Nick Baker
Speaker:Thank you. So, I’m gonna talk a little bit about – I’m gonna talk a lot about – the power of a big idea because when it all comes down to it, whatever we’re doing, and whether it’s an additional way, or whether it’s in a social way, nothing gets away from the fact that you need a big idea. That hasn’t changed. That won’t change. And, in fact, it only gets more important. So, for some of you, I’m afraid this is gonna be a little bit of a talk about Oprah. I imagine there’s an awful lot of people that, if I was having this conversation with you a year ago, would say - [Laughter] “You know, what is – what have I come to? Why am I listening to somebody talk about Oprah, for goodness sake?” I would have been one of those and most of you, if I asked the question, you know, “Who watches Oprah?”, I’d find very few people out there that actually do. But, most of you would know who she was and most of you would understand the power and significance of it. So, I’m gonna talk about that, but I’m also gonna talk, first of all, a little about what Tourism Australia is charged with doing, our campaign that led to Oprah, and a couple of other little bits that we thought on the outside of it. During the course of this, please feel free to ask questions at any time. I’m more than happy for people to stick their hand up, tweet, do whatever they want to do to ask me questions so we make it more conversational. I will allow time at the end to just – to ask anything that’s been bubbling up during the course of the presentation. So, without further adieu, we’ll get onto it. So, towards Australia’s strategic annual plan, this is the foundation of what we do. It’s a 20/20 vision for tourism industry potential. And that’s a 10 year vision for what the organization wants to do and what the industry wants to do and where we should get to as an industry because not many people realize the significance of the tourism industry. It is, in fact, the second largest ____ industry in the country and it’s the second largest employer of people in the country. And so, what we measure ourselves is on the net expenditure by tourisms when they come to us. So, we’ve set ourselves a goal that by 2020, there’ll be $140 billion of expenditure, in overnight expenditure, in Australia, which is quite a huge goal when we’re somewhere around $73, $74 billion at the moment. Now, that means a lot of different things and it’s interesting, when Greg was talking about jobs earlier, this is another key area for us. Labor and skills are predicted to the greatest supply side challenge that we have, not just to achieve the potential, but for business as usual. We need to grow from 500,000 workers to around 600,000 that are directly employed, and that means almost about a million people that are indirectly employed in the industry. We need another 50,000 rooms in hotels across the country, and we nee aviation capacity to grow 40 to 50 percent to come into this country to bring people here because one of the things, obviously, we’re most challenged by is getting people to Australia. What does that mean for TA, Tourism Australia? Everything that we do now, and I know it sounds to a lot of you blindingly obvious, is focused about the consumer. Tourism Australia is set up, and most of you – some of you will know that – as a statutory authority. By that, I mean it’s a body that’s been set up by the government. It’s government funded. We get an allowance from the government of $133, $136 million dollars a year, but we’re set up as a statutory authority. We’re not set up as a department. We have our own independent board. Geoff Dixon, the ex-CEO of Quantas, is the chairman of that board and it’s a very high-powered board, and we answer to the board; but, we’re also dealing with your money – government money. Everything we do inside that is focused on the customer. What can we do more about reaching those people all around the world that we’re trying to target to get to come to Australia and tell them all the compelling reasons why Australia is such an extraordinary place? We also need the industry to be out there. We also need to help grow the industry, to be able to cater for all these people coming down here, and develop in the ways that it needs to. And for all of that, it’s also about technology and there’s a number of platforms that we’re working on about reaching out to people, about how to connect with customers, as it is massively changing; and I think most of you will agree, one of the ways that technology, digital, social, everything you like about that, is most effective, you want one of the categories that’s having the most impact, is travel and leisure. I mean, if you looking here for people that go and look on social sites to try and understand where their next holiday’s gonna go or where they’re gonna buy, social becomes part of that. It is very much everything because it all stems out of word of mouth, and word of mouth was always the thing of “Which – where am I gonna go? Have you been to that place? How do I get there?”, all those kind of things, and the valuable insights you find there. Aviation partnerships – we work with about seven or eight airlines around the world in partnership on major platforms where we do cross-branded campaigns globally. The biggest of which, obviously, is Quantas. We have a strong market strategy about which markets we play in, which markets we actually compete in and I’ll talk a little bit more about that. And we, obviously, have very strong industry partnerships. Our customers are both the global leisure and business events and also the consumer. So, we’re looking at both people that are coming here on