Australia or Tasmania – which one is bigger?
Last week the fake Tourism Milwaukee clip on YouTube lead to a whole debate on Twitter about real and fake destination videos.
Time to look deeper into the mysterious world of destination videos. And what timing! Tourism Australia, a national tourism organization with slightly deeper pockets, just launched a new destination video titled – how appropriate – “Australia”. You will not (primarily) find it on YouTube but rather playing in the movie theatre closest to you.
All jokes aside: while Tourism Australia did of course not commission a 130 million dollar movie with Nicole Kidman as a marketing piece, they did align their whole new marketing strategy with the movie. The hope is to have the same benefits New Zealand had with “Lord of the Rings”.
They even went as far as to ask Baz Luhrman – the director of the movie – to shoot several inspirational trailers (which also can be found on YouTube) that use some of the themes of the movie. Cost for the campaign: 26 million dollars. The entire Tourism Australia website also got a makeover to match the new campaign (not all an improvement in my opinion, the site is now very text-heavy).
So a lot is riding for Tourism Australia on the success of “Australia”.
But now comes the fun part: all of Australia is taking the movie very serious. All of Australia? No, a tiny state in the South of Australia is daring to make fun of it!
Have a look at: “Tasmania – Bigger than Australia”.
Great idea, great execution. Have a look at the details on the website like the footer or the clip of the director talking about the stunt scenes. Somebody had fun with this project!
And of course the main video is on YouTube – over 40,000 views in less than 2 weeks is not too shabby.
But wait, it gets even better: over 100 people left comments on the video. Have a look here and be surprised / shocked / embarrassed how passionate/angry people get about this spoof and Tasmania claiming to be “bigger than Australia”. And be warned: some of the comments are NSFW, but I guess that is just how Aussies and Tassies are.
So my questions for you: what do you think of Tourism Australia basing it’s marketing strategy almost entirely on “Australia”? Do you think “Tasmania” is bigger than “Australia”? What about the comments about Tasmania on YouTube? Does this type of engagement help or hurt?