How Tourism Tasmania turned a weakness into a brand asset
What happens when a tourism brand stops apologising for its perceived weaknesses and turns them into its greatest strength?
In this episode of The CMO Show, host Mark Jones sits down with Lindene Cleary, Chief Marketing Officer at Tourism Tasmania, to unpack the strategy behind one of Australia's most distinctive and effective destination marketing platforms: Come down for Air and its Autumn/Winter extension, The Off Season.
Now in its sixth year, the The Off Season campaign has helped transform winter from a traditional tourism challenge into a compelling reason to visit Tasmania. Lindene shares how the team identified a long-term structural problem facing the state's tourism industry, why discounting wasn't the answer, and how they built a brand platform that encouraged visitors to embrace, rather than avoid, the cold.
The conversation explores the evolution of the campaign's now-iconic black-and-white creative aesthetic, the strategic decision to lean into Tasmania's raw winter identity, and the importance of staying true to the realities of the destination. Lindene also discusses the role of long-term brand building, stakeholder alignment, and why smaller brands with limited budgets often can't afford to play it safe.
Along the way, she reveals how bold earned-media activations such as Odd Jobs for the Off Season generated global attention, how marketers can distinguish between a strategy that's failing and an execution that's tiring, and how Tourism Tasmania balances long-term brand salience with the pressure to deliver measurable tourism outcomes.
This episode is packed with practical lessons on brand courage, stakeholder management, creative effectiveness, and the power of consistent long-term thinking for marketers in any category.
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This episode of The CMO Show was brought to you by host Mark Jones, producers Niall Hughes, Kirsten Bables, Syd Le, and audio engineer Ed Cheng. This is an edited excerpt of the podcast transcript.
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Mark Jones:
Linden, thanks for joining us on the CMO show.
Lindene Cleary:
Thanks for having me, Mark.
Mark Jones:
Really excited to talk to you because of course Tourism Tasmania kicked off the sixth iteration of its off-season campaign.
I gotta say I love the tagline, it's Tasmanian for Winter. Very cool, pun intended.
Tell us about the origins of the campaign.
Lindene Cleary:
So as you hopefully know, Tasmania's a beautiful place year-round but we had a bit of a circular problem to solve in that across the cooler months' visitation tends to drop so people think it's going to be cold and maybe a little bit grim.
It's not actually that bad, but that's the perception out there. So, less people come down to visit. And then that means that we have tourism operators who actually take the opportunity in the quieter months to close down for the season or reduce their opening hours and just take a break themselves or do the renovation. Or whatever it might be because they feel it's not worth you know the effort of opening up throughout the whole season. So that's then with that in place, that obviously affects the visitor experience for the people who do come down during the cooler months.
So we just we had to break that sort of circuit of less people coming, therefore less operators open, therefore not a great experience. We didn't want to do something like discounting or something that would just see you know a spike for one year and then things go back to normal.
We wanted to really break that circuit for the long term. So we came up with the off-season and launched it in 2021 and it was a way of inviting Australians in particular to really embrace the winter as a as a holiday proposition while also being a big rally cry for our tourism industry as you know something they could they felt they could get behind and a reason to you know not just survive through the winter months but actually thrive.
And for Tasmania, the tourism industry is critically important to the economy here because it contributes to about 13% of employment, which is actually doesn't sound like a huge number, but it is the highest tourism contribution to employment of any state in the country. So, it's really critical that we're not just relying on those spring and summer months when you know visitation is consistently quite strong.
Mark Jones:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And when you came on, you've inherited a campaign, as you said, that's been going for a little while now.
What was the experience like firstly getting your head around that and then how have you been able to take it forward? There... as you know, sometimes when CMOs and this is maybe a bit of a broad generalization, but there's always a temptation to shake things up, right? Just scrap it all and start it again. Clearly you didn't do that.
Lindene Cleary:
Yeah. And I guess I had the benefit I suppose of I was Tourism Tasmania's head of brand before I stepped into the CMO role. So, I'd been doing that for a few years already.
So, the off season was already, you know, sort of my baby under the former CMO, so to speak. And so, I was part of coming up with that solution in the first place and really wanted to see it succeed. By the time I stepped into the CMO role a few years ago now, it was almost just hitting its straps and so I saw my role as just making sure that we leveraged that consistency that we'd started to build. And as I said, it's a long-term play, so and we knew that from the start. And that was always the narrative around it with our stakeholders. So, for me to come in as a new but old CMO and change everything just wouldn't have made sense. It wouldn't have been credible. It would have undone a lot of great work that had already been done. So, I guess I was lucky to inherit or continue to nurture something that I already deeply believed in.
