New Zealand might have secured some hits with its online presence in recent years but it has a long way to go before it reaches the pinnacle of DMO branding achieved by its Pacific neighbour in the form of Queensland in Australia.
But the country’s tourism authorities are prepared to give it a go and have brought in favourite son Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings trilogy fame) to help with an online film directing competition.
Launching in a few weeks time, Your Big Break is a simple idea to attract wannabe film-makers to create a screenplay that capture’s the tourist board’s message of “100% Pure New Zealand”.
The organisers have tried to make the application process as easy as possible:
- The first thing you need to do is write a three-minute screenplay on how you would ‘Capture the spirit of 100% Pure New Zealand – the youngest country on earth’.
- You submit your screenplay. It is highly recommended you also supply supporting material in a 60-second video pitch to camera to bring your idea to life. It could include rough storyboards, stock footage edits, narratives etc.
After an initial shortlisting process, four finalists, plus one selected by an online vote, will be flown to New Zealand in 2010 to direct their three-minute clips with the help of Rings’ producer Barrie Osborne.
The campaign doesn’t have the aspirational message of the Queensland campaign (Best Job in the World), but given New Zealand’s success in using the Rings and Jackson as marketing commodities in recent years it could be an interesting exercise in using online tools such as video to get people interested in the idea and, of course, New Zealand.
The screenplay/film-maker idea may be a catchy one, but I hate the slogan, ‘Capture the spirit of 100% Pure New Zealand – the youngest country on earth.’
It sounds very chauvinist to me. What does 100% pure New Zealand mean? It has tones with echoes that are very unattractive, to say the least.
And is New Zealand the youngest country on earth? Well, no. More chauvinism there.
I would advise them to scrap the slogan.
@ Dennis Schaal- Sounds like they’re selling a fruit juice!
New Zealand’s got a bad habit of copying Assie, but innovates amazingly well when they don’t play that game.
The backpacker side of TNZ, for example, has recently launched the “go all the way” campaign which, in its first installment, allows people to compete for a trip in Bebo and Facebook. Why they choose Bebo is beyond my comprehension but the idea is OK.
As far as the “youngest country” goes, NZ was the latest inhabited chunk of earth that calls itself a country and, as I understand it, the youngest geologically. I may be wrong though. Feel free to let me know.
i like the whole notion of creating engaging content certified by an expert. Qualified video content ( since that is the way consumers will actually get influenced). Since there is so much rubbish content out there
Wooh, Crowdsourcing rules!
It is actually unfortunate that Tourism Queensland has set a benchmark that almost every single piece of DMO marketing until the end of time will be judged by.
This is unfair to everyone else given that Best Job campaign simply managed to seize a moment in time and run with it.
Interestingly, Queensland credit some of the success of its campaign to the fact that the world economy was going down the toilet and many people were looking for something aspirational.
Perhaps the buzz building in recent weeks around the filming of The Hobbit in NZ is a similar perfect storm of (almost) unintended coincidence.
Depends how you define country I guess
If you are referring to it as a “nation”, which is what most people think of when they read country, then obviously there are many, many younger ones.
Perhaps they should change their slogan to something less ambiguous like.. “New Zealand, the most recently settled major landmass to refer to itself as a country”
I like that, Peter. Has a nice ring to it; snappy
Yeah, forget Peter Jackson. NZ really needs someone with my kind of marketing genius
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