Many people think of the “Australian Made” campaign as being something relatively new. In fact its not and goes back to the very early 80’s and the height of the community service advertising boom (mostly brought about because TV stations had a manditory amount of CS ads they had to run).
This campaign is from 1981 at the height of Life. Be In It’s popularity and its easy to see the heritage of this ad.
A little after this campaign, John Singleton asked John Williamson to write a song for a TV programme he was planning about “True Blue Aussies” . The show never made it to air but the theme song was written. Some years later when Singo was working on a new “Australian made” campaign he went back to Williamson to use the song …. and that gave us “True Blue”.
The following clip isn’t actually the ad campaign because I can’t find a copy of that but it does demonstrate the phenomenal power of that song reminiscent in some ways of the iconic song/jingles of the 80s.
In 2004 the campaign looked like this.
And in 2009
Personally I don’t its achieved the emotional heights that it did in the earlier two incarnations of the campaign.
