For more than 40 years Tourism Australia has been promoting ‘Brand Australia’ to the world. Paul Hogan telling American TV viewers he’d “slip an extra shrimp on the Barbie” for them back in 1984 has become part of Australia’s global identity.It’s important work. The number of international visitors to these shores is around 7.8 million, and their overnight spend increased by 14 per cent this year to $38.1 billion. Tourism accounts for around three per cent of Australia’s economy and five per cent of jobs.Today’s marketing efforts are increasingly online: last year there were 31.3 million visitors to Tourism Australia’s websites, 7.1 million Facebook fans and 538,000 Weibo followers. The organisation has been undergoing a digital transformation, led by departing 娇色导航Dave Rumsey, who is leaving at the end of the year after five years.“Our aim is to make Australia ‘the most desirable and memorable destination on Earth’,” he says.The government body is being left fully prepared and primed for the future. In the past year, Rumsey has optimised Tourism Australia’s consumer site australia.com, and China-focused australia.cn which engage 25 million consumers directly with personalised digital content based on their home country and interests.These sites are hosted on cloud infrastructure (AWS and Aliyun) are built on Adobe Experience Manager and have tracking tags managed by Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager and reported on through our Adobe Analytics implementation.“This means that we feature great Australian experiences and tourism industry bookable product on our consumer sites,” Rumsey said.Rumsey has also relaunched Tourism Australia’s B2B platforms aussiespecialist.com and aussiespecialist.cn, aligned reporting tools and analytics across the organisation’s regional and head offices and has implemented a data partnership and audience segmentation strategy to support Tourism Australia’s advertising ambitions.Aussie experienceFor many visitors, the idea to spend their trip in Australia is planted by their local travel agent. For their recommendation, Australia is competing with, literally, the rest of the world. Tourism Australia wanted to better enable travel agents worldwide to promote the Australian experience.“We developed an industry leading travel training program and sales toolkit in 15 languages globally,” says Rumsey. “This training program was developed using AEM, AA and Adobe Campaign, we also used Adobe Captivate to develop the interactive training modules. In order to manage the learning management process we implemented the Adobe Communities for Enablement product both in China and globally.”Rumsey has also completed the migration to Microsoft Data warehouse as a service, and Microsoft BI for internal reports.“This has enabled us to consolidate various online and offline data sets and provide business unit leaders and the global leadership team with interactive reports accessible from any device over the internet,” Rumsey said.The agency has earned a reputation for innovation. It became the first national tourism body to utilise 360 degree virtual reality video in its campaigns to give an immersive experience of 18 stunning Australian sites.“We are in the fortunate position that just about every innovation that you can think of is pitched to us by third parties,” Rumsey says. “This means that the exposure to new technologies and innovations occurring which can benefit the travel and tourism industry is high.”The agency is currently experimenting with message bots in social media area, and using Augmented Reality for its marketing in China.On the journeyAchieving project success is the result of Rumsey’s “open and inclusive” leadership style.“I always look for the best idea at the table even if it isn’t my idea,” he says. “Getting buy in for key projects is always about clear communication which describes what business problem are we trying to solve. Then it’s about describing how individuals and their teams will be impacted as a result of implementing the solution.“Even though people now have a higher awareness of digital and technology, the basics around stakeholder and expectation management never change. Everyone still needs to be brought on the journey.”