AFL's Don't Believe in Never, created by Clemenger BBDO Melbourne in March 2018, features Aliir Aliir, Damien Hardwick, and the Bankstown Bullsharks across
AFL Don't Believe in Never Brings Aliir Aliir and Bankstown Bullsharks to Screen
AFL's "Don't Believe in Never" is a three-film brand platform launched in Australia in March 2018, created by Clemenger BBDO Melbourne, that uses the real stories of Sydney Swans player Aliir Aliir, Richmond coach Damien Hardwick, and a young Muslim participant known as Dema from the Bankstown Bullsharks to argue that Australian rules football transcends every apparent barrier to belonging.
Clemenger BBDO Melbourne launched the campaign on 11 March 2018, as reported by Campaign Brief. Three distinct films anchored the platform, each tracing a different dimension of human persistence: elite achievement through Richmond's 2017 Toyota AFL Premiership under Damien Hardwick; inclusion and migration through Aliir Aliir's journey from a Kenyan refugee camp to the top level of Australian football; and gender and multicultural participation through Dema's experience joining the Bankstown Bullsharks, a multicultural teenage girls' team. Together the films argue, under a single unifying line, that the sport has no ceiling on who can play, lead, or belong.
Distribution at launch spanned television on Channel Seven and Foxtel, the AFL's own website, and AFL social platforms, according to afl.com.au. The campaign also extended into out-of-home and digital media, giving each film an audience pathway suited to its tone — the Hardwick and Aliir Aliir films carrying broad broadcast reach, the Bankstown Bullsharks story finding particular resonance in digital and social environments where community sport and grassroots participation stories circulate most naturally. In Australia, where the AFL operates as one of the country's most embedded sporting institutions, the choice to lead with three stories rather than one single hero narrative reflects a deliberate ambition to speak simultaneously to the sport's existing base and to communities it has historically under-represented.
AFL reported more than one million club members in 2018, according to afl.com.au. That figure represents a formidable base, yet the governing body's strategic challenge in this period was not simply retaining existing supporters but widening the game's social footprint — drawing in migrant communities, Muslim women, and culturally diverse youth audiences who had not historically seen themselves reflected in the sport's mainstream marketing. "Don't Believe in Never" is the creative answer to that strategic brief.
The campaign's consumer insight rests on a straightforward premise: participation follows representation. By placing Aliir Aliir — whose path from a Kenyan refugee camp to AFL level in Australia is verifiable public record — at the centre of one film, Clemenger BBDO Melbourne gave that premise a face and a story rather than an assertion. The Bankstown Bullsharks film operates on the same logic, framing a multicultural girls' team in south-western Sydney not as a curiosity but as evidence that the game already belongs to them.
The competitive context matters. In Australia, AFL competes for Recreation and Leisure attention and broadcast audiences with the National Rugby League, which has historically drawn strong support from south-western Sydney — precisely the communities the Bankstown Bullsharks film addresses — and with Football Australia's football codes, which carry natural appeal among migrant communities from non-English-speaking backgrounds. AFL's broadcast rights sold in 2017 for A$2.508 billion over six years, equivalent to approximately A$418 million per year, according to Aph Gov Au, providing the financial foundation for a campaign at this scale. Framing the brand around impossible-seeming journeys that turn possible is a platform strategy, not a one-season execution, and Campaign Brief's coverage at the time positioned it explicitly as a long-term brand idea built around passion, dedication, adversity, and triumph.
Richard Williams and Anthony Phillips served as joint Creative Directors at Clemenger BBDO Melbourne on "Don't Believe in Never." Speaking to Campaign Brief on 12 March 2018, Williams and Phillips stated that "our job was a relatively easy one in this instance" — a comment that points toward the creative philosophy underpinning the work: find stories strong enough that the advertising infrastructure exists primarily to frame and distribute them rather than to construct them. James McGrath served as Creative Chairman, Simon Lamplough as Managing Director, and Paul Rees-Jones as Executive Planning Director, according to Campaign Brief. Sonia von Bibra served as Executive Producer and Jacqui Walker as Senior Producer for television, with Theresa White serving as Project Director, all credited by Campaign Brief.
