Tourism Australia partners with Buzzfeed on millennial targeted campaign

Tourism Australia has partnered with Buzzfeed on a new millennial targeted campaign in an effort to attract compelling and engaging content around authentic Australian travel experiences.

Heralded as a world-first collaboration, the new Buzzfeed Mateship program will see eight young travellers and aspiring content creators from the UK, Germany, Italy and France flown to Australia for a three-month road trip off-the-beaten-track to discover some of Australia’s very best local culture, festivals, surf breaks, food and wine offerings. The Eight ‘Buzzfeed Mates’ will then discover and report on their travel experiences across the country for both Tourism Australia and BuzzFeed social channels.

Tourism Australia’s CMO, Lisa Ronson, said the campaign’s mission to generate spectacular digital content is part of a strategy to attract compelling and engaging content around authentic Australian travel experiences, and build a fresh millennial community around Australia as a memorable and desirable youth destination.

“The youth are very much a focus of Tourism Australia, and have been for a long time because they are a really important segment for the Australian economy,” she told CMO. “In terms of spend, 42 per cent of all expenditure in Australia is by a youth traveller. And that’s effectively because they stay longer and tend to disperse more across regional Australia as well, which has very important implications for key economic factors like employment.

“With youth being so important to us, we felt we need to find an authentic way to speak to youth, and Buzzfeed are absolutely a perfect partner because they have credibility to the millennial audience, they have a massive reach of 44 million millennials each month, and are just perfectly aligned with this target audience.”

According to Ronson, the new campaign fits into Tourism Australia’s wider marketing strategy to promote Australia’s food and wine, aquatic and coastal, as well as nature and wildlife components.

“These are the three core pillars we tend to focus our marketing efforts around,” she said. “A lot of content that will be created by the mateship areas will be focused, but not limited to these key areas where we have competitive strength.”

But while the competition is open to creative professionals and enthusiasts alike, Ronson agreed those applicants who can already demonstrate they are compelling master story tellers with a high level of social influence will stand out from the crowd.

“We want authentic content creators that can speak to the youth audience with an incredibly credible tone of voice, and having a deep understanding of the digital media landscape is also essential - so if they already have experience in that space then that will tick a lot of the criteria boxes,” she added. “But along with this we are also looking for someone who has a great positive attitude, someone who is curious, playful, confident, mature and has a willingness to participate and really immerse themselves in Australia.”

Entries for the Buzzfeed Mateship program are open to applicants from the UK, Germany, Italy and France. The entries are open from 2-18 August with the campaign set to launch in October this year.

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