holiday, but also business commutes, people that are coming in here and having conferences. We are spending more and more of our money now in talking to customers, and the biggest thing we’re trying to do is differentiate the country. It’s interesting when people say, “Well, okay, well, you know, most of you all are in businesses that have strong competitors. Who are our competitors?” Well, we compete against countries all around the world that are, obviously, trying to attract people to go and stay in their countries. Interestingly, in the UK alone, there’s about 190 different NTOs – national tourist offices – for the countries that are out there, actively marketing in the UK alone. So, we got about 190 competitors out there, just I the UK. And it’s fascinating, the amounts of money that is now being spent in this area by countries, whether it be in alot of the near Asian communities, like Singapore and Malaysia or Thailand, or in Europe, or in a lot of the growing South American markets where people are recognizing the importance and power of tourism, not just because of the influence and what it brings, but also the branding that it does for the country. And TA is also about sharing our insights about what building a more appealing Australia is going to look like and how we can do that to help attract investments down to Australia. High impact events. This is what of what we’re talking about. What we’re talking about is how do high impact events create that desire, both to come and to also to come now? Because events are one of those ways where it gives a reason to go someplace, but it also gives a reason to go to that place now. And one of the big changes that we have for Australia is, even though, around the world, it is often the number one dream destination, and we are very lucky to have that, it’s a dream destination, not my next destination, and events and ideas of ways in which changing something from being a dream to reality, to being now. One of the things we’ve also got to do is connect with passion points. One of the – we’re spending a lot more time now connecting people with their passions as we’re bringing them down here. And that could be everything from your classic birdwatcher through to your adventure seeker, through to your cyclist, through to your surfer, through to people that just want to come down and see how cute the flora and _____ is in this country, and believe me, many people still come here for that. It’s the number one reason. Actually, would – who would like to – anybody like to hazard a guess from a brand perspective – you’re all in marketing, all of you. So, if you’ve all got all your own companies, you’ve all got organizations you belong to, and if you have to say, well, how, in one word, is my company or my organization thought of? What are they thinking of doing? If you’re looking about this from a leisure perspective to people all around the world, what would you think would be the one word that people are asked? What is the one word that describes Australia as a destination? Kangaroos is one. It’s actually part of it, but no. Beaches? Beaches is one of the things you think about a lot, but it’s not the one thing that defines us, no. Sorry? Who said that? Absolutely right. The number one word that defines us around the world is adventure. We are an adventure destination. And it’s kind of interesting because a lot of people, when I say that, go, “I don’t know, are we?”, you know? Is that what we are about? Adventure? And it’s really interesting, when you go down underneath it and understand why people say the world adventure, it is an amazing place for adventures to come to life, Australia. It is not necessarily the place where you’ll go like, you think New Zealand, you’ll go bungee jumping; or you think, “I’ll go to Africa and I’ll go maybe on Safari there.” But, in terms of accessible adventures and kind of places that people can go and do different things and feel safe and comfortable to do that, Australia is the number one word. And do you know what make it almost interesting is that that is the word that’s used all around the world with, perhaps, the exception of China. So, as much as that world global market is differentiated, it’s actually got a lot of similarities. So, we spend a lot of time thinking about, “Well, how d we bring adventure to life?” So, where do we play? What are our markets? These are the big markets. China, USA, UK, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea are our biggest ones, and then our core markets, you can see Singapore, Middle East, Malaysia, Germany, Indonesia, Hong Kong, India, Canada and France. We actually operate in about 24 markets in the world. We have offices in about 11 markets in the world. The number one global market for the moment, obviously, is New Zealand. They send over a million people. No surprises, they are our next door neighbor. The second largest market is the UK, and the – does this have a thing on it? Yeah. And the third largest market is USA, and fourth is China. China just took over Japan last year and is phhssst going up. Twenty-four percent growth last year in Chinese arrivals to this country. I could spend an entire time talking to you about why China has grown so much and what we’ve done over the last 10 years to build that to it, which is a fascinating talk in its own right, but not the subject for today. And if anybody wants to ask me questions. So, how are we going to achieve that potential? Continue to adapt to changing target customer’s needs. Let me just talk about that one thing. For travel and leisure and hospitality, that’s an industry in its own right. The industry that its most closely