The film Australia boasted an all-star cast led by Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. It was directed by Baz Luhrmann, whose CV includes the moneyspinner Moulin Rouge. And with a production budget of up to US$130 million, the film looked like a winner. Tourism Australia (TA) made it the centrepiece of its marketing drive, allocating $27 million to a tie-in campaign.
Unfortunately for the tourism body, the film flopped.
Luhrmann reportedly only finished editing it 48 hours prior to its screening after the studio insisted on a happy ending. That still didn’t save the film from a critical mauling, even in Australia. “Luhrmann seems so eager to trowel on the Aussie clichés, obviously to appeal to the tourist market, that Australia is often simply irritating,” said Jim Schembri in Melbourne’s Age. It saw lukewarm box-office returns when it opened in the US and its home market in 2008, sending Tourism Australia’s ambitious plan to piggyback on the film decidedly off-script.
Despite extensive marketing for the $56 billion industry, the tourism body’s recent campaigns have all drawn a lot of attention for the wrong reasons. Its appointment of DDB Worldwide and Carat as creative and media partners in 2008 for its $169 million account came after the failure of M&C Saatchi’s controversial ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’ campaign, which drew as many complaints as tourists.
International visitor arrivals to the country have been at their lowest since 2001. In October 2008, Australia saw 16,000 fewer overseas visitors compared with the same period in 2007. No wonder, then, that TA sought to replicate a strategy from the 80s, when it built on Paul Hogan’s Crocodile Dundee films to drive visitors.
DDB now has its work cut out as Australia, which was supposed to be the launch pad for bigger and better things, looks like it will not provide the marketing platform the brand had hoped for.
Fact Box
- In October 2008, Australia saw 16,000 fewer overseas visitors compared with the same period in 2007. Other than growth among overseas students and various business segments, the number of first-time visitors to the country is down by almost nine per cent.
- A$40 million (US$26.5 million) of taxpayers’ money was invested in Tourism Australia’s scheme to build a global advertising campaign around the Baz Luhrmann film.
- The movie took just US$44.3 million in ticket sales at US and Canadian box offices after five weekends.
Kurt Viertel, group managing director, Leo Burnett Singapore
I like this Hollywood experiment. It’s brave and has an above-average chance of success as a bridging campaign. Unfortunately, the challenge for Tourism Australia is that it is yet truly to define Australia the brand. Beautiful story-telling can’t fill this void - a truth written on the face of the Tourism Minister during the launch of the new campaign.
Bad tourism campaigns are at worst forgettable; they are often not interesting enough to leave negative impressions. Even the much-criticised ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’ campaign didn’t turn visitors away. Regardless of the movie’s success, Tourism Australia needs to stay the course.
To be fair, the rest of the campaign is decent. It has ably expanded the transformational promise to all the jigsaw pieces that are required of tourism marketing.
Next steps (before going back to the drawing board): invest online and target the social networks. Work hard to convert the fleeting share of mind Australia will receive. Use the platform to sell value. The facts are: airline fuel is cheaper and the Australian dollar is weaker. If you are in a position to take a holiday in 2009, market fluctuations, not celluloid, just made Australia a lot more attractive.
Gavin Gibson, strategy planning director, OMD Asia-Pacific
Tourism Australia must be desperate for a big win. Australia is not it, however. The concept itself, hours of majestic content in an epic movie named after the country, must have seemed like a dream on paper. Sadly, the actual film content has weak consumer appeal, evident in the dismal international box-office takings, and does little to position Down Under as a must-visit ‘escapism’ location.
An argument can be made that a film like Australia would generate enough awareness on its own to make the campaign a success.
This may have been true - once. But this campaign is a good example of how marketing has shifted. Today, brands live or die based on consumer opinion and credible third-party endorsement. In TA’s defence, centring a campaign on dedicated film content fits with a world where content is king. Consumers are either ambassadors or critics. But content context and entertainment value have to be spot on, and Australia did not meet consumer expectations.
The success New Zealand enjoyed from the Lord Of The Rings trilogy was down to the total appeal of the movie. People were enthralled by it and had a positive sentiment about anything associated with the film.
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