Mark Jones:
I wanna talk about the campaign specifically in a minute, but first, if you can go back to some of those early days, we understand a bit of the context. What was the mood and the approach that had been taken by the management team and maybe the board when it came to looking at some of these same pressure points and I'm wondering how much of a hard sell was this? Because when you start saying “all right, we're gonna invest in a really long-term brand campaign”. There's obviously the questions around ROI. Clearly tourism's very short term in nature. And so, I imagine there was all sorts of interesting conversations that unfolded.
Lindene Cleary:
Yeah, definitely and you know, it's never easy for any marketer to sell in their work, right? And particularly in the current climate whereas you say everyone is focused on short term results because that's what hits the bottom line.
I think we had a little bit of trust already built up, I guess based off the back of launching our Come Down for Air brand platform back in 2019 which I also worked on as head of brand. And you know that it it's almost like the groundwork for the off season was done in the lead up to that in a way. In that we took some risks creatively and particularly for the category which is traditionally known for montage advertising where you need to tick all the boxes of covering all the different types of experiences, all the different regions in your state, all the things need to be ticked off, and that's... the you know... that's the perpetual challenge of any tourism marketer. And we went against that back in 2019 with advertising that was just, you know, a single shot showcasing one location and taking it a level above to an emotional approach rather than a rational here's all the things you can do in Tasmania.
But we did that off the back of months of workshopping and interviews with Tasmanians themselves to understand how Tasmanians perceive our state, the state of tourism within Tasmania, all sorts of different questions to really understand where people were at. And within that was a lot of tourism operators and festival organisers and event organisers and other stakeholders in the industry.
Lindene Cleary:
So we'd kind of we'd we played the long game in in the setup of this work by understanding and hearing from people first to then help build the work. and then when we had created the work, of course it was still risky and still a not an easy sell, but we had that backing of you know having listened to people and understood where they were coming from. And so then by the time we got to off-season a couple of years later, it was almost as though.
But we'd built a relationship there, I suppose, and some proof points because Come Down for Air had been successful for us by that point. So it's and we always come back to you know the data, and that's where I really do rely on data in in my role is to communicate not just the benefits of how you're doing things but the risk of not doing it that way.
We are obviously the smallest state in Australia, so therefore, we've got the smallest tourism marketing budget. There's absolutely no point us trying to out-shout all of our competitors just based on spend, it's just not going to work. And I was really grateful for the research that came out a couple of years ago by the IPA that's called the cost of dull, showing that you know boring advertising is actually going to cost you money in the end, and so you might as well not do anything.
So we lean on research studies like that to kind of set the scene on, you know, what you're about to see is probably not what you expect from a tourism brand, but here's why and then we just continue that narrative, you know, year in, year out in every opportunity that we have with stakeholders.
Mark Jones:
So you had some research to back your approach. What were the results that you saw from Come Down For Air , which by the way was also a fantastic campaign, big fan of that one.
What what did you actually see in terms of visitation and changes in perception?
What were you measuring? And I'm interested to see how that has come through into this work now.
Lindene Cleary:
Yeah, and again, Come Down For Air as a platform and a line is a long-term play, like it is brand work. It’s not brand for the sake of brand. It's brand for as you say, to get results when you're looking at the campaign in isolation, we're definitely looking at long-term shifts in visitor spend numbers.
So that's the amount that visitors are actually spending on tourism while they're here, and that's the most important metric because that shows whether we're attracting the types of visitors that understand what Tassie offers and really value what Tassie offers. And then you've got your visitor numbers and your then brand health metrics that you know everyone has, but we look at salience meaning and difference. That's the framework we use. And then we'll dig into particular, you know, particular metrics within that depending on what we're trying to achieve with each one.
And yeah, over the years it's definitely been been working for us. And as far as winter goes, we had a record winter last year in terms of visitation. So, proofs in the pudding, but it is, it's, it's a long game.
Mark Jones:
I don't know if you're able to talk about the percentage increase. I don't know whether again too, the specifics are able to help people understand how the dial has actually shifted.
Lindene Cleary:
Yeah... So in terms of the last winter, I think it was an eight percent increase on the previous one.
The record one that I mentioned. Each year it's obviously been a little bit wobbly since with COVID in the mix in 2020-21 and so on, but each year has seen a percentage increase and it depends on whether you look at the whole year or the season, but definitely an incremental increase each year around you know in that region of 2%, 3%, up to 8%, depending on the time period.
