No single tourism campaign (and potentially no single campaign) has ever had such a significant global reach across the spectrum of media and generated such a high volume and highly impassioned response from consumers.

- 34,684 applicants from 201* countries created 610 hours of video content which passionately promotes our product;- Over 450,000 votes for the Wild Card applicant;- In 56 days islandreefjob.com had 6,849,504 visits, 47,548,514 page views with an average of 8.62 minutes spent on the site;- Media coverage has been estimated at over $US100** million from a campaign budget of $US1.2M.*Value of media coverage estimated by Tourism Queensland, as at 19/3/09.**Web-coded countries (only 195 countries are recognised by the UN).

The target audience were new customers, with a vague awareness of the Great Barrier Reef (and Australia), but no awareness of the islands. Our goal was to raise international awareness of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef (a new brand for Tourism Queensland) and transform a popular day-trip destination into an international tourist’s dream holiday. Classified press ads, a PR campaign, online recruitment listings and online display ads would drive traffic to the website to engage with the brand, and in the long term, help to drive visitation to the region.

We tapped into a universal desire and created a job that sounded too good to be true – anyone from anywhere in the world could apply. The Islands Caretaker role is a completely genuine employment opportunity within Tourism Queensland, living on the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef and reporting back to the world. To apply, candidates had to create a persuasive and entertaining video application demonstrating their knowledge of the region. Tourism Queensland wanted to achieve 14,000 application videos from 8 key markets, plus news coverage in mass media and popular social networking sites.

The best aspect of ‘The Best Job in the World’ is its location, and although the generous salary is appealing, the real reward is in spending six months living above the reef and exploring the region. The ‘Best Job in the World’ idea was born out of the brand’s positioning – Life Above and provokes Global Experience Seekers to engage with a unique brand asset – the Great Barrier Reef. This is the first time a tourism brand has been launched with a recruitment campaign, and used real people who haven’t yet been to the destination to help promote it.