Tourism NT has shifted brand focus with a new campaign designed to disrupt traditional tourism marketing, and drive audiences to book a trip to the top end before its too late.
The 'It's about time' campaign is the first from Sydney agency Common Ventures, which was appointed to the tourism body's roster earlier this year.
The campaign extends its current 'Do the NT' positioning which was launched in 2013, but steers about from the conventional structure of tourism advertising: replacing sweeping landscape shots for storytelling.
Tourism NT director of domestic marketing Tony Quarmby told AdNews that previous NT campaigns have targeted people further down the conversion cycle who had already decided to go to the territory.
Instead, the new adverts are designed to appeal to a new target market - “considerers”- who have always wanted to visit it one day, but to make them sit up and take notice, Quarmby said Tourism NT needed a new strategy to “shake up” the category.
“It's the old analogy that if you do the same thing you'll get the same result,” Quarmby said.
“We're already appealing to the people who want to come through the big landscape shots and aspirational images of people looking wistfully at the horizon. People already know that's what you can get in the NT. We need to show them something different and do it in a way that is going to get noticed in the first place.”
“So we did something we don't usually do in our advertising which is focus on the issue at hand, rather than our destination.”
Key to bringing that to life was to build a story. Common Ventures creative team Jane Burhop and Brian Merrifield said the campaign starts with a story through the television commercial and will eventually be extended out through print and digital executions.
“In the TVC storyline they're talking about all of these people who have gone and you're not sure where and it leads you through this path,” Burhop said. “That's what sets it apart, twisting it so that they've gone to the NT and it's amazing. Showing this transient nature of people’s time taps into a fear of missing out.”
Merrifield said the concept of time was part of what the agency pitched for the business.
“Time as an overarching concept is really flexible because it allows you talk about urgency, it allows you to talk about the fact hat time acts differently in the NT and obviously with this campaign its about life is short,” Merrifield said.
“It's really driving an unexpected message in the tourism category, to jump consumers of that complacency: the idea that they’ve always wanted to go but they never actually do it, so get off your ass and do it.”
Quarmby said for this reason, the campaign will start with a large TV push to the message, with other channels to use familiarity to reinforce the message as the campaign rolls out.
All of it is underpinned by research which found that time is one of the biggest barriers for people travelling to the NT.
“Now that's not an isolated incident, time is factor in many people’s travels, but with the NT it is exaggerated obviously due to the location and because it is seen as a once in a lifetime trip,” Quarmby said.
“We had to embed that sense of urgency by alluding to the fact that if you leave it too long you might not actually get here.”
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