Hello from Toko

A screen shot from Tourism NZ’s latest “good morning world” advertising campaign, featuring Te Rau Kururangi from Tokomaru bay and his horse Jerry on Tokomaru Bay Beach. Picture supplied

More of Tairawhiti’s tourism attractions, and down-to-earth residents, will be encouraging overseas tourists to come here — and the way is open for the whole district to join in.

A year-long Tourism New Zealand campaign went live in Australia on Sunday, with a video featuring eight-year-old Parearau Rogers-Brooking and elder Hinetu Dell at Mt Hikurangi at sunrise. (See yesterday’s Gisborne Herald).

So far, that video has attracted nearly a quarter of a million views on social media platforms.

This morning Tourism NZ featured another Tairawhiti video, with Hatea-a-Rangi school pupil Te Rau Kururangi from Tokomaru bay and his horse Jerry the stars this time.

As part of the campaign, New Zealanders are being asked to share their favourite place with the world by creating a ‘good morning world’ video and sharing it on social media.

Activate Tairawhiti tourism general manager Adam Hughes said AT, the regional tourism organisation, worked closely with Tourism NZ to help produce the video, and five more Gisborne videos were still to come.

“I heard about the opportunity late last year that Tourism NZ was potentially going to use New Zealand as the first place to see the sunrise every morning as one of their key messages.”

Mr Hughes said Tairawhiti was “home” for that piece of work, and on top of that, Tourism NZ was also producing a campaign to broaden the authenticity of messages to tourists, “and we have that in spades”, he said.

“It was incredibly fortuitous because our thinking is very aligned. Our tourism work is moving along the same direction — having the sunrise as a key part of our message but also trying to focus on people-to-people interaction and really authentic stories. Our region is just so good at hosting people because we do have that time to slow down and actively engage.”

Over the coming months the campaign would go live in key markets in China, the US, the UK, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Japan, India, Singapore and Korea.

“This is an amazing opportunity for us to talk to more international visitors.,: said Mr Hughes.

“It’s a global campaign and it’s Tourism NZ’s campaign but we worked closely together, along with Ngati Porou and Tourism NZ. It will feature every region, but we’ve been fortunate enough to have quite a few opportunities to be involved in creating content. We have another five videos that are already shot and ready to go.”

Mr Hughes said because Activate Tairawhiti worked closely with Tourism NZ, the organisation was able to see the opportunities coming and had been working since before Christmas to put in place a lot of work both digitally and internationally to prepare.

“That means when we are being featured like we are this morning, when people overseas search for Tokomaru Bay or anything to do with Tairawhiti, they will easily be able to find us.

“The other cool thing for our region and New Zealand, is this is the first time Tourism NZ is trying to give voice to our people. It’s an interactive campaign, so our people, if they feel inclined, can go online and do their own ‘good morning’ world and that could be featured in the campaign as well. We were only involved with five opportunities to create the ‘good morning world’ content but there are so many great spots that we weren’t able to capture that our locals can.

“If someone has a great ‘good morning’ spot, with the sun rising, on their surfboard that get into it, tag it, it could become world famous.”