South Australian Tourism Commission (SATC) has achieved outstanding results from a daring, unbranded ‘teaser’ campaign across the Adshel network.

The campaign highlighted seven little-known parts of South Australia, repositioning them as hidden, luxury tourist destinations.

The ‘Tell Us Where’ campaign rolled out across digital small format out-of-home Adshel sites in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide, targeting consumers on their daily commute and Adshel Rail with station dominations in Sydney and Melbourne.

The campaign aimed to capture the imagination and pique the interest of commuters with seven stunningly beautiful location shots which asked people to guess where each idyllic spot was located.

The placement of the campaign across the Adshel out-of-home network aimed to prime consumers on their daily commute, when people tend to be in a positive mindset and open to new ideas and messages.

Consumers were driven to an unbranded Tell Us Where microsite where they were encouraged to enter a competition to identify each location, with a major travel prize on offer.

The initial phase of the campaign, which made no mention of South Australia, resulted in an astonishing number of interactions with the Tell Us Where microsite, and more than 4,000 entries into the competition.

The SATC brand and the location of each of the images were revealed on the same Adshel network after two weeks of the teaser campaign.

SATC executive director of marketing Brent Hill said: “We took a bit of a gamble on the unbranded element of the campaign, but the results have been phenomenal

“The Tell Us Where campaign had close to 10,000 comments, reactions and likes across social media during its two-week run, and then during phase two, when we revealed that all seven of these breathtaking images were of locations in South Australia, our visits to southaustralia.com absolutely skyrocketed.

“We had the biggest two weeks of traffic in our website’s history after the locations were revealed, with visits from Australian domestic consumers increasing by 30 per cent.”

Adshel’s campaign effectiveness study of consumers who had seen the ads reflected these figures with a 35 per cent uplift in intrigue, “I want to find out more”, and 65 per cent uplift in advocacy, “I want to tell others about this”.

SATC was not the only beneficiary of the campaign, with more than 11,000 leads generated for South Australian tourism operators via the website in the week of the reveal.

“Tourism into South Australia is definitely on the rise, but we know that a lot of Australians in other states – and in fact even people living in South Australia – aren’t familiar with the breadth and depth of experiences we have to offer,” continues Hill.

“This campaign allowed us to position South Australia as a luxurious, intriguing and inviting destination, and really helped to increase curiosity about our state in general.

“We are beyond thrilled with the results of this campaign and could not have pulled it off without Adshel as our media partner,” Hill concludes.

“The images on the digital bus shelters looked spectacular by both day and night, with the displays allowing each mystery location to really pop.

“Then when it came time for us to announce that the locations were actually all in South Australia, Adshel’s digital network allowed a super-fast turnaround so we could deliver the ‘reveal’ seamlessly across all sites. Partnering with Adshel was absolutely critical to the success of this campaign.”