Some briefs give you the headline before you've even started. Bundaberg landed a partnership to open the very first game of Magic Round, timed perfectly with the launch of their new flavour, Drop the Bear. The name did most of the work for us — an Aussie saying, sitting right there, practically begging to become real.

So the first idea was the obvious one: drop an actual person, in an actual bear suit, from an actual parachute, into the middle of the stadium. Bold, simple, exactly what the name promised. Stadium regulations had other plans; a full sky-to-turf entrance wasn't happening.

Rather than shrink the idea, we rebuilt it. We shot a video of the bear parachuting in with the match ball, meeting Johnathan Thurston mid-delivery — the moment built to feel exactly as big as the drop we couldn't legally do. Then, timed straight off the back of that video, we cut to a live cross of JT and the bear walking the ball into the stadium in real time, blurring the line between the video people just watched and what was happening live in front of them.

It landed exactly the way we wanted: the game opened with a story people were still talking about, online and in the stands, long after kickoff.