By Roy Weavers

Tourism Australia(TA) has this morning unveiled details of its latest multi-million dollar campaign to sell Australia to the world.

The campaign will use the tagline ‘There’s nothing like Australia’, with Australians called on to contribute their own experiences and photos to the initiative as social media takes on a more significant role.

A website featuring the photos and experiences will go live on April 15.  The initiative is the successor to the controversial ‘Where the Bloody Hell Are You?’ campaign.

TA has spent $4 million on the campaign including the construction of the website. An international marketing campaign using images from the website will launch on May 31. Tourism minister Martin Ferguson, said the new campaign would be a step in a new direction after the last campaign debacle.

The new campaign is being developed in two phases. Phase One invites all Australians to share their personal stories of where they live and holiday in Australia to show the rest of the world why they should visit.

Tourism Australia's MD Andrew McEvoy said the campaign has been developed to help create powerful word-of-mouth discussion about Australia to encourage others to travel to and through Australia. “For years Australians have seen and heard about Australia’s tourism marketing and have been very passionate about how our country is promoted overseas,” he said.

From 15 April to 12 May 2010 Australians are being invited to upload why they think 'There’s nothing like Australia' with a photo onto a specially built website www.nothinglikeaustralia.comn.

Tourism Australia will use all the entries to create a new interactive map of Australia, made up of all the things Australians think are special about their country. The website will have an easy to use search facility by experience type, location, and by 1,000 keywords. The map will be housed on www.australia.com, which attracts more than a million unique visitors each month, and also at www.nothinglikeaustralia.com.

Tourism Australia will then choose a number of the best entries from Australians to be used in a supportive global online and print advertising campaign.

To encourage people to upload their images, TA, in conjunction with state tourism bodies and the industry partners, will be giving away eight $5000 holidays (one for each state and territory) as well as a grand prize of a $25,000 holiday.
Entries will close on 12 May.

Editors Comments:  This sounds like a fantastic idea.  Everybody get their cameras out and let's showcase Port Douglas, the jewel of the Pacific Rim and it's surrounding districts to the world!  Hey, while you're at it, please send them to us as well 'cos we've got visitors from over 160 countries worldwide and they'd like to see them too.