Tourism Tasmania: CEO Sarah Clark reveals secrets of how state is sold to Australia

Tourism Tasmania’s latest ‘The Off Season’ campaign was one of its best yet, winning awards and grabbing eyeballs. CEO Sarah Clark reveals how the island state competes with the cashed-up mainland.

The Off Season 2022 campaign imagery. Picture: Tourism Tasmania/BMF.

Tourism Tasmania’s chief executive Sarah Clark, still riding high from one of the organisation’s most successful ‘The Off Season’ campaigns yet, says the secret to selling Tasmania is not to compete with mainland states armed with huge advertising budgets.

The Off Season, the winter cousin of Tourism Tasmania’s main campaign, ‘Come Down for Air’, had an estimated reach of 10.5 million Australians and made 160,360,110 media impressions – how many times a piece of content is consumed – in 2022.

Earlier this month, The Off Season 2022, developed in conjunction with creative agency BMF, claimed two awards at the Effie Awards – advertising’s version of the Oscars.

The Off Season, first debuted in 2021, “has been going from strength to strength,” Ms Clark said.

“We’re starting to get quite a lot of pick-up. When people see it year after year, it places Tassie as that great winter destination.”

Tourism Tasmania chief executive Sarah Clark. Picture: Supplied

Ms Clark said the campaign’s beauty was that it did not try and compete with mainland states, the tourism bodies of which have budget bazookas compared to Tasmania’s spud gun.

“It’s got beautiful pictures and that black and white feel. A lot of destinations are talking about beach holidays. It’s about creating something really different when it comes to destination marketing and cut-through in what is a very noisy media landscape,” she said.

Key campaign channels include video-on-demand and pre-roll, billboards in metro areas positioned along work commute corridors, and a “really strong” public relations strategy that sees longer-form content highlighting Tasmania’s winter wonders.

A branding coup was achieved when Tourism Tasmania managed to get a 25-page liftout in Qantas Magazine, ensuring one of the most captive audiences imaginable – air passengers – had Tasmania on their mind.

The Off Season 2022 campaign imagery. Picture: Tourism Tasmania/BMF.

“We try and be as smart as we can. We’re quite targeted towards people we know would travel would Tasmania, as opposed to a broad brush approach,” Ms Clark said.

“We’re not able to always do a television commercial, that obviously is a huge expense, but we tap into more of a cultural brand space. We put advertisements where there’s not a lot of travel advertisements.”

For example, Off Season was placed into Rolling Stone Australia magazine – “It’s a bit quirky, you wouldn’t have a Maldives in that sort of magazine,” Ms Clark said.

Ms Clark described the audience Tourism Tasmania has pitched at for the last two years as “raw urbanites and erudites”.

“It’s really travelling Australians who align with the Tasmanian values. They’re looking for more nature-based experiences, but also that really authentic food and produce, meet the maker-type experiences,” she said.

The Off Season 2022 campaign imagery. Picture: Tourism Tasmania/BMF.

“We have our key pillars of wildlife and nature, food and produce, history and heritage.”

Ms Clark said, for all the campaign’s success – the 2024 edition of Come Down for Air was also launched on Tuesday – there existed significant headwinds in the tourism industry that Tasmania is not immune to.

Follow @humidityreport

“We had this amazing period post-Covid where Australians were travelling domestically and Tasmania was definitely top of the list. We had a great boom in tourism, but in the last six or so months a lot of Australians have been going overseas,” she said.

“The whole Australian domestic travel market has softened and we’re still seeing massive challenges throughout the aviation industry.”

An important goal Ms Clark has set for Tourism Tasmania in the medium-term is to return international visitation to the level it was pre-Covid, then better it.

Before Covid, 15–18 per cent of tourists to Tasmania were from overseas. Currently, just 13 per cent are. Ms Clark wants to see it up at 20 per cent. Overall, only 4.9 per cent of international tourists coming to see Australia make Tasmania a leg of their trip.

In the year to August, tourists spent $3.7bn in Tasmania. Tourism drops off by about 40 per cent in winter – a key rationale of the Off Season.