Australia Day is on January 2026. While not completely supported as the right day to talk about national unity, a feature over the past two decades has been the Lamb advert, put out by the Meat and Livestock Association to promote lamb as the big day’s barbecue food of choice. It must work - I have some in the fridge right now.
In 2005 the MLA started putting out ads from around New Years, headed by ex-AFL footballer Sam Kekovich (Australia’s ‘Lambassador’). The first one is pretty simple but pretty good, and set the tone for what has become an annual advertisement.
Since then they’ve only grown in complexity and tried to navigate a range of different social issues, and had a go at the whole issue of Australianness and Australia Day. The 2026 Lamb ad has been airing now for a few weeks and is pretty much on form as a future classic.
Apart from celebrating the ad campaign as one of the mandatory elements that made an Australian Christmas, I was wondering whether anywhere else had such a thematically sustained advertising campaign that ran over two 20+ years.
Like it.
“Oldest continuous cultures”…“Sucked in, Egypt!..respectfully” [new slang phrase for me]
“We’ve got world-class summer olympians…and well-meaning winter olympians!”
And was that a winking dig at the capital city, in the last seconds? I’m guessing Canberra has a reputation for being boringly bureaucratic.
I assume that sentence has an extra “two” in there by accident.
In the USA, the Budweiser Clydesdales are similar. The Anheuser Busch brewery company has used the team of eight horses towing a 1900s beer wagon as mascots / logos since the 1930s.
From the 1980s until 2010 most years they produced a special Christmas-themed ad involving them. All of which were sappy sentimental and some of which were memorably funny. Once the company got sold to a European multinational all that sentimental marketing tradition went down the drain.
Somehow life here in Australia had conspired to prevent me seeing this year’s ad until it was posted here. That is arguably the most laughs per minute of anything that I have seen for years. Terrific writing and beautifully played.
Even in the first 30 seconds you have:
Leader of Australia’s Merriment & Bliss
“Know what? He’s very busy.”
I’M SAM KEKOVICH
Footballs around the office
“Look it up” - because it is true. Australia did fall to 11th in 2025.
“We’re not behind the Poms are we?” “God no!”
Sam talks in front of 2 different paintings matching his posture.
Boxing kangaroo.
And it continues at this rate. Mind you a lot are fairly Aussie-centric.
“You could say we are girt by it.”
“Succulent Chinese meal”
“I’m just waiting for a mate.”
“I didn’t know they sold tools.”
If only they could have got a snippet of Rhonda and Ketut at the barbie in there.
And then there was the Budweiser Clydesdale 9/11 tribute, aired only once, during the following year’s Super Bowl. Still gets me in the feels every time I watch it.
Yeah. I loved the Budweiser Clydesdales’ Christmas commercials. The team pulling their wagon through a rural landscape, in the snow, to nice instrumental Christmas music. “A Christmas card for you, from Budweiser,” (or something like that) from the announcer in the last five seconds. Great commercials.
I got to meet the Budweiser Clydes once, when they were invited to the Calgary Stampede. Beautiful horses. I got to meet them, then, they were hitched to the wagon, and the driver, a co-driver, and the ever-present Dalmatian dog drove them out.
I owned a part-Clyde once, and though she was mixed (we figured the other half was Morgan), she had the conformation of a Clyde. She, like all Clydes, was a big but gentle horse, easy to train and eager to please. Knowing the breed as I did, I enjoyed those Budweiser commercials all the much more.
Smokey Bear advertisements have been saying “Only YOU can prevent wildfires” for about 80 years now. (Or “forest fires” if we have to get pedantic about it.)
That’s a PSA campaign, though, not really a commercial campaign.
I watched the lamb ad. Between the accents, the slang, and the cultural references it was pretty impenetrable to the 'Murrican after the first minute. But it was clearly great fun and they had fun making it. There were a lot of little details that really sang and I’m sure in my ignorance I missed more than I noticed.
That’s definitely a Christmas tradition to savour.
As to Budweiser Clydesdales, wiki has a good article, and YouTube can serve up an assortment of commercials.
Well, I must’ve soaked up some Aussie knowledge (I blame the Dope), because it was hilarious. It showed off how Aussie fauna all want to kill you (platypus, and the beautiful beach that no one can swim at).
And stuff i didn’t recognized I inferred, like the hardware store “where the sausages outsell the tools” (with a shot of a sausage vendor out front… I’d move there just for that!).
I just related it to the hot dog vendors outside of Home Depot, totally understood most of it even if I had to watch it a couple of times and then on captions
In the late '70s, Miller High Life made their own “horse at Christmas” ad, which, too, ran every Christmastime, for decades. One horse (not eight), pulling a sleigh (not a wagon)…and though many people loved the ad, and looked forward to seeing it every year, a lot of them thought it was a Budweiser ad, undoubtedly due to the horse.
The sausage reference is to the dominant hardware store chain - Bunnings. Every weekend all Bunnings stores offer a kiosk tent and barbecue (‘sausage sizzle’) set up for local charity, sport, social groups who sell a very basic sausage sanger - a sausage on a slice of bread. Bunnings pays for gas and the group (Ive helped out at Girl Guides and soccer team days) pays for the raw materials and keeps the proceeds.
The main point is that a weekend trip to mooch around the big Hammer Barn is a popular suburban ritual and buying a sanga is your way to help a community / charity group raise a few bucks even though its not your personal thing.
School P&C groups will put on a sausage sizzle when our elections are using the school hall as a polling place. These are known as democracy sausages.
There is a national map of food supplied for polling day - see what hapened at our last federal election -
I’ll once again mention one of my current YouTube habits, Tara Farms from somewhere in Victoria. Sheep farming (across thousands of acres), recently with added chickens. Not for those who are excessively squeamish (the occasional flesh-eating maggot, dead animal, assisted birth, minor wounds, etc.) or those who don’t care for occasionally confrontational, delightfully potty-mouthed Australian farmers:
