Aussie News Today
To get young people to escape from all the doom and gloom, they 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.
2 Cannes Lions Awards
Objectives
87% of millennials get their news on social media, so we countered the bombardment of bad news where they hang out. Wherever their contextual language engine found bad stuff, they programmatically served good news. All in multiple languages, on multiple platforms, in real time.
So far they’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.
They even got their own news chopper, fleet of news campervans, and a news studio on top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Strategy & solution
Pre-launch:
They teased the campaign through announcement of the BuzzFeed partnership, and the global search for influencer correspondents from key international markets. This happened across BuzzFeed’s global network.
Launch:
Aussie News Today launched with a live bulletin on top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. This and the launch news promo were supported in paid Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube placements, and earned media across the world.
Momentum:
Their always on, up to the minute news stories and reactive content rolled out, and continues to find and programmatically counter bad news with to their contextual language engine. They tailored content and buy to each social platform though media investment, organic reach, native Taboola advertising, and BuzzFeed co-creation and support.
Action:
They moved from content to conversion by retargeting people with itineraries based around content they liked. They also used their good news index to match StudentUniverse travel deals to local bad news.
Results
Aussie News Today turned the world’s bad news into good news for Tourism Australia. So far they’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 their stories were picked up by media outlets around the world.
Most importantly their content to conversion funnel took their 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. Their early tracking has also found a 12% increase in intention to travel to Australia.