Record-breaking temperatures and months of severe drought fuelled a series of massive bushfires across Australia from late 2019 to March 2020. An estimated 1.2bn animals perished and thousands of homes have been destroyed.

But as the fires were slowly put out, Australia faced a whole new issue – a decline in tourism with increasing numbers of holiday-makers cancelling the trips they had planned. This was in part due to the dissemination of photoshopped images on social media showing the entire country going up flames.

Last year tourism contributed more than $47 billion to the Australian economy but this ‘fake news’ was repelling holiday-makers at a time when the economy needed them most.

One particular area that was hit hardest by the fire was the pristine Kangaroo Island in South Australia. Australia’s third largest island, home to koalas, kangaroos and some of the most idyllic beaches Australia has to offer.

We were tasked by the South Australia Tourism Commission to create a ‘bushfire recovery campaign’ to dispel these myths and show the UK holidaymakers that Australia is very much open for business as well as to drive donations for Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park.

We developed a broadcast first strategy to ‘show rather than tell’, providing UK viewers with a direct line to an expert bushcraft spokesperson, emotive interviews with local business owners and myth dispelling footage of stunning beaches.

This year Arden University is launching a new MBA course in association with one of the UK’s most prominent business leaders, Dame Karren Brady. It has a particular focus on promoting so-called ‘soft skills’, helping students develop their communication and negotiation skills, as well as resilience and the ability to ‘speak up and be heard’ in the workplace. To make as much noise as possible about the course, we worked with them to develop a story based around the skills that businesses are looking for from graduates.

Once we established that the campaign was strong enough to go to the media with, we worked with HSBC to determine the best angles and how to pitch to journalists to get maximum exposure. We helped to identify two distinct audiences – global and domestic – and tailored our approaches accordingly by offering different spokespeople from within the business that we knew would be of interest to different programmes.

How do you promote an obscure German play that is only performed every ten years since a small town in Bavaria? This was the challenge facing The German National Tourist Board when they approached us for support – hardly a straightforward brief!

With tickets already on sale we had to create a reason for broadcasters to speak to our spokesperson now as opposed to March 2020 when performances would commence.

We framed the interview against the backdrop of a recent research trip to Jerusalem that we positioned as the “official” start of rehearsals but because of the lack of news hook and the subject matter, the campaign called for a unique approach to media relations. This was not a case of using our black book of contacts or playing the numbers game via blanket emails to multiple outlets. We drew up a list of religious programmes on national and regional TV and radio outlets (our spokesperson was the man playing Jesus after all) and set up about creating a database of the producers we knew would be interested in the story. Good, old fashioned, phone bashing and establishing relationships with the right journalists on the day.

Co-op Insurance approached us to support the launch of their ‘Graduated Young Driver Insurance Product’.

Rather than just talking about the product and the cost of insurance for recently qualified drivers we decided to focus our campaign on a proposed solution to the number of serious accidents caused by young drivers.

In 2001 21-year-old Rachel Whitear died of a heroin overdose and her parents took the brave decision to release the image of her body – to shock youngsters away from experimenting with the drug. Some schools made the decision to show this image to their pupils as a deterrent.

With this in mind, we set about trying to create parallels with young drivers by raising the question; should we show young drivers graphic images of car accidents to deter dangerous behaviour?

With Co-op running 20 secondary schools across the North of England, we advised them to work with Headteachers on how driver behaviour can be changed by launching seminars at schools – alongside their charity partner Brake – meaning Co-op were taking real action on the issues they were raising.

We then sought to humanise the story, introducing Tamsin – who sadly lost her brother, Tristan due to a dangerous young driver, when she was 13.

Good Broadcast was asked by Celebrity Cruises to help launch one of the most luxurious and technologically advanced passenger ships the world had ever seen. Celebrity Edge was built using groundbreaking techniques, alongside world famous designers who created contemporary interiors that were second to none. Our task was to get broadcasters on board to showcase the ship’s unique qualities, and to highlight the work the company has done to promote diversity amongst its crew.

We approached the task from two separate angles, targeting different sections of the media with different stories. Our first job was to get broadcasters on board, so we worked with Celebrity Cruises to identify design features and technology that hadn’t been seen before on a cruise ship. That allowed us to position Celebrity Edge as a new kind of ship in the cruise industry and that, in turn, allowed us to approach broadcasters with the idea of using it as a backdrop for an outside broadcast to talk about the state of UK tourist industry and cruising, just before the start of the summer.