Being half Aussie, one of the stories in yesterday’s Brand Republic email caught my attention.

The Australian Government recently announced that it is looking for an agency to develop a new brand identity to embody Australia in the 21st century with a budget of A$20 million over four years.

In response to this, agency DesignBay has launched a competition challenging people to submit their own logo and strapline for the chance to win a A$2000 prize. The global competition, which opens today, will run for two weeks, with the winners and short-listed entrants announced in the marketing industry’s B&T magazine in November.

DesignBay founder Alec Lynch, has been quoted saying: “Australia’s brand is important. We want to find the best logo and tagline ideas that Australia’s creative talent and the world can come up with and we’re going to offer them, for free, to the government. We want to give people the opportunity to contribute to Australia’s brand and we want Australia’s brand to be the best it can be.”

In this day and age we are all used to brands and media outlets asking for our contribution and I’m right behind giving the public the chance to translate their patriotism into what could become the new identity for their nation. However on this occasion, I can’t help but think that the aim of the game is more to drive publicity for the design agency than to give consumers a voice. Although hats off to their PR team, as I’m writing about them and I’d certainly never heard of them before reading the article this morning.

The Australian government are due to launch the new identity domestically in February and internationally in May and I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled along the way to see whether the Design Bay competition has any impact on the outcome.

Either way, you’ve got to be in it to win it so I’ll be off to the drawing board…..

By Kelly Russell on October 14th, 2009

Tags: Brand marketing, Communications, Media, Public relations

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