#351 2009 · Tourism Queensland · Tourism / destination marketing
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.
what everyone would do
The available lever was more traditional destination advertising — better photography, a bigger media buy, a catchier tagline — competing for attention in the same oversaturated channel every other tourism board used. That fails during a global financial crisis when discretionary travel spending is collapsing and a mass paid-media campaign isn't realistically affordable, and even with budget, glossy 'come visit' ads are exactly the content audiences have already learned to tune out as marketing.
what they saw
Tourism Queensland saw that the credibility problem with tourism advertising wasn't the message, it was the format — audiences discount an ad's claims by default because they know it's an ad. A real job listing operates under a completely different social contract: people read job postings for information, not persuasion, and share them because they're genuinely useful, not because they were told to. Packaging the destination pitch as an actual job rather than an advertisement about the destination let the same claim (this place is worth experiencing) travel through channels immune to ad-skepticism.
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.
why it works
Because the job was real — an actual salary, an actual six-month position, an actual selection process — it carried a form of proof no advertising claim could match: people could apply, and the ones who won would actually go live it, turning the campaign's central assertion into something falsifiable and therefore credible. That credibility, combined with the job listing's inherently shareable, non-ad framing, is what let it spread through genuine word-of-mouth and news coverage rather than paid placement — press covered it as a story (an unusual, real job opening) rather than as advertising, generating far more reach per dollar than any comparable media buy. The disproportion between the roughly $1 million spent and the roughly $200 million in earned publicity reflects that the campaign wasn't buying attention, it was creating something people wanted to talk about on their own.
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.
where it breaks
This only works when the underlying offer is genuinely real and can withstand the scrutiny that comes with people actually engaging with it as if it were literal — a fake job listing or an offer that turns out to be a bait-and-switch would destroy the credibility the format is built to earn, converting a trust-building mechanism into a trust-destroying one. It also depends on the offer being unusual and desirable enough to generate organic interest and coverage on its own; a mundane or unremarkable 'real thing' packaged the same way wouldn't produce the same viral spread, since the mechanism relies on the underlying offer itself being the story. And it requires genuine willingness to deliver on the real-world logistics of following through — hosting and paying an actual winner, in this case — a cost traditional advertising never has to bear, which limits how often and how big an organization can run this play.
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.
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
- [3]Briton wins 'best job in the world' on islandNBC News (Reuters), 2009nbcnews.com