Tourism New Zealand launches online campaign, Indian site

To promote tourism to the country, its marketing agency has launched an online campaign and an India specific website

Tourism New Zealand, the marketing agency that promotes tourism in the country, has launched its ‘100 % Pure New Zealand’ campaign in India. The campaign, which promotes New Zealand as “the youngest country on earth”, includes TV and Internet advertising.

As part of the campaign, Tourism New Zealand has launched an Indian version of its Webby award winning official website, www.newzealand.com. The India specific website has been created in an effort to attract more tourists from the country. Currently, of the 8.5 million outbound tourists from India, only about 21,850 visited New Zealand in 2007. This figure is growing at 10 per cent per year, according to Tourism New Zealand.

Tourism New Zealand launches online campaign, Indian site

Commenting on the launch of the website earlier this month, Kiran Nambiar, country manager, Tourism New Zealand, says, “Our target audience is very evolved and also well travelled. Unlike the global trend, 70 per cent of the visitors in New Zealand are 'free individual travellers', who like to have a customised itinerary. For that, they do a lot of research and planning online, and we have seen a sharp increase in people visiting our website in the past few years.”

Nambiar says about 60,000 Indians visited Newzealand.com in 2007 in terms of user sessions, and spent about six-seven minutes on an average on the site. The site designed for Indian travellers will provide them with local information such as travel agents in the country and special deals. The site has been designed by the New Zealand-based agency, Shift, which also designed the international version.

Kiran Nambiar

In terms of interactivity, the site offers registered online members a travel planner where they can drag and drop elements from within the site to create a custom itinerary, which can then be shared with a friend or a travel agent. Throughout the site, visitors can add accommodation, location or activity to their travel planner with a single click.

The site features an interactive map with self-drive instructions, which is the preferred mode of travel by tourists in the country. The agency has worked with Google to add a “tourism layer” in Google Earth, where travellers can view satellite images of the country and get information about tourist destinations, which is linked to the official site.

Tourism New Zealand is also running a banner campaign on websites such as Moneycontrol.com, IBNlive.com and MSN Travel, apart from partnering with online ad networks Tribalfusion and Tyroo. It is also running search ads on Google.

Nambiar adds that the agency is exploring social media advertising through blogs, though this part of the campaign has not yet been rolled out.

The 30 second television commercial is a collage of shots from the “youngest country on earth” and is a shorter version of the two minute video which plays on the website. The ads are running on Discovery Travel & Living and NDTV 24x7 because, as Nambiar says, they are targeting a niche audience.

Nambiar says about 40 per cent of the advertising budget is being spent on TV, while the remainder is being spent on the online medium. He adds that the India specific site witnessed about 14,000 unique visitors last week, up from about 3,500 since the site was launched in the first week of February. With the campaign running for two months, Nambiar expects a 15 per cent increase in tourists.

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