Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows an Australia Post advertisement. A man sweeps in St Marks Square in Venice as the Andante from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 4 plays. An attractive young woman sits at an outdoor café table as a voice-over, the 'voice’ of her father, narrates the fond words of the letter she is reading. The camera lingers on her smiling face. A waiter approaches to take her order, interrupting her reverie. The Australia Post advertising tagline 'We Deliver’ and the Australia Post logo appear.

Educational value points

• This advertisement promotes the letter as a valued form of communication, especially for overseas travellers. Prior to the technological revolution of the late 20th century, airmail letters were the cheapest and most popular way for international travellers to stay in touch with friends and relatives. Long-distance communication via email and mobile phones would begin to be widely used within a decade of this advertisement being shown in 1986.

• The advertisement emphasises the personal and tangible qualities of letters, through handwriting, notepaper and enclosures such as photographs, and suggests that the composition and reading of a letter is a very personal experience. The voice-over 'reading’ the letter includes phrases such as 'we are closer now’ to convey the intimacy created through the medium of the letter.

• The 'We Deliver’ advertising campaign raised the profile of Australia Post in the 1980s. While Australia Post had a monopoly on delivery of standard letters, its marketing strategy included promoting letter-writing to young people and increasing letter-writing activity overall in order to compete with growing electronic services and to increase national confidence in the reliability of the mail service, hence the succinct tagline: 'We Deliver’.

• This clip is representative of a genre of advertisement designed around a more intimate approach to marketing a product that became popular in Australia in the 1980s. The underlying message is that Australia Post brings happiness by keeping families close. This same message was exploited, arguably more powerfully, by Telecom (now Telstra) in its advertisements for international telephone calls.

• This genre of commercial was innovative in that it sought to influence its audience obliquely, rather than through more traditional and obvious means. Attractive visuals, family relationships and an intriguing narrative about a young woman’s travels combine to capture the audience’s imagination, replacing techniques such as repeatedly showing or describing a product.

• Australia Post is one of Australia’s largest government organisations. From the first tiny, one-person post office in Sydney in 1809, the organisation continued to grow and to adapt to changes in communications technology until by 2000 it achieved profits of $402 million before tax. By the end of the 1970s, Australia Post had become a government business enterprise, trading as a corporation with a board of directors accountable to the Australian Government. Australia Post has raised its profile in the marketplace by diversifying its range of services to include bill-paying and sales of products.

• Melbourne-based advertising agency Monahan Dayman Adams (MDA), the creators of this advertisement, grew to become the second largest advertising agency in Australia and the first to be floated on the stock exchange. Their most successful campaigns included 'We Deliver’ for Australia Post and 'Life. Be In It’ for the Victorian Department of Youth, Sport and Recreation. MDA merged with Mojo, a rival agency, soon after this advertisement was aired.