Mark Jones:
Now let's dive into the specifics? And the first thing I wanted to ask about was actually the aesthetic, which is really quite distinctive.
Tell us about the creative idea behind this.
Lindene Cleary:
Yeah, so I guess starting the idea in the first place is based on reframing winter as... firstly to stop apologizing for it, I suppose, because there is that perception that it is cold and dark and gloomy and so on.
It doesn't actually rain that much here just for the record. It's more the cold that the cold and the dark.
So it's the idea was based on stopping apologizing for winter and actually just starting to own it and lean into the positives of it. And so that's really what it's all about and then that distinctive look and feel really came about because we felt we had to position winter in Tasmania not just as different to the mainland, as we call it, but different to the rest of the year in Tasmania. Because if you want people to feel differently about a particular season or a time, you need to make it feel different. And it genuinely is. That's not manufacturing a campaign around a lie, that's absolutely a truth about Tasmania that wintertime is when it is most different to the rest of the country.
So that's how we sort of landed on that black and white with the pop of neon. The first year of the off season it didn't have that. It was the off season in a sort of similar, not the same but similar look and feel to the rest of our Come Down for Air work.
And we realized after year one that you know it was fine, it was good work but stepping back we realized that we weren't doing the job that we said we were going to do, which is show how Tasmania was different in winter, not just different to the rest of the country. And so when we saw the idea of going black and white, it was honestly a no-brainer, a scary one, but I honestly sat there and just said, This of course, this is what we should do. Because it shows still showcases the state in all its glory, but in a way that brings the mood that's here during winter. It's that kind of raw, moody,
Just again, just different. No other as far as I know, no other tourism destination brand has promoted themselves in black and white because there's that worry that it's not going to showcase the destination well enough. And you know, that's real that worry, but I think we're doing it in a way that it celebrates the season rather than it, you know, looking like a dialled down version of Tassie.
Mark Jones:
So is that the creative inside or the creative lesson here, which is, you know, very simply if some people zig you zag, 'cause sometimes that boldness or that risk can actually not pay off as you suggest. I mean I think it I do think it looks great, but it's interesting that you've aligned the sort of the perceived darkness with darkness.
Lindene Cleary :
Yeah. Bold move and I think it’s because again it came back to truth, it it's right. You know, we're not just slapping a label or a wrapper around something because it's conveniently different to everyone else.
It's it genuinely it is how Tassie feels and you still... I think you still feel the warmth of Tassie when you look at our campaign. We we're very careful in our, you know, selection of shots, selection of footage to not as you say perpetuate the wrong feeling. But at the same time this is also about owning the feeling and the truth is it is cold, you know, and it it's shorter days. So that's how it is. But because of those two things, Tassie just comes to life in winter. Like it is genuinely the most alive that Tassie feels across the year because people just go, you know what, I'm not gonna hibernate my way through this. I'm gonna get out there and enjoy it. And there's amazing events and festivals that you just don't see anywhere else. You have open fire pits in the streets during a festival, you've got people singing to bonfires, you've got all sorts of wacky stuff going on that you've got nude swims for the winter solstice.
So we wanted to, you know, celebrate that, like the fact that people get to experience a place where things like that happen and it's perfectly normal and just all good fun.
Mark Jones:
Yeah. I think that's probably the distinctive here too when you talk about truth, which is that you weren't ... I don't think creating all of these different events, you're actually putting a story together, a narrative around what was already happening. Is that correct? Yeah.
Lindene Cleary:
Yeah, yeah. We don't put put on any of the events or festivals ourselves. We just work with those who run them to make sure that we're yeah set promoting those and marketing them in a way that's true to what they're trying to achieve. And yeah we really do have so many great events and festivals year-round but particularly in winter that really support that prop brand proposition of the off season. It's what it's all about. It's just getting on your puffer jacket or your tazzy tucks as we call it and your beanie and just get amongst it and don't complain about the cold. And we have a saying here, there's no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing. So as long as you're prepared for it, it's really not that cold.
Mark Jones:
Yeah. I I'm a fan of that one as well. you are hoping that the mainlanders and people from elsewhere will kind of I guess be Tasmanian in a sense in the way that you're describing it, right?
Sort of really get amongst it and so I think you're probably also appealing to people for whom winter is a great idea. is that is that the idea? Because I think you're not creating winter people out of this. It'll be people who go, I connect with that. That's the way I see the world and that looks fun, right? Is that the idea?
Because I don't know whether something like this is going to convert you into being a winter person unless you've actually been there.
