Celebrities holiday on us
Taxpayers helped foot the bill for a recent holiday here by American actress Bryce Dallas Howard as part of a $6.4 million Tourism NZ campaign featuring overseas celebrities.
Since 2015, the government agency has hosted and filmed 10 key influencers – actors, models, movie directors, and TV personalities famous in their home countries and with millions of social media followers globally.
Images of stars bungy jumping, relaxing in hot pools, sipping wine in vineyards, scoffing salmon in the Marlborough Sounds, or dressing up at Weta Workshop are designed to inspire their fans to come here too.
Tourism NZ’s global head of PR, Lauren Vosper, emphasised these seemingly fun junkets were ‘‘hard work from start to finish’’.
In response to an Official Information Act request, received influencer and agency fees lumped together with other costs such as public relations, marketing, research and launch events.
In Howard’s case, those expenses came to $853,000, compared with $39,000 for Brazilian TV presenter Didi Wagner, and $63,000 for Chinese celebrity chef Nicholas Tse.
For all 10 influencers the expenses added up to just under $3m.
Travel, visas, accommodation, meals and activities, production costs, photographers and drone pilots added a further $3.4m to the total bill.
Vosper said the influencer programme represented a tiny percentage of Tourism NZ’s total annual budget of $117m, and the resulting media coverage had an equivalent advertising value of more than $140m. Although stars could make specific requests, itineraries were based on the regions and activities Tourism NZ wanted to promote.
‘‘We’ve had a few instances where maybe they’ve been a little hesitant about doing a bungy jump, for example, but we’re not bullies, we don’t make them do anything they don’t want to do.’’
Some key influencers, such as Howard and US movie director James Cameron, are names many Kiwis will recognise; not so much Bollywood star Sidharth Malhotra or Chinese actor, director, singer and model Huang Lei.
Vosper said careful research went into choosing trusted individuals who appealed to specific visitor markets and the goal was to tip ‘‘active considerers’’ into actually making a booking.
In an Instagram post about a family holiday in Hawke’s Bay a week ago, Howard made light of the flight time from the US – a barrier for some visitors that Tourism NZ is attempting to overcome – and it had almost 77,000 likes.
Tourism NZ said Howard’s latest visit would result in new promotional imagery for Taupo¯ and Hawke’s Bay.
In 2017 her influencer work reached more than 10 million people in the US, Vosper said.
Director of the NZ Tourism Research Institute at AUT Simon Milne said key influencers were increasingly used as a marketing tool because social media had greatly extended the old word of mouth way of choosing a holiday destination.