Melbourne’s not like other Australian destinations. Instead of big landmarks, it’s a city full of small, intimate experiences. These are hidden treasures in a complex, cultural and truly creative city. They’re well known by the people who live there, but not so obvious to visitors to the city.
We wanted to talk to an audience whose opinion holds influence in creative and cultural communities. To do this, we needed to reach this young, digital-savvy audience in a way that was truly innovative and showed off the cultural diversity of Melbourne – making it a must-see destination.
Enter the Remote Control Tourist: a unique, live-streamed and interactive video experience that unveiled Melbourne’s hidden treasures.
Through crowdsourcing of suggestions on Facebook and Twitter, anyone in the world could direct two real-life tourists in Melbourne on where to go and what to do, allowing users to ‘go before they go’.
Over five days our Remote Control Tourists received nearly 9000 requests, with 158 countries and almost 4000 cities participating, and people spending nearly seven minutes exploring the website.
Global press coverage helped us to reach an estimated 150 million people, generating $3.7 million of earned media for the campaign (Millward Brown).
Importantly, the campaign was picked up by online publications that our target audience frequented, and at one point it was the ‘most shared article of the day’ on Mashable.
With social media at the heart of this experience, we generated over 49 million earned impressions, with sentiment towards the campaign at 96% positive.
The Remote Control Tourists created over 80 hours of video footage of Melbourne, took over 2000 Instagram photos and checked into 321 hidden cultural treasures while travelling 109km by foot, bicycle, taxi, helicopter, tram and tall ship. Capturing this data allowed us to create a first-of-its-kind, crowdsourced interactive guide to Melbourne.