Lindene Cleary:
Yeah. Well, I guess there's a hope that we can convert a few people because it and that's the other thing about Tassie is we often find once people there's already a few perceptual barriers about coming to Tasmania and that's you know, things like, it's too it's too cold, or this one, or it's too far away, or it's too hot, or I don't know to do there.
And when people actually come for the first time, their minds are honestly blown by how much they can do, how hard it wasn't to do, how easy it actually is and so if we can get convinced people to come and think differently about winter and try it out as a winter holiday, then we've got them... you know, potentially for life.
Our repeat visitation rate is quite high. So yeah, if we like it's a harder ask, of course, as you say, could we recruiting people for the first time during winter, but we're certainly going for that at the same time as appealing to the people who already have that kind of, you know, sensibility about a winter holiday. And we couple of years ago we added a line into the campaign which is become a winter person which is trying to tap into that sense of identity, that it's bigger than just a holiday.
It's you know, are you up for the challenge? Are you a winter person? Do you want to come and try being a Tasmanian for a little while? and that seems to be working quite well for us as a yeah, an invitation but also a as you say, an acknowledgement of you know how people see themselves.
Mark Jones:
It's true. We all identify with one season more than the other. I hear that all the time, right? I'm a winter person or I'm a summer person or...
Lindene Cleary:
Are you? Are you?
Mark Jones:
Well, no. I'm just saying that's they are the things that people say.
Lindene Cleary:
I thought you were confessing.
Mark Jones:
Since you asked, my personal favourite is actually, I kinda like spring. I just like when there's that that renewal in the air but I'm a snowboarder, so I'm quite happy, quite frankly, in in winter as well.
I'm thinking about the listener or the viewer and they're looking at your work through the lens of their own sector and the way that they approach their audiences. If you think about the work that you've done over the years, what have been the lessons that you've learnt that you think could apply here to any sector? And maybe starting with the challenges, maybe the things that I wouldn't do again.
Lindene Cleary:
Yeah. A couple of things I'd say. I'd say firstly the one I've already mentioned around the first year of the off season not quite stacking up to what we intended. Like the strategy was show how Tasmania is different in winter and we didn't really do that. I think we played it too safe. we knew we had something really powerful in the platform of the off season, but we'd kind of... I feel like we got that right from the tourism industry perspective but not so much the consumer perspective. So we didn't we didn't cut through anywhere near as much as we should have and then did the following year with the black and white.
The other one I'd say is we've done some things particularly well in all areas of our brand but particularly with the off season where we've tried to amplify the story with earned media ideas and that challenge that many brands have around thinking that something is PRable in inverted commas ha ha ha.
That is potentially not. And trying to get that right balance of starting from you know a place where you're going, okay, well if we've got a small budget and we can only manage to you know get to X level of reach with our paid media, how are we going to extend that reach?
And sometimes it's not about picking up the thing that's going well most of the time. It's not about picking up the idea from the paid media campaign and amplifying that. It's actually going, okay, well that's the idea. How does that translate into an earned media environment? and so we managed to do... I mean I'd confidently, proudly say we nailed that with an idea called odd jobs for the off season where yeah... so that was two, three years ago now.
We took the off-season and the plan was always to focus mainly on awareness and consideration for the off-season for the first few years, but then start to sprinkle in more mid-funnel stuff around... okay, well what now you're aware of it, what can you actually do in the off-season and start to nudge towards conversion. And so the role of odd jobs was continue to build awareness in line with the paid media campaign but also educate people on what they could actually do in the off season.
So you know what is this all about? And so we created it was earned media driven, it was 10 odd jobs that we created and posted on LinkedIn that were things like truffle snuffler, wombat walker, devil sitter, sauna stoker, things like that, and got people to apply for these jobs that were ultimately just a really great experience here in Tassie that you could also book as part of the off season.
But we did that in a way that it really cut through way more than we even expected it to, but we had good earned media thinking right from the start and that's why it was a success. Combined with, you know, our tone of voice, that quirkiness that we like to pull through but again also still being really true to what was actually happening on ground in the off season, not making things up.
Just to get headlines. And all yeah, all of that combined was just the perfect combination to really get pickup and we got... my God, we got picked up all over the world from BBC, TV News, we were everywhere for a few weeks with that one and it it's yeah, it worked its little butt off for us.
So I guess that the lesson there is don't yeah, it's not matching luggage when it comes to earn if you're looking for earned media or amplifying your story, you've got to take the core of the idea and then almost start again from scratch to if you really want to get that kind of pickup.
Mark Jones:
Ha ha ha.
