The International Cannes Advertising Festival awarded one campaign the Grand Prix award for direct, cyber and PR for the “Best Job in the World” campaign for Hamilton Island in Queensland, Australia. According to Fast Company, the campaign was “done on a comparatively paltry marketing budget of just 1.7 million dollars and reliant on fortuitous PR and word of mouth, the campaign achieved stunning results, including over 34,000 video entries from applicants in 200 countries, and more than 7 million visitors to the site who generated nearly 500,000 votes.”

Okay, let’s start with the comparatively paltry marketing budget of just 1.7 million dollars. I think paltry is relative. Seeing as Hamilton Island has a population of 1500 people (according to Australian Bureau of Statistics) no math I know makes this look like a paltry budget, although it could just be that I’m jealous. The town I live in has just over 15,000 residents and and our marketing budget is approximately a whopping $200,000. Now I realize I’m using “Boomer Math”, but my friends in Hamilton Island are spending $1133 per resident while versus $13 per resident, yes they had better results. Miracle results? Let’s not let the media fool you into thinking they had a small little budget and pulled off a miracle, they had real money and agencies working for them on two continents.

Now for what they did right, they came up with THE IDEA (yes I meant to shout), it was fabulous. They had a beautiful, gorgeous location they wanted people to visit. Hmmmm, how to get the word out, I know, let’s have a contest! So they created a contest for the “Best Job in the World” where the job is to live for six months on Hamilton Island and share with the world your experiences through a blog, twitter, etc. And don’t forget you get paid for this, you get paid a lot.

So people started to apply online, lots of people. So many people applied that the web server crashed two days into the campaign. (oops, you’d think one of the agencies might have prepared for that.) Because you needed to have people vote for you to get the job, people started to create web sites and blogs to promote themselves, and of course this promoted the “job” itself. The perfect storm of publicity, when your PR goes viral.

So what did little Hamilton Island get for their 1.7 million dollars, they generated $200 million in global publicity for Tourism Queensland according to the BBC (I found this reference on Wikipedia). Now a new Yacht Club as well as a new Golf Club are opening in 2009. Oh, and I’m writing about it in my blog. What more could they ask for! Guess they’ll have some more “great jobs” for us to apply for.