World's Best Campaign

For the last three months, I’ve watched Queensland Tourism kick off its new marketing campaign with The Best Job in the World contest. It’s a thing of genius. It makes me weep. Thirty-five thousand (34,684 to be exact) videos about my product within 2.5 months? Videos viewed an average of 560 times? Being the #1 viewed site in the travel industry? Yes, please.

Job Details:

• – Be the Hamilton Island “Caretaker” for six months
• – Salary = AU$150,000 (roughly $120,000 USD at the start of the campaign. Now about $96,000 USD)
• – Live in a 3-room gorgeous house
• – Blog once a week about your experiences

Application Process:

• – Submit a 60 second video on why you would be the best person for the job
• – No if’s and’s or butt’s. Submit a sixty second video through their website or don’t bother applying.

Efforts Behind the Program:

• – Contest kicked off their new, 3 year, $1.7 MM marketing campaign.
• – Perfectly timed and well thought launch. Info showed up in newspapers, etc. worldwide on a dreary Monday morning when unemployment was at a high.
• – Awesome use of twitter by @Queensland to answer questions/problems with job applications and spread news updates in real time.
• – Facebook page. It’s hot.

Downfalls:

• – Site is mainly flash and slow as hell. After two months of massive traffic you’d think they’d figure this part out and fix it and/or better prepare for the traffic and uploads occurring.
• – Again, lots of site and server issues. In fact, the site even crashed on the final day of the contest. Lots of procrastinators were pissed off that their upload didn’t take.
• – Surprisingly, they never openly leveraged YouTube’s site for video viewing. I understand wanting to keep people on your site, but when it’s down, why not drive more traffic to YouTube for viewing. Also, while they branded their Twitter Background and Facebook page, their use of YouTube is slightly odd. They have one branded channel. On the same day, it looks like they created 40+ other accounts (numbered sequentially) but never branded those. Maybe YouTube only allows a certain number of videos to be uploaded per account? Since the campaign was based on VIDEO submissions, you’d think they’d jazz up their YouTube presence.
• – Lack of preparation. I’m not sure how many videos they were expecting. But the full strategy was lacking. For example, it seemed like they joined twitter on a whim about three weeks into the campaign. After another week, they switched their twitter handle from @anywherebutqsld (or something similar) to @Queensland.

The Big Question? If and how they are going to leverage the 35,000 videos submitted. Okay, that might be a BIG question, but it’s not the REAL question: Did / will the campaign generate more travel to Queensland? Eh. While the campaign raised my awareness of the islands, I didn’t book travel. I bet most of the unemployed people who applied didn’t either BUT, I still love the campaign. I wish I had thought of something similar.