New Zealand is a small country on the far side of the world. With a tiny population, and a budget to match, we’ve got a big task on our hands letting everyone know exactly where we are, and what you can do here, and in doing so, making us a must-visit destination. And in 2012 Tourism New Zealand got a once in a decade opportunity to catapult New Zealand into the spotlight thanks to the making of Sir Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

If you’re a fan of Tolkien, then one place is synonymous with Middle-earth, and that is New Zealand. New Zealand is Middle-earth on Earth. Where Gandalf strides, Hobbit’s walk, and Gollum creeps. So this year, we aimed to earn as much media as we could by using our association with all things Middle-earth. Thus, “100% Middle-earth=100% Pure New Zealand was born. A campaign created with the permission and involvement of Sir Peter Jackson’s Wingnut Films and Warner Brothers. All our campaign activity needed to live and propagate online, and drive global traffic to our gateway portal newzealand.com, and/or to our travel partners. Our campaign started with an epic online film seeded by ‘Sir Peter’ to his fans, then encompassed rich media, paid display, earned media, PR at many levels and audiences, broadcasting the nation’s weather forecast entirely in Elvish, exclusive online content via a ‘Journey to Middle-earth’ book, and even a Dept of Internal affairs sanctioned ‘Welcome to Middle earth’ passport stamp.

‘100% Middle-earth is 100% Pure New Zealand.’ All campaign activity needed to live and propagate online, and drive global traffic to our gateway portal newzealand.com, and/or to our travel partners. Our campaign started with an epic online film seeded by ‘Sir Peter’ to his 650 000 fans, then encompassed rich media, paid display, earned media, PR at many levels (trade, consumer, media, ‘influencers’, stakeholders) and audiences, broadcasting the nation’s weather forecast entirely in Elvish, exclusive online content via a ‘Journey to Middle-earth’ book, and even a Dept of Internal affairs sanctioned ‘Welcome to Middle earth’ passport stamp. The campaign was global and appeared in 47 countries with some parts being tailored to local nuance and need.

Sir Peter shared our film with over 650 000 fans. There were 11,000 likes and 3,500 shares. In the first 3 months of the campaign we had close to a million views online. Visits to newzealand.com using campaign related key-words is up 265%. A 16% increase (year on year) of global traffic to newzealand.com. In the first 48 hours of the ‘virtual book’ going live it received 130,000 page views, with an average of 14 book page views per visit. The weather forecast in Elvish was reported by the BBC and the Daily Mail. Thousands got their passports stamped.