Secret Travel Agents

Tourism New Zealand

Overview

Activating an underground network of 600,000 Kiwi expats in Australia to create the most ambitious word-of-mouth campaign ever.

Challenge

With borders reopening across the globe, Tourism New Zealand needed to stay top of mind with Aussies planning their first overseas trip since COVID.

Turns out 600,000 Kiwi expats live in Australia. What if they were actually secret operatives whose job it is to convince Australians to take their next holiday in New Zealand?

Solution

We recruited all 600,000 Kiwi expats and turned them into Secret (Travel) Agents – by giving them tools to talk up their country to unsuspecting Australians and then reward them for doing our marketing for us.

To launch, we dropped a film of our Secret (Travel) Agents ‘Quarterly Zoom Meeting’ across paid owned and earned channels. The film outlined our agents’ mission in Australia as well as featuring the best bits of New Zealand.

QR codes and secret messages were put in places where New Zealanders would see them, such as New Zealand products sold in Australia, and media buys where expats gathered.

With our Secret (Travel) Agents’ covers well and truly blown, we began recruiting more agents.

Each mention sent new recruits to an agent briefing film, tools, and objectives to make covert operations even easier. Finally, we rewarded our agents’ behaviour with training experiences in New Zealand.