Andrew Waddel

Kia Ora, I'm Andrew Waddell, General Manager Australia, Tourism New Zealand.

I've been with Tourism New Zealand for about three years now. Brand marketeer by trade. I’ve previously worked in the UK, South Africa and Australia for Red Bull, and prior to that, I worked on a number of beer brands, including Stella Artois, Becks and Castlemaine 4X.

The single biggest disruption for the advertising and marketing industry is easily COVID-19 and the pandemic that swept the world. It was a real leveler in knowledge and experience - there’s a saying: “you're only naive once, so make the most of it”. And for marketeers and business people around the world, the rules were completely rewritten. Nothing that worked before was guaranteed to work in the future. So you really had to approach it with a sense of understanding of what was going on, the understanding of the consumer in their context, and how you were going to go about bringing your brand to life and making a commercial impact for your business.

So one of the questions we asked was, when people can't travel, how do we keep the brand alive? We set up a framework under ‘Prime, Ignite and Scale’. Prime was really about winning consumer's hearts and minds when they couldn't travel and for when they could travel. The Ignite phase was really about converting that brand love into the ability to travel to New Zealand in the future.

One of the principles of our go-to-market was really focussed on earned first. The idea of that was to ensure that we had the right spokesperson with the right messaging to land in the right context through the right channels. It was really agile, and it meant we could turn on a dial within a couple of hours versus a paid campaign, which takes a little bit longer to produce and land and market. When the context started settling for the consumer and they were able to travel, that was the right time to be able to bring through a more inspiring campaign and bringing that opportunity to travel to New Zealand to life.

It's a really interesting time to be working in the travel industry. We've gone from this period of real growth and travel over a number of years, then all of a sudden, no visitors. And now, particularly for Australia and New Zealand, is the opportunity to really reignite that travel opportunity. So marketeers have worked on that emotional sense, that idea of setting that desire to travel overseas. But what we're also seeing is an increase in the idea of rational requirements. What does it look like when I travel? What things do I need to think about from a COVID perspective? And that has changed our understanding of the role that we've got to play in encouraging people to travel, inspiring them, but then also making sure that they've got everything sorted out for when they are actually on the ground.

We use a hybrid model for the set up and structure of our marketing services. We find getting best-in-class talent across creative media storytelling and channels is critical and open and transparent working relationships and setting a really high bar and high aspiration for the most creative execution we can bring to market.

One of the things that stands out from New Zealand marketing and storytelling, I think, is its ability to bring humor through and not take itself too seriously. We've seen that show up in social channels, whether it be police videos and social social activity, but also through Tourism New Zealand campaigns as well.

Play NZ was the first virtual walk through of a whole country using video game or video game as a storytelling device. So a really innovative way of bringing to life countries, people in place and the feeling of embracing a country, but through a video game.

Getting close to consumer insights continues to be critical to the travel industry, we're not really too sure - no one's really sure what the future's going to look like. So we really have to understand the consumer and context. What we mean by that is that we really understand what their needs are now and work to anticipate what that looks like. We find with technology partners - if we're able to match new technology with those consumer insights, that's when the magic happens, and we're able to provide a new sort of set up for the consumer to engage and hopefully create that desire and ability to travel in the future.