To get young people to escape from all the doom and gloom, we launched Aussie News Today. A social media news channel with a difference, it shared Australia's abundance of good news with the youth of the world.

From our research we knew that 87% of millennials get their news on social media, so we countered the bombardment of bad news where they hang out. Wherever our contextual language engine found bad stuff, we programmatically served good news in multiple languages, on multiple platforms and in real time.

We had stories from every corner of Australia which allowed us to retarget people with experience specific itineraries based off the content they'd interacted with. We also used our good news index to offer up StudentUniverse deals to young people nearby.

To take Aussie News Today to the world, we struck a world first influencer, content sharing and media partnership with BuzzFeed.

Pre-launch:

We 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:

Our always on, up to the minute news stories and reactive content rolled out, and continues to find and programmatically counter bad news with to our contextual language engine. We tailored content and buy to each social platform though media investment, organic reach, native Taboola advertising, and BuzzFeed co-creation and support.

Action:

We moved from content to conversion by retargeting people with itineraries based around content they liked. We also used our good news index to match StudentUniverse travel deals to local bad news.

Aussie News Today turned the world’s bad news into good news for Tourism Australia. So far we'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 our stories were picked up by media outlets around the world.

Most importantly our content to conversion funnel took our 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. Our early tracking has also found a 12% increase in intention to travel to Australia.

Tourism Australia started Aussie News Today to lure the world's youth Down Under. To do this, they needed a highly targeted global media campaign that was contextually relevant to local news and pop culture every daily. Media plan that could release reactive content in real time, and evolved content and messaging as we retargeted.

A media content play that earned attention, and built an audience bigger than our modest media spend for a global campaign. A media strategy, and programmatic buy that appeared in multiple languages, on multiple social platforms, but never appeared alongside death, disaster or tragedy.

Planning a Working Holiday to a destination 14,000 miles away is a big commitment. Our data showed that our target - youth travellers (18-30 years) get inspired, and plan via social media.

We needed an engaging way to take advantage of this, while building Australia’s case.

In starting a news network that countered bad news with our good news, we needed to work with the social platforms, and media owners to plan, buy and optimise on the micro level.

We worked with Buzzfeed to integrate content in their platform, and mined their learnings from local operations to tailor all of our content by market. We also partnered with Facebook and Instagram to use Live, Stories and selective media spend to grow organic reach and tagging amongst our audience.

Finally we used retail partner spend from StudentUniverse and STA Travel to extend our reach and decrease our cost per lead.

International youth travellers (18-30 years old) are a vital source of visitors, income, and labour to the Australian economy. At 2.1 million people, youth travellers contribute 25% of all international visitor arrivals to Australia, and 46 per cent of all international visitor spend ($18.7bn). Most importantly, they stay longer, spend more, and travel more widely than any other target segment. This spreads the revenue to struggling regional areas in need of visitors and labour.

In recent years due to competition from new ‘gramable, edgy destinations, there has been an increasing decline in youth visitors to Australia. Tourism Australia needed to do something social to motivate a new generation of young people to escape Down Under once again.

The objectives were to raise awareness of Australia as a youth destination, and increase intention for young people planning to travel in the next 18 months.