Tourism Australia Marketing Campaigns

Australian tourism campaigns have often been in the news, sometimes for good reasons attracting attention, other times questions about the campaigns including the most recent ‘Philausophy‘.

Tourism Australia Marketing Campaigns (Image copyright Pexels)

‘The ‘Philausophy’ campaign is self-indulgent wank, and a crime against Australia

Tourism Australia’s latest ‘Philausophy’ campaign has “desecrated” Australia and is appalling, self-indulgent wank, according to creative director and senior copywriter Mark Farrelly.

November 1, 2019 10:52

by MARK FARRELLY

What happens when you give a government department $38m dollars of our money? You get a pile of self-indulgent wank that’s an embarrassment to our nation.

You would think after the unmitigated disaster that was ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’, Tourism Australia would have learnt a lesson. But clearly, it did not.

The campaign after that was completely forgettable. Can you remember it? Bet you can’t. It passed like a ship in the night. The only thing memorable about it was the fact its weak, pathetic slogan was grammatically wrong.

There’s nothing like Australia? No people. Australia is a place. A location. It is somewhere, not something.

There’s nowhere like Australia would have made sense. I’m not saying that’s great. But it’s okay.

Rule one of tourism advertising: you are advertising a destination.

So it’s not surprising that when you have a team of people so unable to use even basic English, they are going to come up with something even more appalling than before…

…The campaign after that was completely forgettable. Can you remember it? Bet you can’t. It passed like a ship in the night. The only thing memorable about it was the fact its weak, pathetic slogan was grammatically wrong.

There’s nothing like Australia? No people. Australia is a place. A location. It is somewhere, not something.

There’s nowhere like Australia would have made sense. I’m not saying that’s great. But it’s okay.

Rule one of tourism advertising: you are advertising a destination.

So it’s not surprising that when you have a team of people so unable to use even basic English, they are going to come up with something even more appalling than before.’

 

What had happened before?

 

‘Tourism Australia looks beyond ‘controversial campaign‘

‘”Where the bloody hell are you?” has gone the way of the “shrimp on the barbie” – into the dustbin of advertising history.

It is two years since the Government unveiled the confrontational slogan to sledge people into coming to Australia, and now it is being dropped.

The $180 million campaign generated much publicity around the world but did not generate any major increase in visitor numbers.

Tourism Australia is also set to review its contracts with advertising agencies as it opens one of the country’s largest advertising accounts to tender.’

 

What is the issue or challenge round tourism marketing?

 

“The Best Job in the World” & Beyond in a Brave New Marketing World

“Not since Willy Wonka and the golden tickets hidden in chocolate bars, has something come along like this.” Editor, The Sunday Times, United Kingdom

Investing heavily in content but not communication channels to reach prospective tourists, however, Queensland’s ‘Best Job in the World’ did gain attention globally through having travellers create the content.

The challenge was to convey to the rest of the world, in an already saturated global travel market, that surrounding this vibrant living organism was tangible product and a new tourism story for Australia…

….By the end of 2008 the groundwork was laid, the tourism regions and operators along the 2300 kilometre of the Great Barrier Reef had come on board under the “Islands of the Great Barrier Reef” banner, we had agreement from our international travel partners to start including Islands of the Great Barrier Reef product into their packages and marketing collateral had been produced.  Now all we needed was an idea or a “hook” to sell the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef to the world.

Stage two was the big idea itself.  Brisbane-based creative agency SapientNitro was given a brief to devise a campaign to promote the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef.  While several ideas were floated we realised that “The Best Job in the World” was The One; a dream job offering one candidate something priceless, the role of Caretaker of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef with six months to explore the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef while based in a luxury house on Hamilton Island for a pay cheque of AUD150,000.

While the caretaker’s duties, cleaning the pool, feeding the fish and collecting the mail, were tongue-in-cheek, for the campaign to work, it needed to be a real job…..

….Then on a cold January morning they opened up the newspaper or turned on the television and were hit by a ray of Queensland sunshine; an advertisement for “the best job in the world” with the initial criteria of “anyone can apply”.  The application process simply asked people from around the world to submit a one minute video of themselves telling Tourism Queensland why they deserved the best job in the world….

….On 6 May 2009, Ben Southall, a 34-year-old British charity events organiser, was announced as the successful candidate for “the best job in the world”.  In the first 24 hours of his announcement as the successful candidate, Ben undertook more than 100 media interviews and featured in news stories around the globe.

