As part of a major push to encourage travellers to visit WA, Tourism Western Australia launched a campaign to highlight some of the many extraordinary experiences on offer. The campaign was developed to boost tourism in the hope to capitalise on some of the fallout from the decline in WA’s oil and resources industry.
The premise behind the campaign is to highlight all the experiences that West Australians may take for granted but visitors find memorable and extraordinary. The idea, developed and planned across creative and media by Cummins&Partners puts the people of WA at it’s heart and features a range of personal stories told from the first person perspective. The most persuasive advert for any tourist destination is a real person who’s experienced that place, hence every story that is told across the campaign is told from the perspective of a real person. The campaign is not just a piece of advertising or a picture book tourist experience, it goes beyond that and tells stories that are personal, intimate and real. The campaign aims to attract visitors and residents of Western Australia to share proudly their own personal experiences in WA and grow those stories organically.
The campaign has been a success and has had a positive impact on visitation, visitor spend, intention and consideration to travel. Brand tracking showed a direct correlation between visitation and campaign with 75% of the interstate target market who booked a holiday to WA stating the campaign impacted their decision. Within the first day of the campaign, the hashtag was trending #1 on Twitter. It is still in use, with over 260,000+ posts on Instagram. The majority of the content from the campaign is user-generated from the hashtag and it is dynamically aggregated into the Campaign Website. During the beginning of the campaign nearly 40,000 images were uploaded, gaining more than 87 million potential impressions and over 1.2 million comments and likes, via earned media.
Role: Digital Art Direction of Campaign Website Agency: Cummins&Partners
UX Design
The campaign website underwent a fair few revisions. These are some of the initial lo-fi wires which illustrates the thinking that went into the designs very early on. Sketches, lo-fi and hi-fi wires were designed for mobile, tablet and desktop to ensure usability and consistency throughout the different platforms during the design phase. A toggle function was also added to the site to allow users to switch into a AAA compliant website to further ensure usability.
Homepage
The initial thinking behind the homepage was to give the audience the feeling that they are going to be lead through a journey of extraordinary experiences. Beautiful imagery highlighting the different regions are shown in first person perspective to accentuate the intimate feeling. To attempt to add realism into the beautiful scenic shots, effects on the imagery were made such as transforming them into Cinemagraphs. Cinemagraphs are still photographs with minor or repeated movements to give images more life. Parallaxing effect was also added to give the images more depth. The copy was also written in a way to reflect Western Australians’ blasé outlook on the beauty and uniqueness of their magnificent state.
Menu
The desktop menu allows through multiple ways of navigation. The user can select via an interactive map or either the Region links on the right. The mobile version shows a condensed version of just the Region links for ease of navigation for smaller screens.
Region Pages
Region Pages are landing pages that showcase the 5 different regions. These landing pages highlight the beauty and extraordinary moments in each region and it does this through presenting personal stories and featured videos by locals and travel experts. Throughout the site you will see motifs such as a journey path, push pins and a map. These have been added to give that feeling that the user is being lead on a journey.
Journeys & Memories
Journey pages and Memory pages are a collection of content that is user generated. Journey pages highlight individual experiences that go into great depth. These individual experiences are written by locals who share their personal stories and images, they also provide a map to mark their experiences. Memory pages are a collection of content that is user generated by the hashtag through social networks such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. They are short and sweet, they’re a quick snapshot of extraordinary experiences.
