The Campaign

Today branded content within the Australian travel industry is largely one dimensional and traditional. A few paid media television travel shows and location reports lagging behind the fast paced, changing world of modern tourism. In an urban environment it's all about discovering what's new. Giving people the clues to find and take ownership – whether it's a café, shop or event. In Melbourne especially, the cultural environment is evolving on a weekly basis. Keeping up with it can be daunting. Indeed the web has changed the way people book and search for vacations, but an audience generated, social media led travel experience is something that hasn't happened until now.

Results

The brief stemmed from Melbourne's uniqueness – it's unlike other Australian destinations. Instead of landmarks and beaches, it's a patchwork of hundreds of little experiences. These take time to discover. The objective was to find a means of letting people explore this depth first-hand. The city has a history of producing evocative and successful television advertising campaigns. The aim was to move away from this and engage a curious and tech savvy, social media active audience. Any idea had to be a new way of showing off a city – that also reinforced Melbourne's position as the cultural capital of Australia. The solution was something never before attempted by a city – allowing people to 'go, before they go', through a real-time web experience. In turn generating a wealth of unique stories, content and finds. Part TV show, part interactive video, we seamlessly combined Googlemaps, live-stream, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Foursquare in one virtual window. Simply authenticate through Facebook or Twitter and within seconds take control - without ever leaving the live stream.

The five day long live streaming web-experience was designed with branded content generation at its core. Viewers contributed to and became part of the story. The virtual window on the city took on a life of part television show, part game. The more they told our Tourists to do, the more content we generated – served back to our audience after each live session with a series of video lifts, highlights, location data, stats and pictures. In fact, we generated over 80 hours of audience generated travel videos. It now lives on today as the World's first crowdsourced city guide.

Our four Remote Control Tourists became the eyes and ears of our online audience. With cameras and GPS they performed almost 3000 requests – from tasting tacos to trying on dresses. They became city data pathfinders. The more they uncovered, the more information we collected - including over 80 hours of videos, 1500 Instagram pictures and data on 321 locations. Over just five-days we generated over 43 million social media impressions and were seen by estimated global audience of 150 million people. We also trended nationally on Twitter, with positive sentiment toward Melbourne rising to 96%. We had users from 158 countries and 3888 cities interact with us directly. Today, as a legacy of the project, our audience generated content and data lives on as the World's first crowdsourced city guide.