The Challenge:The Australian icon, the Great Barrier Reef, was shortlisted to be named a New7Wonder of Nature in a global campaign to find the 7 most wondrous natural sites of the world, as decided by the public vote.Tourism Australia tasked us with creating a PR campaign that would raise awareness and motivate votes for the national icon from a domestic and international audience.The Objective:Raise awareness and drive votes for the Great Barrier Reef in the global New7Wonders of Nature campaign.The Strategy:Create an election-based PR program, to tap into the audience’s love of voting on an international level and motivate Australia’s national pride and competitive spirit on a domestic level.The Execution:We activated a 10-week campaign that included intensive media relations, creation of visual social media and news content, ongoing social media community management as well as experiential activities.The creative focus of the campaign was the creation of the ‘world’s most remote polling booth’, placed on a tiny sandbank island, right in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef. The booth captured the votes of nearby swimmers and snorkelers. Vision was taken and seeded amongst domestic news outlets and global social media channels with significant media uptake.The Outcome:Wide scale news and social media coverage was achieved, reaching over 75m people. The vision received almost 20,000 Facebook ‘likes’, the most achieved on a Tourism Australia Facebook page post to date at that time, and almost 7,000 views on YouTube.

The creative focus was the creation of the ‘world’s most remote polling-booth’, placed on a tiny island, in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef.The booth captured votes from nearby swimmers and snorkelers, via an iPad. Vision was captured and distributed to traditional and social media.Using Tourism Australia’s Friends of Australia network, co-founder of Earth Hour, Andy Ridley, was engaged as spokesperson for all content.Other elements:Phase 1: Media call-out to rally support from media and consumers Phase 2: Great Barrier Reef stunt Phase 3: Australian Milliner, Neil Grigg, created Reef inspired head-pieces, worn by staff at Royal Randwick race course on iconic Melbourne Cup day, designed to catch media and consumer attention.

Phase 4: A final media call-out to urge voting in the final 48 hours Ongoing: A social media program, including management of the campaign Twitter feed, a Facebook voting app, conversation calendar and seeding amongst third party Facebook pages, e.g. tourism stakeholder Stayz.com.au.

Due to competition from countries with significantly larger populations (voting was not scaled accordingly), the Reef was not voted into the final 7. However, the campaign significantly raised the profile of the Great Barrier Reef and Australia, both domestically, and globally.Results highlights include:Media impact- 135 pieces of overall media coverage- 15 pieces of TV coverage- 48 pieces of radio coverage- PR impressions (international and domestic): 75m+Social media impact- 6,290 views on YouTube- 19,136 'likes' on Tourism Australia’s Facebook page - the highest number achieved for a Tourism Australia Facebook post to date- Facebook virality of 2.79%- Over 100 pieces of blog coverageAwarded Best Use of Multi-Media Creativity by the New7Wonders Foundation*NB: Please note that final placing and voting numbers were not disclosed by the New7Wonders of Nature Foundation.