GetUp!’s emotive advertisement A Love Story promoting gay marriage went viral, notching up millions of views from around the world within its first week.
The ad was released on November 24th before the Labor Party’s National Conference on December 2 as a last ditch effort to promote a change to the party’s stance on marriage.
The director behind GetUp!’s new ad, Stephen McCallum, told OUTinPerth he was surprised by the amount of attention the ad had received.
‘The first day we were excited when it got 30,000 hits, that was really amazing,… and then we woke up the next day and it was over 150,000 and the next day it was a million,’ McCallum said.
By the end of November, just a week after the ad was released, the video had received over 2.3 million views on Youtube.com. At the time of OutinPerth going to print almost $60,000 had been raised through GetUp! to get the ad on to television screens before the ALP National Conference.
‘GetUp! really wanted to make a push in whatever way possible for the Labor Party to reconsider its stance on gay marriage and to ramp up the pressure and make people realise it’s now time to change,’ McCallum said.
‘We were considering the best way to get that message across and I guess by showing that whether it’s a gay relationship or heterosexual relationship, love is universal thing.’
Watch the ad here.
McCallum believed the strength of the ad came from its authenticity. While the main actor in the ad was straight, the director said the point was to show heterosexual and homosexual relationships shared the same experiences.
‘The strength of the ad is that anybody that’s been in a relationship, whether it’s heterosexual or homosexual, experiences the same sorts of things: the joy of the first date, the frustration of disagreeing with somebody; they experience loss, they experience love.’
‘I’ve got a lot of gay friends and it’s a message that I’ve felt pretty strongly about and you know, I think that it was that authenticity comes from believing in it.’
Check out the ad at www.getup.org.au
