland. ECQ briefed NWO to produce a multi-platform advertising campaign to reach Queensland’s almost 4 million enrolled voters. There were multiple objectives for this campaign, summarised as follows:



Awareness—make all enrolled voters aware that there was an upcoming election and remind them that voting was compulsory.



Engagement—even with a compulsory voting system, having voters engaged and validated by the electoral process has been proven to increase participation rates.



Functionality—every election in Australia is different in terms of how you can vote, where you can vote, pre-polling, postal voting and other electoral functions. We needed to communicate this dry information in an interesting way.



Voting consideration—the proliferation of information on connected channels, particularly social media, has given rise to the prevalence of misinformation and disinformation about elections. A key objective was to encourage voters to stop and consider what kind of information they were seeing.



With these objectives in mind, we set about creating a multi-executional campaign that addressed key messages separately. However, we recognised the importance of stitching together all the different campaign elements with a common thread.



Ballot boxes are a powerful visual mnemonic in Australian elections. They are always associated with polling stations. But we took creative licence and moved the ballot boxes out “into the wild”. With a combination of iconic Queensland locations and a stylistic use of studio and post-production imaging, this campaign creative was equal doses of epic and fun. The end result was a project that garnered outstanding success and resonated strongly with Queensland’s voting audience.