The Campaign

To get young people to escape from all the doom and gloom, we launched Aussie News Today. A social media news channel that shared Australia's unique abundance of good news. A channel designed, written, and tailored for mobile the platform it shows up on. 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 targeted by trending topics. All in multiple languages, on multiple platforms, in real time. We've shared stories of 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, and the Darwin Beer Can Regatta. We even got our own news chopper, fleet of news campervans, and a news studio on top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

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.

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.

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 social media, 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. An idea that shared all the reasons why life would be much better in Australia in the right way, on the right mobile platform for each message. 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.