International youth travellers (18-30 years old) are a vital source of visitors, income, and

labour to the Australian economy. At 2.1 million people, youth travellers contribute 25% of all

international visitor arrivals to Australia, and 46 per cent of all international visitor spend

($18.7bn). Most importantly, they stay longer, spend more, and travel more widely than any

other target segment. This spreads the revenue to struggling regional areas in need of

visitors and labour.

In recent years due to competition from new ‘gramable, edgy destinations, there has been

an increasing decline in youth visitors to Australia. Tourism Australia needed to do

something social to motivate a new generation of young people to escape Down Under once

again.

The objectives were to raise awareness of Australia as a youth destination, and increase

intention for young people planning to travel in the next 18 months.

In just six months, we published 1,642 news, and were live and reactive in multiple

languages on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, BuzzFeed, and Twitter. We built an editorial

team that features celebrity news anchors, journalists, content creators, editors, and - in a

world-first partnership with BuzzFeed - young news correspondents from around the world

who travelled the country in News Campervans and beamed good news back home in their

local languages. That and we got our very own news chopper, and news desk on top of the

Sydney Harbour Bridge.

All our content is created or adapted to suit platform, channel, and audience. Our flexible

content strategy, and reactive templates allowed for quick turn around long and short form

films in multiple formats, Instagram stories, listicles, articles, all the way down to

Boomerangs.

Our good news index also offered StudentUniverse travel deals to young people in areas

where news wasn't great.