Tourism Australia collaborates with YouTube for new marketing campaign

By Caroline Oudin and Loumpheany Preap

This article entitled “Tourism Australia collaborates with YouTube for new marketing campaign” was written by Mary Jones and it was published on October 15^th 2010 on canadaupdates.com, which is a website that initially informs people about the immigration process in the country. The article deals with a new digital tourism marketing campaign between Tourism Australia and Youtube.

In this article, IT contributes to tourism because it enables the promotion of Australia. Indeed, according to Andrew McEvoy, managing director of Tourism Australia, Youtube is a marketing tool to broadcast a new vision of Australia. Thanks to the video, the sound and creativity, the marketing campaign is more efficient and will have more impact on the web users. Tourism Australia decided to create a new tourism marketing campaign, focused on digital support. This initiative led the DMO to a partnership with Youtube, offering the opportunity to develop social media marketing via videos.

The initial aim of such collaboration is to show Australia as the top exciting destination to visit in the world, focusing on one of the most symbolic structure of the country (Sydney Opera House) as a key point for activities. Also, the DMO is able to show potential consumers the attracting experiences available on site (music, culture, etc.). More significantly, this collaboration with Youtube was useful in order to bring the Youtube Symphony Orchestra 2011 to Australia. Indeed, it not only enabled musicians to audition but it also implied million of views through the social media. This partnership is a clear opportunity for Tourism Australia to expand its online presence, even if a study conducted by travel social network WAYNE revealed that in 2010 Tourism Australia is the most popular national DMO in social media (http://www.newmediatrendwatch.com/news/647-tourism-australia-is-the-most-popular-national-dmo-in-social-media).

The relevancy of this article clearly lays in the fact that it proves, once more, the usefulness of the social media. Youtube, in particular, is one of the top social media innovations, being strategically used by tourism industries such as hotel chains or DMOs. Wondering why companies opt for such a tool, it is to understand this choice. Indeed, broadcasting on Youtube is easy and quicker than other technological devices. A video catches more attention than a simple marketing campaign on the TV. On Youtube, the online user will look for the video by typing on the search bar tool whereas on TV, the marketing campaign won’t have the same effect because other advertisement will be diffused at the same time. Moreover we can guess that the cost of broadcasting on Youtube is cheaper than advertising on TV channels and it reaches more target audiences.

As far as we are concerned, we believe that this is an interesting topic, as the use of social media as a marketing tool is a growing phenomenon.

Source: picture from our personal files