Yesfest / Australian Marriage Equality

The 2017 plesbiscite vote for marriage equality was announced with very little lead time and designed to work against millennial voters who’d never licked the back of a stamp in their life. To ensure young people showed up for marriage equality with their sealed envelopes in hand, my best friends and I concocted a benefit concert where your ‘YES’ vote was your ticket in. Overnight it created a sensation in Australian media.

Putting on a music benefit is no walk in the park. In under six weeks, we’d reached out to top tier artists and booked a line-up, got the backing of the YES Campaign and signed on brands as sponsors. Our team grew from two creatives to dozens across our agency group and even partnered with a rival agency.

We put together the branding, comms, collateral, secured a 50,000 person stadium, got MTV, YouTube and Ben & Jerry’s onboard. Even Sir Elton John jumped on the bandwagon. YesFest was quite the ride until it came to an abrupt end. It’s a long story, but the good news was that the YES voters were victorious, a figure attributed primarily to a dramatic upswing in voting from young people.