Myer Valentine’s Day Campaign: Spreading the Love Without the Hearts

Valentine’s Day is one of the most commercially important moments on the retail calendar — sitting alongside Black Friday and Christmas as a period that can define a retailer’s year. For a national department store like Myer, covering everything from cosmetics and fragrance to homewares, appliances and toys, the creative challenge is immense: how do you create a campaign that drives sales across dozens of categories while still feeling genuinely connected to the occasion?

Myer came to The Animals with a brief that was unusual, to put it mildly.

The brief

The ask was deceptively simple: create a Valentine’s Day campaign — without a single love heart.

Myer needed creative that captured the spirit of the occasion across couples from all walks of life and backgrounds, while simultaneously acknowledging that Valentine’s Day itself was changing. No longer purely a couple’s occasion, the day had expanded to include best friends, grandparents and grandchildren, and — perhaps inevitably — pet owners. The campaign needed to be inclusive, colourful, fun, and product-forward without hiding what Myer was actually selling. It also needed to serve as a timely reminder to the chronically forgetful that the most important day for the important people in their lives was approaching fast.

Oh, and no love hearts.

The approach

We’ll be honest: this one stumped us at first. Removing the heart from Valentine’s Day felt a little like taking Santa out of Christmas. Our early concepts explored different people celebrating the day in different ways — but something wasn’t landing. The work felt earnest where it needed to feel joyful.

The breakthrough came when we stopped thinking about who celebrates Valentine’s Day and started thinking about what they actually say.

Rather than showing people in love, we put the language of love front and centre — making the three hardest words in the English language the hero of the campaign: “I love you.” From there, the creative expanded naturally into a range of irreverent, warm expressions that reflected the full breadth of the modern Valentine’s occasion: “Hey gorgeous.” “Hey handsome.” And, for the growing number of Australians who consider their pets family — “Hey fur baby.”

The result was a campaign built entirely around words, with Myer’s products stepping naturally into the role those words describe — the means by which you show someone they matter.

Across store fit-outs, visual merchandising, point-of-sale, digital display banners, website landing pages, backlit and non-lit signage, the idea scaled effortlessly. Every touchpoint felt cohesive, warm, and unmistakably Myer — without a love heart in sight.

The results

The campaign delivered. The month of the campaign generated some of Myer’s largest-ever sales figures in cosmetics and fragrance — categories that ran into the millions of dollars in revenue — alongside strong results across other featured categories. In a detail that still makes us smile, Dyson vacuum cleaners performed particularly well. Apparently “Hey gorgeous” works on appliances too.

The work was also recognised on the international stage, earning a Silver Trophy at the Graphis Advertising Awards — one of the world’s most respected creative industry programmes, benchmarking excellence in advertising and design since 1944.

Why this project matters to us

The best briefs are the ones that feel impossible at first. The constraint of removing the heart forced us past the obvious and into something more original — an idea rooted in human truth rather than visual convention. That’s the kind of thinking we bring to every project, whether the budget is boutique or national-scale.

If you’re looking for a Melbourne advertising agency that can take a complicated brief and turn it into work that performs commercially and earns recognition creatively — we’d love to talk.