Tourism Western Australia has appointed The Monkeys, Marketforce, The Brand Agency and Sandbox as its new marketing agencies, following a competitive pitch.
The Monkeys, part of Accenture Interactive, has been named as the lead creative agency on a multi-year contract.
It will lead the strategic and creative services part of the contract, both locally and globally, in addition to undertaking implementation and production work alongside the other agencies.
“Western Australia is such a unique place with abundant natural beauty and is home to a wonderfully warm community of people," Accenture Interactive Lead for Australia and New Zealand and The Monkeys Co-Founder and Group CEO Mark Green says.
"Drawing visitors to Western Australia is a job we are looking forward to starting.”
Tourism WA managing director Brodie Carr says the tender process had given Tourism WA the opportunity to see what some of the best agencies in the country had to offer and find the best partners to help make an impact with the state’s destination marketing.
“We’re looking to change our approach in destination marketing and appointing an innovative agency like The Monkeys to handle strategy and creative that will bring a fresh approach to the way we promote the State around the world,” Carr says.
“The Monkeys showed a thorough understanding of the challenges and issues we face in raising the profile of Western Australia as a world-class tourist destination and provided a range of well-researched solutions, strategies and innovative opportunities to overcome those challenges.
“Appointing local companies to provide production and implementation services gives us a great range of quality agencies to work with to grow the number of people coming to WA. It also means a lot of the work will be done here in Perth, supporting local jobs.“
The agency’s first task will be to develop a brand strategy based on Tourism WA’s existing brand narrative work, completed in consultation with the state’s leading tourism industry operators.
“We travelled from Kununurra to Esperance and everywhere in between talking to tourism operators about what made WA stand out as a holiday destination. That consultation helped form WA Tourism - Our Story, which we will be sharing with industry in the coming months,” Carr says.
“The work we have done with industry to develop our own unique story about what makes a WA holiday different from a holiday anywhere else in the world will form the basis of the brand strategy and our campaigns moving forward and will help us attract even more visitors to the State.”
Western Australia had a record-breaking 2.87 million out-of-state (international and interstate) visitors in the year ending September 2019. In the same period, total visitor spend was $10.9 billion, a 17.9 per cent increase on the previous year. International holiday visitors were the highest on record for WA, with the number increasing by 13.2 per cent to 521,800 - the highest amount of international holiday visitors WA has ever seen and the strongest growth in Australia.
“Last year was a huge year for tourism. We’ve seen great growth in visitor numbers and we’ve been in the international spotlight with our business and consumer events,” Carr says.
“And now we can focus on developing an exciting new brand strategy and campaigns that will make us stand out as a must-visit destination.”
Cummins&Partners was the previous creative agency of record for Tourism WA, scoring the account in 2014 from Host.
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