Tales from beyond the cities

By GEORGINA BOND


Long, tall yarns about the sunburned continent are being used in a campaign to combat a feeling of over-familiarity with Australia.

The Colenso BBDO campaign is using holiday stories about Uluru's changing colours and an Aussie rules match to remind New Zealanders of the hidden treasures across the ditch.

General manager Jon Ramage said the advertisements, which had no illustrations, were vastly different from traditional "picture postcard" tourism advertising, something he considered to be a brave approach.

"We believe the people we are talking to in New Zealand already know about things such as the kangaroo - they want something new."

Ramage said the advertisements were designed to grab the reader in the first sentence and to be difficult to tune out from.

If New Zealanders were captured by this storytelling technique, the agency would have achieved Tourism Australia's goal - to get Kiwis looking at Australia in a new way.

The tourism marketing body launched the New Zealand chapter of its $407 million global marketing campaign "Australia - a different light" in Auckland last week.

New Zealand is Australia's most mature source market. Almost 450,000 Kiwis visited in the first half of this year - up 25 per cent on the same period last year - so getting them across the Tasman isn't the problem.

Instead, the challenge lies in getting them to keep coming back, travel more widely, stay longer and spend more money.

Tourism Australia's regional manager for New Zealand, Karen Priest, said the campaign wanted to lift New Zealanders' travel aspirations beyond the traditional gateways of Sydney, Melbourne and the Gold Coast, and to encourage them to experience different aspects of Australia.

She said the campaign was a departure from a conventional reliance on Australia imagery. Kangaroos, koalas, the Sydney Opera House and shrimps on barbecues were out, in favour of the use of storytelling to promote a broader image of Australia, and to personalise experiences through the eyes of visitors, locals and well-known Australians.

In the first of Tourism Australia's series of quirky television commercials to hit our screens from Sunday, international cricket commentator Richie Benaud and singer Delta Goodrem give their take on Australia.

Priest said brand awareness of Australia was high in New Zealand, so instead of images Kiwis already knew, the aim was to show them experiences they might not know about.

Ramage said Colenso's print and online campaign had tried to emulate the way holiday experiences were spoken about socially - such as at a barbecue.

"In the same way that every person's experience of Australia is different, readers will take in a different experience from the advertisement," he said.

Although it had been tempting to use images "that's not the way people tell stories".