Melbourne Solves Tourism Puzzle

THE latest stage of Tourism Victoria's long-running jigsaw ad campaign will focus on lesser-known destinations in and around Melbourne, using social media to encourage travellers to share their favourite holiday spots.

The 10th phase of the campaign, first launched in 1993, will be unveiled this weekend and will target Australian travellers, especially those in Sydney.

Tourism Victoria director of marketing Don Richter said the new phase of the campaign would be fully integrated, making the most use of digital media.

Mr Richter said tourism and travel was ideally suited to the Web 2.0 age, with people increasingly using social media to write about travel destinations and research holidays.

He said the newest phase of the campaign would also ''be dialling up the slightly more energetic and youthful component of the market''.

The long-running campaign had been highly successful, with Tourism Victoria using research to continually evolve the campaign's focus, emphasising aspects of Victoria people enjoyed, or meeting a gap in the market.

''We've got to a situation where Melbourne is the most-loved destination in Australia; people get that Melbourne is a sophisticated, cultural place.

''The next stage is to activate that love of Melbourne by giving them new excuses to come here. One of our challenges is that people think they know Melbourne - but in fact there is a lot more to discover.''

Mr Richter said there was never any possibility of not continuing to use the 17-year-old jigsaw campaign, with research demonstrating its success. He said it was a credit to successive state governments that they had stuck with the campaign, as a common problem with destination marketing was that new governments often demanded a new marketing campaign.

Surveys by Roy Morgan Research have found that Melbourne holds the lead as the destination most preferred by Australians for a domestic holiday in the next two years. The most recent (2010) survey found Melbourne beat the other states and territories for both interstate overnight visitor numbers (4 million) and total domestic overnight spending ($4.7 billion).

Roy Morgan's brand-health survey found that Melbourne was the Australian city perceived by most Australians to be associated with sporting and cultural events. Melbourne led this ranking in 2005 and has held the top spot since then.

According to the survey, Melbourne also continues to increase its lead over all other Australian cities as the destination most associated with great shopping.

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