AUSSIE NEWS TODAY

Silver Spike

Case Film

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TitleAUSSIE NEWS TODAY
BrandTOURISM AUSTRALIA
Product / ServiceAUSTRALIA
CategoryD02. Use of Branded Content created for Digital or Social
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 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

In 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 and beamed good news back home in their local languages. 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, even Boomerangs. We had stories from every corner of Australia which allowed us to retarget people with experience specific itineraries built around the content they've interacted with. We also used our good new index to offer up StudentUniverse travel deals to young people nearby.

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 with good news. To work, this was a highly targeted global media campaign that had to be contextually relevant to local news and pop culture daily. We needed to push out reactive content in real time, and evolve as we retargeted. A media content play that earned attention and an audience above a modest media spend for the amount of countries it entered. A media strategy, and programmatic buy that appeared in multiple languages, on multiple social platforms, but never came up against death, 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. We had a natural enemy - the state of the world. Feeds all over the globe are flooded with bad news. This has many millennials dreading an uncertain future at home. Luckily, there’s a country with more than enough good times to go around - Australia. If we were going to start a news network that used a contextual language engine to counter local bad news with our good news, we needed to work with the social platforms, and media owners to plan, buy and optimise media on the micro level. We also had to spend smart, and leave room to be reactive.

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