The Campaign

To get young people to escape 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. All in multiple languages, on multiple platforms, in real-time. So far 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

Pre-launch: We teased the campaign through announcement of the BuzzFeed partnership, and the global search for influencer correspondents from key international markets. This happened across BuzzFeed's global network. Launch: Aussie News Today launched with a live bulletin on top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. This and the launch news promo were supported in paid Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube placements, and earned media across the world. Momentum: Our always on, up to the minute news stories and reactive content rolled out, and continues to find and programmatically counter bad news with to our contextual language engine. We tailored content and buy to each social platform though media investment, organic reach, native Taboola advertising, and BuzzFeed co-creation and support. Action: We moved from content to conversion by retargeting people with itineraries based around content they liked. We also used our good news index to match StudentUniverse travel deals to local bad news.

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.

Tourism Australia started Aussie News Today to lure the world's youth Down Under. To do this, they needed a highly targeted global media campaign that was contextually relevant to local news and pop culture every daily. Media plan that could release reactive content in real time, and evolved content and messaging as we retargeted. A media content play that earned attention, and built an audience bigger than our modest media spend for a global campaign. A media strategy, and programmatic buy that appeared in multiple languages, on multiple social platforms, but never appeared alongside death, disaster or tragedy.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Planning a Working Holiday to a destination 14,000 miles away is a big commitment. Our data showed that our target - youth travellers (18-30 years) get inspired, and plan via social media. We needed an engaging way to take advantage of this, while building Australia’s case. In starting a news network that countered bad news with our good news, we needed to work with the social platforms, and media owners to plan, buy and optimise on the micro level. We worked with Buzzfeed to integrate content in their platform, and mined their learnings from local operations to tailor all of our content by market. We also partnered with Facebook and Instagram to use Live, Stories and selective media spend to grow organic reach and tagging amongst our audience. Finally we used retail partner spend from StudentUniverse and STA Travel to extend our reach and decrease our cost per lead.