This idea was born out of a universal insight that many social media influencers and users share very similar-looking travel photos. There are multiple trends and poses that have become fashionable on social, which people all around the world are replicating.

One prime example is the ‘follow me’ pose, featuring a female holding someone’s hand, leading them towards iconic landmarks, which has gone viral as a photo trend worldwide.

Using social as our sole communications channel, our campaign aims to encourage more original social media travel photos by creating a fictional social enforcement team – the Social Observation Squad.

Situation:

Tourism was New Zealand’s biggest export industry, contributing 20.1% of our total exports. But with our borders closed due to Covid, NZ is facing a $12.9 billion hole created from having no international visitors – making domestic travel vital to our country’s economic recovery.

Brief:

While Tourism NZ has launched a domestic tourism campaign encouraging NZers to ‘do something new’, many people are just visiting our most-popular tourism destinations, which can be seen from the photos shared on social.

To help boost our local economies throughout the country, we need to challenge NZers' existing holiday behaviours to be more adventurous and inspire others on social media to seek out more original experiences.

Objectives:

- Drive advocacy for domestic tourism.

- Broaden the range of tourism experiences shared on social.

- 10% increase in photos tagged with existing campaign hashtag #DoSomethingNewNZ

- 2% social engagement across Tourism NZ’s social channels.

While New Zealanders have been embracing domestic travel while our borders are closed due to Covid, many were visiting the same popular tourism destinations and taking almost identical photos.

The best way to describe these photos are influencer-style travel photos, which follow fashionable trends and poses that get replicated on social media all around the world.

So to encourage NZers to seek out more original experiences, we launched a national PSA campaign on social media asking them to stop travelling under the “social influence”. Embracing NZ’s tongue-in-cheek humour, we created a fictitious social enforcement squad who set out to rescue wayward travelers from the clichés of NZ tourism and encourage NZers to ‘share something new’.

Our Social Observation Squad leader was played by a well-known NZ comedian and social influencer himself, who’s social channels weren’t filled with cliché influencer photos, making him the perfect personality to front our campaign.

Trying to fill the $12.9 billion spending gap without international visitors is a massive task that all New Zealanders can play a role in.

Research shows that 70% of NZers are planning a holiday within NZ in the next 12 months. And with 83% of NZers being active social media users of YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, these were the key social platforms we needed to use to reach our wide target audience of 18-54 year olds right across the country.

Our approach with a limited budget was to launch a social campaign that sparked conversation around the types of travel photos NZers have been sharing on social media, recently and pre-Covid.

We wanted to encourage NZers to share more photos of our less-popular travel destinations and experiences, which were suffering the most, inspiring NZers on social media to go somewhere new for their next NZ holiday.

Our social campaign launched with one hero social film via Tourism New Zealand’s Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube channels, followed by two supporting social films which continued the story.

The campaign only had paid media support in the New Zealand market for a duration of 4 weeks, which consisted of sponsored and boosted posts across Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

Throughout the campaign, Tourism New Zealand also reshared posts from followers who responded to the campaign with more original travel photos using #DoSomethingNewNZ, as well engaging in social commentary via their community social media management team.

Organic Reach (global):

-1.47 BILLION global impressions within first 7 days

Paid Reach (within NZ):

-7.8 MILLION impressions across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube

Engagement:

-1000% increase in social engagement using #DoSomethingNewNZ

-11.8% engagement across Tourism NZ’s social channels

-22x higher Facebook engagement than industry benchmark*

-8.6x higher Instagram engagement than industry benchmark*

-95% positive sentiment worldwide (during a pandemic with most international borders closed)

Targets achieved:

-5.9x targeted social engagement across Tourism NZ’s social channels

-100x targeted increase in photos tagged with #DoSomethingNewNZ

As well as making news headlines across all of New Zealand’s major new sites, it picked up mass global media coverage, including New York Times, BBC, CNN, The Guardian, Bloomberg, The Independent, Lonely Planet, The Herald Scotland, City News Toronto, Irish Examiner, Conde Nast Traveller, Yahoo News, South China Morning Post, People Magazine and many more.

*Compared with industry benchmarks across all industries. Source: Socialinsider data, Jan2019-Oct2020