aligned to, and not usually thought about, is that travel is a fashion brand. Travel is a fashion industry. Why is that? Because places, hotels, restaurants, adventures go in an out of fashion. Countries go in an out of fashion. Vietnam, for right now, is considered a hot destination. Most of you will know people that are going to Vietnam or thinking about – Vietnam’s on their bucket list of places to go. Places fall in and out and the way that they do that is fascinating for people – for us to sort of get the insights on why those places are changing. And so, we as an organization, have had to spend a lot of time thinking, “Well, how do we think Australia fashionable?” How do we make it relevant and how do we continue to readapt it? And the power of big ideas and what we did with Oprah, and what we have done with a few other projects, is part and parcel of that. One of things we’ve done inside this is, obviously, the launch of “There’s Nothing Like Australia” campaign. Now, I’m gonna talk a little bit about that campaign. Now, I’m gonna talk a little bit about that campaign in a minute, but one of the things that I wanted to mention also in here is media partners. Traditionally, Tourism Australia would go out there and we’d go along with the broadcast media, the print media, and all the other media outlets that you’ve got and the media owners. We’ve now spent a lot of time now thinking – reconsidering that. And some of our biggest media partners in the world now are, in fact, things like Google and YouTube, places like Facebook and other channels that we now consider as just as important as broadsheets and TV channels, in fact, becoming even more important. And we’ll talk a little bit about that now. And the way that we’re seeing – an interesting way you might be able to relate to – is travel agents is – for us, travel agents are no longer a place where you go in there and just sort of – you get your brochure from and you go to places. They’re actually a media outlet for us, a media channel. They’re an outdoor mechanism and they’ve got their own source _____ list that we go to. So, we’re spending a lot more talking about how do we get our stuff out there, outside of the cluster of normal channels? We have to spend far more on being on the cutting edge. You know, Tourism Australia has spent a whole of time in the media and the social channels and I’m gonna spend a bit of time on that in a minute. Really, we now are absolutely destined to be on the cutting edge. I set the goal for the organization to be the most digitally enabled, most digitally empowered, NTO on the planet. We would have the best skills, the best people, and the best campaigns digitally because we don’t have the luxury of massive, huge budgets to go into all markets. We don’t have the luxury of the next door neighbors that will drive over our state boundaries or our country boundaries to get here. The only way we can connect with people is around the world, so to go out to those people, we need to connect to them digitally. So, how did we come up with our campaign? Very simple. One of the key things that we found, and key insight, is people to travel to experience difference. Accentuating the differences will get more people to travel. Very basic insight. The second insight we came up with is that Australians are really proud about their own country. They’re really proud about telling people about it. All of you – a lot of you probably would have worked abroad and many of you will regale people over lots of glasses of wine and beer, about how great your own country is, how great Australia is. Australians love telling stories about their own country. That was a powerful insight and most people wanted to be part of telling those stories. So, our new campaign, we went out there and said, “You know what? Instead of just us, Tourism Australia, telling the world while Australia is great, why there’s nothing like it, let’s tell it from the experts. Let’s get the people of Australia to tell that story.” And so, that campaign that we built, right, “There’s Nothing Like Australia”, was built out of those insights and Australians telling the world why there’s nothing like it. It’s a really difficult job, you know? It’s interesting. Being the head of marketing for Tourism Australia and trying to tell everybody about Australia is kind of tricky because you’ve got 22 million people in the country who think they can probably do a better job than you can. And, a lot of times, they may be right. A lot of the challenges that we have when we’re putting a global – a campaign out there is that we have to make sure it’s universally understood. It’s simple. It’s translatable. Any campaign that we do has to go across numerous different linguistic and cultural challenges to be able to read out there. So, being ultra quirky and very clever does work because it’s not gonna be understood by lots of people. It’s gotta be authentic and true to Australia, otherwise Australians are gonna tell us really quickly that it’s not. It can’t be polarizing. We don’t have that luxury. It’s got to engender a sense of pride for Australians. They gotta feel proud about it. They gotta feel like, “Okay, I believe in this. It can’t be colloquial because nobody will understand it, and that’s the problems we had with previous campaigns. We won’t go there. Work across markets and segments, so it’s gotta go to different groups that we’re going to. It’s going to be a rallying point behind the industry. Something the organization can believe in and live to. Rational and emotional. An idea that can live for a long time. Something that gets stronger and is defensible. Now, that’s kind of