gapyear.com comes up with video-based social media competition

Jan 16, 2012

Destination marketing organisation Gold Coast Tourism has teamed up with gapyear.com and Qantas to create the `I'm A Backpacker’ video-based social media competition.

The prize is for six winners who will each win a return flight to Queensland and accommodation while they compete to become King or Queen of the jungle.

The six entrants will fly from the UK courtesy of Qantas.

Once in Australia, they’ll stay at the Palazzo Versace hotel where the ITV celebrities stay when not in the jungle, and get to hang out on surfing beaches located in Australia’s Gold Coast. These six entrants six will also face their own bush tucker trials and the backpacker with the most points wins overall. The winner will walk away with a Grand Mystery Prize.

Participants need to create a one-minute video, explaining why they have what it takes to win the Backpacker crown. The six winners will be the entrants with the most `Likes’ on YouTube. The competition closes 31 January 2012. Entrants must be aged 18 or over and residents of the UK and Northern Ireland.

Such initiatives attempt to capitalise on the combination of advocacy and online video in order to showcase inspiring destination content.

One of Tourism Australia’s objectives is to get more young people to holiday in Australia. As mentioned by Tourism Australia’s managing director Andrew McEvoy in August last year, these travellers often become lifelong advocates, influencing friends and family of all ages to holiday and returning themselves later in life.

Travel companies are also focused on integrating content that is most useful to customers at the time they are researching sites with intent to book. Today’s consumer is influenced by visuals, so the role rich content plays in marketing hotels, cruise ships, and destinations is critical. When developing a video-content strategy a combination of professionally produced video and consumer-generated video will yield the best results as together they provide controlled messaging and effectiveness of peer or unvarnished review.