Mascots, markets and metrics: Australia’s tourism bet

Tourism Australia has revived its flagship global marketing effort with a second instalment of Come and Say G’day, expanding the campaign into key markets including India, China, the UK, Japan, South Korea and Germany. The work carries over familiar brand devices—most notably Ruby the Roo, the animated kangaroo introduced in 2022—while pushing harder on market-specific messaging and local talent endorsements.

The campaign is backed by a federal allocation of AUD $225 million over five years, AUD $120 million of which fuels this latest wave across seven brand markets. Whether that investment translates into hard arrivals and expenditure or merely raises top-funnel awareness is the central question facing the organisation, as destination marketers globally wrestle with proving ROI.

“We’ve created a robust measurement framework to look at our campaign results from zero to six months,” said Susan Coghill, chief marketing officer of Tourism Australia. “Besides assessing our creative testing, it covers whether our media strategy is working, are we getting the right reach and frequency, are we getting earned media coverage and social media engagement and are people talking about the campaign.”

Susan Coghill, chief marketing officer of Tourism Australia.

The second tier is six to 12 months, where Tourism Australia looks at its brand awareness and consideration measures because these take time to move. It also checks partnership results, whether it’s OTAs or airlines and how they are seeing business conversions off the back of its activity. “At the top of the pyramid, between 12 to 24 months, we look at arrivals and expenditure,” Coghill added.

This structured funnel illustrates how the government agency attempts to bridge brand campaigns with distribution outcomes. Yet Coghill is quick to note the lag. “With travel and tourism destination marketing, it can be a longer consideration through the booking period,” she added.

India: A strategic priority

India has emerged as Australia’s fifth-largest inbound market. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 453,000 Indians visited in the 12 months to May 2025, a 10% increase year on year. Visitor expenditure reached AUD $2.7 billion in the 12 months to March 2025, a 14% rise, per Tourism Research Australia.

“Since our last major campaign in market, we have seen India climb to become Australia’s fifth-largest inbound tourism market,” noted Nishant Kashikar, country manager for India and Gulf at Tourism Australia.

For India, the new campaign features Sara Tendulkar, daughter of veteran cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, who has been inducted into the Friend of Australia advocacy programme. Kashikar said this signals a shift from using a single global celebrity to drawing on market-specific figures who already have a connection to the country.

Leaning on Tendulkar’s experience of visiting Australia since childhood, Tourism Australia aims to strike a more relatable chord with Indian travellers. “It’s not just about having a famous face; it’s about having somebody with a connection to Australia,” said Coghill. “And we can’t think of anyone better than Sara who grew up traveling there with her father, ace cricketer Sachin Tendulkar.”

For her part, Tendulkar spoke about personal resonance rather than scripted brand lines. “There is something about Australia that keeps calling me back. I have always felt so welcomed. I am touched and excited to be able to share a slice of the unforgettable memories I have made Down Under in Tourism Australia’s Come and Say G’day campaign,” she said.

The campaign was soft-launched in India during Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s trade mission in July 2025, before going public with a domestic launch in Australia and then extending into China in August.

A multi-local rollout

The rollout strategy mixes global consistency—Ruby the Roo remains the anchor—with local variations. In China, actor and singer-songwriter Yosh Yu leads the campaign alongside the mascot. In the US, Robert Irwin, son of conservationist Steve Irwin, fronts the messaging. The UK execution turns to food personality Nigella Lawson, Japan features comedian Abareru-kun, and in Australia, actor Thomas Weatherall takes centre stage.

“It’s the first time that we have really gone global and local at the same time,” Coghill said. “Hopefully, we’re getting the strength of that global consistency and storytelling along with local relevance, resonance and respect.”

The execution also expands on the original brief by weaving in Indigenous creativity in production and storylines. Coghill argued that heritage matters in building authenticity. She said that it has the heritage from Paul Hogan’s famous ‘Come Say G’Day’ ads more than 30 years ago, which is a really strong line.

“And while this campaign will feature the country’s iconic destinations and experiences, Tourism Australia will try to show new parts of Australia and make Indigenous creativity a part of the story and production as well,” Coghill added.

Media mix: Video and attentive reach

While the organisation does not disclose market-specific budget splits, Coghill outlined two principles that guide media allocation. The first is “an attentive reach strategy” designed to place messaging in contexts where travellers are most receptive. The second is a video-led storytelling bias, recognising the visual nature of destination marketing.