tricky, right? Because, on one side, you’ve got people around the world actually love the idea of seeing Australia as kind of the place where kangaroos do bounce down the streets. They love seeing the idea that it is about mateship. It is a land without strangers. They love the colloquial nature of it, the mateship, the sense of country and space. A lot of Australians don’t quite want to see Australia like that. Australians want to see it with a greatest sense of modernity, the greatest sense of sophistication, the greatest sense of cultural well-being, a greatest sense of being in the real world. It’s kind of hard to balance those two things, isn’t it? So, anyway, we had a bash and we got 30,000 people out there that uploaded their photographs about their special places in Australia and their 25 words. And we did this and it was great success. I mean, it was the biggest user generated campaign in Australia. To get 30,000 Australians, 30,000 people, to do that, again to sense that sense of pride. And we’re gonna go back out to the market again later this year. We used that to start off and then we went into video that we created for it and we engaged with them in market and got people in the rest of the world to tell their stories about why they loved Australia. We built this wonderful map, There’s Nothing Like tool – and, by the way, if any of you are thinking about Australian holidays, go onto this map. I guarantee you one thing, you will be invigorated with places in Australia – this is my little sales pitch by the way, okay, for going on a holiday in Australia, which is a great place – you go on here, and you’ll see this, and you’ll plan a route, and you’ll say, “I’m interested in going on the South Coast. I’m interested in going surfing.” All these pictures will come up and they’ll give you this great idea about places to go and inspirational stories from every day Australians. It’s really powerful and it’s addictive. And this is the kind of stories that they come up with in their photographs that they sent in. We did this, 30 countries, 6 months, 15 languages, we launched it. So, what does it look like? We’re gonna show you the actual campaign and then we’re gonna go on to Oprah – or not ____. [Video Playing] And that’s the campaign we’ve built and the line we’ve built. And this line is, we built this to last for the next 10 years minimum. We’ll be building more campaigns around it, but what we’re trying to do is show the reason why “There’s Nothing Like Australia”. So, when you come to that point, “There’s Nothing Like Australia”, and you come to it, you think, “Well, how are we gonna help demonstrate that?” The way – one of the things that we’re all talking about in this conference is the power of social media, but underpinning social media, really, what we’re looking at, is the power of advocacy. That’s what really underpins so much of it is what people are saying about you and if that advocacy that has formed so much of what we have done over the last two years, and central to that has been some of the programs that we’ve done and how much of the content we’ve done, and actually, one of these – I’ll just talk a little about this – is we now have – in fact, actually, that’s actually wrong – we have 1.5 people on Facebook. We have the largest Facebook site for any NTO government office around the world. IN fact, we’re the second largest Facebook site in Australia, only beaten by some band called INXS. So, we’ve got those people on there and then, we’re growing. We grew 22,000 Facebook friends last week. We grow around about 4,000 to 5,000 Facebook friends a day. Half of that is from Australia and half of that’s from around the world. An interesting little insight, just – I’ve sort of digressed a tad, but an interesting little insight into that is that we now have somewhere in the region of just 800,000 people on Facebook in Australia. It means that I can talk to more people in Australia than any newspaper can, most TV stations can, and most radio stations can. I now have built this up and we heard Greg talk about what he did on the Fire brand, but I now have the capacity. We can go and talk and tell stories to all these people. We can harness this group to be advocates for us around the world, and that is what we are doing. Compelling stories – I liken my role, my whole job, I think, is to tell stories. I mean, that’s what I think Tourism Australia’s job is to do is to tell the stories of the people, to inspire people around the world about how wonderful it is and how there’s nothing like this. And that just shows you some of the strength. We’ve done that. This was a little program. Interestingly, it wasn’t that I jumped ahead. I think the slide’s, actually, sort of come out of place here, but we had a TV show called No Leave, No Life, which was another project we’ve done, and we decided that because we were getting into it, rather than just do adverts about why people should have holidays and holidays in Australia, we created a TV show. And this TV show is going on in primetime and we built this, and we did this with one of our partners, the states and territories around Australia to generate this TV show, which plays out on Saturdays at 6:30. We just about start doing series three of this, but, again, this show goes to about a million people in Australia when it goes out every Saturday for the summer season. So, it’s about building content and this about stories. But, this time, the stories are being told to Australians and it’s about advocacy of the people that have to the show, the celebrities that we do behind the show, to tell their stories. Visiting opinion leader program, and this is what Oprah came