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.

Execution

Phase 1: "The Mateship" A global competition was launched in collaboration with BuzzFeed to give eight aspiring content creators from key markets the opportunity to join a world first BuzzFeed's "Mateship" program to find Aussie News Today correspondents. This was announced via a media release and domestic and international media outreach. This was then amplified through our media partner as well as through Tourism Australia's own social channels and earned PR. Phase 2: Launch of Aussie News Today Marking our campaign announcement, Nick Cummins reported the first official Aussie News Today news bulletin from the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, broadcast live around the world. Phase 3: Momentum and global outreach Our Aussie News Today anchors embarked on bespoke road trips around the country to capture content. The itineraries also provided unique media opportunities, amplifying the campaign through a stream of earned media coverage around the world.

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.

The Situation

International youth travellers (18-35) are hard to reach, and even harder to engage. We needed to use our limited budget to put Australia back on the map. To do this we had to rise above the travel pages, and into social currency by becoming the good news solution to our audience's bad news lives. We started Aussie News Today, a good news network. Powered in part by a platform our target market trusts - BuzzFeed. And released the weird, funny, and 'Only in Australia' stories that we knew would gain free syndication from media companies around the world.

The Strategy

Planning a Working Holiday to a destination 14,000 miles away is a major commitment. Our data and local market research showed that youth travellers (18-30 years) get inspired, and plan via social media. We needed an engaging way to take advantage of this, and build Australia’s case. An idea that got peers and trusted influencers to share all the reasons why life would be better in Australia. We had a natural enemy - the state of the world. To put Australia back on the map as a memorable and desirable destination for youth travellers around the world, we had to give young people, influencers and traditional media a reason to not just talk about Australia again, but to share all the entertaining reasons to come here. To help underpin the campaign, we launched a world-first content partnership with BuzzFeed, chosen for their relevance and reach across the global youth audience.