New Zealand is a beautiful and exciting place to visit, but is a far flung destination at the bottom of the world. It relies on its constant stream of tourists throughout the year. But because it’s further away, it’s often seen as too expensive and a bit too far to travel to.

So when the world reopened after Covid and got back to holidaying overseas again, New Zealand really needed a big come back to put it back on the tourist map as a fun travel destination for global tourists to come looking for adventure.

Ultimately, they wanted to increase awareness and positive sentiment about New Zealand and get people booking their next trip there.

To attract more visitors to New Zealand after Covid, Tourism New Zealand turned to famous Kiwi ambassador and Oscar-winning filmmaker, Taika Waititi to help make their new Tourism film. But, he was too busy filming his hit pirate show for HBO Max.

So they deployed some of their trademark Kiwi ingenuity and humour to find another way to showcase New Zealand’s beautiful destinations and exciting activities. This resulted in an entertaining meta film production, where the making of the Tourism New Zealand film became the narrative of the actual Tourism New Zealand film. Whilst showing off New Zealand as a beautiful and fun destination and there's really is ‘No Place Like It On Earth’.

During Covid, New Zealand was perceived as a progressive country that did Covid well, closing its doors to world and focusing on domestic travel. And everyone wanted to come, but couldn’t get there. However, when the rest of the world started travelling again, New Zealand was late back to the party and people were already visiting places like rivals Australia, that were cheaper and easier to get to.

Post-Covid travellers were desperate to start travelling again, seeing the world that had been closed. They had a good perception of New Zealand, but needed reminding that it was an exciting option and was now welcoming back tourists.

With a quirky online tourism film, starring Taika Waititi, viewers on social could enjoy, share and comment, and see New Zealand as an exciting paradise destination. Somewhere they film pirate tv shows! So people could put it top of their travel lists.

With Season Two of HBO Max show, Our Flag Means Death filming in New Zealand, this was the perfect window to showcase some of the beautiful sets and locations. This film was a partnership production with HBO and Tourism New Zealand, working with Oscar-winning filmmaker, Taika Waititi and his team and their busy Hollywood schedule, meaning this had to be a creative production approach, juggling tight and changing timelines. Sharing some of HBO's production cast and crew and beautiful film locations meant they were able to mimic the production values of the HBO show.

However with limited access to its star, Taika, they decided to use his ‘pirate’ body double creatively, blurring the lines of reality to help bring their film to life.

This project had to wait out the Hollywood Actors' strike and launched with Season Two of the Show on HBO to maximise the big PR opportunity.

Campaign KPIs.

Global PR:

Reach: 1.3 billion reach

EAV (editorial) & Media value: NZD $10.8 milion

Coverage: 296 articles

Sentiment: 95% positive

Global Live coverage EAV NZD $717k

Tourism New Zealand Owned Social:

Video Views (YouTube): 9.4 million

Engagements: 125.1k

Sentiment: 95% positive

For the first time, Tourism New Zealand partnered with TV show, Our Flag Means Death which was the 2nd most in-demand series among young adult viewers in 2022. The campaign's star, Taika Waititi is an award-winning New Zealand filmmaker, actor and comedian with over 3.1 million instagram followers. He's won an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Grammy and two Emmy nominations, with his name attached to projects for Marvel and Star Wars franchises. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2022.