Travel and tourism are among the industries who were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic since the first case of the disease was reported in January 2020.
Tourism New Zealand’s challenge was to keep up a level of desirability for tourists to consider New Zealand as one of their travel destinations when international travel resumes. To maintain brand equity and build awareness, Tourism New Zealand began to explore new media channels, which includes gaming.
This resulted in PLAY NZ, the world’s first gameplay walkthrough of the real world, effectively bringing New Zealand to life as a game and enabling tourists to explore some of New Zealand’s greatest attractions via a gamified experience.
About the Campaign
As Australians are spending more time indoors engaging in online or virtual experiences, game usage has skyrocketed with a 75% increase since March 2020. Designed to engage the growing online gaming audience, PLAY NZ shows off New Zealand as the ultimate place to come and PLAY by gamifying the experience of visiting New Zealand.
Unifying the objectives of Tourism New Zealand to maintain brand equity and build awareness during the pandemic, TBWA\Sydney developed PLAY NZ, a gamified approach of experiencing New Zealand. They collaborated with Mindshare Australia and AdColony to create an interactive mobile campaign that would allow the audience to virtually explore some of New Zealand’s top experiences.
How did it work?
To maximise the relevance of the mobile campaign to its users, Tourism New Zealand utilized AdColony’s precise audience targeting capabilities to reach consumers aged 25 to 39 years old who are residing in 5 major states in Australia – New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia – and played games online within the last 4 months.
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The campaign strategy was to create an interactive mobile campaign that would engage users to get-to-know the gaming characters and drive anticipation to the game, illustrating the campaign’s KPIs for engagement rate and dwell time.
The mobile ad began with a compelling video which showcased various snippets of the game, followed by an interactive dynamic end card, which was intentionally designed to simulate the same gaming visual experience on PLAY NZ. Users could scroll through the various characters via a gallery by swiping on the screen, and tap on hotspots to find out more about each character. The interactive experience concluded with a call-to-action that invited users to visit the PLAY NZ website for more information about the game.
Campaign Results
The mobile campaign successfully piqued the interest of users as they spent an average dwell time of 11.89 seconds (AdColony benchmark of 8 seconds) on the interactive dynamic end card, and achieved an engagement rate of 47% (AdColony benchmark of 10%). Click-through rate was 3.63% (AdColony benchmark of 1%), illustrating the success of the mobile campaign in achieving the objectives for Tourism New Zealand. Furthermore, the mobile gaming video creative delivered an average cost per visit almost six times lower than the broader campaign’s average.
In a brand lift study conducted by On Device Research, results were also aligned in achieving the campaign’s objectives. Respondents who were exposed to the interactive mobile campaign had the best impact on spontaneous awareness and increased consideration for New Zealand as a holiday destination. All of the top emotions provoked were positive, where 29% of exposed respondents made them want to visit New Zealand, followed by 23% who were curious to find out more about visiting New Zealand versus other holiday destinations. The campaign successfully motivated users to perform various positive post-campaign actions, where 16% searched for information online, followed by 13% who talked to others about New Zealand as a holiday destination.
About Tourism New Zealand
Tourism New Zealand is the organisation responsible for marketing New Zealand as a holiday destination. The major tool they use to do this is the 100% Pure New Zealand marketing campaign, a campaign that has evolved over the past decade to make New Zealand one of the world’s most well-respected tourism brands.
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