out of. One of the things that we decided to do is, rather than – we have a program we bring journalists from around the world in. We bring about – in fact, this year, we’ll bring about 1,030 journalists from around the world to come to Australia to tell stories, and they’ll be the ones that we’ll bring down and we’ll show how wonderful the country is. We’ll take ‘em to extraordinary places. We’ll work with the partners, our states and territories, and we’ll go out and show them stories, and whether it’s about anything from restaurants or hotels, travel, or koalas or kangaroos, or things that bite you and sting you and do all of the other things we don’t like talking about too much, we bring them down. But, we realize that it’s more than that now. It’s also about visiting opinion leaders and this is where we started tapping into bloggers. And we thought, “Well, we’re gonna go out there because these bloggers have just as much power, in fact, if not even more, to resonate than some o these magazines do now. Scott Schuman was the first person we brought down, AKA, The Sartorialist. Those of you that are really into fashion and style and design will probably know and read his blog; 300,000 or 400,000 a month do go onto his blog, and it is powerful because he tells stories about fashion and he takes photographs about people and places. We brought him down, piggybacked on fashion week in Melbourne, and he started shooting, and all these wonderful shots. So, he might take pictures of people, “That’s a really interesting outfit”, set against places in Australia. So, indirectly, we’re telling that story and we’re connecting with people through fashion and their passion. We did this in other places around the world and we did this – and we thought, “Well, this is an interesting way of getting people to come down here and tell our stories through this.” Ultimately, we wanted to bring the world’s most influential person down, Oprah Winfrey. So, this is sort of, I mean, you know, people say it often, “Well, how do you go about getting Oprah? Did you just like write her a letter and say, ‘Hey, Oprah, do you fancy coming down?’”, because apart from being sort of fairly influential around the world, she’s also, you know, her show has been seen for 25 year, it’s very well established, had never been out of America before. So, the show had never been done. Had they taken segments outside of America? Yep. Had they ever done a show outside of America? No. So, we thought, “Hey, it’s their last episode – it’s their last season, sorry – we’ll write to them.” And so we started writing notes about ideas that we had about how they could come down to Australia. You know, at first, we would take a little bit of time and would get sort of the nice little, you know, “That’s very nice of you and Oprah thanks you very much for your interest in our show” kind of notes. But, we didn’t give up. We kept finding more reasons and we kept watching the shows and finding, “Well, what are the little angles? What could be really big?” You know, we’d known that she’d given cars away on the show, and we’d known that she’d given other stuff away. “Well, what would incentivize her?” And so, we said, “Well, why don’t you – instead of you just coming down, let’s bring your whole audience down. Let’s take them around Australia and show how great it is.” We knew, because of the work we’d done before with Australia The Movie and with Baz Luhrmann and with Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, that they had been on the show and spoken about Australia very well. They were good advocates for the country. They’d seeded it. And they’d given – we’d sent Tim Tams and all these other kinds of things. And, eventually, the idea got out that maybe this would be kind of interesting. And I think I’m not telling you something out school here, but it’s – there’s always sort of one little moment, something in a campaign that is a trigger moment that makes you go, “Actually – this is actually gonna come to life.” And it was the moment that we went back and said a very simple thing. We went back and one of my team said, “Let’s call the Opera House the Oprah House.” So, we sent a little note to her and we got a reply immediately. No 24 hours; no week; literally came back, “Love it.” That went straight to Oprah. That was one of the tipping point moments in getting her to do it. It is the simple things. It is the little sparks of genius that create that moment, that do it. She went, “I like the idea of an Oprah House.” Even for somebody as wealthy and influential as that, that sounded pretty good. And then it was like, “Well, what are you gonna do with the Oprah House?” First of all, we had to actually ask the Opera House if they minded. [Laughter] That was – let me tell you, that was a whole different exercise. But, we had to then go and say, “Well, how are we gonna build this? How are we gonna build this?” So, we did build it. We built the idea around what they would do here, how we would go out and tell the stories when they were coming here, all the things that we would engage with her and her audience, and why it would be so compelling to come down here because she could choose anywhere. And that’s the thing is Oprah could have chosen to go anywhere in the world. There’s plenty of other countries asked her to come down, but she chose our country. She chose Australia. So, I’m just gonna play you this little segment. Some of you may have seen it. For those of you that aren’t used to American TV and the power of audiences and the emotional bit, protect yourself over this little section. I do warn you, it does get a bit oooh! [Laughter] And when I watched it, I