Tourism Australia operates across 18 markets around the world. For the youth audience, we focused on the biggest targets: the UK, USA, German, France and Italy, with the platform rolling out into Japan and Korea. While age united our audience, they were entirely different in terms of culture, political climate, language, and type of experience or gap year experience they were seeking.

Our data showed that we needed to be able to connect with each market in a bespoke way, and to pull on the levers that motivate people in each country. In Asia the desire is for further education and to improve 'Business English'. Whereas in Europe the want was for adventure and an escape from the troubles of home.

The beauty of creating our own news channel meant that we could both create, tailor and deploy our messages to work very specifically within those different cultural contexts.

To help the youth escape all that doom and gloom, we launched Aussie News Today.

We countered the bombardment of bad news on our audience’s social channels with good news from Down Under. Wherever our contextual language engine found bad stuff, we programmatically served good news in multiple languages, on multiple platforms and in real time.

We went far and wide with a fleet of news camper-vans, a news studio on the Harbour Bridge, and our own news chopper so we could retarget people with experience and state specific itineraries based off the content they've interacted with.

So far we've shared stories of street fighting kangaroos, hat eating crocodiles, helicopter pub crawls, a wallaby speeding across the Harbour Bridge, the Nude Beach Olympics, and the Darwin Beer Can Regatta.

We also used a good news index to offer up exclusive StudentUniverse deals to young people in the area.

There were three observations that informed our big idea:

1. Friends inspire holiday choice

Recommendations are hugely important for this audience, but especially when considering a year long holiday to a destination that’s 14,000 miles away. So, social was going to form the spine of the campaign. But how to stand out?

2. The world was going to hell in a handbasket

87% of millennials were getting their news on social media and those feeds were increasingly depressing. North Korean missiles. Climate change. Unemployment. Student debt. Feeds all over the globe are flooded with bad news. This has many young people dreading an uncertain future at home.

3. Australia was the last bastion of good news

By comparison, Australia’s news was refreshingly good. Our location had kept us isolated from most of the bad stuff going on in the world so the news in Australia was abundantly upbeat.

We needed an engaging way to take advantage of this, and build Australia’s case. Not just an idea, but a platform that reached young people online, appealed to their sense of humour, and shared all the reasons why life would be much better in Australia.

We received 300,000 new and additional bookings and enquiries post the launch of the campaign. Between 2017 and 2018 the average expenditure per night from backpackers increased by 5.1%. And expenditure on education increased by 16.5%. All indicative signs that Australia is becoming a more appealing destination for those long trips and amongst a more valuable audience.

In the first few months since launch, Aussie News Today reached 316 million people globally through earned media coverage, including 900 media clips equating to an estimated advertising value of $5.3 million.

The Aussie News Today social platforms have reached over 300 million young people in our target audience. And our Facebook page has grown to 684,000 followers, with the top video receiving more than 662,000 views and more than 2,400 shares.