Destination Gold Coast: driving consideration beyond school holidays

Ask most Australians about the Gold Coast and they will describe sunshine, long white sand beaches, school holidays and Schoolies. That picture is set early, on trips taken as kids and later trips for schoolies, and it leaves out most of what the region has to offer. Destination Gold Coast needed travellers without kids to see the rest of it, and to come in the weeks when the resorts and experiences are not already full.

Thirty-nine publishers, 370 pieces, and a new reason to travel in each

Across four campaigns we worked with 39 different publishers, each aligned to a different interest. Rather than sell the destination whole, the work built new reasons to travel: the solo trip, the romantic weekend, escaping the grind, a getaway with friends, a girls weekend, a quick road trip. Every publisher took a different audience segment, so the recommendation arrived from a voice that reader trusts, in the place they were doing their planning.

Publishers wrote itineraries that set out what there is to do, and backed them with social content and articles about trips people take on impulse: a birthday celebrated midweek, a few days working from somewhere better. It brought awareness to the 160 plus lesser known experiences the Gold Coast has to offer.

Each of the four campaigns took a different angle.

• Invitation to the Gold Coast. An invitation to Sydney and Melbourne audiences to create new memories there, with each publisher writing its own itinerary against Destination Gold Coast’s PLAY pillars: adventure, friends, cuisine, romance and relaxation.
• Lived experiences. Socially led and video rich. Publishers acted as influencers, documenting their own Gold Coast trips in face to camera video and interactive articles, and readers clicked through to vendor sites.
• Wellness, nature and soft luxury. Premium long form content and video, telling the story of a Gold Coast beyond the one people know.
• Sneeky Mid-Weeky. Aimed at travellers without kids in Sydney and Melbourne, against the midweek visitation slump. The name ran in the headlines, and articles, social, video and email made the case for a midweek trip: a birthday, a day in lieu, a few days working away, a romantic escape.

What readers stayed with in one campaign decided what the next one published

Over the four, those 39 publishers produced 370 pieces of content, dwell time and interaction rates ran past benchmark, and audiences spent over 18,000 hours consuming the work, with high levels of positive sentiment.

What this one proves is that travellers gave the Gold Coast their time.

Thirty-nine publishers, writing in their own voices to readers who trusted them, made the case for a Gold Coast of wellness, road trips and midweek escapes rather than one of school holidays.

Whether the picture shifted is not what this campaign measured. It counted attention and sentiment across four campaigns, and it was not built to change what an AI answer says about the Gold Coast. What it does show is a destination being re-described by the people its travellers plan with.