Tasmania’s Off Season—a time when the island embraces winter’s cold with unique, otherworldly experiences—needed a new spark in 2024. With the flagship winter festival, Dark Mofo, on hiatus, Tasmania faced a challenge: how to attract sun-seeking Aussies to a destination even colder than home?
Rather than relying on traditional advertising, Tourism Tasmania engaged HAVAS Red to craft an earned-first PR campaign that would position Tasmania as Australia’s most ‘anti-ordinary’ winter destination and increase visitor consideration.
Research uncovered a striking cultural tension: Australians were sitting on 200 million days of unused annual leave, with nearly one in three workers experiencing burnout. Meanwhile, pop culture trends—like the record-breaking success of SBS’s Alone and the rise of ‘cottagecore’ content online—highlighted a growing desire for nature-driven escapes from the ordinary.
If Australians were feeling burned out, The Off Season was the perfect antidote.
To cut through the travel clutter and position Tasmania as the ultimate winter retreat, the campaign needed to be high-impact, high-volume, and highly newsworthy. By blending social, PR, and traditional media, we sought to create a content-rich experience that would thrive across platforms and surprise audiences at every turn.
The result? Odd Jobs—a campaign that invited Australians to take time off work and swap their day jobs for quirky, one-of-a-kind roles in Tasmania.
We collaborated with local operators to create 10 unique Odd Jobs that showcased Tasmania’s key tourism pillars—food and drink, nature, creativity and culture, experiences, and history and heritage.
To bring the concept to life, we developed a dynamic content suite, including LinkedIn jobs ads, hero videos featuring comedian Josh Thomas and high-quality imagery.
The launch was engineered to generate buzz, leveraging LinkedIn’s over-indexed audience of high-value travelers before rolling out to wider media.
We tailored earned media pitches to specific verticals—such as ‘Wine Whisperer’ for food media and ‘Paranormal Investigator’ for lifestyle outlets—securing extensive coverage across TV, radio, podcasts, print, and digital.
To amplify the reach, we trained local tourism operators as spokespeople, ensuring authentic representation of Tasmania’s Off Season across all coverage.
Record traffic to discovertasmania.com.au with 212,000 engaged sessions (75% engagement rate).
12,602 applications for Odd Jobs.
5,589 opt-ins for Tourism Tasmania’s eDM from 8,465 unique entrants
2,046 articles & broadcast segments (+1191% above KPI) with 1.3B impressions (+3150% above KPI).
23 hours of national & international TV coverage, including BBC Global News (434M households). Homepage feature on BBC.com for 12 hours. Coverage in Vanity Fair, CNN Travel, Metro UK, Smithsonian Magazine, and more.
128M earned social reach.
86 pieces of earned social coverage, including a News.com.au Facebook post with 4.7M views, 11K comments, and 7K shares. 276K organic views on Instagram.
1.4M paid LinkedIn impressions (+97% above KPI). 13.2M paid impressions on META (+155% above KPI). 1.5M ThruPlays on META (+45% above KPI)
Take the next step and reach out today.
©
HAVAS Red
