There are recruitment campaigns and there are recruitment campaigns. And then there's the Best Job in the World campaign, which can be described best as the most effective recruitment campaign in a very long time – making for a killer case study.

In fact, I shouldn't even call it a recruitment campaign - this was a lot bigger than that. It transcended mere recruitment to cover brand building, tourism promotion, social media marketing and even reality TV - garnering tremendous exposure for Australia's Great Barrier Reef islands – nothing the ads that the tourism industry normally comes up with could ever achieve.  

I won’t even be surprised if I hear that the Australians never really needed an island caretaker and this was all an elaborate way to bringing the focus of the world’s media to the Barrier Reef islands. Money well spent I say, especially when you’re getting:

Applicants:	34,683 from 201 countries
User generated content:	610 hours
Website visits:	8 Million (54 million page views)
Estimated media coverage:	over US$ 150 million with a CNN live cross & BBC documentary
Campaign budget:	US$ 1.2 million

This case study is a great example of a couple of things that we’ve been talking about for a while now, viz.:

-          Marketing is consistently becoming less advertising and more PR and this is a great example of this. Ads are becoming blind spots and you need to create genuine content around something with a unique angle/concept/hook to stand out from the clutter.

-          Further, this is yet another example of how Social Media Marketing can propel campaigns to becoming viral movements. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were all perfectly suited to this campaign as the infrastructure needed to help content go viral.

Enuf said, Roll the Case Study video

(Thanks xcruz82)

It’s no surprise that this won 3 lions at Cannes this year.

It’s also interesting that there was another campaign, with a similar concept that wasn’t submitted for consideration for the awards, but achieved great results nonetheless. It was the Professional Fan Job – Case Study below:

(Thanks Daniel)

On a separate note, while the Australian Tourism Board must have surely received hundreds of great applications from several qualified candidates, here's one that I stumbled upon that I think was awesome:

And in case you're wondering who won, it's this guy: