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Winter Campaign 2013 Results

News story
Tuesday 15 Oct 2013

This winter, Heart of the City ran the "LOVE YOUR CITY” Campaign over the 3 months of June, July & August – which promoted 453 reasons to Love Your City. We invited Aucklanders to come in and take a photo of their favourite places and things to do, and to then share their images via Instagram, using the hashtag #loveyourcityBLC. We curated over 7,000 images creating a gallery on both our website and facebook page.

We formed a very successful partnership with APN for NZ Herald (Viva, Canvas, Weekend & Living), Digital, Outdoor Billboards & AdShels around Auckland. APN embraced the campaign and added a further $1.1m worth of editorial and advertising value. Something we would certainly look to repeat again, given they are the perfect media fit for Auckland who account for 80% of our central city spend.

Results from the Love your City campaign:

  • Unprompted recall for BIG little City advertising rose slightly to 65% (versus 57% last year)
  • 66% of Aucklanders surveyed had visited either 4 or more times (33%) or 2 or more times (33%), an increase of 18% on last year (v 48% last year) – these visits being for reasons other than work.
  • Marketview spend results for campaign partners showed a +6% increase versus same time last year (STLY), and +29% versus the 5 year average, while competitors (Newmaket, Ponsonby, Parnell, St Lukes, Sylvia Park, Albany) were collectively down 3.3% versus STLY
  • Traffic to our website rose +60% to nearly half a million visits over the 11 weeks of the campaign (467k)
  • Facebook audience grew by 40% to just over 66k fans (from 50k at the start of the campaign) – now 70k

48 Hour City (1 Jul – 31 Aug):

During July and August, we ran for the third year our tactical offers campaign, 48 Hour City. The purpose of 48 Hour City is to provide an opportunity for retailers to promote deals & offers during their quiet days/times of day over winter. Many of you took the opportunity to include offers, with all nearly 100 deal spots being booked out by 1st June (well in advance of the campaign starting). Heart of the City invested $150k on digital media to drive awareness and uptake of these offers, and all we ask is that retailers/hospitality businesses come on-board with a strong/compelling offer.

Results from 48 Hour City:

  • Increased awareness for 48 Hour City from 9% last year to 29%
  • With over 13,000 deals redeemed via the website
  • Visits to the website rose 76% versus last year

Overall we are delighted with how the Winter Campaign performed, generated more awareness for the central city amongst Aucklanders and surrounding drive markets than we’ve ever had before, and increasing people’s frequency of visits into the central city in the last month by 18% pts, i.e. 66% of Aucklanders had visited 2 or more times (of which 33% had visited 4 or more times) in the last month, for reasons other than work, a significant increase of 48% who had visited 2 or more times last winter.

Once again people stated ‘Dining’ as the main reason for visiting the central city, but this year we saw significant growth in ‘Shopping’ and ‘Nightlife/Bars’ and people coming in on the weekends to shop.

We are already starting to work on the strategy and plans for next Winter, and will look to replicate the success of key elements such as Restaurant Month and 48 Hour City, and partnerships with the likes of APN.