Two months later on 1 July 2009, Ben started his role as the Caretaker for the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef.  During his stint he visited almost 100 Queensland destinations, fielded more than 450 media interviews and posted more than 60 blogs of 75,000 words, 2,000 photographs, 47 video diaries and more than 1,000 tweets….

….The estimated publicity value of the campaign topped AUD430 million and penetrated almost every country on earth.  Not bad for an investment of around AUD4 million over the three-year life of the campaign.’

 

Ongoing issue of direct communication with prospective tourists

 

Campaign fantastic but let down by one oversight by QLD Tourism, no direct channel via their global web presence to contact or make an enquiry in one’s own language, locally.  However, this is where Tourism Australia has been quietly creating a global web presence and physically through local travel and related representatives trained as ‘Aussie Specialists’ with resources made available online via ‘Aussie Specialists Club’.

As important, mostly ignored, are the significant digital marketing resource created by Aussie Specialists developing their own web presence targeting geographic, cultural and linguistic regions.

Result?

Most related web searches would find the relevant Tourism Australia website then finding travel planning and an Aussie Specialist travel agent would only be three clicks away; digital marketing 101.

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Brand Trust – Social Media – Digital Marketing – Personal Customer Data

How can trust in brands be developed and maintained in an age of digital marketing, speed, mistrust and social media?

This article first appeared in The Australian on 15th February 2019, then via KPMG NewsRoom.

Brand Trust in Digital Times (Image copyright Pexels)

‘Brand power in the age of declining trust

Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer report in 2017 carried a headline “Trust is in crisis around the world”. A KPMG report last year found that “trust has declined in almost every major economy and many developing ones”. In a CNN interview recently, Salesforce’s founder and CEO Marc Benioff argued that “companies that are struggling today are struggling because of a crisis with trust”.

There seems no end to the brands, organisations and leaders that have lost the public’s trust. There has been a royal commission into our banks, multiple questions over Facebook’s use of personal data, cheating cricketers, fake news, church leaders charged, and political parties bickering among themselves.

It is hard to believe that some brands and organisations have turned a blind eye to building trust with customers over the past decade. Trust is the basis of all relationships, gained slowly like drops of rain but lost in buckets. It is fundamental to business, symbolised in a handshake and eye-to-eye contact. ……These brands meet the “trust” checklist in the KPMG report – standing for something more than profit; demonstrably acting in the customers’ best interest; doing what you say you will; keeping customers informed; and being competent and likeable.

There is no doubt that brand trust is more complex in a digital world, where social media and data personalisation have enabled brands to act as if they are talking to you in person. Combine that with the exponential growth of individuals’ data that can be captured; digital marketplaces; smartphones; voice technology such as Google Home and Alexa; and the algorithms and deep learning of artificial intelligence, and there are far more opportunities to get brand trust wrong. This is especially so when trust is measured at lightning speed and some decisions around brands are being made by machines acting like humans.

Data became the hottest brand trust issue last year. The biggest data breach involved the Marriott International hotel chain and had an impact on up to 383 million people on the Starwood booking database. This included more than five million unencrypted passport numbers. Facebook had multiple issues, the most discussed being Cambridge Analytica’s access to Facebook users’ data. This data was used to persuade voters to change their opinions in the last US presidential election.

Consumers started to question the trust they had in these brands: one US survey showed 71 percent of people were worried about how brands collected and used their personal data. …… Marketers also had their doubts after YouTube posted ads that appeared alongside offensive videos, leading to a number of companies and their media agencies withdrawing advertising from YouTube for a period.

In the past five years, some of Australia’s biggest companies have rushed to establish or buy into data businesses that can offer insights into the purchasing behaviour of their customers and also use that information to improve their marketing communications……

Some companies have commercialised this data by selling it to outside organisations that match it with their customer profiles, adding to the knowledge they have on their customers. Some have questioned the ethics of this, even if it is anonymous; others ask who actually owns the data – the individual or the companies?

Trust around data relies on the fundamentals: common sense says that being a friendly and helpful neighbour is better for a long-term relationship than being annoying or remote. The personal customer data a business holds needs to be treated in the same way. In a business environment where consumers have more choice than ever, as well as more transparency and lower barriers to switching brands, boards, CEOs and marketers cannot ignore the need to invest in brand trust.