The three films are unified by a documentary-adjacent register — observational, portrait-driven, and reliant on the credibility of their subjects rather than on dramatised set pieces. Aliir Aliir's film traces a journey that is both geographically vast and emotionally specific: a boy in a Kenyan refugee camp becoming an AFL player in Australia is a story that requires no embellishment, and the craft decision to underplay artifice honours that reality. The Richmond film anchors the platform in elite sporting achievement, giving the campaign mainstream sporting credibility. The Bankstown Bullsharks film shifts register again, finding texture and warmth in community participation rather than elite performance.
Channel Seven subsequently commissioned a 30-minute programme expanding the Bankstown Bullsharks story, as reported by Little Black Book and marketingmag.com.au — a downstream outcome that signals the creative material was judged to have audience value beyond its advertising function. The campaign ran across television, out-of-home, digital, and social media, each channel selected to match the natural distribution pathway of each story within Australia's media landscape.
No verified performance data for "Don't Believe in Never" is publicly available in terms of view counts, brand-lift metrics, or documented shifts in participation figures attributable specifically to the campaign. What the public record does offer is a set of structural signals worth analysing.
The most concrete downstream indicator is Channel Seven's decision to commission a 30-minute programme expanding the Bankstown Bullsharks narrative, as reported by lbbonline.com. A broadcaster does not commit editorial airtime to a marketing story unless audience testing or editorial judgement suggests the material has legs beyond its promotional origin — which implies the Bankstown Bullsharks film generated meaningful interest during its initial distribution run.
AFL's 2018 premiership season recorded more than 6.94 million attendances, according to afl.com.au, demonstrating the health of the sport's live audience in Australia at the moment the campaign ran. In a Recreation and Leisure category as competitive as Australian professional sport, a campaign that generated a long-form broadcast commission and sustained coverage in Campaign Brief, The Drum, and news.com.au without relying on a single celebrity spokesperson represents a structurally sound execution. The decision to run three narratives rather than one reduces the risk of a single story failing to land and increases the range of audience touchpoints the platform can own simultaneously.
Clapboard Score: 63/100. The score reflects a campaign with clear strategic coherence and credible creative craft, tempered by the absence of publicly documented performance metrics and limited evidence of sustained platform evolution beyond the launch window.
"Don't Believe in Never" is a three-film brand platform created by Clemenger BBDO Melbourne for AFL, launched in Australia on 11 March 2018. It features Aliir Aliir's story as a Kenyan refugee who reached AFL level, Richmond coach Damien Hardwick's 2017 premiership, and Dema's experience with the Bankstown Bullsharks girls' team.
Clemenger BBDO Melbourne created the campaign. Creative Directors Richard Williams and Anthony Phillips led the creative work, with James McGrath as Creative Chairman and Simon Lamplough as Managing Director, as credited by Campaign Brief in March 2018. The campaign launched across Seven, Foxtel, and AFL digital platforms in Australia.
Aliir Aliir is a Sydney Swans AFL player whose journey from a Kenyan refugee camp to elite Australian football anchors one of the three campaign films. His story illustrates the platform's central argument that football in Australia can overcome apparently impossible barriers to participation and belonging.
The Bankstown Bullsharks are a multicultural teenage girls' football team in south-western Sydney. Their film, featuring a participant named Dema, addresses gender and multicultural inclusion in Australian rules football. Channel Seven later commissioned a 30-minute programme expanding their story, as reported by lbbonline.com and marketingmag.com.au.
The campaign launched on 11 March 2018 in Australia, according to afl.com.au. Distribution spanned Channel Seven, Foxtel, the AFL website, and AFL social platforms, with additional out-of-home and digital media placements, making it a multi-channel campaign timed to the start of the 2018 AFL premiership season.
No verified performance data for the campaign is publicly available. Channel Seven's decision to commission a 30-minute Bankstown Bullsharks documentary, as reported by lbbonline.com, is the most concrete public indicator of audience impact. The campaign received strongly positive coverage from Campaign Brief, thedrum.com, and news.com.au at launch.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
.jpg&w=256&q=75)
