“We want to embarrass the government on a global stage”: how the Lockout Memorials campaign took Keep Sydney Open worldwide
“Are you fucked off about the lockouts?”
That’s the subject line of an all-office email Jonno Seidler sent a week into a new job, whichkicked off the now-notorious Lockout Memorial plaques campaign in support of Keep Sydney Open.
“I was feeling increasingly disempowered and having a lot of frustrating conversations with a lot of my friends who didn’t care or didn’t see the problem with the lockouts,” he says. “I realised when I started at my new agency [M&C Saatchi Sydney] that I was surrounded by some really intelligent, really creative people who might be able to help me bring something to life.
“[The body of the email] said, ‘If so, email me.’ I’d been there for a week; literally no one knew who I was.”
The email resulted in Seidler, a copywriter as well as alongtime music journalist, teaming up with art director Tristan Cornelius to create a pro bono campaign that blew up – generating “tens of millions” impressions with next to no media budget – and was shortlisted for this year’s Cannes Lions in the PR category.
The plaques, crafted by Sydney sculptor Oliver Tanner and placed guerrilla-style outside more than a dozen venues in September 2016,were the perfect symbol for thedamage done to thecity’s most vibrant nightlife areas, as well as the frustration felt by locals at the depleted state of affairs following the lockout laws introduced by the Baird government in 2014.
A host of local acts including Flume, Flight Facilities, Nina Las Vegas and honorary Sydneysider Lorde featured on the nameplates attached to shuttered venues such as Hugo’s, Phoenix/Q Bar and Goodgod.
Almost one year on, Seidler is still working with Keep Sydney Open as a media liaison (alongside Inertia Music’s Meg Williams) in the fight to reinvigorate Sydney’s nightlife – and even has plans for new plaques that will celebrate the rebirth and renewal of venues and precincts, rather than the slow slide into respectable, funereal quiet.
Ahead of Keep Sydney Open’s sprawling multi-venue party Meet Me in The Cross this weekend, TMN chatted to Seidler about howthe Lockout Memorials campaign caught on around the world, and the secretto mobilising music fans.
The mobilisation that has actually happened around Keep Sydney Open is amazing. Why do you think it’s been so effective? It’s hard to get people to give a shit about, you know, what’s essentially a policy argument.
It is. In the wake of the success of the campaign that we did, I’ve had a lot of university students come and contact me because they’re all writing pieces about slacktivism and campaign effectiveness and how to get young people mobilised. They all kept asking me, “What is the secret and how do you do it?”
It’s something that they say in advertising a lot, that if you actually come up with an insight that is based on a truth, then people will respond to that. Our insight was based on a truth – you might not necessarily care about what is happening to venues in Kings Cross right now, but you sure as fuck either remember being there or listen to music actively that was related to that venue, you know? Once you can tie those things together, [you] make that palpable for people.
The fact that we had world-class talent who were willing to put their reputations on the line for this, I think really helps. It’s one thing to say, “Oh, you know, blah blah blah cares about it,” but it was really like the whole music community in Sydney. They are very, as we realised, very influential. A lot of them are kicking major goals overseas. A lot of them are very famous overseas. When people hear it from people that they trust, that’s when policy turns into action, I think.
Yeah. How did you go about developing that audience profile?
I use anecdotal evidence first and foremost – I talk to a lot of people whenever I’m working on something, what I did discover is that if you find something that a lot of people are that they don’t realise that they are, it helps.
Most people love music, right? [Australians] spend a lot of money on music, more than we do on sport annually. I was kind of like, ‘Well, I’ve been trying to save my people by where they live or what they do with their Friday nights’. Let’s get to a base level understanding – all of you love music. A lot of you love Australian music and a lot of that music comes from Sydney. That was kind of the way that we segmented to start with and we moved out from there.
The core base for a long time was people who were in their late 20s to 30s – which is actually people who are almost older than demographically will be directly affected when you think about it. It was people almost fighting for something that didn’t even matter to them so much right now, but understood the value of it overall.
What have you learned about that kind of audience? What would you tell someone who wants to get through to those people?
I’d say don’t be disingenuous. I think music fans are particularly conscious of brands’ involvement because people my age or a bit younger or even a bit older have watched events like Big Day Out and other things become massive corporate entities.
