Yorkshire Tea vandalises outdoor ads in Australia to suit local tastes /

Good and proper / When brands expand, the easy move is to adjust the message for each market. Yorkshire Tea could have dropped or rephrased ‘doing things proper’ in Australia, where ‘proper’ sounds posh rather than right. But that would have meant discarding the idea that took it to number one in the UK.

Instead, it doubled down. The line stayed, because it’s the brand’s strongest equity –  the thing you never dilute. As Yorkshire Tea brand manager Liz Griffin told us in 2023, ‘We’ve always taken a long-term view as a brand. Our campaign is about everything [being] done proper, and it’s about that commitment and consistency of brand building and ensuring our product quality is there and is communicated and that as a brand.’

The smart move was not to rewrite the message, but to reframe it: playfully translating ‘proper’ for Australians so the meaning landed locally without losing its Yorkshire bite. That’s how you export a brand without hollowing it out.

Choose fame, then follow through / In our Yorkshire Tea Brand Spotlight, Dom Dwight, then marketing director at Taylors of Harrogate, shares that Lucky Generals was picked because their pitch was about reach and perception: go after people who don’t think about Yorkshire Tea or have the wrong idea about it. ‘We wanted to put their pitch strategy into action.’ That focus on fame – not reassurance – drove the UK turnaround.

The Australian campaign follows the same playbook: hold onto ‘doing things proper’ and reframe it for people who’d otherwise dismiss it. It’s a reminder that fame isn’t built by comforting fans – it’s earned by confronting misperceptions and forcing your way into the consideration set of people who weren’t looking.

British poise / In Australia, Britishness can read as pompous – and for a tea brand trading on heritage, that’s a risk. Yorkshire Tea avoids it by leading with self-deprecating humour. The brand has always played with its identity through tongue-in-cheek UK ads starring Sean Bean, Michael Parkinson and The Kaiser Chiefs for a taste), and this campaign carries that same humour into outdoor.

By defacing its own outdoor ads, the campaign turned potential scepticism into a laugh, showing Aussies the brand doesn’t take itself too seriously. Filming the stunt then gave the humour a second life online, where sharing and memeing carried the joke even further. In a market where Britishness can come off as stuck-up, that humour isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s what makes the brand likeable.