We needed to shift the perceptions of South Australia (SA). The intrastate audience was stuck in a rut, travelling to the same places over and over, and the interstate audience knew South Australia for its great wineries, but didn’t consider it to be exciting enough to replace an overseas trip.

We wanted to depart from the usual tourism advertising approach of ‘postcards from paradise’ and show off the state and its experiences in a way that was truly innovative and genuine. South Australia is a state that rewards the curious, so we rebranded it as such and needed to find a way of broadcasting it to the nation.

With five days being the ideal minimum length of a holiday in SA, allowing tourists enough time to really explore a few areas, the idea wrote itself: 5 DAYS IN A STATE OF WONDER.

A 120hour branded content film that explored the very best of the state’s regions, events and experiences, in one continuous shot, almost as if from the point of view of a tourist. The unprecedented and disruptive event streamed 24/7 on screens around the country in real-time, so viewers could tune in at any time to see what they could be doing at that very moment if they were travelling in SA.

Tourism marketing strategy generally starts with a view to build memory structures out of iconic scenery, through repetition. A whole part of the world gets distilled down into a few 'postcard' experiences.

Traveling around South Australia made us realise we couldn't do it justice this way; nor was it SA's style to engineer the perfect marketing moment. Our travels had revealed a place that was refreshingly non-commercial, potentially to its detriment.

So in-place of high-frequency 'postcard porn', we set out to open a window into what five days in South Australia was genuinely like. So we let the place sell itself, without the ‘advertising’ getting in the way.

Throughout the 120hour film, no two frames and subsequently no two views were alike. This created a unique viewing experience; as campaign frequency grew, so did the viewers’ sense of scale and authenticity of what an adventure in SA would offer.

The spine of the campaign was executed as a 120hour, non-stop, single-shot film that was live streamed in real-time to a national audience on SouthAustralia.com and YouTube Live, with key highlights being broadcast on Facebook Live and OOH placements across the country. We also broadcast sections on various digital placements, such as YouTube Homepage banners and a NineMSN homepage takeover.

To produce the film, we shot for 120 hours straight, without stopping. This required three full film crews working 24/7, moving seamlessly between five camera setups, hundreds of memory cards and batteries, complex audio setups for interviews, live music, and underwater filming.

To publish the live stream, we approached many broadcast partners who weren’t confident that they could keep a 1080p stream live for five days, so we had to stream our own master feed via an innovative AWS platform, with multiple back-up feeds plus manual USB uploads.

• 14.1 million online video plays with an average view time of 7.7 minutes.

• +41% increase in interstate traffic and a +19% increase in intrastate traffic creating 255,461 domestic visits to SA.com during the campaign period

• 21,274 leads to tourism partners achieved across the campaign period; an 83% increase on the same period the previous year, and at the time the highest two weeks on record

• 5.1 million Australians - total remarketing pool

• 20,452 domestic visits to SA.com in a single day which is still the highest single-day traffic ever

• 1.2 million social interactions on the live stream