International youth travellers are a vital source of visitors, income, and labour to the Australian economy. At 2.1 million people, they contribute 25% of all international visitor arrivals to Australia, and 46 per cent of all international visitor spend. In recent years due to competition from new Instagrammable destinations, there has been a decline in youth visitors to Australia. Tourism Australia needed to motivate a new generation of travellers to escape Down Under. The objectives were to raise awareness of Australia as a youth destination, and increase intention for young people to travel in the next 18 months.

 

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. 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

 

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 over 200 million young people globally, earned millions of 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, with over 300,000 new leads and bookings delivered to our travel partners, 400% over our target. Social mention travel terms associated with Australia increased 9% during the campaign. And by leveraging our own data we drove a 41% higher CTR than our third party data strategies on Facebook.