Addison Gazal is an accomplished strategist with over a decade of experience in brand strategy, advertising, and design. He has built strong client relationships with brands like Uber, Unilever, Kellanova, MyPayNow and Uniqlo, delivering impactful creative strategies.
He has overseen large-scale brands and campaigns, championing evidence-based strategies. His passion for people first brand strategies and creative campaigns has earned him numerous awards, including Webbies, Lovies, and Communication Arts Awards
LBB> My first campaign …
Addison> I think my first project was a start-up detox tea company. They came in full blank slate and really let us do pretty much whatever we wanted, which was amazing — though it did really throw me off when I started getting clients who actually had a brief.
The name we landed on was Tea LC (Yes like the band). I thought that naming a company was one of the coolest things ever. I still have a sealed batch somewhere even though it doesn’t exist anymore. RIP. But that was a branding project, not an actual campaign.
My first ‘proper’ campaign work was in tactical campaigns for Uber (Uber Puppies, Uber Jet, Uber Ice Cream). There were quite a few early in my career — Uber really wanted to be everywhere, and they were, and we luckily got to be a part of it.
One that I love because I’m inherently anti-authority was a campaign we did when the QLD premier banned Uber as a last-ditch attempt to keep the taxi companies afloat. This was outdated and we knew it. So — we drove people to sign a petition. Every signature was used to generate an unofficial ‘fine’ (we copied the design of the fines Uber drivers were getting at the time). We then printed them out (sorry, ESG was in its infancy so please don’t blame us) and delivered sacks full of them to the Premier via horse and carriage.
We also did a Drinkwise x Uber collab where we got excited and spent 85% of our budget on licencing the Golden Girls soundtrack. These three spots were the first TVC’s I worked on. Fun.
LBB> The campaign that someone else did that made me jealous …
I [redacted] love this campaign. I remember seeing this case study and loving it. I love real, tangible, relatable campaigns.
What I love most is you can tell this wasn’t born out of data (I’m currently on quite the anti-data train, we rely on it too much and it’s going to lead to a sea of homogenous, best practice campaigns that leave people uninspired and bored).
It’s a human problem. It’s relatable. It’s solved in an interesting way and it works.
Honourable mention goes to ‘I just want milk that tastes like real milk’.
LBB> The campaign that taught me some painful but useful lessons…
Addison> There was an Australian launch campaign I worked on for an international airline company and the client and whole team was amazing. However, we had been briefed with pretty solid budget and the whole team was super keen to get started. Then last minute our budget gets absolutely shredded — media and creative — Porsche to pushbike. When we question this, we are then told that global massacred our budget to get Jackie Chan as a global ambassador. I was excited again — I was about to meet a childhood hero. I was dreaming of quoting Rush Hour with him on set, winning awards with him looking on from the table proudly, raising his glass with a cheeky wink a la great Gatsby Leo meme.
This was short-lived.
Global sent us four pre-approved photos and said to make them work.
LBB> The work that I’m proudest of…
Addison> This is a tricky one. I’m proud of a lot of things I’ve been a part of (brag) but there’s different ways to cut it. I currently do a lot of behaviour change work with Cancer Institute NSW and that is truly rewarding — it also helps me ensure that the scales of greater good/questionably moral are tipping towards ‘good’ for me.
BUT that’s the vanilla answer. If I’m to put on my self-congratulatory hat I would have to go with the MyPayNow launch.
We worked on this brand from inception, when we came on board they were looking for a brand identity, UI/UX for the App and website, and some digital ads. We ended up seeing this brand through a huge journey. It was chaos but we all thrived during it.
Two weeks before launch we learned that Meta didn’t allow ads for this product as it technically fell under short term loans — lol.
So — the client instead decided to go balls to the wall and give us a substantial budget for OOH. What was going to be a subtle launch with 5-10k a week to test the waters on Meta turned into a full-blown ATL campaign with no digital spend (we weren’t allowed to do it but knowing we could attribute the results to pure ATL was intoxicating). We had OOH custom wraps across the Eastern seaboard. The Sydney city ones got pulled because they were ‘too purple’ and ‘eye-catching’ according to one MP who doesn’t seem to understand the definition of advertising.
JCDecaux still refuses to this day to give me their name.
Government interventions aside, the campaign was incredibly effective and we rode that momentum. We turned around a 3D sloth mascot, a 3D TVC for a Married at First Sight partner ship (pre-AI) in 6 weeks from brief to CAD (the movement of the sloth was actually based on me being motion tracked in a monkey onesie. Brag. I’ll attach a photo) and a 60-second brand spot that was just a classic Kinks song with one line of brand VO at the end.
Just all in all a lot of fun.
I’m proud of this one because we got to see what we could do with an open client, unknown brand, and a pretty great budget.