User generated content has been a hot topic in class this year. What is the best way to encourage it? How can you effectively leverage it? What platforms should be used? These are all questions with not many definitive answers, but I want to examine one of my favourite campaigns from the past that focused almost solely on user generated content, which went viral almost as quickly as it was released.
It was January of 2009 and everyone north of California was already a couple months into their winter season and needing some sunshine in their life. This was when Tourism Australia released their campaign for “best job in the world”. The premise was actually pretty simple; it was a job posting in Australia. The execution, however, was brilliant. This wasn’t just your ordinary job and Tourism Australia knew this, so they decided to launch this campaign around it.
The application process was pretty straightforward, but also a unique one, as applicants needed to submit a 60 second video online, which visitors to the site could view and vote for their favourite ones. In the end, this campaign received over 35,000 unique submissions, and tourism Australia barely had to make any content of their own. Applicants would create their videos and then share them amongst their groups of friends to encourage them to vote, causing more and more buzz around the job position, and Australia as a whole.
What was fascinating is how quickly this online marketing campaign took off, and how quickly news sites around the world were following this story. In fact, in Tourism Australia’s final report, they concluded that over $400 Million dollars in media coverage was provided to them, absolutely free, all because of this one of a kind contest. Applicants knew that they needed to stand out more than the rest, so as the days went on, the video’s became more and more creative. Check out the eventual winner’s application below to see for yourself.
Only counting YouTube, this video has been seen about 180,000 times, but when you add in the views on the contest website, estimates are well over 1 million views. Furthermore, the video below shows that in just 6 weeks, there were already 28 Million page views on the website.
Although this campaign on the surface was about finding someone to become a “caretaker for the great barrier reef islands”, in actual fact, this was a brilliant campaign launched to showcase how vast and beautiful the great barrier reef is, and to basically remind the world about why visitors continue to visit this spot, year after year. It’s hard to predict the success of something like this ahead of time, but when the content is 100% user generated, it is hard to see the downside in something like this.
