Time to move beyond billboards: Australia’s tourism strategy needs to embrace the personal

boxiang Xiao/Unsplash Katharina Wolf, Curtin University

Australia continues to rely on billboard-style and cinematic advertising to promote itself as a destination. This approach, used for decades, presents a national image built around iconic sites and curated visuals.

While this style may appeal to tourism bodies because of the celebrity-fronted content and central control, it is increasingly out of step with how modern travellers plan their journeys.

In 2025, travellers are scrolling TikTok, watching Instagram reels, and browsing peer reviews. Tourism campaigns should meet people where they are.

Authenticity beats curated content

Social media is a central source of travel inspiration, particularly for Gen Z and millennials, according to a global survey of 20,000 respondents across all age groups.

Almost 90% of young travellers discover new destinations through TikTok, and 40% say they have booked a trip directly because of something they saw on the platform.

What matters most is not just reach, but trust.

Influencers shape behaviour from desire to booking and post-trip sharing. Their impact rests on perceived authenticity. Real people telling stories resonate more than stylised ads.

Storytelling sits at the heart of this shift, and tourism providers can engage in this form of storytelling, too. Airbnb’s Host Stories campaign invites hosts to share personal narratives through short videos and blog posts.

By highlighting real hosts and their daily lives, marketing moves beyond selling places and instead emphasises authentic, locally rooted connections that resonate with travellers.

It introduces travellers to places through personal experience, grounded in local knowledge and genuine connection.

User-generated content builds trust

A 2025 study found user-generated content enhances emotional connection and perceived authenticity with potential tourists.

Stumbling on a friend’s holiday photo or a short travel video in their feed can increase the appeal of a destination. Unlike traditional advertising, which requires deliberate placement, peer content can influence simply by appearing in everyday browsing.

Australia has used participatory storytelling before. One powerful example is Tourism Queensland’s 2009 Best Job in the World campaign, which invited applicants from around the world to compete for a six-month caretaker role on Hamilton Island in the Great Barrier Reef. All they had to do was submit a short video explaining why they were the right candidate.

The campaign went viral, attracting over 34,000 applicants from 200+ countries, millions of website hits and global media overage.

Its success was driven less by who eventually got the job and more by the anticipation and unusual premise. It stood out because of simplicity and inclusivity, inviting real people to be part of the narrative.

Yet, 16 years on, Australia’s national tourism campaigns still rely on cinema ads, billboards and polished TV commercials built around icons such as Uluru and the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

From storytelling to story-sharing

The long-running Inspired by Iceland campaign consistently encourages locals to share authentic travel memories, cultural insights and personal stories.

Iceland Hour, launched in June 2010, saw schools, parliament and businesses pause for a coordinated social media push. Citizens and international supporters posted more than 1.5 million positive, personal messages across social media in a single week.

The campaign helped rebuild confidence after the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption, and contributed to a 20% year-on-year rise in tourist arrivals.

Finland’s Rent a Finn campaign, launched in 2019, embraced a similarly human-centred approach. Showcasing ordinary people rather than cinematic landscapes, the campaign reached 149 countries, contributed €220 million in additional tourism revenue and reinforced Finland’s reputation as the “world’s happiest country”.

The United Kingdom’s Great Chinese Names for Great Britain campaign in late 2014 invited Chinese audiences to propose Mandarin nicknames for 101 British landmarks.

Suggested names, such as “Strong Man Skirt Party” for a kilted parade or “Stone Guardians” for Hadrian’s Wall, were featured on Google Maps and Wikipedia.

The campaign attracted more than 13,000 submissions, sparked widespread engagement on Chinese social media and was followed by a 27% increase in visits from China. It was worth an estimated £22 million boost to the UK economy.

Storytelling as a sustainability strategy

Participatory storytelling is not only more engaging, it can also be more sustainable.

Japan’s Hidden Gems campaign redirects tourist traffic away from overcrowded areas like Kyoto and Tokyo by spotlighting lesser-known destinations through locally led narratives. These stories promote slower travel, distribute benefits more evenly and reduce pressure on fragile ecosystems.

