#153 2009 · Tourism Queensland · Tourism / destination marketingwrong-door
Tourism Queensland turned a real job listing into roughly $200 million of free advertising for the Great Barrier Reef
the problem
Nobody trusts a tourism ad, but everybody reads a job posting
background
Tourism boards routinely spend heavily on traditional destination advertising — glossy imagery, 'come visit' campaigns — competing against thousands of other travel ads across every channel, most of which audiences have learned to tune out. In early 2009, in the middle of the global financial crisis, Tourism Queensland needed to promote the Great Barrier Reef at exactly the moment discretionary travel spending was collapsing worldwide and a mass paid-media campaign was not realistically affordable.
Destination advertising also struggles on credibility: a photo of a beautiful beach reads the same whether the claim behind it is true or aspirational fiction, and audiences discount travel-ad claims accordingly. Queensland needed a way to make the underlying claim — that this place is genuinely worth experiencing — credible enough that people would act on it and talk about it themselves, not just glance past another ad.
the move
Working with agency CumminsNitro, Tourism Queensland posted an actual job opening rather than an advertisement: 'Caretaker of the Islands' of the Great Barrier Reef, a real six-month position based on Hamilton Island with a salary, a multimillion-dollar villa included, and a job description requiring the winner to blog, film and photograph their time exploring the reef.
the payoff
More than 34,000 video applications arrived from nearly 200 countries, and the campaign site drew about 4 million hits an hour on its first day and crashed under the traffic. Tourism Queensland spent roughly US$1 million on the campaign and generated an estimated US$70 million in global publicity within the first month alone, rising to roughly US$200 million in total earned media by the campaign's end; Ben Southall of the UK was announced as the winner in May 2009.
what came after
The campaign won multiple Cannes Lions and two D&AD Black Pencils and became a standard case study in tourism and content marketing for turning a real, tangible offer into a self-propagating media event instead of a paid ad buy; Tourism Queensland and other tourism boards later repeated the 'real job as advertising' format in follow-up campaigns.
filed under
references
- [1]The Best Job in the World (advertising)Wikipedia, 2025en.wikipedia.org
- [2]40,000 apply for Best Jobs in the World campaignGulf News, 2013gulfnews.com