Australia. A land of peace and prosperity.

Home to highly developed coastal cities, majestic natural wonders beaches and curious marsupials – it’s hard to fathom that a few decades ago attracting visitors was seen as a real challenge. Save for the tyranny of distance it seemed the deck was rigged heavily in our favour.

But in 1984, according to well publicised tourism sentiment surveys, Australia ranked a lowly 78^th in the Most Desired Vacation list for US citizens. It’s a safe bet that remote Europeans also held Australia in equally low regard as a holiday destination.

Enter the Australian Tourist Commission, the forerunner to Tourism Australia, in league with advertising agencies Mojo and US based N.W Ayer. It was this partnership that would ensure the country’s profile would soon change fundamentally. Enlisting the services of Australian everyman Paul Hogan, then unknown outside our shores, the first Come and Say G’day advertisement struck the proverbial bullseye in US marketing terms.

Timing is everything and the campaign, which hit US TV screens in January 1984, couldn’t have arrived at a better juncture. Bill Baker and Peggy Bendel, writing for the US-based Association of Travel Marketing Executives, point out that by 1984 Australia was on quite a roll. Local act Men at Work had blitzed the US charts with their anthem to Australiana Down Under, AC/DC were riding high and Olivia Newton-John was getting physical with mainstream America. In perhaps the biggest coup of all, the plucky crew of Australia II had ended sport’s longest monopoly in September 1983 by wresting the America’s Cup off the holders after 132 years. The time was clearly right for the US to become more au fait with Australia.

But when Paul Hogan, broad accented and bare-chested, strolled onto US TV screens even the most ambitious marketer couldn’t have anticipated the response. Australia was catapulted up to number 7 on the Most Desired Vacation list a mere three months after the campaign commenced. According to Baker and Bendel’s analysis, Australia then spent virtually the next two decades in position 1 or 2 on the Dream Vacation list, a metric similar to the Most Desired Vacation list.

Aside from timing, the campaign’s success owed plenty to Hogan’s roguish charm as well as marketing messages that hit the right notes with the US audience. Hogan typified Australians as open and friendly, self assured, but welcoming. He pointed out we speak the same language. There was the cheeky sense of humour, the sun-kissed beaches and barbeques in the sun.

And of course, the relentlessly misquoted line, “I’ll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you”. Here, the American influence, insisting on the term shrimp instead of prawn, proved a masterstroke. Baker and Bendel noted that “today when developing destination brands, we tend to be influenced by the opinions and values of local stakeholders. In this case, if it had been left to the local stakeholders, one of the best-ever travel marketing campaigns would never have been launched.”

Hogan’s blockbuster comedy Crocodile Dundee, which hit movie screens in 1986 – and ended that year as the second highest grossing film in the US – also functioned as a tourism vehicle in its own right. It gave another shot in the arm to the Come And Say G’day campaign, impetus enough to see it maintained until 1990.

But by the turn of the millennium tourism campaigns were, by technological necessity, required to be rather more complex. And while the straightforward tropes were precisely what hit the mark back in 1984, today the campaign has a charmingly unsophisticated feel. There is the sense that in those primitive years of destination marketing the creators had set off into the wilderness with a pendulum and stumbled upon El Dorado.

Come the mid noughties it was decided that something more robust than Hogan in board shorts was required to make a splash. And in 2006 Tourism Australia’s collaboration with the Sydney office of London’s M&C Saatchi created a wave of publicity of a different nature. Its new slogan, delivered by a bikini clad Lara Bingle, plaintively asked, “So where the bloody hell are you?” to a swag of foreign audiences. The campaign promptly foundered on the rocks in the UK when the Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre banned the ad thanks to its use of the word “bloody”. Only after lobbying by Tourism Australia and then-tourism minister Fran Bailey did the ad return to screens, but only after 9pm. In Canada it fared worse, being permanently shelved on the somewhat tenuous grounds that it hinted at unbranded alcohol consumption.

The sledgehammer approach, which depicted Australians as plain speaking and a little brash is certainly not without merit. M&C Saatchi’s Tom McFarlane, who lent his hand to the creation of the slogan, told Travel Weekly’s sister publication B&T that he was unmoved by any negativity that followed the campaign. “We didn’t set out to say ‘hey, we’ll use the word bloody and get a whole lot of attention’. I don’t even think that’s really a swear word anymore.” There’s certainly no denying the phrase is in common parlance in Australia and MacFarlane believes it dovetails with the open nature of the locals. “One of the things people really like about coming to Australia is Australians,” he said.