Australia faces a similar challenge. Our global image is still anchored to a handful of spectacular but vulnerable icons.

Yet tourism is about more than selfies in front of sandstone or coral. By inviting regional communities and visitors to tell their stories, we could shift attention beyond brochure highlights and encourage deeper, more diverse engagement.

There is also a strong economic case for prioritising emotional connection. Research shows when travellers form personal bonds with a place – through memorable, localised experiences – they are more likely to return, recommend it to others and stay longer.

Tourism is a relationship, not a product

Visitors are not passive consumers of postcard moments but active contributors to a shared story.

Australia’s tourism strategy should reflect this. This could mean amplifying visitor photos and videos on official platforms, inviting local communities to co-design campaigns, and drawing on authentic user-generated content rather than polished advertising and cinematic masterpieces.

That means letting go of perfection, embracing authenticity and trusting that the people who come here, as well as the people who live here, have stories worth sharing.

Katharina Wolf, Associate Professor in Strategic Communication, Curtin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More........ → November 01, 2025

A US startup plans to deliver ‘sunlight on demand’ after dark. Can it work – and would we want it to?

Can a new satellite constellation create sunlight on demand? SpaceX/Flickr, CC BY-ND Michael J. I. Brown, Monash University and Matthew Kenworthy, Leiden University

A proposed constellation of satellites has astronomers very worried. Unlike satellites that reflect sunlight and produce light pollution as an unfortunate byproduct, the ones by US startup Reflect Orbital would produce light pollution by design.

The company promises to produce “sunlight on demand” with mirrors that beam sunlight down to Earth so solar farms can operate after sunset.

It plans to start with an 18-metre test satellite named Earendil-1 which the company has applied to launch in 2026. It would eventually be followed by about 4,000 satellites in orbit by 2030, according to the latest reports.

So how bad would the light pollution be? And perhaps more importantly, can Reflect Orbital’s satellites even work as advertised?

Bouncing sunlight

Sunlight can be bounced off a wristwatch to produce a spot of light . M. Brown

In the same way you can bounce sunlight off a watch face to produce a spot of light, Reflect Orbital’s satellites would use mirrors to beam light onto a patch of Earth.

But the scale involved is vastly different. Reflect Orbital’s satellites would orbit about 625km above the ground, and would eventually have mirrors 54 metres across.

When you bounce light off your watch onto a nearby wall, the spot of light can be very bright. But if you bounce it onto a distant wall, the spot becomes larger – and dimmer.

This is because the Sun is not a point of light, but spans half a degree in angle in the sky. This means that at large distances, a beam of sunlight reflected off a flat mirror spreads out with an angle of half a degree.

What does that mean in practice? Let’s take a satellite reflecting sunlight over a distance of roughly 800km – because a 625km-high satellite won’t always be directly overhead, but beaming the sunlight at an angle. The illuminated patch of ground would be at least 7km across.

Even a curved mirror or a lens can’t focus the sunlight into a tighter spot due to the distance and the half-degree angle of the Sun in the sky.

Would this reflected sunlight be bright or dim? Well, for a single 54 metre satellite it will be 15,000 times fainter than the midday Sun, but this is still far brighter than the full Moon.

Mylar reflectors can be unfolded in orbit. Josh Spradling/The Planetary Society, CC BY

The balloon test

Last year, Reflect Orbital’s founder Ben Nowack posted a short video which summarised a test with the “last thing to build before moving into space”. It was a reflector carried on a hot air balloon.

In the test, a flat, square mirror roughly 2.5 metres across directs a beam of light down to solar panels and sensors. In one instance the team measures 516 watts of light per square metre while the balloon is at a distance of 242 metres.

For comparison, the midday Sun produces roughly 1,000 watts per square metre. So 516 watts per square metre is about half of that, which is enough to be useful.

