Tourism Victoria | Remote Control Tourist

Insight

Unlike other Australian destinations, Melbourne is not known for its iconic buildings or amazing natural landmarks. Instead, it’s more about ‘experiences’ – food, fashion, music, the famous laneways and its overall creativity. In fact, the best bits of Melbourne are hidden away. They are things that take time to discover - but once you do, your curiosity is rewarded.

The primary objective for this campaign was to highlight the fact that Melbourne is a very different destination that is constantly changing, and there’s much more to it than initially meets the eye. Its main focus was to give the domestic audience new reasons to visit Melbourne – whether they had visited previously or never considered coming.

So Clemenger BBDO Melbourne created the Remote Control Tourist – a way to let people from anywhere in world explore the hidden secrets of Melbourne before they visit in person. To literally let them ‘go before they go’. Remote Control Tourist is a tourism marketing world-first; a real-time web experience which allows visitors from around the world to truly experience the depth of all Melbourne has to offer, in the closest way possible to actually being there. They could ask the Remote Control Tourists to explore anything: stepping on to the MCG, drinking coffee in a laneway, checking out a designer store or sampling one of Melbourne’s gourmet restaurants.

Strategy

The campaign strategy was built around the idea of allowing people in other cities to experience Melbourne’s depth first hand. By harnessing the power of social media and combining it with some clever streaming video technology, the Tourists truly became the users’ eyes and ears in Melbourne. Part guide, part humble servant, the Tourists helped the audience explore the twists and turns of the city.

Potential visitors simply had to tweet or message via a specifically designed website, and the most interesting suggestions would be actioned by a Remote Control Tourist. The campaign included a number of distinct phases of activity – from pre-launch and the five-day live period, right through to a calendar of promotions and assets that can be used for a number of purposes. The strategy relied on the creation of first person video content that told the deeper and more interesting stories of Melbourne. This content is essential to provide information and to help people explore Melbourne in the future.

Execution

As the Remote Control Tourist was a world first campaign, Tool had to do a lot of work behind the scenes to work out how to even make it happen. It had no blueprint for it. The campaign itself was run on a custom built platform that allowed people from anywhere in the world to watch and control the Remote Control Tourists live as they were on the ground in Melbourne. The Remote Control Tourists were controlled by requests made on the website, Twitter and Facebook. Live requests were moderated and then fed to the website and in turn, to the Remote Control Tourists on the ground. Aside from the real-time HD video stream, viewers could also follow the journey on an interactive Google Map that provided information on the nearby places of interest.

To enable the constantly moving Tourists to stream HD footage in real-time, their backpacks contained cutting edge technology that enabled the digital video data to be split across four 4G LTE Mobile data connections. The four streams were then received at the RCT headquarters and stitched back into a single stream and then encoded for the various devices (desktop computers, smartphones, tablets) and distributed across the Internet via the Akamai network.

The resulting experience was a website that delivered a real-time HD video stream, map-based location tracking and a social feed of the user-generated requests and dialogue. The teaser campaign was launched the week before the campaign live period that incorporated bespoke designs from respected artists, Craig and Karl. The teaser campaign and live period consisted of press, outdoor posters, digital screens and banners but was complimented with a large scale social media and PR presence.

Results

From October 2 – November 20:

- Estimated unique reach of media coverage: 150,980,058
- Twitter impressions: 41,464,450
- Facebook impressions: 7,906,130
- Total visits to site: 138,980
- Unique visits to site: 107,830
- Return visitor: 22.40%
- Average visit duration: 6:18
- Cities: 5324
- Countries interacting with the website: 171
- Positive sentiment: 96%

BRAND:

Tourism Victoria

CATEGORIES:

Government/Public Sector

Travel/Airlines

REGION:

Australia

DATE:

October - October 2013

AGENCIES:

Tool

Clemenger BBDO

MEDIA CHANNEL:

Digital,Mobile,Online,Out-of-Home,PR