I don’t know if I’d get up so early if I didn’t know the Marketing Association always has good catering at their Brainy Breakfasts. Delicious. I didn’t need to eat all the rest of the day.

But what I was ostensibly there for was to hear (D’oh! I’ve forgotten her name!) from Tourism New Zealand, and Che Tamahori (no connection to Lee that I could tell) from web dev company Shift, talk about the award-winning success of their 100% Pure New Zealand campaign, which was a total campaign but centred on the web.

Pertinent points for anyone considering a web strategy – which should be just about anybody:

• authenticity was a key part of what their target audiences (regular FIT – Free Independent Travellers) were looking for. An important part of the New Zealand brand.
• Did you know that Namibia and Vietnam are among the new competitors to NZ for the tourism dollar? Particularly in terms of ‘undiscovered territory’.
• “The internet is an advertising channel. The website is not.” An important distinction, which apparently the Aussies don’t understand – their current “where the bloody hell are you?” site has a copy of their TVC creative and little else.
• Internet use is trending upwards across all decision-making processes
• Shift have been working with Tourism NZ for several years, and the long term relationship leads to an “ever deepening understanding” of the end user for the website. Which is a neat idea, I think.
• Looking forward, Shift and Tourism NZ are planning to harness the big trends shaping the web at the moment, including syndication – they already syndicate content to regional portals like NorthlandNZ.com – and visitor generated content, for instance travel blogs.
• Shift is a very design-focused company, so it’s really exciting to hear them place equal emphasis on usability and community.
• Some numbers: 4 million registered users a year; 100,000 users have registered to use the interactive travel planner since its launch in Sept 05.
• Promotion has been solely through natural search optimisation – there’s been no paid optimisation and no paid keywords on search engines.