That's a really great point. It's the it gets back to the power of an idea that then is part of a campaign narrative that then can be unpacked in, if you like, micro ideas or smaller executions that really kind of pop. I love that. It's a it's a really great lesson.
Any other lessons that come to mind terms of expanding this into any sector?
Lindene Cleary:
I mean, I always come back to if you're the smaller one of the smaller brands with a smaller budget in a category, then often safe is the riskiest choice. And that's a really hard argument to win when you're facing up to your board and or for us it's your minister, but whoever.
But I do genuinely feel like working on a brand... not that we have a you know, an unhealthy budget. We certainly don't but compared to the other states, it's very small and that's who we're competing with really the core of our visitation comes from mainland Australia.
We've got we do focus on international markets as well but the our the bulk of our programme is focused on domestics. So for us again there's just very little point in spending our carefully curated budget on a paid media plan. That's going to go nowhere if we're not doing it in a way that cuts through.
So, yeah, for any category that's relevant. Just don't play it safe just because that you know makes you helps you sleep at night. You do have to find ways to take some risks. And sometimes that's with the creative that you're putting out in your paid media, but sometimes it's carving out a smaller, you know, might be an earned media idea that you're looking for that requires less investment financially, just some more careful thinking as a team and with your agency to go, okay, well, how could this come to life and actually cut through in a much bigger way than maybe the paid media campaign will?
But knowing that either way it's a risk and you know it's the risk of playing it safe and achieving very little or having a crack at something and maybe achieving a lot more, but if it doesn't you haven't invest you haven't sunk too much investment into it.
Mark Jones:
When will you know that it's time to do something else? How long do you think these brand campaigns should go for?
Lindene Cleary:
Yeah, I mean I don't think there's a hard and fast rule for how long. I think you keep it going as long as it is actually working for you. I think it's, you know, marketers are absolutely the first people to get tired of an idea or of an execution, and then maybe next it's your stakeholders, whether that's board or for us it could be tourism operators or minister or so on.
And our job in that is to again remind people of it's a long-term strategy and here's why because we don't want to just see short-term spikes that'll get us nowhere. We we I think it's also important to distinguish between is it the strategy that's not working or is it just the execution that's not working and we while we've leaned into consistency of both come down for air and off season for years now, each year we've iterated on that in some way.
Some years it's bigger than others, it might be a whole new suite of creative we bring to market. Other years we're just you know... adding and tweaking a little bit. So I think, yeah, first question is if someone's telling you it's time to change, the question is, well, why? What's not working here? And is it the strategy or the execution? More often than not, it's the execution.
So for us that means sticking with those two platforms and holding firm, but looking at how else we can sort of cut through all over again.
Mark Jones:
Now at the risk of being daggy, is there an on-season campaign for the summer? Like what are you gonna do?
Lindene Cleary:
Yeah, it's it's always on when it's not off. So yeah that's the work that we do over spring summer is our come down for air brand campaign.
Mark Jones:
Okay, so you'll revert back to that.
Lindene Cleary:
Yeah, yeah, and we do that every year traditionally. The off season wraps up in August and then we're usually in market with come down for air in late September or sometime in October and that goes all the way through to March and then we pick up the off season again in April.
So they're kind of our two anchor points for everything we do across the whole year. Not to say that we're, you know, on air so to speak, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, definitely not, but some form of presence.
And yeah, Come Down for Air is our core brand platform, and off season just slots in under that for the winter period. And the Come Down for Air campaign is 100% about long-term salience, you know, just getting keeping Tasmania top of mind.
We know most of us are probably fantasizing about a holiday every day, but no one's actually in the market for a holiday every day, so we've got to make sure that we're building that long-term demand consistently over the over the year so that when people are ready to convert we come to mind. It's you know just simple marketing strategy there.
Mark Jones:
Yeah, that that is the game. Well, what an amazing story. And again from my point of view, seeing the clarity of the thinking and the strategy, fun execution and being a bit brave and sort of obviously avoiding the boring. Another key lesson.
Thank you for sharing your story with us and all the best with the next round of Come Down for Air. I imagine it’s... well in the works.
Lindene Cleary:
Yes, it's definitely very top of mind right now. It's not too far away, but yeah, we're we are looking at what's next for Come Down for Air and then also next year's off season we're already thinking about as well. So the fun never stops, so they say.
Mark Jones:
No, it does not. All right, well stay warm, obviously, and we'll see you again another time. Thanks for joining us on the CMO show.
Lindene Cleary:
Thanks for having me, Mark.