The Brief

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. Melbourne has a history of producing successful television advertising campaigns. The aim was to move on from this. Any idea had to be a new way of showing off the city – that also still reinforced Melbourne's position as the cultural capital of Australia. Our target was cultural opinion leaders domestically and new visitors internationally.

Creative Execution

The execution was something that a city tourist board had never attempted – allowing people to see a city as it really is, live and interactive for 5 days straight. And since Melbourne is about the hundreds of small hidden things – cafes, pop ups, shops and galleries - this idea allowed us to truly let people explore, spend time and get a feel of the city, before they got on a plane. Melbourne is also constantly changing cultural landscape, so this idea allowed us to be reactive on a minute-by-minute basis, uncovering new things as our audience driven travel stories unfolded.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

For five days, we created a real-time live streaming web experience – a virtual window on the city. Part TV show, part interactive video, we seamlessly combined Googlemaps, live stream, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Foursquare to totally immerse viewers into the urban environment. Our Remote Control Tourists became the eyes and ears of our audience. With cameras and GPS they performed almost 3000 direct requests from users – everything from tasting tacos to trying on dresses. We even facilitated a successful marriage proposal. The ultimate campaign objective - to build the World's first crowdsourced city guide.

Results

In just five days over our We generated over 43 million social media impressions and were seen by estimated global audience of 150 million people. We had users from 158 countries and 3888 cities interact with us directly. Our Tourists themselves carried out almost 3000 unique requests for users – everything from trying on dresses to tasting tacos. We even facilitated a successful marriage proposal. We also trended nationally on Twitter, with positive sentiment toward Melbourne rising to 96%.