Tourism Queensland
Won 2009 Stevie Award for PR Campaign of the Year
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Tourism Queensland’s groundbreaking THE BEST JOB IN THE WORLD campaign is a travel PR and viral marketing phenomenon that has generated worldwide media attention, with over $11 million worth of exposure and 627 million media impressions in the U.S. and Canada alone. Conceived by Tourism Queensland (TQ) and its ad agency, CumminsNitro Brisbane, it was executed in the US and Canada by Quinn & Co. Public Relations.
The concept was simple: post a one-minute video application on TQ’s website explaining why you should be chosen as caretaker of Hamilton Island on the Great Barrier Reef and you might get to blog and cam your way through a six-month gig that paid about $100K U.S.
The story broke with our Reuters placement around sunrise in Australia on 1.12.09. By breakfast time in London, AP was interviewing TQ’s UK director for a broadcast package that turned up on the morning shows in the U.S. Within two days, our monitoring service found 1,100 TV placements in the U.S. alone.
TQ’s goal was to get 400,000 new visitors to its THE BEST JOB IN THE WORLD website (www.islandreefjob.com) over the course of the one-year campaign. They blew past that in about 30 hours and had one million hits on the second day. The million hits crashed the site. When they brought it back up it was hosted on 10 Web servers, the maximum number of servers possible. Approximately 34,684 people from more than 200 countries applied for the job of Island Caretaker.
A social networking frenzy ensued with 336,000 Facebook-referred website visits, more than 3,170 @Queensland followers on Twitter and over 338 members on the campaign’s Wiki (islandreefjob.ning.com). By 3.18.09, 423,000 people (including 210,000 from the U.S.) had voted for their favorite top-50 finalist.
As of 3.18.09, the website had 6.7 million visitors, including 1.7 million from the U.S. Quinn & Co.’s online public relations work promoting THE BEST JOB IN THE WORLD continues to produce powerful exposure across all media platforms and channels.
