Christchurch Mayor, Bob Parker is calling on Australia to lend the New Zealand city its Big Thing icons in the first phase of a new tongue-in-cheek campaign being launched today to encourage Aussies to return to Christchurch.Having seen a significant decline in holidaymakers since the February 2011 earthquake, Christchurch and Canterbury Tourism is launching the two phase campaign to put the city back on the radar for visitors from Australia – Christchurch’s largest international visitor market.
“We’ve got a major issue in Christchurch at the moment, said Parker. “We’ve got tourists flocking here from all over the world but where are the Australians?”
The first phase of the campaign is designed to get Australians talking about Christchurch again in a positive way.
Over a series of three video episodes, Parker is filmed “documentary style” with his fictional assistant “Keith” on a whirlwind tour of Australia visiting cult iconic Big Things including the Big Merino in Goulburn, the Big Chook in Mount Vernon, the Big Pineapple on the Sunshine Coast, and the Big Macadamia and Cow in Nambour.
Calling on each town’s mayors and city officials, Parker asks them to sign a Memorandum of Support to lend Christchurch their Big Things to help increase the number of Australian tourists visiting the city.
“Australia is a big country, full of people with big hearts and big ideas and big pineapples. They’re crazy about big stuff. So we decided to ask if we could borrow some of these icons and put them around Christchurch to make our Aussie mates feel more at home in our place,” suggests the Mayor in the first of the video episodes.
Tom Hoskins, Creative Director for iris Sydney, the agency behind the campaign, said “Australians got used to seeing Mayor Bob Parker as the face of the Christchurch earthquake disaster in 2011. We decided to flip that, making him the face of the good news in 2012, taking advantage of some Aussie Kiwi banter whilst we’re at it.”
The Big Things video
The Big Things video episodes documenting the Mayor’s visit to Australia will tell the story on popular digital sites. This is being supported by an open letter of appeal in Sydney and Melbourne newspapers today.
Developed by the Sydney arm of creative innovation network iris following its successful pitch for the Christchurch business in July, this is the first campaign to be launched for the city of Christchurch since the earthquake.
Capitalising on the expected increase in conversations about Christchurch that will come from the first phase of thecampaign, the second phase – the Discovery Stream – will launch in October. This breakthrough initiative is designed to showcase the actual ‘big things’ that are happening in Christchurch right now.
The Discovery Stream which will be found at reimagined.christchurchnz.com is a micro-site that will incorporate real-time content from visitors and residents documenting what they are seeing in thecity.
The Stream pulls from Twitter and Instagram to uncover what people are doing and saying, in and around Christchurch at anyhour of the day whether that is sitting in one of the new pop up bars, attending the IceFest event or shopping in the Re:start shipping container mall. People are encouraged to take photos of Christchurch, tag it with #chch, and share it on Twitter and Instagram, in addition to uploadingimages on Facebook.
A grassroots campaign will be launched simultaneously in the city through tourism operators to encourage visitors to share their images.
“This campaign sets out to address Australia’s misconceptions of Christchurch as a tourist destination, by providing a lens into the ever-evolving city and replacing the images of the earthquake that visitors have previously held onto. The Discovery Stream provides Christchurch with a world first, a platform that crowd-sources and broadcasts the visitor experience in real-time, showing all the big things happening in and around the city,” continued Hoskins.
Tim Hunter, CEO of Christchurch and Canterbury Tourism said the campaign represented good value for money for a city that relies heavily on the Australian tourism dollar. “We believe it has the right mixture of energy, creativity, humour and passion which will get travellersback across the ditch.”