In a bid to lift ticket sales to a boxing day football match, Lowe Sydney decided to set-up a free Christmas gift wrapping stall at a local shopping centre. The campaign for Football Federation Australia became known as The Great Christmas Gift Wrapping Swindle. What appeared to be a free gift-wrapping service, and a gesture of goodwill, turned out to be a jab at the Brisbane Roar football team and their fans.

Check out the full story of The Great Christmas Gift Wrapping Swindle

This week is good news week at Lowe Sydney. (And not just because we’re all off on holiday soon.) We’ve just heard that we’ve got four Finalist nominations at the global Caples Awards held in New York: two for our Socceroos viral campaign, one for our cutting-edge iamunique microsite for Foxtel, and one for our Google-mashup ‘Welcome’ Pack DM for Aussie.

Then we opened the B&T end-of-year roundup issue and saw that the Omo Dust Storm execution was #7 in B&T’s Top Ten print ads of the year. But best of all, new Lowe Digital CD Melissa Peters was #3 in B&T’s Who’s Hot And Who’s Cool rankings!

Melissa, it’s official: you are hot!

Lowe Sydney has created another online campaign for FOXTEL, this time to launch their new offering - FOXTEL NEXT GENERATION™.

Working closely with FOXTEL’s other agencies, Lowe helped to produce a tightly integrated campaign with an online video allowing foxtel.com.au visitors to interact with some of the characters featured in the TVC.

A series of landing pages and online advertising were also produced to help drive subscriber acquisition to the new offering from the subscription TV provider.

When briefed earlier this year to develop a campaign around Aussie’s mortgage broking service, Lowe turned to real customers who had experienced Aussie’s service first-hand.

We found two couples whose lives had changed with the help of their Aussie mortgage broker. Real people. Real stories. No actors. It was their stories that we wanted to share. This was the most powerful message we could communicate.

This integrated campaign included TVCs, outdoor, and online. Take a look.

Lowe Sydney has appointed Melissa Peters as its digital creative head in Australia following the promotion of Tom Markham to head the digital team at Lowe Worldwide in New York.

Melissa joins from Melbourne digital shop Citrus. Prior to that she was at Clemenger Harvie Edge. She has also worked at DDB, ThruThe Line, George Patterson, Y&R and Mojo. Melissa also has international experience, working as a creative consultant for Bates Vietnam, where she launched the country’s first pre-paid mobile card for telco MobiFone.

Melissa was a finalist at Cannes and the Caples last year for the Mazda3 campaign, and has previously won MADC and ADMA awards for her integrated campaigns.

Lowe Sydney received an honourable mention in the August/September “Could Be a Caxton” competition for the dust storm ad created for Unilever. The awards were established by the Caxton Committee to showcase outstanding creative work. Michael Syme, Art Director of Whybin/TBWA Melbourne and the judge of the August/September competition, said:

““This month it was great to see a number of entries using one of newspapers’ great strengths – topicality. There were quite a few ads based around the Sydney dust storm. Some were cleverer than others and some were more relevant than others but all should be congratulated for coming up with the ideas, obtaining client approval and getting the ad into the paper in time to be topical. Of the dust storm ads, Omo’s “A little dirt isn’t the end of the world” appealed to me the most.”

Following on from the Carefree^® Flexia^® campaign created last year, Lowe Sydney has recently completed the latest installment, this time for Carefree^® Silk-Ease^®. This new TVC highlights how ‘big confidence comes from the littlest things’.

FOXTEL turned to Lowe Sydney to help launch their new online download service. Lowe’s creative teams worked their magic to develop print, outdoor, and digital campaign promoting the new service which allows FOXTEL subscribers to legally download hundreds of shows and movies to their PC.

The latest edition of Geek Mail is out. It’s Lowe Sydney’s regular look at the worlds latest and most interesting digital campaigns, trends and opinions.

In this edition we talk TED, get aroused in a stimulation lab, and ponder the idea of a freebee.

If your not already on our list of VIPs that receive Geek Mail directly to their inbox then you can sign-up here. You can also browse our previous editions to catch up.

Whilst we are on the subject of geeky things, if you are that way inclined you can subscribe to Lowe Sydney’s RSS feed, and follow us on Twitter.

We woke up to what looked like the end of the world on September 23 with the Sydney dust storm. Thankfully the threat of Armageddon subsided as the day went on. Lowe Sydney took the once in a lifetime event as an opportunity to work with our client Unilever in creating an ad for Omo which appeared in newspapers the following day. After all, a little dirt is good.

At Lowe we like a challenge, so when we were given the task of revamping Aussie’s welcome pack sent to all new customers, we jumped at the chance to create something memorable that would encourage customers to spread the word about Aussie.

In a first for Australia, we worked closely with Google and a specialist printing company, to develop a way to export individualized map data direct to print. Each envelope was custom-printed with a map showing the exact location of the customer’s new property. The pack also contained a revamped product guide and a matching stack of map postcards for the customer to send to friends as change-of-address cards, and invitations to house warming parties.

Lowe has helped Johnson’s 24 Hour Moisture Body Lotion launch its first major digital communications push here in Australia, with a range of online media and a Facebook-based promotion to upload your earliest photo and childhood memories. The result is a highly effective, nostalgia-filled product page with some candid and entertaining personal anecdotes from consumers. You can check it out at www.facebook.com/johnsonsadultpacific

August is here again, and that means the launch of another season of the Hyundai A-League. To kick the season off with a bang Lowe Sydney has created a new TVC and supporting advertising campaign.

Our brief was to create a campaign that clearly articulated the scale and international nature of football, whilst also highlighting the local code. To do this we created the worlds biggest football pitch, and got a few friends together to kick a ball around. The result? Well see for yourself below. The campaign launched on FOX SPORTS, FOXTEL, free-to-air television, in cinema and outdoors.

Our integrated campaign Tree People has won the New York Festivals UNDPI award. This award was created in 1990 by a collaboration between NYF and the UN to ‘honour public service advertising which best exemplifies the ideals and goals of the United Nations.’

It’s an award we’re especially proud of and it’s dedicated to the lovely and talented Liz Montgomery.

Lowe Sydney’s fake Ghanaian fan club created to promote a soccer match between the Socceroos and Ghana has just won Gold at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. It was a radical but very effective strategy that paid dividends for the Lowe client Football Federation Australia.