Travel Marketing Summit: ‘Boring is a waste of space’ – Emily Taylor and Cam Blackley on challenging marketing’s conservatism
Taylor and Blackley presenting at the Summit yesterday
Boring advertising is a waste of space, and for travel marketers in particular, it’s never been more important to create work that is more inspiring than the destination itself, according to the Bureau of Everything’s founders, Emily Taylor and Cam Blackley.
Kicking off Mumbrella’s Travel Marketing Summit on Thursday, the creative and strategy partners challenged the “creeping conservatism” seeping into travel and tourism marketing.
Across the board, Taylor said she has noticed more conservatism in marketing, saying it’s something everybody is struggling with at the moment. As the creative and strategic leaders behind Tourism Australia’s highly successful ‘Come and Say G’Day‘ campaign, Taylor said she and Blackley also grappled with it.
Rational marketing became a norm – cemented with market challenges like Covid – and so too did “boring” advertising. And while Taylor acknowledged that marketers are more adaptable and have evolved more than agency folk, there’s still too much of the same.
Taylor and Blackley presenting at the Summit yesterday
“Unless we mix things up and take different approaches, it’s not a huge surprise that we’re getting a bit same-same in the market, and that’s certainly true with some of the work we see in tourism,” Taylor said.
Blackley said there are too many parameters that set advertisers up to make boring work, and it’s not just a waste of space – it’s a waste of money and resources too.
“It’s a very expensive waste of space,” he said. “We need to be better at standing out.”
So, the big challenge for travel marketers, Taylor explained, is getting away from this conservatism we’re seeing – and that can be done if people take the following five key principles into consideration:
1. Quit seeing the competition as the fight.
This is very topical, according to Blackley. Marketers must think about the content consumers are engaging with, what’s going in people’s feed, what they are sharing.
Audiences like to engage, rather than be fed, and marketers need to lean into that.
“Thank about the media placement that you’re going to be sitting up against,” he said. “We are more avoidable than ever and throwing money at media spend is making ever diminishing returns.
“The attention conversation is almost entirely about media, but what are you putting in that increasingly expensive media buy?”
2. Behave like a brand in crisis, even if you’re not.
When you think of the most epic, memorable, stand out work, often, it comes from a brand with a bit of drama.
“Quite often, it was do or die for a brand,” Taylor explained. “The brand was in a position of trouble, and if you look into their campaign, you can feel that pressure, that ambition, that drive.
“In a matter of life or death, you can’t afford to bore your audience.”
She said adding drama to a brief or project can boost a brand immensely, and marketers, again, need to lean into that.
3. Don’t underestimate the power of a weakness.
While it is tempting to ignore a weakness, and often considered “marketing madness” to gravitate towards that, there is power in directly taking a weakness on and off the perceptions built around it.
“It’s incredibly powerful in the right situation,” Taylor continued. “And I think tourism is a category that really shows proof of that.”
4. Be creative with brand codes.
Taylor said she and Blackley are big advocates of brand codes and distinctive assets, particularly in travel and tourism. And brands codes are invaluable but they can lose their impact if they are just like everyone else’s.
However, its so easy to fall down the slope of classic, trope-y travel visuals.
“For Tourism Australia, we needed to lean into kangaroos, we needed to lean into our animals, we needed to bring up our landmarks, so for us, it was about doing that in a different way.”
So they introduced Ruby the Roo – the now iconic Tourism Australia’s mascot.
5. Give the montage real meaning.
Finally, Blackley acknowledged that despite the above points, travel marketing is going to do the classic montage from time to time, “whether we like it or not”.
“We need to show a range of experiences a lot of the time, as Emily mentioned, but we need to do it in a meaningful way,” he said.
He said travel marketers must recontextualise their product, destination, whatever they are montaging, and make it more inspiring.
Taylor concluded the session with one key takeaway: “Boring is a waste of space.”
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