“Our storytelling skews to those channels,” Coghill said. “If I look at when and where we have done outdoor placements, we tend to favour high impact video, digital video, outdoor placements. For example, when we had outdoor in the metro stations in Shanghai, it’s very much like video storytelling with the talent in that market.” In India, the rollout spans connected television, outdoor placements, social platforms and digital video, reflecting the screen-led skew.

Creative testing is a central plank of the campaign’s development. Coghill described how the first chapter was run through System1 Group’s testing process.

When Tourism Australia first developed Come and Say G’Day’s campaign idea in 2022 and was testing at concept stage, it did initial focus groups around the creative territories before going into concept testing with System1 Group, a global online creative testing platform. “Since our business is online, it’s very tightly managed and controlled and we cannot influence the outcome. They tested our creative with more than 150 people, which is better than doing focus groups with 15 folks around a table,” she added.

This quantitative approach was later expanded. “We gained confidence after consistently getting four to five-star ratings from System1, which is about long-term market share growth potential. This consistency told us that we are in the top one to 3% ads percentile and we had a winning platform at launch,” she noted.

As the campaign entered its second wave, assets were again tested across thousands of respondents in seven markets, not as a binary go/no-go, but to calibrate resonance and brand recall.

Measuring signals: From search to conversions

In an industry where attribution remains murky, forward indicators are key. “One of the key things we look at, for example, is the share of search, whether it’s on Google or our online travel aggregators (OTAs),” Coghill said. “That is a great forward indicator that interest in Australia is picking up and that ultimately could link to a greater consideration and conversion for our partners.”

Feedback loops with airlines and online travel agents serve as another signal. “Feedback from our key distribution partners (KDP) like airlines or OTAs is a fantastic leading indicator for us whether the campaign is landing,” she added.

Tourism Australia also capitalises on cultural moments to deepen engagement. In India, cricket remains a core contextual lever. Past activations include the 2023 content series with David Warner, highlighting holiday experiences during the Border-Gavaskar series, and the 2025 “Howzat for a holiday?” initiative with Pat Cummins timed to the Test series.

The ROI challenge

Global arrivals to Australia are projected to reach 10 million in 2026, climbing to 11.8 million by 2029, according to Tourism Research Australia. The challenge for Tourism Australia is proving that its brand spend is a driver, rather than a halo effect of aviation capacity and broader demand.

Coghill acknowledged the interplay. There are many levers that impact any market, whether it’s their consideration to travel to Australia or things like aviation, which has certainly helped. She noted that the amount of aviation capacity coming back into Australia since Covid has been significantly higher than pre-pandemic, which definitely helped the initiative.

Balancing breadth and specificity

That raises a common question for destination marketers: how much credit belongs to brand advertising versus structural shifts like increased flight frequency or visa policy changes?

Tourism Australia insists it does not attempt to capture every possible travel motivation in one execution. Instead, it layers messages across the funnel. “In any given market, different people travel for a myriad of different reasons and you’ll never be able to capture every single purpose of travel in every single activation,” Coghill said.

The government agency has a “robust” mid-funnel strategy to ensure there is a whole range of content for different types of travel, whether it is through social media, influencers that it works with, its website, or media and content partnerships. It also takes advantage of media or cultural moments.

For e.g., sporting and cricket moments are shared context between India and Australia. Hence, it always seeks to take that opportunity to tell a larger story. Similarly, in 2014, Tourism Australia developed a food and wine strategy built around the concept of Restaurant Australia. This was built based on consumer research which identified ‘food and wine’ as a key factor in holiday decision making and the most important emotive trigger, ahead of world class beauty, for influencing people’s destination choice.

A long-term bet

Tourism Australia sees Come and Say G’day not as a short campaign burst but as a long-term brand platform. “We knew that we didn’t lose any creative effectiveness running the campaign consistently from year to year,” Coghill said. That continuity is now being tested in the multi-local rollouts, where the global mascot must work alongside culturally resonant faces.

The campaign’s longevity—set to run for another two years—will test whether this dual approach can do more than build familiarity. The metrics Tourism Australia tracks, from share of search to OTA bookings and eventual arrivals, will determine whether its global-local experiment proves a model for destination marketers facing similar ROI scrutiny.

In a world of fragmented media and shifting traveller cohorts, Come and Say G’day 2.0 will serve as a case study in how far advertising alone can move the needle on inbound tourism—and how much rests on factors outside marketing’s control.