Wellington NZ

The FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 was one of the biggest events to hit Wellington. With international eyes on Wellington, we were on a mission to show just how wonderful our capital is. Our challenge was to make Wellington Te Whanganui-a-Tara famous in the US as a highly desirable travel destination.

Thompson Spencer’s specialists all came together, forging a successful campaign that leveraged comedic sensation Karen O’Leary’s notability in the US with her strong roots in Wellington, creating engaging content that resonated with our US target market.

Working collaboratively with WellingtonNZ and partner Frank Management, we ideated a highly entertaining content series phased across 5x episodes.

Our social team set out to recruit a football-loving fan in the US to fly to Wellington to take part in Karen O’Leary’s “Wellington Ready” training. Our  production team hit the streets of Wellington to film the content series, with our US fans put through rigorous tests such as sampling the local coffee, running against the infamous Welly wind, and being quizzed on the pronunciation of Kiwi slang. Our media team amplified the content to the US market.

Not only did our US fans pass the test to become true Wellingtonians, we delivered above and beyond campaign goals. As well as staggering reach and impression results, the content piqued interest enough to surge landing page views to the site, meaning our US base got to know more about Wellington as a destination.