What you need to know:

• Tourism Australia CMO and ‘virtual professor’ Mark Ritson are fresh back from the Festival of Marketing in London, where they unpacked why Australia’s reboot of the 1984 classic Come Say G’Day campaign, but with a CGI kangaroo replacing Paul Hogan, is here to stay.
• Coghill copped flack from the army of armchair experts when the campaign launched. Wasn’t Australia a bit more sophisticated than a kangaroo? Hadn’t the world moved on? Actually no, says Coghill, at least when it comes to shorthand brand codes that are unmistakably Australian. She jokes that it took six months of research to get to that point.
• While Tourism Australia went deep into market orientation and dynamics during that research phase, it also dived into the archive to understand its most effective brand assets over the years. Nothing said Australia like Say G’Day, per Coghill.
• Then it went large on pre-testing and refining, until its effectiveness scores were top drawer – which along with market data meant Coghill could confidently tell the heavy team of government and industry stakeholders that the $125m bet was as close to a dead cert as they come.
• Amortising the creative over three years meant she could also back it harder with media at a time when rival tourist boards were spending big – and were further ahead of the curve.
• Coghill says TA will keep the platform rolling for years. Ritson reckons that’s a lesson more marketers should heed. Creative wear-out, he says, is largely a myth.
• One year on, travel data suggests it’s starting to work, with consideration uplift powering and ad effectiveness scores that blow most campaigns out of the water.
• There’s much more in the feature-length podcast. Get the full download here.

Just read the instructions

CMOs come to Mark Ritson every couple of months to bless their new baby, a campaign they’ve spent the previous nine months gestating. “It’s very rare I lose my shit either way,” he says. “It’s um, ‘we’ll see’.” But Tourism Australia’s Say G’Day campaign was one of those loosening outliers. Which is why he called out the armchair critics queuing up to knock the CGI kangaroo and lifting of 1984’s Come Say G’Day campaign as underwhelming: Australia’s moved on from a clichéd marsupial was the general naysayer thrust.

“I emailed Susan [Coghill, Tourism Australia’s CMO] at the time, and said, ‘When this campaign comes out, you're literally going to kill these doofuses telling you that it's a shit campaign’.”

The critiques duly arrived. Ritson, by then backed up by System1 data and some strong results for the campaign, waited five months before telling them they knew nothing about market orientation and needed to “avoid sniffing their own ampits.” By nature, he says, Australians are not the target of a campaign to drive international tourism, while effective ads and creative award winning ads are two entirely different beasts.

Coghill, he says, is now reaping the rewards of following the marketing effectiveness playbook.

“What Susan has done better than anyone I know is first of all, listen and learn from all the other material case studies and [marketing] theories out there,” says Ritson.

“I don't mean this is a backhanded compliment [but Say G’day] is not doing anything revolutionary. What she's doing is demonstrating that the effectiveness book that's built, when you just follow the bloody instructions, is a really mighty and influential thing,” adds the virtual professor.

“I grow tired of all our experts [who] if you come up with a law of something, they find a reason why it doesn't apply. I don't think that's helpful – it's everyone trying to find a little rung in the ladder of marketing thinkers. But here's a woman who's come along and just said, ‘Yeah, whatever, it's not that complex, let's take it, let's apply it, put a lot of hard work in and produce work that ticks the boxes of effectiveness’. And … it’s very effective as a result.”

A year on from the $125m campaign’s launch, Say G’Day is still powering Ritson thinks it could keep delivering for decades. Coghill’s planning at least four years for the brand platform, with some tweaks and refreshes, meaning the money invested upfront can be amortised – with more to spend on media to keep it pumping demand for years to come.

Learn, then test

A chunk of the upfront investment was in exhaustive research and testing, the results of which seeded the genesis of Ruby the kangaroo and the decision to lift Paul Hogan’s iconic 1984 campaign strap-line, Come Say G’Day.

Ravaged by the 2019 bushfires and then Covid, Australia was late to reopen to the world with other countries already sprinting ahead, spending large to re-fire their tourism engines. The campaign had to cut through and deliver – tourism’s GDP contribution was now a fraction of its 2019 peak of $62bn – putting tens of thousands of jobs at risk and the economy under pressure. Australia could ill afford misattribution – a major problem in tourism ads when everybody’s showing beaches and waterfalls, per Coghill. Hence the unmistakably Australian marsupial fronting the campaign.

