Purpose

Tourism Victoria initiated the Play Melbourne campaign to reignite interest in Melbourne from interstate visitors. “What the research is telling us is that people like Melbourne, but they felt they’d seen everything there was to see. We wanted to remind them of the cool things that they don’t know about in Melbourne and to reignite their passion to visit,” says Paul Baron, Group Manager Online Marketing at Tourism Victoria.

Winning

The Play Melbourne microsite has users answer a multiple choice question about a Melbourne destination before they go into a draw for a trip to the city. “You enter every week and find out on Wednesday whether you’re going, you’ve got to be able to go on Friday and everything’s paid for: your hotel, your dinners out, and fun times, and then there are ‘super prizes’ which are pretty exciting,” says Baron. ‘Super prizes’ often coincide with sporting and major entertainment events.

Brand attributes

The campaign aims to retain the brand attributes which Tourism Victoria has spent years reinforcing. “In terms of the brand of Melbourne and Victoria, nationally, we position Melbourne with a brand of style and sophistication, and Victoria as compact diversity. The brand attributes we try and own for Melbourne are: style, sophistication, romance, food and wine, arts, theatre and culture.”

Demographic

“Tourism Victoria has always tended to pursue the more premium market, the affluent one,” says Baron. “That’s our strategy.” The Play Melbourne campaign specifically targets creative opinion leaders as profiled in two Roy Morgan demographic segments: the Socially Aware and the Visible Achievers. “Those groups are influencers and that group happens to like the things that Melbourne has to offer: the arts culture, food, wine etc. They really tap into the cultural aspects of Melbourne,” says Baron.

Media

Whilst entry to the Play Melbourne competition is only online, in fitting with the target audience, there is a significant spend on traditional media. “It’s probably the most integrated campaign we’ve ever run,” says Baron. “It’s in everything: it’s cinema, print, TV, you name it. It’s all over the online stuff, it’s in social media, it’s everywhere it can be.”

Measurement

Tourism Victoria have some long-standing measurement approaches for campaigns. Panels are conducted asking questions to verify associations with certain destinations, for example ‘which city in Australia do you most associate with romance, style, or events or food and wine, arts and culture’. “All of those things we measure over time,” Baron confirms. “We go way back until probably the mid-90s, so you can see over time the impact of our brand advertising on the positioning of Melbourne relative to other cities in Australia, and if you see those graphs, we own a lot of those attributes over time. We didn’t used to, we do now. So that’s really how we measure the effectiveness beyond the obvious ones: how is visitation going; how is Melbourne going? The idea is you position the brand as a premium brand and money will come, and that’s happened.”