Scrolling Girl: Effort as a proxy for quality in the age of AI

AI can get you to an answer quickly, but what it can’t do is care about the effort that went into finding it. Nor can it predict whether all that effort's worth the investment, at least not when there's zero paid media dollars involved.

Right now at The Royals, that effort benchmark is becoming a useful filter. Because when everything starts to feel easy to make, effort becomes a signal. You can see it. And most importantly, you can feel it in the reaction of people to the work.

Last week's launch of Scrolling Girl for our client, Dairy Farmers, is a good example. Over 10M+ people have been exposed to it since launch. She’s a reworking of Melbourne’s Skipping Girl sign that reflects a confronting shift; childhood moving from play-based to screen-based. The simple and arresting cultural truth that screens are stealing our kids' vitality - captured in the form of a familiar neon silhouette, slumped over a phone in an endless, scrolling loop.

To anyone looking at Scrolling Girl, it's obvious this wasn’t a campaign you could spin up in a few weeks. In fact, it took over 18-months to go live.

When we first presented the idea, our client at Dairy Farmers said 'no' and for good reason. Outside of Melbourne, not everyone knows the Skipping Girl sign, and that's an issue when the brand's heartland still lives north of the Victorian border. Solving that problem meant building a broader campaign platform.

Enter Lauren Jumps: the world's most recognisable skipper with over 7.5 million followers and a sure fire way to extend our message beyond state boundaries.

Enter Team Kids: we partnered with Australia’s largest after school care provider to run a 10- week skipping program in over 270 schools and spearhead the distribution of almost 8000 skipping ropes. That's a lot of Oomph!

Then came the building.

Switching off an 90-year-old heritage-listed icon isn’t a small ask. It meant working with the building owners and the custodians of the sign to earn enough trust to let it go dark. In its place, a new figure. A modern ‘sign of the times’ perched on the balcony below, in full public view.

That’s before you even get near the local council.

Permits became their own project. Navigating the planning process closely enough to avoid triggering resident notifications that would have spoiled the moment. Securing approvals, then moving into full building permits. Engineering the structure so it wasn’t just safe for eight days, but robust enough to stand for decades.

Then there’s the physical reality of installing it.

Traffic permits. Road closures. Crews working at height, in the dark, on a night forecast for 30-knot winds. The kind of conditions where everything becomes harder, slower, riskier. The kind of conditions no one sees when they look at the finished work.

And that’s the point.

All of that effort is invisible. But it’s also the reason the work feels the way it does. Because the idea is grounded in something real. 

Teenagers are spending close to three times longer on screens than they are exercising. Most parents can see the impact it’s having on their kids’ mental and physical wellbeing. And that’s not a Royals’ take, that’s from the nation-wide YouGov survey commissioned as part of the campaign.

Scrolling Girl turns that into something people can’t ignore. Then the campaign builds further. TeamKids and over 450,000 skipping sessions. Support from leading child and adolescent psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg. Inspiring content getting people to put down their phones and get active from Lauren Jumps and world champion Australian jump roper, Luke Boon.

Real, demonstrable action behind this 'sign of the times'.

There’s a lot of conversation about AI and creativity. Some of it is useful. Lots of it is noise. One thing feels clear. When the cost of making drops, the value of effort goes up.

Effort in thinking. Effort in craft. Effort in seeing something through with a group of people who passionately believe in the importance of making a difference through the power of creativity.

That doesn’t mean everything needs to take 18-months. But it does mean that in an age of AI, the stuff that can't be spun up at the will of a prompt is often the most rewarding.