Two stories last week made the same point from opposite directions: reputation is decided in the moments nobody planned for – not the campaign.
Services Australia danced. Australians didn’t laugh.
In June, Services Australia posted a video of staff performing a choreographed dance to Ace of Base’s “The Sign,” promoting a new myGov feature for 2026 Census updates. It wasn’t a one-off, the same channels have posted staff dancing to Hall & Oates in a service centre foyer, a Sabrina Carpenter-soundtracked “mobile centre tour,” and a nationwide social workers’ routine for World Social Work Day.
The problem is not so much the dancing. It’s the timing. While the videos were being filmed, parents calling the agency were facing 36-minute wait times. The post was deleted, but deletion doesn’t undo a clip’s second life and it kept circulating, and the mockery outlasted the video itself.
And this isn’t a one-bad-week story. Services Australia has been the poster child for call centre pain for over a decade. Average hold times have crept from 14 minutes in 2021-22 to over 45 minutes by 2024, with some callers reporting waits of up to four hours across the past nine years. It’s the same story in person – nobody looks forward to a trip to the Services office to queue for a Medicare card or a license photo, it is actual dread that fills you when you realise those vital items are due. That reputation was already baked in long before a single dance track was chosen. A $228 million budget boost and 3,000 new staff have gone some way to addressing it, but the goodwill deficit was already deep!
Layer on the moment we’re in. Cost-of-living pressure means more Australians than ever need Centrelink and Medicare to actually work – JobSeeker recipients are reportedly falling behind by $251 a week after rent, food and transport, and calls for bigger payment increases are growing louder each budget cycle. When the service someone depends on to eat this week is also the one filming dance content, the disconnect isn’t just tone-deaf, it’s personal. It raises a real question for the “fun, relatable government content” era. Has the public mood – squeezed budgets, rising anxiety, more people relying on these exact services out of necessity rather than choice – moved past the point where a dancing reel reads as charming rather than dismissive? A cheerful reel, from an agency people are relying on out of desperation lands very differently to one from a brand people choose to engage with.
For comms teams, this is a masterclass in reading the room, and in remembering that tone deafness compounds. Fun, relatable content isn’t the mistake. Fun content that ignores both a live service failure and a public that’s more stretched and more dependent on you than ever, is. Before a “cute” campaign goes out, ask not just what your audience is currently frustrated about, but how many of them currently need you more than they’d like to – because if you don’t, the internet will build that split-screen for you.
Reviews just beat your best friend’s opinion
BrightLocal’s 2026 Consumer Review Survey – 4,800 adults across the US, UK, Canada and Australia, found trust in online reviews over personal recommendations climbed to 62%, up from 54% the year before. For the first time, strangers on a review page are more persuasive than a friend’s word.
That’s a quiet but significant shift. It means a Google comment, or a one-star review left unanswered for six months, may now carry more decision-making weight than word of mouth – the one channel brands have always trusted most and controlled least.
For comms teams, your reputation is no longer just what’s said about you at dinner. It’s what’s written under your name at 11pm by someone you’ve never met. If your review response strategy is still an afterthought, it’s time to move it to the front line.
What brings these two stories together
Same lesson, two angles – reputation gets built in the details people didn’t expect you to be watched in – the choice to film content instead of fixing hold times, the review nobody replied to. Plan the big campaign all you like. People are making up their minds somewhere else. Stay aligned to your audience and be aware of what is going to influence them.
Amanda Lacey is the founder and director of Popcom, a boutique PR and strategic communications agency specialising in reputation management, media strategy, and executive visibility for professional services firms. She works with legal, financial services, and accounting clients to build the kind of credibility that holds up under scrutiny.