was like, “Okay.” But, who here wouldn’t want their brand, their organization, their country to elicit this kind of response. [Video Playing] [Laughter] We sat and watched that and go zzzz zzzz. [Laughter] But, you can imagine the impact. The second thing was absolute fear and dread now that we’re going to have this monster of a show and Oprah come down and we’ve got to live up to it. But, it was amazing to see this and they liked that. [Laughter] By the way, when they came down here, they still – it’s very much like that. [Laughter] And that’s powerful because the Americans do know how to do that kind of stuff. So, just a couple of facts behind Oprah, you know? Launched 18 million homes. Highest rated talk show of all time. Global reach – the show airs in 147 counties around the world with 30 million viewers weekly. Her website is the number one lifestyle website. Averages 59 million page view, you know? All these numbers are like huge. Her book club – I mean, we all know about her book club in terms of – well, I actually didn’t know about her book club, but I do now. [Laughter] So, forgive me when I say, “We all know” because we all don’t. But, I mean, those of you that do know, what she does for books when she says she likes it, it goes from like, you know, 300,000th book to the most popular. She is one of the most influential people in the world and her recommendations can do all the kinds of things that you can’t believe that you can get a brand to do. This is something I didn’t really realize. In the Time 100 Most Influential People over the last 25 years, she is the only person to have been in that list every year. So, out of all the lists of the Time Magazine, she is the only person to have been on that list every single year. So, just think – that influence – and that’s against politicians. It’s across business owners. It’s across everything and, obviously, she has a few people on YouTube and she Tweets to a couple. [Laughter] When she came in and seated, her first broadcast, it was all the press. Now, all of you probably have to deal with the press at your time and you know how wonderful they can also be about asking some of those deep questions and about the values and about the costs, and all those kind of things, and “Why is government investing in this show and bringing somebody down here who can afford to come here on her own?” She just sat there and she said, “Let me handle this.” And this is the kind of statements that she said. “Let me just tell you. This is the truth. It is immeasurable what four hours of a love fest that your country broadcast to 145 countries around the world can do. Stop. What I know for sure is that what will happen is the people who have never even thought about Australia, didn’t know it was here, will have seed planted in their hearts.” They can’t ask for more than that. So, we got off to a pretty picking start when she came. Three hundred and two people came down; 242 women and 60 men; 48 couples, age between 18 and 75; 38 states; 13 from Canada, blah, blah; 200 crew – we weren’t quite expecting that. [Laughter] When we said, “Well, bring your own audience down”, she said – came back and said, “Ahhh, that’s brilliant, and 200 crew.” I’m thinking, “What does 200 crew do?” [Laughter] I mean, “We’re gonna have TV stations here. We’re gonna have all these people doing all this stuff. What do you got” – anyway, they – it’s a lot of people. And they arrived, and we took them out to 25 locations with 250 operated. Now, one of the big, important points is this – you don’t do this on your own, right? Tourism Australia doesn’t do this on their own. Tourism Australia had to spend a lot of time working out with the states and territories, with the operators around the country, and saying, “Partner us.” Here’s an interesting learning. It is a lot more easy to get people to run towards a big idea than to run towards a small idea. As soon as we went out there and said, “Hey, you know, we’ve got Oprah coming. Would you kind of give us a few rooms for a few audience and look after them?” “Oh, yes.” [Laughter] You know, everybody got behind it. It was amazing the power that this idea and this woman had on people, even people that said, “You got Oprah? Seriously? Oprah? I’ve never watched an Oprah show. I don’t know what it’s like.” But, t hey understood the power of it. So, it was an easy sell, and that’s what a big idea can do for you. It’s an easy sell once you get it and once people believe in it. When Oprah was coming down here, we said if – [Laughter] – if you can imagine from the government, so the government’s sort of saying to us, “Okay, that’s great Nick. How are you gonna measure it and what are we gonna get out of it?” So, we go back to Harpo and say, “Hmmm, what are we gonna get?” And they said, “Well, you’re gonna get a show.” “Well, okay, how do we measure that? And how many shows?” They said, “Well, we’ll just make sure that your country looks really great.” So, I thought, “Well, that’s fantastic. I’ll just go to the government, and go back to the department and say, ‘They’re gonna make our country look great. We’re gonna put $2 million into this and they’re gonna make our country look great. Is that okay?’” Anyway, we had to go around a few more little sort of ideas on how we were gonna get that thing done, but we did get it done. But, what we happened is, and this is telling conviction around why There’s Nothing Like Australia, the power of a good idea, and the power of somebody you believe in. We, at first, were only going to get one show definitely. We may get a second show. We ended up with four shows here, plus a launch show, plus a closing show in the closing