Koala fakes a boss's voicemail to announce its Black Friday sale

"POV: your boss leaves you a voicemail"

The ad is a mock-up of the iPhone Voicemail screen on a near-black background. At the top left is the blue "Voicemail" back link. White type in the upper half reads "POV: your boss leaves you a voicemail". Lower down a grey block hides the contact name, then "Sydney, New South Wales" and "9 March 2026 at 1:48 pm", a share icon and an info icon, a progress bar, a pause icon, and three round buttons: a blue speaker, a blue phone and a red bin. One line of subtitle sits at the bottom. In the frame used as the cover it reads "Koala is on sale now," with the player at 0:12.

The offer arrives inside the message. The subtitles run one line at a time: "Far out, David." "bloody outrageous." "The image needs to say," "Koala's on sale now," "up to 35% off everything." "anything fancy." "image to say," "Koala is on sale now,". After about 12 seconds a 4-second olive-green end card replaces the screen: "black friday", "up to 35% off everything*", a Shop now button, the Koala logo and "*T&Cs and exclusions apply. Full T&Cs at au.koala.com." The caption says "Something huge has come to Koala...", "You could save up to $1,610 this Black Friday", "It's our BIGGEST ever sale" and "Up to 35% off everything!" The numbers are the ad's own claims. The audio was not heard.

This is a reading of the creative, not proof of results: the Ad Library shows when ads ran, not how they performed, and it says nothing about whether the claims in the ad are true. The ad copies a screen the reader has used a thousand times and then makes the sale message a joke about ads: the boss is angry that the image is not "fancy" and says what the image needs to say, which is the offer. So the discount is delivered as a line in someone else's story, twice, and the plain end card then lands as the answer to the boss. The mock-up is drawn: 9 March 2026 is not a Black Friday date, and the contact name is greyed out. The video was downloaded and read frame by frame (17 seconds, 4:5). The library shows one ad with this video on the Koala Page: 2541844989659485, started 3 Nov 2026, active and not flagged "Low impression count". Many other Koala videos and pictures share the caption "Something huge has come to Koala...", and the library lists about 62 ads with it against 29 in the scraper's list, so another ad may use the same video and one is a floor. Until a second ad appears the panel reads "Still running".