Sydney New Year’s Eve 2011 – 2018

SydNYE 2011 - 2018
City of Sydney

The Brief

New Year, New Benchmark.

As one of the first cities in the world to celebrate the New Year, all eyes  are on Sydney each year to set the benchmark for celebrations. From  2011, we were challenged by the City of Sydney to create a fresh and exciting theme and content for an excited local audience and an expectant global one.

Year on year, we sought to enhance the experience from the previous by injecting dynamic new elements, creating enviable parties and engaging the millions of viewers with stunning visuals, emotive themes, and entertaining special guest creative collaborators.

The Challenge

How do you continue to add freshness, variety and attract huge amounts of PRto what is essentially the same project year-on-year? Our creative approach needed to translate globally in terms of how it looked, but also the story it told. After all, while Sydney New Year’s Eve is a thank you and celebration for the city, its ultimate objective is to drive tourism to Sydney and Australia.

Strategic Insight

Sydney New Year’s Eve, perhaps like no other event, truly appeals to all ages and all walks of life from every corner of the world. Our challenge each year is to re-invent a theme that appeals to the masses, while retaining a uniquely Sydney lens on it. Our intention each year was to start with an inspiring, optimistic theme that gave us ultimate flexibility in terms of execution, conversation and participation.

Solution

Since 2011 we’ve chosen simple resonant themes that captured the essence of Sydney and its people - such as ‘City of Colour’ or ‘Time to Dream’, then brought them to life through vibrant ambient media, advertising, fireworks soundtracks, website, and stunning projections on the Sydney Harbour Bridge pylons. Apart from the major public items, we also delivered the Lord Mayor’s Party, Lord Mayor’s Picnic and the Dawes Point NYE Party.

We partnered with iconic creative collaborators, such as Kylie Minogue, Reg Mombassa, Jack Thompson and Marc Newson, which helped deliver new creative and PR angles each year.

Further to the repeat scope, each year we managed to onboard sponsors to the event, each of whom helped deliver additional items not able to be funded by the client. Telstra, Ford, Interface, Coates Hire are great examples of this.

The pulse of Sydney

2018

Every year has a theme that we have anchor ourselves to. For the first four years of SydNYE we would base it off the creative ambassadors. 2011 was Marc Newson, 2012 was Kylie Minogue, 2013 was Reg Mombassa and 2014 was Jack Thomspon but for the next four years we based on many other things.

For 2018 our inspiration was the pulse of Sydney.

As well as that, I designed and art directed work for the Dawe’s Point Party, Round Midnight and Lord Mayor’s Picnic, Colour Burst.