“I joke we did six months of research and the answer was a kangaroo,” says Coghill of the upshot of its multimarket “full funnel” analysis. “But we needed to show the breadth of experience, the breadth of the country in a way that is unmistakably Australian.

“I appreciate that people might [think], we're more contemporary than that, haven't we outgrown that? Well, yes and no,” says Coghill of the need to land “shorthand brand codes” across multiple international markets. “So walking that fine line can be really tricky … but we don’t have enough budget for people to mistake us for another destination.”

Greatest hits playbook

$125m might seem like a lot, says Coghill, but not when it’s spread across 15 key countries, and not when every other country is spending massively to rebuild their tourism economies. Which was one of the reasons for returning to the 1984 tagline.

“We went all the way back, looking at our most effective campaigns over the years and you cannot walk away from the power of that original Paul Hogan ‘Come Say G'day’, campaign in the 80s,” says Coghill.

“We broke that down and he's leaning into the Australian character, it's a clear call to action, a clear invitation. He shows off the country. He does everything in that campaign that we are trying to do in a more modern, more contemporary way – with a bit of joy and warmth that the world needs after such troubled time,” she adds. “The world's a very volatile place right now, we need to present Australia as a warm and welcoming destiny.”

Hence ditching other ideas, one of which centred around a “green and gold decade” and sticking with the kangaroo.

Test, then sell

Then TA tested like crazy, showing the work to “hundreds and in some markets thousands of people,” per Coghill. “I’ve been on record in the past stating that creative testing takes you to the lowest common denominator. But I needed to make sure I built confidence in the campaign with my internal team and our stakeholders,” she adds. “So that was incredibly important. But also multiple rounds of testing to understand how consumers responded to various changes that we made, for the evolution of the campaign, was really helpful. We knew if we were getting better.”

Then she did a road trip around the industry, across state partners and key tourism operators, unpacking not just the ad, and what went into it, but the “full funnel” strategy that would deliver them convertible demand. Which effectively meant unpacking the marketing effectiveness plan to all of those stakeholders.

“I think marketing effectiveness can be a big, broad term – what does that actually mean? For us, it's about getting the inputs right: What do we understand about our customer and about our category? Then how do we build more effective work and how do we measure it at the other end so that we can get better? Also very important in my world is how can we demonstrate the effects and impact that we have: Tourism Australia as a government agency is very stakeholder heavy.”

Accept data imperfection

Tourism Australia’s brand-demand strategy is complicated by the fact that its major markets all have different seasonality. Plus, while it’s trying to hit all potential travellers, it has to focus more heavily on higher yielding, higher earning travellers likely to spend long hours on a plane and splash thousands of dollars on a big trip down under. Each market has different competitors – different countries vying for the tourist dollar – and requires a “two-speed approach”, or classic Binet & Field ‘long and short’ brand and performance strategy simultaneously adapted across different markets, per Ritson, to keep filling the long-term bucket while serving up immediate demand for airline, travel and tourism partners to convert.

That complexity risks “analysis paralysis”, admits Coghill, but Ritson says that is where smart marketers accept the reality of imperfect datasets. Those seeking marketing science perfection, he warns, will never become top grade CMOs.

“[Coghill] isn't chasing perfection: It's as good as it possibly can be. I see a lot of marketers strive for some perfect strategic approach and never get there – because it doesn't exist. Susan's very good at being very hard on herself and her approach. But then she goes, ‘I think we got it, move on’. And if there's one thing I've seen across the top CMOs, it’s that ability to say, ‘it's there, keep going’.”

Ritson admits to laying traps for marketers on his mini MBA to underline that point.

“I set simulations where the numbers deliberately don't add up to 100. And I'd say 20 per cent of the class derail and never re-rail as a result of that. It's a deliberate attempt to teach them that marketing data isn't perfect data,” says Ritson.

“Go-getting, high net value marketers are able to get to the 80^th percentile of certainty and recognise that to get 20 more points on the table will take another five years. So comfort with imprecision is a skill I would put at the top of the marketing totem pole above creativity and all that other stuff,” he adds.

“I'd say there's 20 or 30 per cent that never move forward into a senior position because they can't rectify that fluidity of dealing with known unknowns,” says Ritson. “And this is where scientific marketing isn't a good thing. It's great, because it's made us more rigorous. But it's bad because it's training a lot of marketers to think the ‘S’ word means that everything must add up to 100.”

