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Uncle Tobys Great Grows Here Redefines Australian Greatness
Uncle Tobys' "Great Grows Here" is a 2019 Australian masterbrand film campaign created by Ogilvy Sydney that unites the brand's entire product portfolio under a single idea — that greatness is not exceptional but everyday, and that Australia remains fertile ground for it.
The campaign launched in Australia in January 2019, as reported by LBBOnline on 18 January 2019, and represents the first time Uncle Tobys had brought its full product range — from oats to muesli bars — beneath one overarching brand platform. Prior to this work, the brand's communications had operated in a fragmented manner across individual product lines. Lisa May, Nutritious Snacks Business Manager at Nestlé, acknowledged this directly, stating: "For too long our brand platform has been fragmented across our product portfolio, now under the new masterbrand platform we're reminding parents of what our kids can achieve with the right fuel and encouragement." That strategic consolidation is the defining structural fact of the campaign's ambition.
Three films form the creative core of the work, each archived and identifiable within the Clapboard platform. The films profile three real Australians: AFLW player Sabrina Frederick-Traub, rocket scientist Samantha Ridgway, and acrobat Peter Kismartoni, as documented by LBBOnline. Each portrait deploys the same logic — that an ordinary Australian, fuelled and encouraged, can achieve something genuinely remarkable. The campaign's positioning, as characterised by LBBOnline, centres on "everyday Australian greatness," a deliberate move away from the brand's historical association with elite sport and Olympic achievement. Uncle Tobys is owned by Nestlé Australia, with its oats business connected to Cereal Partners Worldwide, the Nestlé–General Mills joint venture, according to publicly available corporate information. The "Great Grows Here" platform marks a significant turn in how the brand chooses to speak to Australian families, trading aspirational distance for recognisable proximity. Clapboard Score: 63/100.
Uncle Tobys entered 2019 facing a familiar challenge for heritage food brands in Australia: how to remain emotionally relevant to modern families without abandoning the equity built over decades. The brand's previous communications leaned heavily on elite sporting achievement — a platform with resonance but limited reach, associating greatness with the few rather than the many.
Ogilvy Sydney's strategic response was to reframe the definition of greatness itself. Andrew Hankin, Associate Creative Director at Ogilvy Sydney, articulated the brief's intent clearly: "The 'Great Grows Here' positioning shines a light on what great now looks like in Australia while reminding people that we're still the lucky country." The campaign positions Australia not as a backdrop but as an active ingredient — a place whose culture, landscape, and spirit genuinely produce remarkable people. This is a values-led repositioning, not a product-led one, and its ambition is to make Uncle Tobys synonymous with the conditions that allow children to grow into their potential.
In Australia, the breakfast cereal category is competitive and maturing. Kellogg's, with brands including Special K, Corn Flakes, and Coco Pops, operates as a direct category competitor, and Sanitarium, the Australian-owned producer of Weet-Bix, holds strong heritage positioning in the same morning occasion. Against these rivals, Uncle Tobys' decision to invest in a masterbrand platform — rather than individual product promotion — signals a longer-term play for emotional share of market. The global breakfast cereal market was valued at approximately US$43.2 billion in 2019, according to Transparency Market Research, with the Asia-Pacific region forecast to represent approximately 13% of global market share by that year, according to Research and Markets. The Byron Quandary — the strategic challenge of whether a challenger brand should focus its resources or broaden its platform — is directly relevant here: Uncle Tobys chose breadth, betting that a unified masterbrand idea would generate more durable brand equity than continued product-level fragmentation, as noted in the brand's own repositioning rationale covered by LBBOnline.
"Great Grows Here" is a film-led campaign. The creative unit at Ogilvy Sydney responsible for the work was led by Creative Directors Boris Garejla and Andrew Hankin, as documented across campaign records held at Clapboard and Ads of the World. The campaign's central creative decision — to feature real, named Australians rather than actors or composited archetypes — shapes every dimension of its execution.
