CHALLENGE:Increase US travel to New Zealand.

STRATEGY:Recapture the “Lord of the Rings” travel boom by tapping the connection between New Zealand and the world of film. We built “Your Big Break”, a global short film competition site supported by director Peter Jackson and producer Barrie Osbourne, to find an amateur filmmaker who captured the spirit of “The Youngest Country on Earth.” EXECUTION & RESULTS:The benchmark for success–100 entries–was trumped with 1,075 submissions and over 18,000 votes.

The winning film aired March 5 on IFC and was seen more than 4 million times. Your-big-break.com generated twice the number of visitors of New-Zealand.com and more than 20,000 prospective traveler leads.

Filmmakers were invited to submit a 3-minute script and video pitch for a chance to be one of the 5 finalists chosen to fly to NZ for a 3 weeks shoot with production company Park Road Post.

A website was built where participants could create their submissions and solicit votes from their networks.

To maximize submissions, we mobilized the creative and film community around the competition through industry bloggers, MeetUps, professional guilds and film schools. Over 27 major film programs endorsed the program.We built a community through a campaign blog, Facebook and Twitter. A community manager provided advice, answered questions and hosted guest bloggers to keep the community engaged.The five finalists live-blogged their experience through the blog and behind-the-scenes video clip.Media efforts were supported by media buys and Facebook engagement ads.The grand prize winner was screened at the Spirit Awards show on the Independent Film Channel.

The first goal of generating a wide variety of high quality entries was a clear success with more 1,080 submissions from great talent including students from the 27 film programs around the country that officially endorsed the competition.The community embraced this initiative generating 18,000 votes, more than 50 blog and media postings, and nearly 21 million impressions, as well as a total of over 4 million views of the submissions and final films.For the 3 months the campaign ran, www.your-big-break.com generated over twice the number of visitors of www.new-zealand.com. The between clicks through to www.new-zealand.com and to the “Visit New Zealand” section of the site generated more than 20,000 incremental leads.