Melbourne: when good CX helps you get lost
Play Melbourne: an experiential platform designed to find hundreds of thousands of potential visitors – then help them lose themselves.
When you’re asked to get 100,000 potential customers to engage with a city that’s famous for not being famous, you know you’ve got a real CX challenge on your hands.
We met that challenge with Play Melbourne: a comprehensive digital and physical experience celebrating Melbourne’s unique beneath-the-surface appeal.
From the curiously interactive web ads, to the Memory-style weekly challenge, and into the world’s only city guide App designed to make sure you get lost – every artefact and touchpoint delivered on the experience of discovering something beneath that surface.
My team’s work really worked: we directly engaged with over 150,000 people, sold thousands of packages, delivered tens of thousands of leads to sales agents, and lifted Melbourne to become the #1 searched travel destination across Australasia.
What went on beneath the surface?
The ad agency was about to shoot a genuinely lovely (and really expensive) ad – with a CX vacuum behind it.
As Digital Creative Director of Mojo’s Auckland office, I was asked to assemble and lead a team of creatives, producers, developers and partners across Auckland and Melbourne.
Together we filled the void with an engagement platform designed to work across paid, owned and earned channels, that would capture attention, capture data, help people fall in love with Melbourne in advance, and celebrate their experiences once there.
In reality we were sprinting: ideating, prototyping, testing, building and refining on the fly, to integrate loads of interactive and experiential elements across a rich hub of content and events, most of which also featured in the 5-star rated iPhone app. The centrepiece of the experience was an acquisition engine, in the form of a playful Memory game that refreshed each week for an entire year, giving visitors the chance to Play Melbourne and win a spontaneous visit.
Specifically this meant:
Assembling and leading a team of up to 30 writers, art directors, designers, developers and project managers across two countries;
Taking responsibility for the creative quality of every element, and the experience as a whole;
Conceptualising and overseeing the production of a huge number of beautifully crafted interactive ads;
Leading the build of a deeply engaging full-service website to run a year-long competition, provide information, and sell packages;
Designing, prototyping and directing the build of a native App to leverage syndicated content;
Directing the syndication and editing of content for the platform;
Ensuring the SEO content matched the brand story, and the business requirements;
Creating and automating outbound social feeds;
Directing the specification and integration of CRM and CMS platforms.
