Tourism Queensland yesterday launched a big user-generated-content campaign: the Australian version of “Island Idol”. Visitors are invited to submit a casting video on www.islandreefjob.com and apply for the job of Island Caretaker in the Great Barrier Reef:

The Caretaker of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef is a newly created position. There are a few minor tasks that need to be taken care of, but the most important duty is to report back to Tourism Queensland (and the world) and let us know what’s taking place on the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef.

The promotion was launched on a very nice (but flash heavy) microsite and supported by a very clever PR campaign.

Videos are submitted to the site but hosted on YouTube. About 30 videos have been submitted so far. Tourism Queensland will select 10 candidates and the public can select one wildcard candiate. All will be flown to Queensland where the final selection will be made. And one lucky winner will get to live in the Barrier Reef for 6 months and be paid to go sailing, snorkeling etc. and blog about it. Oh, the salary: A$150,000 for six months.

Another destination that launched a video contest today was Discover LA. For the launch of the new “That’s so LA” campaign consumers are asked to submit a video (or a photo) for a chance to win one of 5 LA weekends and $1,000 in cash. Videos are uploaded on the site and also hosted on DiscoverLA.com. Very few videos have been submitted but some of the ones that have been uploaded look like they might infringe on copyright for music used in the background (but then – I am not a lawyer.)

And the third destination to launch a YouTube video contest is CapeTown Tourism. The contest does not indicate whether it is the work of the official Capetown Tourism organization or somebody else. Users can submit a video to win 2 tickets on a cruise that departs on Feb 14th. Winners for the contest will be announced just 2 weeks before on Feb 2nd. Does not give the winner a lot of time to pack …

Overall thoughts:

The Tourism Queensland campaign is not cheap but beautifully executed. Great idea, great website, great YouTube integration, great PR. They will get their money’s worth, even with the high cost involved. By hosting the videos on YouTube Tourism Queensland minimizes the risk of copyright infringement plus benefits from the power of YouTube – the YouTube channel for the contest was the 4th most watched channel in Australia today. By hosting the videos themselves Discover LA misses out on the viral opportunities YouTube offers.

But YouTube alone is not the way to go as the Capetown contest shows. I challenge you to find the information about the rules and the prize on the site. Without a microsite to support it is hard to run a video contest on YouTube.

The biggest challenge for video contest is the high hurdle for engaging people. If you do not get a lot of people really excited about the idea and/or about the prize you will not get a lot of videos.

So don’t do a video contest it if you can not do it right.

Anybody wants to guess how many videos will be uploaded on
- Feb 2nd when the Capetown Tourism contest closes
- Feb 22nd (or earlier if more than 30,000 applications are received) for the Queensland contest
- June 1st, when the Discover LA contest closes?

Your thoughts on video contests in general?

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Industry Observations, Tourism, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.