The campaign, evidently, aimed to deliver a more contemporary and in-your-face message than the gentle wisecracks of Hogan a few decades before. And according to McFarlane, the old adage that any publicity is good publicity applied. “It absolutely suited us in Great Britain. We got millions and millions of pounds in free publicity.”

Roaring success or otherwise, the most recent campaigns have opted for safer territory. Once the dust had settled on the So Where The Bloody Hell Are You? outing the next Tourism Australia initiative piggybacked on a film seemingly tailor made as a vehicle for promoting this country. The raging success of Crocodile Dundee decades earlier, one assumes, must have appeared the perfect template at the conception stage.

Baz Luhrmann’s 2008 epic Australia was a big budget romance crammed with action sequences. Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman featured, but arguably the awe-inspiring Kimberley and Top End regions were the real stars. US film critic Roger Ebert even likened it to an antipodean Gone With The Wind. But while its impact perhaps failed to match that film, the Come Walkabout campaign that ran alongside Australia undoubtedly did the trick.

Tourism Australia set out to lure so-called ‘experience seekers’ to our shores through the film-propelled campaign, which also saw two television advertisements developed in conjunction with Luhrmann.

With more sophisticated multi-platform campaigns also came greater scrutiny of the efficacy of the undertakings. Happily for Tourism Australia, subsequent feedback from the International Visitor Survey and the National Visitor Survey revealed several pleasing aspects.

Some 23 million people watched the movie in 70 countries and the knock-on effects were equally encouraging. Over 1100 domestic travel agents became ‘Aussie specialists’ by completing special training courses relating to movie-inspired holidays. In addition to having the travel trade on side, 61% of international visitors to Australia saw, read, or heard about the campaign and 87% of domestic visitors had seen, read, or heard about the campaign. A further 15% of visitors chose Australia over another holiday destination as a result of seeing the campaign and the campaign influenced up to 8% of international visitors to come to Australia for a holiday.

Following this success, in 2010 Tourism Australia recalibrated once again, this time tugging at the heartstrings with its There’s Nothing Like Australia campaign. Now running into its fifth year, the campaign is durable by design. There’s Nothing Like Australia was conceived to be long-standing and flexible – a campaign that we can and will evolve to stay relevant for our target consumers in a highly competitive and fast-changing global tourism environment,” Tourism Australia’s managing director John O’Sullivan told Travel Weekly.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the latest iteration of the campaign focused on the biggest single travel trend in recent years – food.

The ubiquity of television chefs and the sudden proliferation of restaurant critics and food bloggers have clearly provided some significant cues to marketing types and Tourism Australia has not missed the signals. The tourism body enlisted BDA Marketing to look into the factors that matter to 15 of Australia’s key travel markets and, as anticipated, the quality of cuisine was a significant motivator for prospective travellers. The research revealing that great food, wine and local cuisine ranked a lofty third in terms of major factors that influenced holiday decisions.

If this was perhaps expected, then more encouraging was the fact that for those who had visited Australia, the country ranked second among the 15 key markets for its food and wine experiences, behind only perennial tourism darling France.

The research also demonstrated that among visitors from China, the US, France, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia and the UK, Australia ranked first for its food and wine offering. On the flipside, for those who had not visited Australia, only 26% associate the destination with a good food and wine offering.

The answer, then, is to align the perceptions of those who have and haven’t visited. And that is where Restaurant Australia comes in. “International visitors were spending around $4.2 billion on food and wine when we began this push in late 2013, early 2014. Our aim is to increase this spending by just over $500 million by the end of this year – and I’m pleased to see we’re on track,” O’Sullivan said. Establishing precisely how successful the campaign has been, ultimately, will take a little longer.

Looking to the future, defining a successful campaign is somewhat easier for Tourism Australia. “It’s about brand awareness – in our case Destination Australia – and conversion; getting more people to take the step towards booking a trip here. Conversion is now key, as we move into the ‘seeing the results’ phase of our Tourism 2020 industry targets,” O’Sullivan said.

Images: Tourism Australia