The Tourism Business Council of South Africa (TBCSA) has revealed impressive figures, highlighting the effectiveness of its Trevor Noah destination marketing campaign and providing a successful case study for the use of global celebrities to promote tourism. A partnership between the TBCSA, TOMSA and South African Tourism, the packaged video adverts achieved worldwide acclaim during their run between November 2023 and August 2024.
The Trevor Noah Tourism Campaign for SA achieved an overall reach of 231 million people in nine monitored tourism source markets, the associations CEO Tshifhiwa Tshivhengwa said at the TBCSA Tourism Leadership Conference in Sun City on September 18-19. Social media engagement in those markets hit 485million impressions.
The reach extends much further than that as this was only in the nine markets we tracked, Tshivhengwa emphasised.
He said the return on investment in the multi-award winning campaign equated to R8 (0.4) for every R1 (0.05) spent.
The campaign was conceived with the aim of helping South Africa reach its target of 15.6 million international tourist arrivals by 2030. The TBCSA harnessed a mix of social media, digital advertisements, influencer collaboration and other online media to package the video in various forms. Noah gave a comedic but impactful portrayal of the countrys diverse range of attractions, landmarks, wildlife and cityscapes across well-known and off-the-beaten track locations.
