AUSSIE NEWS TODAY

Short List
TitleAUSSIE NEWS TODAY
BrandTOURISM AUSTRALIA
Product / ServiceAUSTRALIA
CategoryA07. Travel
EntrantCLEMENGER BBDO SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
Idea Creation CLEMENGER BBDO SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
Media Placement UM Sydney, AUSTRALIA
PR ONE GREEN BEAN SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
Production CLEMENGER BBDO SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA

Credits

Name Company Position
Ben Coulson Clemenger BBDO Sydney Chief Creative Officer
Emily Perrett Clemenger BBDO Sydney Managing Director
Darren Wright Clemenger BBDO Sydney Creative Director
John Aitken Clemenger BBDO Sydney Senior Copywriter
Simon Koay Clemenger BBDO Sydney Senior Art Director
Vanessa Robinson Clemenger BBDO Sydney Senior Art Director
Nick Alcock Clemenger BBDO Sydney Copywriter
Adam Smith Clemenger BBDO Sydney Copywriter
Taylor Green Clemenger BBDO Sydney Art Director
Elle Glass Clemenger BBDO/Flare Editorial Writer
Sarah Scaife Clemenger BBDO/Flare Editorial Writer
Denise McKeon Clemenger BBDO Sydney Head of Production
Bel Hissey Clemenger BBDO Sydney Group Account Director
Melanie Spence Clemenger BBDO Sydney Senior Account Director
Cicely Milsom Clemenger BBDO Sydney Account Manager
Daniel Mortensen Clemenger BBDO Sydney Head of Craft
Robin Sung Clemenger BBDO/Flare Director
Alex Guterres Clemenger BBDO/Primecuts Editor
Jess Morgan Clemenger BBDO/Primecuts Senior Online Editor
Jo Messina Clemenger BBDO/Flare Production Manager
Alison Cole GrooveQ Composer
Dave Smith GrooveQ Composer
Ashleigh Krstanoski UM Client Director
Sarina Ballauff UM Digital Director
Chris Colter UM Strategy Director
Sophie Bingham UM Group Director
Anthony Thomas UM Digital Manager
Claire Salvetti One Green Bean Managing Director

The Campaign

To get young people to escape far away from all the doom and gloom, we launched Aussie News Today. A social media news channel with a difference, it shared Australia's abundance, of good, weird, funny news with the youth of the world. 87% of millennials get their news on social media, so we countered the bombardment of bad news where they hang out. Wherever our contextual language engine found bad stuff, we programmatically served good news in multiple languages, and in real time. So far we've covered street fighting kangaroos, hat eating crocodiles, koalas wandering into local shops, helicopter pub crawls, a wallaby speeding across the Harbour Bridge, the Nude Beach Olympics the Darwin Beer Can Regatta, and news stories from every state in Australia. Having content from every state allowed us to retarget people with itineraries, flights and deals that linked exactly with the news, and experiences they'd watched.

Creative Execution

In just six months, we published 1,642 news, and were live and reactive in multiple languages on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, BuzzFeed, and Twitter. We built an editorial team that features celebrity news anchors, journalists, content creators, editors, and - in a world-first partnership with BuzzFeed - young news correspondents from around the world who travelled the country in News Campervans and beamed good news back home in their local languages. That and we got our very own news chopper, and news desk on top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. All our content is created or adapted to suit platform, channel, and audience. Our flexible content strategy, and reactive templates allowed for quick turn around long and short form films in multiple formats, Instagram stories, listicles, articles, all the way down to Boomerangs. Our good news index also offered StudentUniverse travel deals to young people in areas where news wasn't great.

Results

Aussie News Today turned the world’s bad news into good news for Tourism Australia. So far we've reached 316 million young people globally, earned 18 million views, with an average view time of over 25 seconds from videos averaging 35 seconds length. The top video scored 662,000 organic views and 2,400 shares. Aussie news became the news, generating $5.3 million dollars in traditional media coverage from 900 media clips and story syndications as our stories were picked up by media outlets around the world. Most importantly our content to conversion funnel took our audience from entertainment, to consideration, planning and booking with over 200,000 new leads and bookings from young people since launch. That’s three times as many as the same period last year. Our early tracking has also found a 12% increase in intention to travel to Australia.

Global youth travellers (18-35) are hard to engage, and even harder to convert. So while we started a social news platform to raise intention to visit in Australia. At its core, Aussie News Today is a booking drive. We built a content to conversion funnel that moved our audience from dreaming, to planning, to doing. We helped plan trips by serving up itineraries based off content young people had interacted with. And when local news got grim, our good news algorithm offered exclusive StudentUniverse travel deals. Leading to a tripling in bookings and enquiries by young people during our campaign.

Planning a Working Holiday to a destination 14,000 miles away is a major, year-long commitment. Our data and local market research showed that youth travellers (18-30 years) get inspired, and plan via mobile, relying on influencers, travel-porn and friends’ experiences to dictate where next. We needed an engaging way to take advantage of this, and build Australia’s case. Not just an idea, but a platform that reached young people online, appealed to their sense of humour, and shared all the reasons why life would be much better in Australia. We had a natural enemy - the state of the world. North Korean missiles. Climate change. Unemployment. Student debt. Feeds all over the globe are flooded with bad news. This has many millennials dreading an uncertain future at home. Luckily, if they jump on a plane, there’s a country with more than enough good times to go around - Australia.

Links

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