Tourism Australia’s Dougan on giving international audiences a story that ‘moves their journey on the understanding of Australia’
Tourism Australia’s executive general manager of strategy and research, Rob Dougan, today walked a packed room through the tourism body’s ’10 principles of destination advertising’ as seen in its latest international work featuring animated characters Ruby the kangaroo and Louie the unicorn.
The campaign, which was worked on by creative agency M&C Saatchi, last week launched across 15 key international markets in what was the first major international tourism campaign launched by Tourism Australia since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dougan explained that the task at hand required simplifying down Australia’s greatest assets more than what would be done for an Australian audience, who “have a deep understanding of what this destination offers”.
“Really, what we need to do is talk to that international audience and make sure that they recognize that we’re Australian, first and foremost. Then, give them a story that moves their journey on the understanding of Australia,” he said.
“Basically, what we wanted to do was make sure that we had the latest marketing theory, the latest science and the latest data from that historic campaign so that we could build something that was enabled us to be more consistent, and more effective over the mid-to-long term. What we do isn’t necessarily going to drive people here tomorrow, it’s going to start to do that when we work with conversion partners.”
The ‘ten principles’ as outlined by Dougan, were as followed.
- Win in consideration
- Competitive experience
- Always be distinctive
- Creatively ambitious
- Invest in attention
- Meaningful impact
- Broad appeal
- Timely delivery
- Consistent presence
- Feed the funnel
“The good thing about this campaign is that we own these characters. So we can use these characters and we can apply these characters now in lots and lots of different places. So that gives us a level on consistency across time, across channel, across markets, that helps us to drive aggregate effect across the mid-to-long term.”
The level of research, “science and rigour” behind that informed the campaign is, according to Dougan, “probably more than Tourism Australia has ever invested in”.
The full recording of this session will be available on Mumbrella Pro.
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