Film Over Reels: Tourism Australia's Post-Pandemic Gambit Pays Off

While the travel marketing world pivots to short-form social content, Tourism Australia has doubled down on a contrarian bet: a nine-minute narrative film that has delivered measurable results for the nation's tourism sector.

At Cannes in Cairns this week, Susan Coghill laid out the strategic case for "Come and Say G'Day," the award-winning short film that represents a deliberate departure from the TikTok-and-Reels playbook now dominating the industry. The setting—flanked by the Great Barrier Reef and rainforests—underscored the stakes of selling Australia as a destination in a competitive global market.

Those stakes are substantial. Tourism ranks as Australia's second-largest export, sustaining one in twelve jobs nationwide and nearly one in eight in Cairns. The sector comprises over 350,000 small and mid-sized operators—many of whom mortgaged homes and took financial risks to build their businesses around hosting international visitors. Post-pandemic recovery remains critical for these operators and the communities that depend on tourism revenue.

Coghill explained that Tourism Australia's creative strategy didn't seek novelty for its own sake. Instead, the team examined the successful campaigns of the past, particularly Paul Hogan's 1984 "Wonders Down Under," which set the template for modern destination marketing. That campaign's potent combination of stunning natural imagery, charming Australian character, and distinctly Australian iconography made the country stand out globally. Yet it had a significant blind spot: it rendered Australia's First Nations peoples and multicultural communities invisible.

Crafting a post-pandemic "Australia is open" message meant correcting this omission while still tapping into the symbols and landscapes that resonate universally. Six months of consumer testing across international markets yielded a clear finding: the global appetite for quintessentially Australian imagery remains potent. Kangaroos ranked at the top—closely followed by koalas, the Sydney Opera House, Crocodile Dundee references, and Uluru. Coghill acknowledged the potential for the kangaroo choice to feel obvious or trite, yet the data was unambiguous. Both Tourism Australia and Qantas had built their branding around the marsupial for a reason: it is globally recognisable and distinctly Australian.

The resulting campaign wove these iconic symbols and destinations into a narrative that centred First Nations perspectives and reflected Australia's multicultural reality. This represented a deliberate break from previous campaigns that had left these voices unheard.

The strategic gamble appears to have paid dividends. In an industry where audience attention fragments across platforms and short-form video reigns, Tourism Australia's investment in a longer, more substantive film has generated measurable engagement and business results. The achievement sends a message to the broader tourism sector: effectiveness doesn't always track the trend. Sometimes the boldest choice is one that runs against it.

For the tourism operators in Cairns and across Australia—many still rebuilding from the pandemic's damage—the film's success offers encouragement that the path forward isn't simply chasing viral formats, but telling Australia's story in a way that is both authentically representative and strategically grounded in what actually resonates with international audiences.