Articles
Type
-
Type
Article
- All
- Article
- Podcast
- Video
- Creative Month Video Archive
- A Creative Perspective
Category
-
Category
All
- All
- @ The One Club
- A Creative Perspective
- Advertising
- Agency/Company Profiles
- Art
- Award Shows
- Awards
- Business
- Creative Hall of Fame
- Creative Month
- Creative Showcase
- Design
- DGMS
- Digital/Technology
- Education
- Events
- Featured Articles
- Film/Motion/Animation
- From the Archive
- Gender Equality
- History
- Illustration
- Inclusion & Diversity
- Judging
- Member News
- One Screen
- Online Exclusive
- Photography
- Portfolio Night
- Professional Development
- Profiles
- Social Media
- Strategy
- Technique
- The Future
- Typography/Lettering
- Viewpoint
- Young Guns
- Young Ones
Type
-
Type
Article
- All
- Article
- Podcast
- Video
- Creative Month Video Archive
- A Creative Perspective
Articles
Read the latest viewpoints, learn new techniques and stay up to date with top industry trends. For more information on how to submit an article please contact editorial@oneclub.org.
Back to Basics
Pereira and Sree talk about their future plans and how they approach their clients' projects.
Public Displays
Digital out-of-home is proving to be one of the few bright spots on the advertising landscape.
Virtual Shopper
The small businesses are loving it because they can put their things out there.
Excerpt from GLIMMER: How do designers jump the fence to originality?
Bruce Mau, Stefan Sagmeister, and other top designers use lateral thinking to spark original ideas.
One Trick Pony
Pizer and Reed gave themselves a name that serves as a reminder of what they don't want to become.
2009 One Show: A Year of Challenges
With the faltering economy, agencies turned to big ideas with smaller budgets.
Best of Show
By Yash Egami
“ Imagine a morning commute that involved walking barefoot on the beach. Your job? Feeding the fish, collecting mail, cleaning the pool and blogging about how beautiful the island is. Oh, and it comes with a free luxury apartment and a six-figure salary.
Sounds too good to be true? Not for Ben Southall, the Brit who became famous overnight for winning the “Best Job in the World” contest for Tourism Queensland. The ingenious integrated campaign to promote the islands in the Great Barrier Reef was created by CumminsNitro in South Brisbane and was the 2009 One Show Best of Show. And did it ever work: 34,648 applicants from 201 countries sent in 610 hours of video, islandreefjob.com had 6,849,504 visits over a period of 56 days and there were 47,548,514 page views with an average of 8.62 minutes spent on the site. We corresponded with joint creative director Nancy Hartley from CumminsNitro to find out how it all came together to become such a
phenomenon.
How did the idea of the “Best Job in the World” come about?
In January 2008, we received a brief from our client Tourism Queensland to create global awareness of The Islands of the Great Barrier Reef. Although the Great Barrier Reef is a world-heritage listed natural wonder, the perception was that you visited it as a day-trip from the mainland. Globally, people were unaware that there were beautiful islands and resorts where you could actually stay and enjoy “life above” the Reef. And while we had plenty of beautiful footage of the region, we also had a $1.2 US million budget—so the use of traditional media was out of the question. We knew we needed a big idea that would engage people on an international level.
This of course was very exciting for us—I remember our planning director Darren McColl coming back to the agency and saying, “I’ve got the brief of the year.” We briefed three of our senior creatives—writer Merrin McCormick and art directors Cristian Staal and Ralph Barnett. Two weeks later the guys came back with three ideas—they were all good, but “Best Job” of course was a standout. It was such a pure idea—so simple and so aspirational that everyone who heard it immediately went, “That’s fantastic!”
The whole point was to create something that would make the brand newsworthy and engaging, as we would need to rely on people interacting with our website and spreading their content through social networks. The fact that this was a real job with a generous salary and one that ANYONE could apply for meant people could see this was more than a game of chance—you could actually pitch yourself to get “The Best Job in the World” as island caretaker on Hamilton Island on the Great Barrier Reef.
Did you ever expect that the contest would garner as much attention around the world as it did?
It had been decided to launch the campaign in the Northern Winter, so we had a full year to plan and execute everything we needed to do. Tourism Queensland’s international offices were briefed and onboard, media kits were prepared, the website was developed and the creative team spent at least 3 days every week working with the client to make sure everything was in place. We even had contingency plans in case it didn’t ignite as quickly as we had hoped and we all admit to butterflies the day before the campaign launched. So while we had extremely high hopes and had given this every chance to be a success, I don’t think anyone could have been prepared for the enormity and immediacy of the response.
It went viral from day one. My co-creative director James Burchill was on holiday in Brazil and immediately found it was being blogged in Portuguese. One of our junior art directors was in Italy talking to a little old man and when the man discovered he was from Australia, he opened the paper and pointed to “The Best Job” story. In the UK on day one, we were the fourth most visited website after Google UK, BBC and Facebook.
The footage we have collected for our case study means you can actually tell the whole story using news items from around the world.
When we look back at the initial video presentation the team put together to sell the idea “up the line,” it’s almost spooky. The idea and the details of how the campaign would work remained unchanged and everything we predicted would happen in that video did happen—albeit to an even greater extent than we could have dreamed.
Has the Great Barrier Reef seen a spike in tourists lately because of the campaign?
In the past, when people were planning an island holiday, they thought of Greece, the Bahamas, the Maldives. The purpose of this campaign was to create global awareness of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef, and place them into the consideration set. So the goal is long term. Having said that, apparently Hamilton Island enquiries are up 80% and Wotif (an online hotel booking site) reports bookings for January to April up 40%. That’s great news in a tough market. And as the Whitsunday Islands Tourism CEO said on the weekend, “We no longer have to explain where we are.”
How does it feel to be named Best of Show at this year’s One Show?
We put together a list of winners since 2001, and that certainly is
esteemed company we are keeping. Naturally, we are thrilled to see our campaign take its place alongside legendary work from agencies we admire. We are also extremely grateful to our client Tourism Queensland. The idea and the campaign remain unchanged since inception, and that took trust and partnership. Best of Show is also recognition that the best work in the world can come from anywhere in the world. As the campaign itself proved, globally there are no barriers when you can crack a universal insight.
Our CEO Sean Cummins—a brilliant creative who founded Cummins & Partners (now CumminsNitro) in Melbourne 10 years ago—paid us a great compliment when he said, “When I opened the Brisbane office not 4 years ago, I wanted to have a business that didn’t think, didn’t act and didn’t feel like it was just a Brisbane agency. An off-shoot, a branch office of the more entitled cities. Being world class is not about where you are in the world. But a state of mind.”
We’re really proud of the great thinkers we have at our agency and thank everyone at One Show for the honor.
Obama For America
The historic election campaign was helped by game-changing advertising.
One Show Education Festival
This years College Competition was dominated by the Swedes.
2009 One Show Design
Judges Chuck Tso and Jon Olsen took a lot of inspiration away from this show.
Editor's Note
The creatives decided to take a risk, and comedy prevailed in the end.
Editor's Note
Advertisers are walking a fine line between being funny and going too far.
Kit Hinrichs: A Storyteller Tells His Own Story
Kit Hinrichs tells his story.
Funny Business
Agencies that have built their reputations on doing funny ads are even poking fun at the economy.
Comic Relief
A sense of humor is the best prescription to cure consumers' economic ills
Alan Aboud: Living Color
Renowned clothing company and Aboud's esteemed design shop are still working together.