A live & interactive virtual holiday for a world in lockdown.
In the wake of devastating bushfires and a global pandemic, Australia’s tourism sector was facing its most difficult period ever. To help the industry survive, we needed to inspire local and international audiences to start planning their next Aussie holiday at a time when they couldn’t leave home…
In the darkest period in the history of Australian tourism, we took on a bold challenge to reignite the dream for travel in Australia.
Our ambition was to find a new way to facilitate international audiences exploring and experiencing Australia remotely and increasing Australians’ intentions to undertake domestic travel.
At the height of lockdown, no one was planning an Australian holiday.
So we needed to understand what they were doing instead.
Analysing rapidly evolving media consumption, we discovered the world was in search of new forms of social interaction, with news and personality anchored TV programming up 17.4% YOY.
But the relationship between TV screens and social media was also changing. Once confined to mobile devices, live streams were providing a form of escape and variety for living room entertainment. Social media users were searching and streaming LIVE content, with Facebook LIVE and YouTube LIVE audiences tripling compared to pre-COVID 19 levels.
With travel unattainable, we went where the audiences were and created something aspiring travellers couldn’t get anywhere else.
A live virtual holiday,
reconnecting the world
with the best of Australia.
Live on Facebook, YouTube and Australia.com, with a new Aussie travel experience, on the hour every hour, for an entire weekend.
Inviting the world down under.
We created a Facebook event to invite a world in lockdown on a virtual holiday around Australia. Through teaser content, we gave viewers a taste of the unmissable experiences they could expect to see, inspiring them to explore the weekend lineup and add the event to their calendars.
An open invite to Australia.
To launch the experience and generate maximum awareness locally, we partnered with national broadcaster Channel 10 to create The Love Australia Project - a network-first, special-edition of Australia’s most popular panel show, The Project, that provided a compelling media moment to launch the campaign. This integrated TV special united Channel 10’s best talent to celebrate Australia’s tourism sector and introduce viewers to the Live From Aus virtual holiday experience.
Then we handed over the reins to 40 tourism industry operators and personalities to do what they do best.
Tap an image to watch some highlight selections from the weekend of live streams.
An epic weekend.
Over 48 hours, Aussie tourism operators from every corner of the country showed off the incredible breadth of Australia’s tourism offering through their unique live stories and experiences. We even engaged celebrity chefs including Matt Moran, Hayden Quinn and Jock Zonfrillo, entertainers like Rove McManus, The Wiggles and Jack River, and Outback Wrangler Matt Wright to add some star power to our weekend lineup.
Across 32 live streams, viewers experienced croc feeding in Darwin, scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef, a chopper flight over The Kimberley, koala cuddles in Currumbin and an Uluru sunset. Amplified across 12 global markets, we gave viewers a unique chance to experience the best of Australia from anywhere in the world.
To enable people around the world to experience a real-time connection with over 40 industry storytellers, many working from incredibly remote parts of Australia, we developed a range of reliable and remote production capabilites, turning broadcast technologies and practices into smartphone-friendly streaming solutions to help the industry share their stories and experiences from wherever they were.
A connected campaign.
To drive consistency across the 32 live streams, we developed a suite of assets to reinforce Tourism Australia’s brand identity - including a brand-aligned look and feel, supers, title sequences, social content and live community management.
To ensure maximum brand alignment and impact, every live stream was simultaneously multicast across the brand’s major digital platforms - Facebook, YouTube and Australia.com.
To align the project with Tourism Australia’s broad range of campaigns and content, we did what the brand has always done - putting passionate Aussies at the forefront of our communication to give audiences around the world a taste of the Australian way of life.
And to ensure every live stream drove meaningful action, we linked each stream through to content on Australia.com to help audiences find out how to discover, book and experience what they were seeing in Live From Aus for themselves.
Rising to the challenge.
The technical challenges of achieving our ambition at the height of a global lockdown were numerous and complex.
We had to establish a way to enable the live event across three platform simultaneously - Facebook, YouTube and Australia.com - in order to reach the maximum number of people across Tourism Australia’s digital ecosystem and make it easy for viewers to watch and interact with Live From Aus on whichever platform they’d prefer. That meant establishing a bespoke solution, adapting broadcast technology and processes to create virtual clones of streams from talent to multicast across all platforms.
Next, we had to develop a stream sharing solution that was simple enough for talent of all levels of digital savviness to effortlessly connect with, across a range of devices from standard smartphones through to multi-camera broadcast setups.
Our streaming solution had to be two-way, so that on-stream talent could respond to audience questions in real-time, enabling a more immersive, interactive streaming experience for viewers. To enable this, we developed a text-based solution that would forward curated social comments directly to the talent’s stream at an appropriate moment for them to respond (e.g. not when they’re flying a helicopter or feeding a crocodile).
To enable all of the above, we rapidly developed a bespoke technology and communication solution, powered by a unified team of 200 people across Tourism Australia, its agency village, production and technical partners and tourism operators from every state and territory.
All this in less than 6 weeks from briefing to live date, and all in the midst of strict COVID-19 lockdown restrictions.
Driving epic results.
1.27 million
Aussie viewers watched our live TV special, trending #1 on Twitter nationally.
127 million
Unique social media users reached.
6.6 million
Live views on social, delivering 12 years of viewership in 36 hours.
1,765
Pieces of earned media coverage, with 100% positive sentiment.
34 million
Views from 40 countries around with world within 2 weeks of the event.
1 billion
Estimated reach through global PR.
226 million
Social media impressions within 2 weeks of launch.
10x
Spike in search for Australian holiday experiences on Booking.com the weekend of the event.
By reminding the world to take time to dream, Live From Aus delivered the first positive week-on-week change in demand for travel in Australia following 12 weeks of falling demand (according to Adara’s Data Co-op), kickstarting sustained demand growth for 6 consecutive weeks.