Absolute Radio Live Melbourne Broadcast and Campaign

Further to the two week radio promotion that ran in October 2008, Tourism Victoria was presented with the opportunity to host an outside broadcast by UK national radio station Absolute Radio from Federation Square daily from January 25 to 29, 2010.

Absolute Radio is the only independent national UK radio station sitting alongside the BBC. Absolute Radio offered Melbourne and Victoria the opportunity to run a station wide promotion with one week pre and one week post promotion exposure, together with the one week of live broadcasts on the Christian O’Connell Breakfast Show as well as the Evening Shows each day.

The January timing allowed Melbourne to receive maximum exposure during a key holiday booking period in the UK and created numerous opportunities for the radio hosts to convey positive messages about the destination.

The timing also coincided with Australia Day and of course the Australian Open providing Tourism Victoria with a further opportunity to provide some excellent promotion and “noise” for the event and reinforced Melbourne’s position as the events capital of Australia.

Listeners of Christian O’Connell’s breakfast show in the UK were given the chance to win a trip to Melbourne by calling into the show and were also driven to visit the website to discover more about Melbourne and Victoria.

In partnership with Etihad Airlines and netflights.com, Tourism Victoria brought to Melbourne, the producer Brian Murphy, Head of News Andrew Bailey, a celebrity co-presenter Russell Kane (who regularly performs at the Melbourne Comedy Festival), evening show host Ben Jones, as well as two directors from Radio Lynx.

The Radio Lynx team filmed pod and vod casts as well as short videos for broad distribution in the UK which can be viewed on Tourism Victoria and Absolute Radio’s websites.

The overall campaign is expected to reach 2.3 million people. The online delivery through the Absolute Radio website, the most visited radio station in the world and the reach of Absolute Radio beyond the UK added a further 350,000 expected listeners and viewers.