The three films profile AFLW player Sabrina Frederick-Traub, rocket scientist Samantha Ridgway, and acrobat Peter Kismartoni, per LBBOnline's coverage of the campaign. Each subject represents a different register of achievement: athletic, scientific, and physical-artistic. The selection is deliberate in its range. Sabrina Frederick-Traub grounds the work in sport — the category Uncle Tobys has historically occupied — while Samantha Ridgway and Peter Kismartoni extend the brand's definition of greatness into domains the brand had not previously claimed. This expansion is what gives the platform its strategic elasticity; it can accommodate almost any story of Australian potential without contradiction.
The films are constructed around personal narrative rather than product demonstration, placing the individuals at the centre and Uncle Tobys in a supporting, enabling role. This is consistent with masterbrand filmmaking in the food and drink category, where the brand's function is to facilitate human achievement rather than to be the subject of it. Andrew Hankin, writing as part of the campaign's creative rationale as reported by LBBOnline, noted the intent to celebrate "different and unexpected expressions of greatness" — a formulation that gives the creative team latitude to expand the series over time. Production credits beyond the named creative directors are not publicly documented in full detail across the available sources for this campaign.
No verified performance data for "Great Grows Here" is publicly available across Cannes Lions, Effies, The One Show, D&AD, Clios, Webby Awards, or WARC Awards records. The campaign did not surface in any identified awards shortlists or winners lists during the period reviewed. What can be assessed is the structural logic of the work and what its architecture suggests about effectiveness potential.
The decision to unify Uncle Tobys' product portfolio under a single masterbrand platform is, in itself, a measurable strategic commitment. Lisa May of Nestlé identified fragmentation as the explicit problem the campaign was designed to solve, and the three-film structure suggests a sustained content approach rather than a single executional push. A campaign built around real, named Australians — Sabrina Frederick-Traub, Samantha Ridgway, and Peter Kismartoni — carries inherent earned-media potential, since each subject brings their own audience and community. The AFLW connection through Sabrina Frederick-Traub is particularly notable given the league's rapid audience growth in Australia during this period, a trajectory documented by the AFL and covered in Australian sports media.
The Clapboard Score of 63/100 reflects a campaign with genuine strategic ambition and a clearly articulated brand idea, moderated by the absence of verifiable market impact data and the relative conventionality of the masterbrand film format it employs. The platform's emotional core — that Australia grows great people, and that Uncle Tobys is part of what makes that possible — is coherent and ownable. Whether that idea was activated with sufficient media weight and consistency to shift brand equity at scale in the Australian market remains unconfirmed by public record.
"Great Grows Here" is Uncle Tobys' first masterbrand campaign, created by Ogilvy Sydney and launched in Australia in January 2019. It unified the brand's entire product portfolio under one idea — that Australia produces everyday greatness — using three films profiling real Australians: an AFLW player, a rocket scientist, and an acrobat, as reported by LBBOnline.
Ogilvy Sydney created the campaign. Creative Directors Boris Garejla and Andrew Hankin led the work, as documented by Clapboard and Ads of the World. Andrew Hankin described the positioning as shining a light on what great now looks like in Australia, aiming to rekindle the sense of possibility associated with growing up there, per LBBOnline.
Peter refers to Peter Kismartoni, an acrobat, and Samantha refers to Samantha Ridgway, a rocket scientist. Both appear as subjects in individual films within the Great Grows Here campaign, alongside AFLW player Sabrina Frederick-Traub, as documented by LBBOnline and within the Clapboard archive.
Uncle Tobys launched the campaign to address fragmentation across its product portfolio. Lisa May, Nutritious Snacks Business Manager at Nestlé, stated publicly that the brand's platform had been fragmented and that the masterbrand approach would remind parents of what children can achieve with the right fuel and encouragement, marking a shift from elite-sport heritage messaging.
No verified awards for Great Grows Here appear in records from Cannes Lions, Effies, The One Show, D&AD, Clios, Webby Awards, or WARC Awards. The campaign received editorial coverage from LBBOnline upon its Australian launch in January 2019 and earned a Clapboard Score of 63/100, reflecting its strategic clarity without confirmed competitive recognition.
The Byron Quandary describes the strategic tension between focusing brand resources narrowly or broadening a platform across a portfolio. For Uncle Tobys in 2019, Ogilvy Sydney resolved this by choosing breadth — a unified masterbrand idea spanning all products — over product-level fragmentation, a choice directly acknowledged by Nestlé's own business leadership as reported by LBBOnline.
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