The one thing I said very early on when we did this [Memorials] campaign was, “This can’t come from Keep Sydney Open. This has to come from the artists”. Because when the artist speaks – particularly when you have artists like Alison Wonderland or Flume or The Preatures, who are very outspoken about what they believe in – it certainly has a level of legitimacy that you cannot argue with. They’re saying something and it’s coming from them, even though it’s your campaign. You cannot argue with somebody who’s sold out Red Rocks three times over telling you that without Goodgod, he wouldn’t have gone anywhere. It really drives it home. You have to get artists on the side. Rather than feeding them quotes, you have to let them do it themselves. You have to actually want them to be passionate enough.
That’s why you decided to put the emphasis on the artists’ names on the plaques rather than like the venues that you were memorialising?
Precisely, because the hierarchy changed. The original version was to do the venues and having the artists at the top. We changed that around when we realised that using them as evangelists and letting them own it and letting them own that story. Every plaque has a different statistic or story about what those artists did. The more that they started talking about it, the more they realised how important it was for them.
Obviously, the Cannes thing is a nice recognition, but how else are you measuring the campaign’s success?
My words were, “We want to embarrass the government on a global stage.” My worry was that it wasn’t getting outside of Sydney and definitely wasn’t getting outside of Australia.
There’s nothing worse for a government than people from overseas saying, “Wait a second. I don’t want to come here. There’s nothing to do. There’s nowhere to go.” That was a major KPI for us, which means websites like Billboard and MixMag, [as well as] artists who are not Australian start talking about it. We had people calling in from France. We had coverage from place we would have never expected.
There’s that, and then there’s metrics just in terms of the number of people who saw the wrap video that we did where Flume donated his track [Heater, unreleased at the time] to it, which massively helped us in terms of building up PR and stuff like that. You’ve got like close to a million people who saw that. The impressions that came off that were in the tens of millions. I mean, we had no media budget. We had nothing for this. The whole thing cost us less than a grand to make.
In terms of efficacy, it was just incredible to be able to say, “Wow. There are people around the world who love Flume or who love The Presets or whatever who are picking up and going, ’What is going on in Sydney? What is happening here?’” That’s really what we wanted. We wanted that attention and we wanted people to actually start talking about it in a different way.
Do you think The Cross is on its way back up? There’s definitely a deliberate push happening, but it kind of doesn’t feel self-sustaining yet.
I think that The Cross is obviously very complicated – there is definitely still a scene there. Is it the same as it was in 2006? Probably not, but then there were a lot of chronic issues happening that had nothing to do with the music and had to do with management.
Obvious The Cross remains very important for a lot of [artists] because it’s one of the few places that they can play. We feel like it needs the support. We’ve got real estate developers coming in there with billion dollar contracts. I’m not sure it will, but I think there will always be a place for live music at The Cross and I think that we can’t be complacent and just say, “Oh well, the developers have it.” We really have to fight for it because it is, for a lot of people, the spiritual home of music in Sydney.
And it’s not just electronic [music]. That was a lot of feedback that we got when we were trying to do the plaque thing as well. People were saying it’s just electronic music. I’m like, “Well, no it wasn’t because I used to play rock tunes at Candy’s Apartment”. A lot of artists who became DJs were not DJs and played in bands who played at World Bar. I just think that the criticism that says “Rock belongs in the Annandale” is just not true. It would be really good to have people out there showing that we’re actually still there for them as much as they’re there for themselves.
And ticket sales for Meet Me In The Cross will go straight back into KSO?
Yes. It’s gotten to the point now where we’ve had to make ourselves an actual entity because everyone was kind of running on fumes. It’s not like we’re paying ourselves or anything, but I think we’ve exhausted our favours bucket a few too many times. There’s only so many times you can ask people to donate sound systems, to come and help you sell t-shirts, come and organise entire rallies to lobby the government.
At some point, you have to have an organisational structure – we’re not going to be millionaires out of it by any stretch of the imagination, but it will help us when something big does happen. We can actually go and be there and have the resources to be able to stand up and make our voices heard.
Meet Me In The Cross takes place this Saturday night across Kings Cross Hotel,The World Bar,Candys Apartment,Potts Point Hotel(formerlyKit & Kaboodle),Crane Bar,Jangling Jack’sandSweethearts Rooftop, as well as The Old Growler. Tickets are on sale now via Eventbrite.