Play Melbourne
Tourism Victoria
Issue 38 | March 2016
Agency
Clemenger BBDO Melbourne
Creative Team
Creative Chairman James McGrath Executive Creative Director Ant Keogh Interactive Creative Directors Ben Keenan Chris Jovanov Senior Digital Producer Nathan VanderByl Executive TV Producer Sonia von Bibra Senior TV Producer Lisa Moro Group Account Director Jonathan Pangu Senior Account Director Paige Prettyman Account Manager Rebecca Orlandi Strategic Planners Matt Kingston Sam Hodgson Digital Design Jess Ramsey
Production Team
Production Studio Periscope Industrial Designers Lisa Oaten Robert Sim
Other Credits
Tourism Victoria Group Manager Brand Strategy & Advertising Nicole Bradley Manager, Melbourne Marketing Charles Deuchrass Manager, Advertising & Media Services Fiona Ive
Date
December 2015
Background
Tourism Victoria's 'Remote Control Tourist' had been an award-winning and mould-breaking success. By providing compelling new reasons for locals and tourists to re-engage with the city, it helped Melbourne evolve into the country's most popular city break destination.
Now Tourism Victoria wanted to build on that success with a new campaign, which would be equally reflective of the city's reputation as a creative leader and early adopter of new technologies.
Idea
Play Melbourne Live turned the city into a playing field with games played entirely through Twitter's new live video-streaming platform, Periscope. The games used a cork ball embedded with a smartphone, designed to be passed around by Melburnians. As they dived deep into the real Melbourne they knew, they took their viewers behind the scenes of exclusive events such as the Australian Open tennis championships in January and the Andy Warhol/Ai WeiWei exhibition.
Periscope star Adam Cinemre revealed some of the hidden gems of the city while keeping the ball moving.
Because Periscope was a two-way medium, as people explored the 'go before you go' experience, they could ask questions of the ball carrier and even direct its play.
All they had to do was download Periscope and follow @Melbourne.
Of course, people could also go to playmelbourne.com.au to watch videos of what the ball had captured.
Results
By early February, five games had been launched. While figures cannot be shared yet, there have been people from as far afield as Istanbul and Portland saying 'hello'.
Our Thoughts
This is something of a leap of faith for both agency and client in that they used custom-built live-streaming software for the Remote Control Tourist campaign but chose to use off-the-shelf Periscope here. I’m presuming it worked otherwise we wouldn’t have got to the sixth game in the series, based around the tennis championships.
There is no shadow of doubt, when you connect live to a stranger guiding you around a foreign city, you move incredibly rapidly from someone having a laugh to someone genuinely interested. What this brilliant campaign does is get you close to the minute details of a place. I went to Hell’s Kitchen, was shown where it is on Google maps, had the phone number provided and genuinely got the ‘go before you go’ experience.