Acting managing director of Tourism Australia, Geoff Buckley, told mice.net the campaign had been thoroughly researched and tested and should be set for launch by November this year.
“We have always wanted to go down a significant campaign route [for business events]. When we launched the `Where the bloody hell are you?’ campaign our thoughts were whether we could leverage off that campaign in the business events market.
“We worked through some concepts and ideas of that process and what came back was that yes, the invitation worked but we needed to more strongly affirm Australia’s credibility in a business context, and certainly the target market we were going to in a leisure campaign sense weren’t the same people that we were going to in terms of targeting business events.”
Mr Buckley said research indicated that the straight use of the leisure campaign for business events wasn’t going to work.
“We undertook some research in the UK, China and the US, and from that came a very clear idea of what this group was looking for. This gave us a chance to go away and adjust the creative concept that we had.
“What we have evolved to is a direct marketing campaign targeting corporate decision makers, corporate influencers – travel agents and incentive houses – in our three key markets – the UK, US and Asia, primarily China.
“The final creative concept is just being finalised now. The thinking is at this stage that we will launch the campaign - we think – in November, but it won’t go into our key markets until the appropriate time – in February in China, for example, after Chinese New Year.”
Mr Buckley said the campaign will not be a one-off. Multiple direct mail pieces will be sent to key decision makers.
Incentives research
As well as this new business events campaign Tourism Australia is just finalising research into the incentive market within Australia, developed through the CRC [Cooperative Research Centre] for Sustainable Tourism in partnership with local incentive companies and DMCs.
“This will help us understand the shape and size of the incentive market over the 2004/2005 period, where the business is coming from, and what destinations were visited by these groups. That should actually be launched later this month [September] or early next month.
“This will give us a handle on the size and scope of the incentive market, where the business is coming from, what industry groups it is coming from, and what they are doing when they are here.”
Mr Buckley said research of this kind was critical as more and more destinations compete for business events.
“You’ve got destinations like Singapore [spending money], enormous growth out of China in terms of infrastructure being built, traditional competitors like South Africa, and the Gulf States have been targeting this market for some time now.
“As a destination we have to market smarter and make the offer compelling. And it has to be a business offer.”
Mr Buckley said he was not throwing his hat in the ring for the top job at Tourism Australia. Once an appointment has been made he will be returning to his normal job with TA as director of strategy and research.
ABOVE: Tourism Australia won’t be using the `Where the bloody hell are you?’ tag-line for their new business events campaign.
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