Tourism Australia MD denies food and wine focused campaign favours luxury market

Oh yes, the table in the oyster bed is so typical Australian TA. Not. This is the sort of ‘same old’ that TA has been serving up for years – nice to look at, yes, but TA continues to ignore the often poor experience visitors have when they land in this country (please tell us if this is wrong TA). An example I have seen more than once is rude and discriminatory people at airports (I actually apologised on behalf of Australia to an Asian family for the treatment they received by an airport shuttle bus driver).

The evocative images all comes undone by this, yet there seems no word from TA about what they intend to do about it.

TA needs to look hard at itself if it thinks it can keep dishing up this material for ever.

I smell a rat here. ‘Friend of friend’ in agency land says Tourism Australia’s brief for this restaurant strategy came across their desks well before any due diligence was done. The agency has been cringing, ducking and weaving ever since – having to justify what (even they felt) was a crazy strategy. Would be interesting to see dates of when this “exhaustive research” was done versus when work started on promoting hatted restaurants.
As for O’Sullivan’s use of the words “trickle down effect” – how insulting to industry. No wonder they’re angry. If you throw enough cash at the “big end of town”, is he kinda hoping that their hands will be too full to catch all of the golden coins so that the rest of town could scrabble for the leftovers? Wow.

Ratsmeller – Tim @Mumbrella beat me to it. The food and wine insights came out of a piece of consumer demand research we do every year across 11 of our key international markets. The particular findings which have provided the catalyst for this campaign were actually first published in September 2012 – way, way before any campaign development work.

I think I’ve already addressed the ‘big end of town’ comments, in the comments section of the original article published by Mumbrella last week. If you’re really interested in the actual strategy behind RA, have a look at the information on the ‘Campaigns’ section of http://www.tourism.australia.com. You may well not agree with it, fair enough, but it’s all been very transparent – we first started talking about it, seeking input from and engaging with industry from around September 2013.

Beero – the TV spot includes a mixture of high end and also some very accessible and affordable ones food and wine experiences – such as drinks and dinner at one of Melbourne’s laneways bar/restaurants, barbecuing seafood on Rottnest Island and wines tasting in the Barossa. We didn’t choose these particular experiences by accident – they were each selected based on international consumer demand research and with input from our state and territory tourism partners, as being the type of experiences most likely to appeal to and attract our target consumers in our top target markets.

Your point about delivering the promise is spot on. We can do our bit, and this campaign does focus upon some of the exceptional people (not actors) delivering great food and wine experiences, as well as the produce and the place. But, ultimately, we’re a marketing agency. Delivering great experiences is something the industry as a whole must collectively own.

So Tim and Leo are you saying not a single brief in the food and wine space was given to the agency before September 2012?

WOW. There’s really no pleasing some people. It’s not like you can advertise the food and wine experiences available in the country to a global audience by showing cars queued up at the Maccas drive-through.

Of course you’re highlighting the best parts – the great restaurants, the out-of-the-way places. Isn’t the idea to get people to come here? And once they are here it’s not like the only thing they’ll do is go to a restaurant; of course they’re going to do other things as well.

Geez you guys.

@ratsmeller there are people who think the moon landing was a conspiracy too.

Ratsmeller – correct. If it helps diffuse the conspiracy theory, Clems didn’t start work for us until July 2013.

Seeing this thread has turned the research and resultant strategy, I am going to repeat the last comment I made in the previous thread that started this debate.

If the research findings that have been made available in the public domain are all that there is to go on, then I am going to stand by my original position that further justification should be called for. I’m not going to go into all the technicalities here. But let’s take a top-line look at the two ‘insights’ used to support the strategy.

First, that travellers from Australia’s top 15 markets rank ‘Good food, wine, local cuisine and produce’ as their third most important factor in choosing a holiday destination. Interestingly the first two factors are hygiene points – ‘Safety and security’ and ‘Value for money’. If these top three points were taken on face value then all a destination would have to do to get the world beating a path to its door is be safe, reasonably priced with good food and wine. Sound exciting? I’m being flippant to illustrate a point that aggregated data like this (all people in all markets) needs to be treated carefully. Here are a few queries: How do the factors differ by market? By different segments of travellers? By short-break vs ‘trip of a life-time? By short-haul vs long-haul? By those that have Australia in their consideration set already vs those that don’t? (It’s also worth noting that this factor actually consists of four factors, which is problematic in itself – good food, good wine, good local produce, good local cuisine. So which one(s) were respondents actually rating when asked the question? For instance, it may be a different story if the weighting is on ‘local cuisine’ and their mental benchmark is Italian, French, Greek, Thai, etc.).

