Client Showcase

Passport to Shine – Tourism Queensland Facebook Application launches new global brand with astonishing results

Client: Tourism Queensland
Passport to Shine delivered an engaging and powerful consumer campaign for Tourism Queensland, spreading the new brand "Queensland – where Australia shines" globally and achieved enormous growth for the brand across both facebook and email.

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Background

Tourism Queensland's over arching goal was to spread the shine around the world which resulted in the decision to look to the Facebook platform as the distribution channel for this campaign. This was supported by a $100,000 Queensland prize for the ultimate winner of the competition.

The idea was to create an campaign that distributed Tourism Queensland's new brand globally whilst encouraging users to return multiple times through out the campaign period.

"The agency came up with the concept of building a Facebook application that enabled entrants to create their own passport and achieved the multiple impression goal by having users come back three times through out the campaign to select their favourite images for their passport. This how we conceived the 'Passport to Shine' campaign" said Tourism Queensland's Chief Executive Officer, Anthony Hayes.

Objectives

The campaign needed to be global in nature and be marketed in five priority markets around the world. Those markets included the UK, USA, New Zealand, Malaysia as well as the local Australian market, with the official campaign launch occurring in the UK.

The channel that was preferred by the client was Facebook, due to the existing group of 'likes' and the established and familiar sharing capability to a potential 500million users of the platform worldwide.

Developing in the Facebook platform allowed Tourism Queensland to talk to a global audience and leverage the sharing and target the key markets with the specific creative.

"Tourism Queensland's Passport to Shine campaign leveraged Facebook's targeting capability which enabled them to outreached specifically to people around the globe who already had an interest and affiliation with Australia or Queensland. As a result, we were able to deliver a large number of targeted Facebook users to the application who were primed to become a fan and already a likely competition entry candidate." Said Australian Vice President of Facebook, Paul Borrud.

With page like's and global sharing some of the key KPI's, Facebook allowed Tourism Queensland talk to the key markets and generate PR activity in those regions. The campaign also needed to capture and build email addresses for ongoing communications with those regions after the conclusion of the campaign.

Strategy

The campaign was global in nature and therefore by using Facebook, the audience extended to all countries where Facebook was used. There was specific focus on the priority markets of UK, USA, Malaysia, New Zealand and the Australian domestic market. In each of the priority markets, the local Tourism Queensland office was promoting the campaign through local PR activity. This PR activity was reinforced to user of the application whereby they were presented with content specific their current location as indicated on their Facebook profile.

Performance of similar viral campaigns has indicated sharing is achieved mostly through email, however coupling this with Facebook's established social sharing capability took this to another level. The campaign was seeded to Tourism Queensland's existing Facebook community of over 34,000 as well as to their consumer email database, which comprised of predominately Australian, but a good mix of international subscribers also.

Director of XCOM Media, Rob Bell said "The email component of the campaign was extremely important as the integration with an enterprise level email systems was required to manage the volume of and complexity involved with delivering entry confirmation and forward to friend messages."

Tourism Queensland leveraged both the email and social media sharing perfectly to produce the results it did. Was this a difficult process to manage?

"This component was seamlessly integrated with Strongmail Systems in the back-end to manage this delivery due to it's database integration technology. Tourism Queensland already used Strongmail for their consumer communications and therefore the integration of this system was made even easier" said Mr Bell.

Execution

The campaign was 6-weeks in duration and ran via the Facebook platform with a final prize value of $100,000, which doubled from $25,000 over the campaign's 3 phases, encouraging entrants to revisit 3 times. Each time a user returned to their virtual "Queensland passport" 8 new images of Queensland experiences were released at each phase, where users chose 1 for their Passport to double their prize value.

Bonus entries were gained by sharing via Twitter & email; the campaign reach was further increased through Facebook sharing and wall posts. Geo-location technology was used to target international markets for specific weeks, presenting users with custom landing pages offering bonus prizes as incentive to enter or share the competition.

When asked about the sharing capabilities of the campaigns, Australian Vice President of Facebook Paul Borrud was always confident about the potential results the campaign could have achieved. "The application was both engaging and highly shareable which meant that the Facebook platform was a perfect place for it to live. The reach the campaign achieved through the Facebook platform spread to 137 countries with over 790,000 entries which is a phenomenal result that both the client and agency should be proud of"

A Map & Video tab used geo-location data to plot "shining lights" on a world map representing entrants original location & demonstrating the campaigns reach. A branded YouTube video was embedded below the map. Results: over 65,000 entrants from 137 countries; shared over 600,000 times via email, 80,000 times via Facebook & 4000 times via Twitter.

The video was added to this tab to showcase the new brand through vision and sound creating further impressions and traffic to the YouTube channel.

Results

Facebook Page "Likes"

• Number of page "Likes" at commencement of campaign: 34,621
• Number of page "Likes" at campaign completion: 258,298
• Number of new page "Likes" during the campaign period: 223,677
• Percentage increase in page "Likes": 746%

Competition Entrants
An entrant classified as a unique user who entered the competition throughout the six week campaign period.

• Total number of unique entrants: 131,414
• Total Entries
• Bonus entries were given to users who shared the competition via email or Twitter.
• Total number of campaign entries: 797,410
• Average number of entries: Over 5 entries per entrant

Sharing
Sharing the campaign was achieved through three main channels - Facebook, Twitter and email.

Facebook

• Facebook sharing was built into the application for users to share with their friends.
• Total number of shares via Facebook: 82,656

Twitter

• A share via Twitter was registered by posting the provided tweet to a user's Twitter followers.
• Total number of shares via Twitter: 4,195

Email
A share via email was registered for every valid email address that a user forwarded the campaign to.

• Total number of unique shares via email: 641,842
• Global Reach
• The competition was open to a global audience.
• Total number of countries where an entry was registered: 137 Countries

PR Reach
PR reach and value will be calculated over the weeks following the campaigns close. The campaign was published in many of the leading news publications in Australia, UK, US, India and many other regions. The campaign also appeared on the TV show Sunrise in Australia and two TV news outlets in Tawian. The campaign was also posted on blogs throughout the world. The campaign has solidified Facebook as the dominant social media chanel for Toruism Queensland. With the gains in page likes and future strategy around leveraging the international audience, it gives Tourism Queensland the ability to.

Email Campaign performance

Average performance metrics for 40 email campaigns over duration of campaign

• Delivery 98.37%
• Opens 30.36%
• Clicks 14.85%
• Clicks as % of opens 48.31%
• Total number of delivered campaign messages 1,006,033

Industry email performance averages for travel tourism sector as of jun 2010.

• Delivery 94.95%
• Opens 22.26%
• Clicks 4.75%
• Clicks as % of opens 20.34%

Additional Information

Technical

• Facebook-built using FBML, PHP, Java Script, PHP, mySQL & GeoIP Tools & YouTUBE
• Sharing-Twitter & StrongMail API's used to integrate sharing via Twitter & email. Facebook sharing (Post to Wall & Friend Notifications) also integrated.

Campaign Support

• Email Marketing-schedule included targeted campaigns - Launch, remarketing, new phase & country week announcement eDM's.
• Media Placement-Comprehensive Facebook media placement including targeted country reach blocks & other strategic placements worked on in collaboration with Facebook.

PR-Local PR used in key regions to support the campaign

• Country Bonus Week-5 key regions Geotargeted- Australia, New Zealand, UK, USA & Malaysia
• Brand Impressions-Campaigns 3 phases & country bonus weeks supported by Facebook media schedule & vast social sharing via Facebook, Twitter, Email maximised brand reach.