 

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Impact of Digital on Marketing Industry Employee Skills

Digital and any new technology can be disruptive and requires changes in thinking, working, learning, education and training; includes marketing and IT.  However, like computer science, education and even job descriptions do not keep pace with technological change while many working successfully in IT or marketing do not possess related university degree, if at all.  Many are educated in other or similar disciplines e.g. engineering, or self-taught through personal or business need, and industry training or certification is more important than the degree (like CPA in accounting), supported by outcomes.

Impact of Digital on Marketing Industry (Image copyright Pexels)

Following is paid content (marketing) from Digital Essentials on Mumbrella explaining how digital has impacted the marketing industry:

‘Marketing jobs are radically different in 2019 – but some employees can’t keep up

A revolution in how we consume media has turned advertising on its head, but recruits of all levels aren’t being trained in essential new skills.

February 4, 2019 7:30

Keeley Pope understands better than most how jobs in Australia’s media and marketing have changed over the last decade. A recruiter with 25 years experience, she deals first-hand with exasperated employers who require new starters to have mastered a breathless list of digital skills. “Today, you’ve got to be able to go from editing a video one minute to analysing data the next and then briefing into a post-production house afterwards,” she says.

In fact, that’s just the start of it. Marketing roles in 2019, she explains, can also encompass social media strategy, paid content, e-commerce, app building, project management as well as skills in Photoshop, CMS and copywriting. “Even the mid-level roles are very much hands-on,” she adds. “Now, marketers are publishers in their own right, too.”

These changes are, of course, a result of how marketers and agencies have reacted to the differing ways we consume media – the decline of printed newspapers, say, or the rise of social media and TV-on-demand. The problem is many current employees have been caught cold: either forced to suddenly acquire skills they’ve never been trained for or rejected for new positions outright. “The onus is on the individual to upscale themselves….

….And all that change is affecting how businesses are marketing and growing. New research by PWC and Facebook, for instance, reveals more than a third of Australian small businesses are exporting to foreign markets, and more than a third of companies now earn international revenue within just two years of establishment.

And so brands have reacted. Digital marketing spend has grown by 13% in the last year, up to $2.24bn, with video showing the biggest leap, along with increases to display, classified and search (Google ads, basically). Meanwhile, programmatic spend in Australia has leapt to $1.7bn – a staggering increase from just $84m in 2012.

“The reality is modern market is diversifying,” says Easther. “So employees now need to know a little bit about a lot – whatever side of the fence you’re working on. So, to do marketing well, particularly in digital, you need to be able to hold a conversation, and you need to know the strategy of how all the channels work together.”….

….On Easther’s course, he finds his students range from those starting out in creative agencies to senior marketing directors working client side and even those in media sales. “Some have learned digital from a few different sources and they come to formalise their learning,” he says. “While others have deep knowledge in one area but want to be more versatile. They might be a social specialist, say, but when they have a meeting to discuss programmatic, they wish they could contribute more.”’

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EU – GDPR General Data Protection Regulation – US – Australia

In the US and Australia there seems to be much ignorance and complacency on the potential impact of the EU GDPR General Data Protection Regulation on private data, data collectors e.g. government agencies, and commercial entities, accessing and using data for commercial reasons; underpinned by lack of citizens’ rights?

Issues for US and Australia on EU GDPR General Data Protection Regulation (Image copyright Pexels)

‘Data privacy rules in the EU may leave the US behind

January 24, 2019 8.03am AEDT

France made headlines on Jan. 21 for fining Google US$57 million – the first fine to be issued for violations of the European Union’s newly implemented General Data Protection Regulations. GDPR, as it’s called, is meant to ensure consumers’ personal information is appropriately used and protected by companies. It also creates procedures to sanction companies who misuse information.

According to French data privacy agency the National Commission on Informatics and Liberty (CNIL), which levied the fine, Google didn’t clearly and concisely provide users with the information they needed to understand how it was collecting their personal data or what it was doing with it. Additionally, CNIL said Google did not obtain user consent to show them personalized advertisements. For its part, Google may appeal.

In other parts of the EU, similar investigations are currently underway against Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

This case demonstrates the increasingly prominent role that the EU intends to play in policing the use of personal information by major companies and organizations online. The U.S. lags behind Europe on this front. As a researcher who studies computer hacking and data breaches, I’d argue the U.S. may have ceded regulatory powers to the EU – despite being the headquarters for most major internet service providers. Why has the U.S. not taken a similarly strong approach to privacy management and regulation?

