- Western Australia to be celebrated on the world stage in Times Square
- Innovative, three-dimensional animations to run during New Year’s Eve celebrations
- Walking On A Dream advertising culminates week of promotional activity New York City
Western Australia’s global tourism brand, Walking On A Dream, will be showcased on the billboards of Times Square as part of New York City’s famous New Year’s Eve festivities.
Three-dimensional animations featuring Walking On A Dream’s iconic floating whale shark will be seen on four prominent billboards in and around Times Square.
The promotion includes The Cube, a highly coveted advertising space which is in the centre of the action for the midnight ball drop at Times Square.
A fifth, smaller site in the 42nd Street subway station will feature a 2D animation of Walking On A Dream imagery from the Margaret River Region.
The Times Square New Year’s Eve advertisements will be the culmination of a week of promotional activity in Manhattan.
The billboard campaign at the five locations began on 26 December, running through to 1 January.
Tourism WA partnered with New York-based Australian coffee franchise Bluestone Lane to distribute complimentary Walking On A Dream-branded flat whites to New Yorkers at their 11 Times Square store. The coffee sleeves on the cups directed customers to a dedicated landing page for holidaymakers on westernaustralia.com.
The Walking On A Dream brand films are also being shown to more than 1.4 million New Yorkers through geo-targeted social media posts.
As part of Tourism WA’s broader US brand launch, Walking On A Dream advertising will also be published by US luxury travel magazine Travel & Leisure, reaching nearly 9.5 million readers across their December/January and February print editions, as well as across the outlet’s online channels and its affiliate’s digital platforms.
The high-impact New York City advertising initiative is supported by the WA Government as part of Tourism WA’s $15 million launch of the new global tourism brand funded through the WA Government’s $195 million Reconnect WA package
The tourism campaign was launched in September last year, featuring a new version of the hit song Walking On A Dream by Empire Of The Sun ‘s Luke Steel, his daughter Sunny Tiger, and Nick Littlemore.
It features two WA-born Aboriginal performers Rika Hamaguchi and Ian Wilkes against the backdrop of Ningaloo Reef on the Coral Coast, the vineyards of Margaret River in Australia’s South-West, the iconic Perth city skyline and the Bungle Bungle Range of the Kimberley’s Purnululu National Park, in Australia’s North-West.
The campaign initially focused on the Australian east coast market, including an innovative television execution during the NRL Grand Final in Sydney of a whale shark floating across the stadium watched by an audience of 2.75 million viewers.
Internationally, it has been launched in Indonesia, New Zealand and Singapore and the US. It will be rolled out in more international markets, including the United Kingdom, in the new year.
For more information on the Walking On A Dream campaign, visit tourism.wa.gov.au.
As stated by Tourism Minister Roger Cook:
“Times Square is one of the world’s biggest New Year’s Eve parties and Western Australia is going to be right in the middle of it.
“The Walking On a Dream campaign continues to be bold and eye-catching.
“Now it’s New York’s turn on a cold winter’s night to see a Ningaloo Reef whale shark creating a surreal splash in an innovative 3D animation.
“Walking On A Dream is all about elevating Western Australia as a dreamlike and aspirational destination in a highly competitive global travel marketplace.
“The United States is a hugely important inbound visitor market for WA, so putting our new global tourism brand on centre stage during such an iconic celebration will help drive visitation to Western Australia and contribute to a thriving tourism sector into the future.”