The results

A year in, Tourism Australia is now starting to do monthly dives on how the campaign is delivering, looking at data from the likes of [travel meta engine] Skyscanner to map city pairing searches and bookings to understand how brand and demand are syncing. Data from other conversion partners – the airlines and tourism partners on the ground – will take longer. But broad brush, the recovery is on, says Coghill.

“We’re know that we’re about 80 per cent of arrivals month on month [versus per-Covid], which is amazing, and our spend levels are just ahead of that, outpacing inflation. So we know that we’ve got more high yielding travellers coming and that they are spending more here – and we know that our tourism industry has the confidence to charge what they need to charge – they don’t have to discount their services,” says Coghill.

And that’s after 12 months, points out Ritson. “It’s not like buying yoghurt. Travelling to Australia is going to take three, four, five, six years to play out properly. But it’s already moving.”

Consideration numbers are up on average “two to three percentage points” across markets, per Coghill, which translates to double digit uplift in absolute percentage terms. In the US, for example, the three per cent consideration gain equates to “uplift of 18 per cent,” says Coghill. And it’s converting commercially: “Our forward bookings, as we get into December … are looking really strong.”

Meanwhile in China, where the campaign launched three months ago, “the early indications are that are brand perceptions about being welcoming are up 15 per cent amongst people who had seen the campaign,” says Coghill. “That tells me the work is connecting.”

Plus, from India, “we’ve had an uplift in aviation capacity which means our arrivals and expenditures out of India have already surpassed 2019.”

All of which helps put billions of dollars on the runs board.

Don’t go changing

Hence those vying to earn a place on Tourism Australia’s creative roster might do well to avoid pitching the next big thing. Coghill can’t say much about the statutory review, given government procurement rules, but she’s clear that the roo will be hopping around for a few years yet.

“We’ve built this to last for four years. Our intent is for the campaign assets to run for two to three years, we did our financial modelling around that – we would invest upfront in production, and then we would invest in media over the two to three years that followed,” she says.

“We will look to refresh with another core brand campaign at the right time. But I've been very clear that our intent for the next chapter for Come and Say G'day is to still use the Ruby character, to build on what we've done and continue make it better and better. We don't want to be chopping and changing, because we lose the multiplier effect of consistency. When you're constantly going out with a new campaign, you have to retrain consumers on how to identify and recognise your brand. We don't have enough money or resource to be doing that, so consistency is going to be the bedrock improvement.”

Plus, she says, latest data shows it is still powering.

“We have gone out and tested again in five or six of our core markets and we're still scoring high fours and fives. It remains in the top 10 to one per cent of ads that [System1] is testing. It's still top not only of the travel and tourism category, but also across their entire ad set. So I've got great confidence that what we've developed will have longevity.”

Wear-out warning

Ritson urges marketers to similarly follow the marketing effectiveness rulebook.

“We are increasingly of the mind, generally speaking, that wear out doesn't exist, except in the industry where everyone wants a new big campaign every season.”

Getting out of that mindset creates huge synergies and efficiencies, per Ritson – not least because creative costs make up 20-30 per cent of budget.

“If you realise that you don't need new creative every year, suddenly that's giving you 20-30 points more media to spend every year. And if you're really clever, like Susan, in the first year you can dump more of your money into creative to get that great multi year execution,” he says. “I question whether we even need new executions for most clients. Maybe we need a new creative version on the same theme, but maybe just the same ad.”

But if the data shows effectiveness starting to wane, “You should be able to keep doing new executions on the same thing with the same codes with the same message – driving the same nail into the same wooden post, piling those layers of meaning and salience on top of the consumer,” says Ritson. “We are encouraging clients, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.”

That message, however, does not always land.

“Talking to the guys at System1, they would echo that point. They will regularly go to clients with a new campaign and tell them ‘we’ve tested it and it's okay – but it's not as effective as your old campaign’,” says Ritson.

“It costs about $10,000 for System1 to do that test. But when they deliver the news, the clients are always disappointed, according to System1. Rather than going ‘Oh shit, you've just saved us so much money, and given us an amazing insight’, they're disappointed because they want a new campaign, because that's what they do.”

He thinks Coghill and Tourism Australia could buck the prevailing campaign wisdom for decades to come.

“There's absolutely no reason why Come and Say G'day couldn't last for 20 years. In my opinion it takes 10 years for it to work.”

There’s much, much more in the podcast. Get the full download here.