The best job in the world

This is what the best job in the world has to offer - a salary of 150,000 Australian dollars (103,000 USD) for six months and rent-free accommodation in three bedroom villa complete with a pool in the picturesque islands of Queensland. Your job - to live there and maintain a blog about your experience. And there are no prerequesities (except for knowledge of sailing, diving, snorkling) Dont trust me - then refer to the newspaper clipping below-

Heres the reason why we are discussing this job (besides the fact that it sounds out-of-wordly kind of awesome)- This job ad is part of a promotional campaign run by tourism department of Queensland in 2009.  What works for the campaign(besides being amazingly creative) is the manner in which it was executed. The newspaper ad in big bold letters stands out from the rest of the text drawing the attention of the reader, which is obviously the idea behind the entire campaign. The customers are drawn in because of the shock value and as they read more about it and get more involved, it is going to stay at the back of their minds for a very long time, promoting the destination indirectly. The campaign clearly struck a chord, resulting in a total of 34,684 one-minute video applications on Youtube from 200 countries in addition to insane amount of buzz generated on social media, blogosphere and news networks all over the world.

Ben Southall, the guy who finally won the competition, is pretty amazing - he spent an entire year circumnavigating the continent of Africa in a Land Rover and in the process scaled the five highest mountains and ran five marathons-raising money for charity, prior to the competition. He was eventually retained as the tourism ambassador for Queensland after he finished his six months on the Best Job. Here's the link for the video resume he submitted for the competition- 

The campaign finally ended up providing media coverage of 400 million dollars including a special slot on Oprah Winfrey's show and a BBC program. The best part of the campaign is that, the "stunt promoted the product" (as the tourism department put it), which means more tourists and greater revenue for the island. This is something that most campaigns fail to do nowadays, in my opinion, i.e. to translate the interest into rupees for the brand. This marketing ploy definitely figures in the top 5 campaigns of all time for me.

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