Visit Britain
VisitBritain – Alt Albion
How do you convince a fickle Gen Y audience that Britain is cool when their overwhelming perception is that it’s stuffy and boring?
The core of our idea was very simple. To use social networks to spread the word about the side of Britain that really would appeal to the Gen Y audience. That’s all very well. But how do you make this happen on a large scale – and on a relatively small budget?
The solution:
We started by giving the campaign a name that would sum up the notion of looking at Britain differently. And so Alt Albion was born – Alt being short for alternative, and Albion the oldest known name for the island of Great Britain.
Our next task was to assemble a group of extremely well-connected Gen Y’ers and send them off on a 10-day tour of Britain to find all that is culturally cool about England, Scotland and Wales.
Essentially these guys and girls would become virtual ‘tour guides’ for Gen Y’ers back in NZ. So they went armed with laptops, cameras and anything else they needed to capture what they saw and report back on it.
The results:
The fruits of the ten-day tour have resulted in a wealth of information finding its way to the ears and eyes of our elusive Gen Y audience – to change their opinion of Britain from cheesy to choice.
So far we’ve had a staggering 20 pages devoted to Alt Albion in the March issue of Real Groove Magazine. With an estimated value of $15k per page, that’s $300k worth of free media. We’ve also had great write-ups in M2 and Actv8.
Online, we’ve been written about at nzgirl, fashionnz, TV3, getfrank, codeforeverything, thisblogisacat
and more.
We’ve had three articles on Campbell Live and one on Nightline. We’ve been on bFM and George FM countless times.
And the vibe about the alternative side of Britain is spreading at a remarkable rate through all the social networks such as Bebo, Facebook – and especially Twitter.
The Alt Albion website itself is now also full of great stories about things to do and see in Britain that most travel agents would never think of mentioning.
Visit: altalbion.co.nz