However, let’s scale the balloon test to space. As we noted earlier, if the satellites were 800km from the area of interest, the reflector would need to be 6.5km by 6.5km – 42 square kilometres. It’s not practical to build such a giant reflector, so the balloon test has some limitations.

So what is Reflect Orbital planning to do?

Reflect Orbital’s plan is “simple satellites in the right constellation shining on existing solar farms”. And their goal is only 200 watts per square metre – 20% of the midday Sun.

Can smaller satellites deliver? If a single 54 metre satellite is 15,000 times fainter than the midday Sun, you would need 3,000 of them to achieve 20% of the midday Sun. That’s a lot of satellites to illuminate one region.

Another issue: satellites at a 625km altitude move at 7.5 kilometres per second. So a satellite will be within 1,000km of a given location for no more than 3.5 minutes.

This means 3,000 satellites would give you a few minutes of illumination. To provide even an hour, you’d need thousands more.

Reflect Orbital isn’t lacking ambition. In one interview, Nowack suggested 250,000 satellites in 600km high orbits. That’s more than all the currently catalogued satellites and large pieces of space junk put together.

And yet, that vast constellation would deliver only 20% of the midday Sun to no more than 80 locations at once, based on our calculations above. In practice, even fewer locations would be illuminated due to cloudy weather.

Additionally, given their altitude, the satellites could only deliver illumination to most locations near dusk and dawn, when the mirrors in low Earth orbit would be bathed in sunlight. Aware of this, Reflect Orbital plan for their constellation to encircle Earth above the day-night line in sun-synchronous orbits to keep them continuously in sunlight.

Cheaper rockets have enabled the deployment of satellite constellations. SpaceX/Flickr, CC BY-NC

Bright lights

So, are mirrored satellites a practical means to produce affordable solar power at night? Probably not. Could they produce devastating light pollution? Absolutely.

In the early evening it doesn’t take long to spot satellites and space junk – and they’re not deliberately designed to be bright. With Reflect Orbital’s plan, even if just the test satellite works as planned, it will sometimes appear far brighter than the full Moon.

A constellation of such mirrors would be devastating to astronomy and dangerous to astronomers. To anyone looking through a telescope the surface of each mirror could be almost as bright as the surface of the Sun, risking permanent eye damage.

The light pollution will hinder everyone’s ability to see the cosmos and light pollution is known to impact the daily rhythms of animals as well.

Although Reflect Orbital aims to illuminate specific locations, the satellites’ beams would also sweep across Earth when moving from one location to the next. The night sky could be lit up with flashes of light brighter than the Moon.

The company did not reply to The Conversation about these concerns within deadline. However, it told Bloomberg this week it plans to redirect sunlight in ways that are “brief, predictable and targeted”, avoiding observatories and sharing the locations of the satellites so scientists can plan their work.

The consequences would be dire

It remains to be seen whether Reflect Orbital’s project will get off the ground. The company may launch a test satellite, but it’s a long way from that to getting 250,000 enormous mirrors constantly circling Earth to keep some solar farms ticking over for a few extra hours a day.

Still, it’s a project to watch. The consequences of success for astronomers – and anyone else who likes the night sky dark – would be dire.

The number of satellites visible in the evening has skyrocketed.

Michael J. I. Brown, Associate Professor in Astronomy, Monash University and Matthew Kenworthy, Associate Professor in Astronomy, Leiden University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More........ → October 17, 2025

Want more protein for less money? Don’t be fooled by the slick black packaging

The Conversation, CC BY-SA Emma Beckett, UNSW Sydney

If you’ve been supermarket shopping lately, you might have noticed more foods with big, bold protein claims on black packaging – from powders and bars to yoghurt, bread and even coffee.

International surveys show people are shopping for more protein because they think it’ll help their fitness and health. But clever marketing can sway our judgement too.

Before your next shop, here’s what you should know about how protein is allowed to be sold to us. And as a food and nutrition scientist, I’ll offer some tips for choosing the best value meat or plant-based protein for every $1 you spend – and no, protein bars aren’t the winner.