Do individual Americans even care?

There’s no single answer to why the U.S. hasn’t taken similar measures to protect and regulate consumers’ data.

Americans use online services in the same way as our European counterparts, and at generally similar rates. And U.S. consumers’ privacy has been harmed by the ever-growing number of data breaches affecting financial institutions, retailers and government targets. The federal government’s own Office of Personnel Management lost millions of records, including Social Security numbers, names, addresses and other sensitive details, in hacks. My research demonstrates that hackers and data thieves make massive profits through the sale and misuse of personally identifiable information….

Companies don’t want these regulations

Social media sites’ and internet service providers’ resistance to external regulation is also a likely reason why the U.S. has not acted.

Facebook’s practices over the last few years are a perfect example of why and how legal regulation is vital, but heavily resisted by corporations…..

….Should the U.S. continue on its current path, it faces a substantial risk not only to personal information safety, but to the legitimacy of governmental agencies tasked with investigating wrongdoing.’

 

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Australian Business Challenges 2019 KPMG

Following is an excerpt from KPMG blog on top 5 concerns for Australian business leaders which include digital transformation, innovation and disruption, regulation, political paralysis and customer centricity.

Challenges According to Business Leaders (Image copyright Pexels).

‘What’s really top of mind and keeping our business leaders up at night (when there’s no axe to grind)

What are Australian business leaders really concerned about when they look forward to 2019?

So our research practice, KPMG Acuity, engaged a broad spectrum of C-level leaders from a diversity of industries to think about the main issues exercising them when they consider 2019.

220 leaders – some with fewer than 50 employees, some running companies with revenues of over $1 billion a year – took time out to respond. Most were from the private sector, but the public sector is represented as well.

In order of importance the top 5 issues are.

1. Digital Transformation

Just about every CEO has ‘digital transformation’ at top of mind. In 2018, the term ‘digital transformation’ means so many things there is a very real risk that this lack of clarity is causing confusion, leading to diverse agendas and ultimately missed opportunities.

Digital transformation includes investments in digital technologies, but also spans the modification of an organisation’s functions, its ways of working, its back office technologies, and occasionally forging a completely new business model. True transformation should also include culture – often the poor cousin behind the more visible technology investment.”

2. Innovation and disruption

The fear of disruption, on its most elemental level, is straightforward: the constant worry that your competition will use new tech and methods to do what you are not. But as we look toward 2019, we see the dilemma is actually more immediate, more tangible, and more complex.”

One reason for this is the current global marketplace has made it abundantly clear that the network effects of the innovation race tend toward winner-takes-all. There are spectacularly outsized growth opportunities for the lucky few – and the potential to get left in the dust for everyone else. This raises the stakes enormously.

3. Regulation

This included both the sector-specific regulations facing the financial services industry and the broader challenges of harmonising business regulation; cutting red tape; and concerns over the capacity/capability of Australia’s regulators.

While we don’t wish to see needlessly bureaucratic demands on business, there is a danger of seeing new regulation as purely negative. Reporting can be a strong discipline to get things done, so we would urge businesses not to take their eyes off the ball and get into a defensive mindset if additional regulations are introduced in their sectors, or generally in 2019.

4. Political paralysis

Fourth on the list of issues worrying business leaders was the ongoing political log jam at Canberra. There was uncertainty over the prospect of significant reforms or necessary changes, and a lack of belief that Australia’s major parties can work cohesively on national agenda items.

Many CEOs referred to energy policy as an indicia of political paralysis. The problem was a trilemma – price, stability, environment – but political discourse could not deal with the three issues and it drifted to one of the three depending on the political perspective. As a country we have to overcome this problem and start relying on evidence-based policy.

5. Customer centricity

Customer not only came fifth in our list – but was the issue that permeated almost every other answer. It came up in responses ranging from regulation – where it needs to be seen through a lens of driving a closer connection of trust with your customers – to big data, where the real issue, said respondents, was ensuring every sector in the business has a plan to collect and deploy its data to create real value for customers.

The companies that truly get it are those who understand there is no silver bullet. These companies understand they need to have engaged, helpful people delivering outstanding service. That these people need to be working in alignment with a great digital experience. And that it is this combination that drives loyalty, advocacy, and commercial performance.

Read our full analysis of the top 10 ‘

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