The second ‘insight’ is that while people from the same markets that had not visited Australia ranked it 6th for ‘good food and wine’, those that had been ranked it 2nd. And in jumping from 6th to 2nd it overtook Italy, Spain, Japan and Germany. So on that basis given that ‘everyone’ wants ‘good food & wine’, and that Australia is apparently underappreciated on this point, then we should focus our efforts on this. But had the same respondents also been to Italy, Spain, etc.? If not, then the rating is biased in our favour.

This aside, is the effort needed to raise potential travellers’ perceptions of Australia on this dimension from 6th (which isn’t too bad really, and ahead of Thailand!) to 2nd worth it? Is it effective as alternative strategies, such as say adding depth and emotion to the aspects of Australia that people already thinking about travelling from the other side of the world dream about? At least the campaign does use Australia’s great natural beauty as a backdrop and several of the dining experiences present ‘new world’ living. But the focus on food and wine as the lead theme rather than as a support point remains questionable based on the facts presented.

Glenn – sorry for delay getting back to you. We had the launch/first night of our pop-up restaurant in the UK overnight, so just dealing with that.

Thanks for your follow up.

Yes, I suspect you’ve only seen a top line summary of the research – a simplified aggregate of the key findings, if you like. The full research and analysis is pretty comprehensive, and actually covers 15 individual markets.

We’ve got individual factsheets on our corporate site http://www.tourism.australia.c.....heets.aspx

But to try and answer your queries:

FIRST INSIGHT:-
– As just stated above, the research covers 15 individual markets;
– Importance factors differ by market, but F&W consistently ranked highly (top 5 in all but two of the 15 markets);
– The data has been cut in multiple ways, in line with TA’s strategy – including TA media target, special interest groups, demographic and regional segmentation, traveller type. We’re interested in out of region travel so we pre-screen to make sure we’re talking to consumers who have recently travelled long haul, or who are planning to do so;
– We also cut the data by consumers at different stages in the purchasing cycle/decision-making process. Interestingly, when we cut the data by intender vs. non-intender, we see no significant difference in perceptions of Australian F&W offering;
– Your point about the four factors (good food, wine, local cuisine and produce) – we drill down and specifically ask/clarify what each respondent defines as constituting each of these factors;

SECOND INSIGHT:-
– Great question! This has been raised before and as a result we ran the numbers looking at how Australia rated against Italy, France, Spain etc. for consumers who have visited all these countries. Obviously a much smaller sample size, but the findings were still consistent;

I hope that helps Glenn. If you want to drill deeper, let me know and I’ll hook you up with one of the guys from our research and insights team.

Cheers

Leo from TA – you are from Tourism Australia – ignoring the significance of the word of mouth effect because you are ‘ultimately a marketing agency’ is the easy way out.

You imply that you care about the reputation of our country as a destination but you won’t do anything about it. Sorry, but that is the role of a marketing agency and TA should be prepared to tackel the fundamental issues like this. Ignoring it is just wasting taxpayers money and your effort.

Sure you’ll get some short term results from a ‘nice’ advertising campaign, but it does nothing for brand Australia overseas when the people who get treated poorly go home and tell friends and family (or do it online) what poor hosts we are. That is just as big a problem as other inputs and some basic research should tell you that.

Beero – as part of our most recent consumer demand research, we surveyed 11 key international markets. In every case, the experience of visiting Australia exceeded the expectations. Every single market. Not to belittle your point, but the research shows that brand Australia is actually pretty strong. Those people and businesses delivering tourism experiences tom our visitors must be doing something right…

One of the features of Restaurant Australia is that it actively encourages Australians to advocate and recommend what they – not we – believe to be great Australian food and wine experiences. Other than the eight scenes in the TVC (which, by the way, were selected based on consumer research and input from our state and territory tourism partners), the vast majority of the over 1,600 experiences showcased are the typical experiences you refer to in your original post.