finale. Six shows, and that’s because we just kept on building the idea, kept on seeding new thoughts into it, bringing more partners on board, and irrevocably letting Australia do what it does best, which is showcase of how extraordinary this country is, how remarkable it’s people are, and how welcoming this is. And we really are the most welcoming people and I had – I was fortunate enough to have a chat with Oprah and meet her. And this was out Longitude 131, out at Oolaroo. Who’s been to Oolaroo here? Shame on the rest of you. [Laughter] It’s the most fascinating place. It really is inspirational and she wants to go there. So, we went out there and we were in the luxury safari camps. And so, I started talking to her, you know, and at first, you get over that first thing of – right? And you start talking to her and I just sort of asked her what she found compelling. What was it that she liked about this country? And she said to me, “I cannot believe the people here. I cannot believe how welcoming the people are, how open the people are, and how extraordinary the country is. She really believed that she had never met a more friendly people in the world, had never been made more welcome by anybody in the world before. And that’s why she was so powerful and that’s why the whole show grew is because she believed in it and she came and thought it was fantastic. So, these are all the shows that we did. I’m not going to go onto much more about the shows because there were lots of them, loads of people saw them. Hopefully, people – how many people saw the show – any of the shows that were aired in Sydney – in Australia? [Laughter] Well, that’s good. That’s almost half of you, optimistically. [Laughter] But, what it did do was it generated 86,700 articles around the world. We had people telling us about this and letting us know about this from the media, that they had heard that this show was on. We had people from all around the world that came and said, “We know that this is going on. We want to be involved. We love it.” So, we reached out to huge numbers of people. The numbers are just off the Richter Scale in terms of the articles that were written, and the power of this was 103,000 social media conversations were generated by it. The advertising equivalency on this is, you know, just large numbers, really. But, really, what’s most important is the people loved it, watched it, and it’s changing attitudes around Australia about Australia to people. A whole bunch of stats. Anybody wants it, they can get it, but it really changed the perception. We did a lot of recording and analysis of what peoples’ perceptions were about Australia, the people that were coming, and it really changed them. And these people have become advocates for our country and are absolute believers in what it did to them and they’re telling people all around America and the rest of the world about how great the country is. We did get some official research by Repucom done – did. And some of the stats that came out of that is that – were extraordinary and, again, there’s a whole lot here, but in the interest of time, I’m not going to go through to them, with them, because you can read those later. But, interestingly, a poll found that three percent of those interviewed had already, in America, three percent of people interviewed, had already booked a trip to Australia as a result of that. Now, three percent sounds like really kind of a small number. But, when you deal with the size of America, that actually is a potential of $664 million of value to us as an organization and to us as country. So, we know that it is massive, the impact that this has had and is having. I know we have a small issue with exchange rates and that is deadening a little bit, and some of the transatlantic fares are not quite where we would like them at the moment, and we know that there’s thousands of Australians going out to America, but this is having an impact. People are coming, and it is resonating with people, and it has changed attitudes. Last thing she said was about the memories that she had about how mesmerized she was, the energy of the people, and a trip of a lifetime, even to somebody like Oprah. She will never forget it and she will be back. So, I’ve got another little program that I wanted to mention to you. Another group called – another sort of power of a big idea, is with YouTube Symphony Orchestra. Now, some of you may know – oh, well, all of you know about YouTube. Some of you will know, hopefully, a number of you will know that what they did is, a year ago, is they decided to conduct a symphony orchestra. And they decided to make one up and people would audition online through YouTube and they did this at Carnegie Hall, a lot of opera baths and a lot of sort of orchestra baths and people say, “Oooh, God, what’s that gonna be like? You know, you’re gonna get some teacher from Wakoki on a bassoon and try to make them into an orchestra?” Well, they did it. It was democratization, if you like, of classical music and they did it. And we thought the next idea would be, “Well, what about is if they could come down to Australia?” And they have. And they did. And in March this year, YouTube came down. Now, I would love to say that this was completely planned out by us, but it wasn’t. But, they decided that the first place that they’d like to come to outside of America, was Australia. And they brought down these musicians, and we made a thing called Making Tracks, and this is the power of content, the power of social, the power of digital, and the power of advocacy rolled into one little program. Smaller than that of Oprah, but I wanted to share this with