‘Protein’ vs ‘increased protein’ claims

Let’s start with those “high protein” or “increased protein” claims we’re seeing more of on the shelves.

In Australia and New Zealand, there are actually rules and nuances about how and when companies can use those phrases.

Under those rules, labelling a product as a “protein” product implies it’s a “source” of protein. That means it has at least 5 grams of protein per serving.

“High protein” doesn’t have a specific meaning in the food regulations, but is taken to mean “good source”. Under the rules, a “good source” should have at least 10 grams of protein per serving.

Then there is the “increased protein” claim, which means it has at least 25% more protein than the standard version of the same food.

If you see a product labelled as a “protein” version, you might assume it has significantly more protein than the standard version. But this might not be the case.

Take, for example, a “protein”-branded, black-wrapped cheese: Mini Babybel Protein. It meets the Australian and New Zealand rules of being labelled as a “source” of protein, because it has 5 grams of protein per serving (in this case, in a 20 gram serve of cheese).

But what about the original red-wrapped Mini Babybel cheese? That has 4.6g of protein per 20 gram serving.

The difference between the original vs “protein” cheese is not even a 10% bump in protein content.

Black packaging by design

Food marketers use colours to give us signals about what’s in a package.

Green signals natural and environmentally friendly, reds and yellows are often linked to energy, and blue goes with coolness and hydration.

These days, black is often used as a visual shorthand for products containing protein.

But it’s more than that. Research also suggests black conveys high-quality or “premium” products. This makes it the perfect match for foods marketed as “functional” or “performance-boosting”.

The ‘health halo’ effect

When one attribute of a food is seen as positive, it can make us assume the whole product is health-promoting, even if that’s not the case. This is called a “health halo”.

For protein, the glow of the protein halo can make us blind to the other attributes of the food, such as added fats or sugars. We might be willing to pay more too.

It’s important to know protein deficiency is rare in countries like Australia. You can even have too much protein.

How to spend less to get more protein

If you do have good reason to think you need more protein, here’s how to get better value for your money.

Animal-based core foods are nutritionally dense and high-quality protein foods. Meats, fish, poultry, eggs, fish, and cheese will have between 11 to 32 grams of protein per 100 grams.

That could give you 60g in a chicken breast, 22g in a can of tuna, 17g in a 170g tub of Greek yoghurt, or 12g in 2 eggs.

In the animal foods, chicken is economical, delivering more than 30g of protein for each $1 spent.

But you don’t need to eat animal products to get enough protein.

In fact, once you factor in costs – and I made the following calculations based on recent supermarket prices – plant-based protein sources become even more attractive.

Legumes (such as beans, lentils and soybeans) have about 9g of protein per 100g, which is about half a cup. Legumes are in the range of 20g of protein per dollar spent, which is a similar cost ratio to a protein powder.

Nuts, seeds, legumes and oats are all good plant-based options. Towfiqu Barbhuiya/Unsplash, CC BY

Nuts and seeds like sunflower seeds can have 7g in one 30g handful. Even one cup of simple frozen peas will provide about 7g of protein.

Peanuts at $6 per kilogram supply 42g of protein for each $1 spent.

Dry oats, at $3/kg have 13g of protein per 100g (or 5g in a half cup serve), that’s 33g of protein per dollar spent.

In contrast, processed protein bars are typically poor value, coming in at between 6-8g of protein per $1 spent, depending on if you buy them in a single serve, or in a box of five bars.

Fresh often beats processed on price and protein

Packaged products offer convenience and certainty. But if you rely on convenience, colours and keywords alone, you might not get the best deals or the most nutritious choices.

Choosing a variety of fresh and whole foods for your protein will provide a diversity of vitamins and minerals, while reducing risks associated with consuming too much of any one thing. And it can be done without breaking the bank.

Emma Beckett, Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Nutrition, Dietetics & Food Innovation - School of Health Sciences, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More........ → September 17, 2025