When the weather turns cold in Brisbane, we know it’s that time of year again… it’s time to celebrate our MediaCast birthday!

This weekend we celebrated Parisian style with a mash-up of Olympics meets Moulin Rouge! We met in the city for the opening ceremony, before our two competing teams the ‘Holy Moules’ and ‘Oh Crêpes’ headed off on a scavenger hunt across the CBD! Collecting baguettes and French flags along the way, they finally had to solve a riddle to uncover the location for the evening’s antics. Our clever team took no time at all to decipher the Parisian poem and made their way to the W Brisbane for a blow-out party celebrating all things MediaCast! 

It was a tremendous evening celebrating our team’s achievements over the past 12 months, MediaCast’s highlights over the past nine years, and we can confirm our French accents got considerably worse as the evening went on.

Looking back at the past 12 months, there certainly was a lot to unpack and truly so much to celebrate. We brought on new team members, welcomed Cavill back from maternity leave and introduced 17 new clients to our agency including Chemist Warehouse, Identilab, Momentum Research Group, Health Bright, Volunteering QLD, Sydney Children’s Hospital Foundation, Matilda Awards, Guide Dogs QLD, Little Athletics NSW, Friends with Dignity and You After X just to name a few.

The team delivered over 279 individual campaigns, not including countless stories and reactive pitches across our retained clients! Busy bees indeed!

Just last month we wrapped our annual Volunteering Australia campaign which is our largest campaign of the year. We always strive to top the previous year’s coverage numbers and this year was no exception! The record-breaking campaign wrapped on a staggering 1,242 items of coverage and over 61.5 million impressions!

A new initiative in our ninth year of operation, was the introduction of our charity grant ‘Pro Bono for Purpose’. Led by our Director of Clients, People and Culture, Cavill, the program was designed to give organisations that don’t have budgets for PR the opportunity to work with our team on purpose-driven media campaigns. We received an incredible 140 submissions for consideration and both management and the team played a role in selecting the final four charities. The Emergency Medicine Foundation and Gather My Crew were awarded $10,000 grants while DV Safe Phone and Motherless Daughters Australia received $5,000 grants. The team put their absolute all into each campaign and achieved some outstanding results not only in coverage, but in traffic to the organisations’ websites, app downloads, social media impressions, overall brand awareness and most importantly, donations. We’re excited to roll the program out again at the end of this year!

In February, we were announced as finalists in three categories in the PRCA APAC Awards, with our work with the Tourette Syndrome Association of Australia, GI Cancer Institute and Orange Sky.

In March, we were delighted to take home the win for the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion category for our ‘Tourette Syndrome – What’s Your First Response’ awareness campaign. This powerful campaign advocated for additional training for first responders to ensure that their interactions with Australians living with Tourette Syndrome are more empathetic and understanding. For the last eight years, we’ve worked with the TSAA to tackle taboos, break down stigmas and educate the public so having our work recognised on the global stage was a real highlight.

And finally, we’re on the move! We’re dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s on our new permanent home in Sanders St, Mount Gravatt. The purchase of a new space for MediaCast will allow us to fit-out our new home in a way that fosters collaboration and connection and is truly fit for purpose! We’re excited to move into our new office and new studio in the coming months and will of course be taking our resident office pups Murray and Sia along for the ride. 

It's been a truly phenomenal year, and one we couldn’t have survived without our incredible team. In particular, our fabulous Head of Delivery Amy who guided the team and weathered some true PR storms with the calm of a seasoned captain! We are immensely proud of the business we’ve built over the last nine years and are grateful for our wonderful clients, suppliers and the journos we work with day in and day out for all their support! We can’t wait to see what our tenth year brings!

-  Fran and George