This Facebook Group Spent An Entire Decade Tracking Down An Obscure Gambling Ad
"IS THAT MY WALLET, JASON?" was created in search of a 20-year-old Victorian gambling ad.
In May of 2010, Cameron Bourke created the “IS THAT MY WALLET, JASON?” Facebook page.
Cameron, an IT engineer from Melbourne, created the Facebook page a decade ago in search of an elusive Australian anti-gambling advertisement from 2000. The ad detailed the story of a man named Jason and his troubles with gambling addiction. At the start of the advertisement, Jason’s boss shouts “Is that my wallet, Jason?!” after he catches Jason stealing a few $50 notes.
The page, which was created in the heyday of Facebook fan pages, lay dormant for years. “I created the page back when there was a ‘fan’ page made on every little thing you could think of and I noticed [the ad] didn’t exist,” Cameron told Junkee. “It eventually became a place where people reminisced about and tried to find the ad. But I definitely gave up and had resigned to the fact that I’d only be seeing the ad inside my brain forever. It seemed like we had all given up”
Over 800 people who spent their time searching had stopped trying, so it was a shock ten years later when Isaac Towell randomly posted in the group. Along with the hard to find video, Isaac detailed the story of how he managed to located the wallet pick-pocket Jason.
Finding The Missing Ad
Don’t fuck with Jasons bosses wallet: hunting a problem gambler. I will preface this and say I have worked in TV for almost 10 years, and I hadn’t heard of this Facebook page until 3 days ago……cue pandemonium. Tuesday, 28th January 2020, 1:48pm. A friend of mine at work showed me a Facebook page ‘ IS THAT MY WALLET JASON ‘ and asked me who would we ask to find a 20 year old obscure ad about problem gambling that was run by the Victorian state government, when NO ONE else had been able to locate it in the 10 years that the Facebook page was created. You know that scene in Swordfish when Hugh Jackman is like sitting in front of a computer and he cracks his knuckles and puts his headset on and then somehow creates this unreal virus that will save his life and bring john Travolta lots and lots of cash?? Literally me for the next 3 days trying to locate Jason and his bloody bosses wallet….So first up I Called the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra.. Pleaded my case with the lovely lady on the other end of the line, gave her the spiel and the details….Nothing. They didn’t have it. My next step was asking people internally if they had heard of the campaign before. Some had, some hadn’t. We went as far as one of the ladies I work with giving us a 200page printout from 2002 that listed every single ad that was on air in the year 2002 with the hopes of finding a description, duration, ANYTHING.….but we were out of luck. We even had someone watching YouTube clips of programs that had been recorded WITH the commercial breaks…but still nothing.So I emailed a few people I know who deal with ad distribution asking them if they could search their archives. But they only went as far back as 2003. Fuck. Come on, this ad HAS TO exist somewhere. Why did I care about this ad so much? I think because I just cared about Jason’s story and what he would have had to go through to be rehabbed from his addiction, but I digress. Wednesday 29th January, 9:01am. I hadn’t heard back from my friends in our news department so I made a phone call, got some advice saying maybe back in the 2000s there had been a news story on the campaign and there may be clips within that news story. MORE HOPE was injected into our veins but we still didn’t know if we would ever get to see this. Wednesday 29th January, 5:07pm. My email to our archivists and news crews is sent, with a little bit of hope not much. I go home, and get an email around 8pm that night. It was an email confirming that we had indeed ran a story back on the 7th of November, 2000 about a problem gambling campaign that the government had run. There it is, that H word again. Couldn’t sleep that night thinking about if I was finally about to see Jason steal pineapples out of his bosses wallet…..Thursday 30th January, 11:17am. An email hits my inbox titled ‘ Commercial for Isaac…. ‘ and I get that rush of adrenaline. ‘I’ve been able to give it more time today to find the “Is this my wallet Jason?” commercial. ‘ I STARE AT THIS EMAIL FOR 20 SECONDS…FROZEN, not knowing if this is going to be the right ad. I emailed back, ‘ IS THIS FOR REAL ‘ and got ‘ it is Isaac. And now it is yours. I had to kiss a few frogs before I found the prince, but happy to assist.’ I am literally in shock. Absolutely Gobsmacked. Floored. I still hadn’t viewed the ad myself but it sounded like it was the one…I opened up the file finally..….and there it was. IN ALL ITS PROBLEM GAMBLING GLORY. Mr Bigshot himself. Taking pineapples from his bosses wallet. I couldn’t believe it. What had taken upwards of 10 years of searching by this Facebook page, going as far as to find the bloke who actually played jason go dark on cameron ( the admin of this page ) trying to get onto the media manager to no avail…. I was able to locate within 3 days with help from friends and contacts that I had gained over my years working in TV. I sit here writing this story, still laughing at the infamous line, and also laughing at the fact that they had ‘ dickhead ‘ in the actual ad itself. Like in south park, when they say shit on TV for the first time. To the followers, enjoy. I am very happy that I could assist Cameron in finding this ad Let’s make sure that Jason and his bosses wallet lives on forever……love you all.
Posted by Isaac G. Towell on Wednesday, January 29, 2020
Using his contacts in media, Issac spent three days searching for the gambling advertisement created by the Victorian state government. After being shown the Facebook page, Issac contacted the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra, which yielded zero results. So he then went through a “200-page” list of every single ad aired in 2002, but still came up empty.
Dipping into his ad distribution contact list, Isaac emailed around to see if he could search their ad archives. Unfortunately, these lists only went back to 2003, a few years shy of the year Jason made his gambling debut. So Isaac started searching within his own company, in the hopes of finding a news story run about the gambling campaign itself.
Success! On the 7th of November, 2000 Isaac’s company had run a story on the ad. The next morning, he opened his emails to find what he had painstakingly been searching for. “An email hits my inbox titled ‘ Commercial for Isaac….’ and I get that rush of adrenaline. ‘I’ve been able to give it more time today to find the ‘Is this my wallet Jason?’ commercial,” Isaac posted to the group.
“I STARE AT THIS EMAIL FOR 20 SECONDS…FROZEN, not knowing if this is going to be the right ad,” he continued. “I emailed back, ‘IS THIS FOR REAL’ and got ‘It is Isaac. And now it is yours. I had to kiss a few frogs before I found the prince, but happy to assist.’
In shock, Isaac watched the video and realised he had found the ad, that he had located the Jason everyone had been searching for. Ending his post, Isaac said: “To the followers, enjoy. I am very happy that I could assist Cameron in finding this ad. Let’s make sure that Jason and his bosses wallet lives on forever…… love you all.”
When Isaac found the ad, Cameron was shocked. “I was actually speechless when Isaac found the ad. I had never spoken to him in my life and we ended up having a good laugh over the phone when he found it,” Cameron told Junkee.
But while the video did live to the hype and get an “overwhelming positive” response from all of Jason’s fans, Cameron thinks this is the end of the page. “I think I might let the page fizzle out now,” he said. “The video has been found and the page can now just act as a virtual Jason shrine.”