Page 39 - AdNews Magazine Jul-Aug 2020

Genero CEO and co-founder Mick Entwistle says the data is collected through a regular survey of the platform’s global network of creatives and then verified against key news and government sources.
“As things have started to open up, one of the biggest challenges has been finding innovative ways to adhere to the safety restrictions,” Entwistle says. “The biggest initial opportunity was for post-production services like animation, editing, motion design and AR which could still take place safely from home. However, we’ve also helped clients source teams in
safe markets to shoot live productions that couldn’t go ahead locally. “We’ve also seen an increase in live streaming in an effort for brands
to capture a very attentive digital audience.”
Unprecedented solutions
One brand who has tapped successfully into this audience is Tourism Australia. With travel restrictions imposed both locally and globally, the tourism body needed to find a way to remain top of mind.
Tourism Australia chief marketing officer Susan Coghill says the organisation did some research and found that among all the negative news, Australians were craving hope and a sense of optimism.
More than 60% of those spoken to by Tourism Australia said they would be keen to travel domestically once restrictions began to ease, which Coghill says presented a huge opportunity. From here, Live From Aus, was born.
“Working remotely, within COVID-19 restrictions, meant we weren’t able to travel and produce content ourselves,” Coghill says.
“As we’ve had to do in so many other aspects of our business, adversity forced us to pivot. Underpinning the success of Live From Aus has been the ability to tap into our country’s incredible network of tourism industry operators and our own network of talented Friends of Australia ambas- sadors, who could manage live streaming independently and become first-hand content creators for us.”
For the entire weekend of May 16 and 17, Tourism Australia went live across Facebook and YouTube with exclusive travel experiences, broadcasting on the hour, every hour, to an audience of 17.8 million across 40 different countries.
“Working remotely, within COVID-19 restrictions, meant we weren’t able to travel and produce content ourselves.”
Tourism Australia CMO Susan Coghill.
The program of live events included a dance party with The Wiggles, iconic workouts in Byron Bay, close crocodile encounters with the Outback Wrangler Matt Wright, pro golfing lessons and din- ner with Matt Moran and friends.
But getting it to all run seam- lessly required an immense amount of work. Tourism Australia collaborated with its agencies M&C Saatchi, Digitas, UM and OPR to bring the whole thing to life in the space of a month.
Digitas creative director Simon Brock says it was like running a news broadcast, reality TV show and digital campaign all at once.
“Those live streams had to be choreographed,” Brock says. “We couldn’t have 32 different groups of people all running Australia’s social channels all at the same time because you would get bounced out from each other.”
To ensure it ran without a glitch, Brock says there were run throughs happening over three days and technology built to help the broadcasts go live across both Facebook and YouTube. Unable to send crew to physically be there, they had to test for internet qual- ity and in some cases the best
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