This VFS Global campaign reframes visa anxiety with multilingual, emotion-led storytelling and strategic advisories— Clapboard's Global Ad Archive.
Come and say G’day - Tourism Australia | Clapboard Ad Archive
Tourism Australia’s 2025 campaign Come and say G’day, created by Droga5 and The Monkeys, elevates the brand’s signature approach to destination storytelling with a globally calibrated creative platform that revolves around Ruby the Souvenir Kangaroo, whose return as ambassador expands her reach through strategic pairings with market-specific celebrities like Australian wildlife advocate Robert Irwin and Chinese actor Yosh Yu. The campaign, rooted in the travel and leisure category, builds directly on several years of momentum by positioning Australia as a place where experiences linger long after departure, both through immersive on-the-ground storytelling set against iconic backdrops such as Sydney, the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, and the Margaret River region, and through the relatable, animated presence of Ruby, whose ability to switch languages and cultural codes enables the brand to speak fluently to audiences from China to Germany to India. What Clapboard's taxonomy would classify as FORMAT#8—Ongoing Characters or Celebrities—serves here not just as a mnemonic shortcut but as a strategic lever, creating a framework for market-by-market resonance as Ruby’s persona is credibly localised yet remains globally consistent. The creative is further localised by integrating familiar faces from priority markets, demonstrating a nuanced understanding of advocacy’s role in travel consideration and a granular approach to relevancy that extends across both film and a spectrum of supporting activations, from event-led launches to sustained digital content, social, and highly orchestrated trade and media outreach. The narrative eschews the parade-of-scenic-b-roll conventions of the category, instead foregrounding the emotional and personally resonant outcomes of visiting Australia—friendship, discovery, and a set of stories to bring home—while adroitly leveraging the reach of recurring characters to drive memorability and recall in the cluttered global tourism market. The refreshed campaign is timed around key booking windows and amplified through partnerships, media famils, and targeted cooperative programs, ensuring the Australia brand is contextually visible in the right place at the right time. By embodying the campaign’s promise in Ruby’s character and anchoring the messaging in authentic, globally accessible narratives, Tourism Australia continues to see double-digit uplifts in key brand consideration metrics—a performance reflected in the film’s rapid audience engagement and sustained awareness since launch. The campaign earns 76/100 in Clapboard’s global creative archive. This work matters to the industry because it demonstrates the power of brand-owned character continuity when paired with meticulously localised activations, driving both recall and resonance in international destination marketing.
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