Tourism Western Australia appoints The Monkeys as lead agency for Strategic and Creative Services; Marketforce, The Brand Agency and Sandbox appointed for implementation work
Tourism Western Australia has appointed The Monkeys, Marketforce, The Brand Agency and Sandbox as its new marketing agencies.
Sydney-based The Monkeys, part of Accenture Interactive, will lead the strategic and creative services part of the contract while the other agencies, in addition to The Monkeys, will undertake the implementation and production work.
The announcement comes after an extraordinarily protracted process of more than a year, with the tender having been released in December 2018.
Tourism WA’s Managing Director, Brodie Carr, said the tender process had given Tourism WA the opportunity to see what some of the best agencies in the country had to offer and find the best partners to help make an impact with the State’s destination marketing.
“We’re looking to change our approach in destination marketing and appointing an innovative agency like The Monkeys to handle strategy and creative that will bring a fresh approach to the way we promote the State around the world.”
“The Monkeys showed a thorough understanding of the challenges and issues we face in raising the profile of Western Australia as a world-class tourist destination and provided a range of well-researched solutions, strategies and innovative opportunities to overcome those challenges.
“Appointing local companies to provide production and implementation services gives us a great range of quality agencies to work with to grow the number of people coming to WA. It also means a lot of the work will be done here in Perth, supporting local jobs.
Carr said The Monkeys first task would be to develop a brand strategy based on the WA tourism brand narrative work which was done in consultation the State’s tourism industry.
“We travelled from Kununurra to Esperance and everywhere in between talking to tourism operators about what made WA stand out as a holiday destination. That consultation helped form WA Tourism – Our Story, which we will be sharing with industry in the coming months,” he said.
“The work we have done with industry to develop our own unique story about what makes a WA holiday different from a holiday anywhere else in the world will form the basis of the brand strategy and our campaigns moving forward and will help us attract even more visitors to the State.”
“Last year was a huge year for tourism. We’ve seen great growth in visitor numbers and we’ve been in the international spotlight with our business and consumer events. And now we can focus on developing an exciting new brand strategy and campaigns that will make us stand out as a must-visit destination.”
Accenture Interactive Lead for Australia and New Zealand and The Monkeys Co-Founder and Group CEO Mark Green said: “Western Australia is such a unique place with abundant natural beauty and is home to a wonderfully warm community of people. Drawing visitors to Western Australia is a job we are looking forward to starting.”
It is the third successive time Tourism WA has appointed an east coast based agency to lead the account, following Host in 2009 and Cummins + Partners in 2014.
18 Comments
A little more faith in WA creative and strategy would be great.
Looks like we need to change where the sun sets eh..
Monkeys being united with their former strategy director who is now a client.
I’ve checked April 1st is not for a few weeks…..
They came for our tourism brand. We said nothing.
They came for our bank. We said nothing.
They came for our health fund. We said nothing.
They came for our university. We said nothing.
They came for our tourism brand again …
Bring back the Extraordinary Taxi Ride. Been waiting years to find out how it ends.
No trust in the local creative industry which is in a very sorry state at the moment. East coast agencies taking local clients left right and centre. Also Sandbox are an agency now?!
Just to clarify, Sandbox has been awarded to only one category being – Implementation & Production Services – Television and Cinema. We provide production services to agencies and are not, nor ever will be a creative agency. We will leave that up to the pros!
It would appear that no one has the balls to put their names to any of these comments, so I’ll start. Every WA strategic and creative agency has been denied the chance to tell the overarching story about the place they live in, travel to, and experience every day. Again. For the third time in a row. The panel format feels tokenistic at best, insulting at worst. Well done on the agencies who found their way onto it, because I know it was a bloody hard year+ slog that was unnecessarily convoluted and caused a fair amount of stress and heartache along the way. You deserve it after all that. Being second best in our own backyard sucks. Especially when you know the agencies and individuals involved are more than capable of smashing this out of the park. But whatever. It’s just another day in WA.
This has been an unnecessarily long and costly process for all agencies. To have three key WA agencies in the “implementation” mix might, in the end, be a reasonable result (and congrats to all appointed) but to have the process take almost 16 months is not. There are many questions to be asked and hopefully answered around how this process was managed and why it took so long. The cost to our businesses, the industry and to our economy of a process like this needs attention from our politicians. Let’s hope the campaigns that roll from this decision covers the cost of the investment that everyone put in just to get to a yes.
From day one this always felt like the client was going East to me. Just had to have Perth agencies involved in the pitch to minimise the critisism towards the Govt, for taking jobs out of WA. Nothing’s changed.
Once again the talent in Western Australia has been overlooked in favour of an eastern states mob. Who better to tell the story of the magnificent West than a West Australian who lives and breathes this magnificent state? There always seems to be the mentality that people from The East are better… maybe it’s just a clever ad campaign from the ‘powers that be’ who are jealous of the westerners?
Until the overall standard of advertising and marketing in WA improves dramatically this will continue to happen.
The quality of creative and production in Perth is well below par, particularly with the bigger brands. Look at RAC, Kleenheat, Office of Road Safety, etc etc etc and it’s absolutely no surprise that Tourism once again goes East.
Instead of whinging PERTH, wake up and do better work.
Who the fuck are you m8?
It’s time everyone of us reading this column wrote a letter to the Hon. Paul Papalia (MLA), who is the Western Australian Minister for Tourism, to protest this decision and demand that it be reviewed!
Pity we don’t have any industry bodies with any teeth. A lot of talk. No action.
Does that mean Sandbox now has a monopoly on all Tourism WA production and no other production houses are allowed to tender?
Maybe they are looking for agencies with experience OUTSIDE of WA given that is where the tourism market is. Product understanding is not what is needed here – it’s strategic experience and context outside the state that’s required. No wonder they don’t appoint small parochial companies that feel entitled to the business to do the thinking.