you for the last few minutes today because it is a lovely story about a great job where we had all these people that had been chosen to play in this orchestra and we took them out and we married them up with Australian musicians, and we went around and we filled them making their compositions, making their films together. But, what we wanted to see was the way that Australia transformed people, the way it inspired people to make a piece of work. So, we charged with them with the idea of going out to places in Australia and writing an original composition inspired by the country and the people. And I think – [Video Playing] This was followed all around the world by bloggers, by media outlets, everywhere. We did a big push around this and, ultimately, got on time square and the music tracks have been downloaded 2.6 million times, and those little musical stories, go onto it, because those musical stories are beautiful, but they have created content. They have created advocacy. And they’ve used a digital platform to do that and, ultimately, we’ve got all these people blogging about us. So, that really is the sort of end of – oh, we’ve got a few honors as well, but leave it at that. Suffice to say that, so, what I’ve hoped I’ve been able to do is maybe, hopefully, inspired you a little bit about Australia, the country, and how lucky we are to live here. I told you a little bit about Oprah and the power of a big idea behind her and behind what we’ve done with YouTube, symphony orchestra. It’s about looking for the little things that make the difference and, ultimately, it’s about the power of digital and social to take those messages and amplify them. So, the final thing is what we believe in is lighting fires and then creating a long tail of events around those fires to make those live and be amplified in social media. So, thank you. I’m happy to answer any questions now, if anybody has any. [Applause] Thanks. Moderator:And any questions. Speaker:Okay, the question was, “What was the word, the one word, that we’d use for the Chinese people to talk about it?” And it’s outdoors or nature. They use those indispensably. But, for the Chinese, you know what the power of it is down here? It’s for them to be able to come out and to walk on a beach, walk on the grass, be able to go in and buy milk and know that it’s gonna be safe; buy food and know that’s it’s come from a good place. Go out someplace where there’s no pollution, there’s no smog. Go to a place where people welcome them, and ultimately, just to have fresh air and to be in a space that’s not dominated by cities because most people live there. It’s a very different execution for them. The question was “Have we gotten any strategies around challenging the fact that we’ve got a very high Australian dollar right now?” And so, I said, “On one side, you know, we do have to face the Australian dollar and we’re trying to – the biggest negative for us is that everyone’s going outbound and I have a responsibility to try and keep people staying on a holiday in Australia. Watch for some things we’re doing on that in the next few months. But, what we have for the interest rates is, is we did some research to find out what is the impact o the exchange rate on people in terms of influencing their travel behavior? And it is not as great as you might think. What it does do is severely limit the amount of money they spend when they come to Australia. So, instead of staying in five star, they may stay in four star. They may stay shorter. They may not do as much. But, people are still looking at it because, mostly, first they get over they believe in the country; secondly, the airline flight is far more important in terms of peoples’ evaluation, and it’s really down in the country too, that security with their job and how good they feel about traveling. So, it does have an impact, but not, perhaps, as great as we think. Right. So, this is, instead of just us taking – making films about things and playing back them, it’s real time, showing people what’s happening real time in Australia. We’ve looked at a number of things in that. We’ve had some things where everything from, you know, surf blogs and cans and things that showed weather and places like that. When we did the YouTube symphony orchestra, 31 million people watched it online around the world, as it happened on their screens. So, doing those kinds of events that pan over that, yes, we have, but most of our other stuff is a recorded and playback environment, but I think we’ll be moving more and more into real time. Audience:I was interested in your measurements. Do you expect to see, or have you forecasted a list in U. S. arrival numbers because you’ve actually got some very specific, hard measures that you can work with? Speaker:Yeah. Audience:So, do you envisage a long tail of that as it goes through into the, I guess, it’s the U. S. winter that Australia gets bigger arrival numbers? Speaker:Yes, we do. We are anticipating a lift out of the U. S. and we’ve already started seeing that playing through in terms of interests and a lot of the major wholesalers and players and industry people over there are reporting that, over that time, they had a lot of interest and that was converting to business. And, obviously, with the holiday, it doesn’t mean it’s gonna happen the week after you show Oprah that everyone’s gonna turn up. So, we are seeing it and we are planning for it, and we definitely, now, are doing a lot more around how do we keep that message and how do we keep that impact of Oprah alive, so it keep on going? It’s not just a ____ thing. Super. Well, thank you very much for your time today. [Applause] [End of Audio]