For the past 12 years, the meat mafia (aka The Meat & Livestock Association or MLA) have spent millions on advertising to convince Aussies it’s their patriotic duty to eat meat on our national day, 'Australia Day'. They literally hijacked it.

Their ads (much like the Super Bowl in the US) have become a yearly calendar highlight in Aussie culture.

Typically these ads portray vegetarians as humourless and weak.

It seemed fair therefore for us to have a fun and cheeky dig back at the bullies. So we hijacked their hijack campaign, reclaiming Australia Day for all Australians, not just meat eaters.

Using one of Australian's funniest comedians, Dave Hughes (a vegetarian and top Aussie bloke), we replicated the set, rewrote the script and rerecorded an early MLA ad. From behind a presidential desk and accompanied by the Australian national anthem, Dave addressed the nation on behalf of vegetarians everywhere.

Our success relied on hijacking the hype around the MLA's new Australia Day ad. So we waited until the new ad was uploaded to YouTube, roughly two weeks before Australia Day.

Within just one hour, our vegetarian Australia Day alternative was live on Facebook and by that afternoon, it was the lead headline on news.com.au (Australia's largest news network).

Our comedian, Dave Hughes, even shared it on his own social channels for free (1.1m followers) because he loved it so much.

Before the meat mafia even knew what had happened, we owned the media agenda.

The news was backed up with statistics about the growing trend of flexitarians in Australia, we offered interviews with our comedian Dave Hughes, placed non-meat Australia Day recipes in food magazines and with social influencers and created a video on how to create alternative Australia Day BBQs using our product.

Media outputs:

• +218 earned media articles (including 4 TV and syndicated national articles)

• +91,575,983 earned reach (circulation/impressions/viewership/listenership)

Influencer

• 26,930 combined likes

• 576 combined comments

Target audience outcomes:

• +3.5m video views (across all video content)

• 85% organic reach (via sharing alone)

• 23,000 reactions

• 23,800 shares

• 6,600 comments with overwhelming positive support

• 3.7m social actions

• 0 to 20,760 page likes (without using like ads)

By focusing the campaign idea on a cultural tension that polarised people's opinions and hijacking the hype around a calendar moment, we created huge reach and passionately positive engagement for a brand new product and brand. Using a tiny fraction of the meat industry's budget and minimal paid media spend, we took on the multimillion dollar meat mafia and successfully changed the conversation about what it means to be Australian on Australia Day.

Most importantly, however, as a direct result of the campaign, we cleared shelves of the product, selling four times as much as the category average and gaining 10% of the chilled vegetarian market share in Australia.