Andrea McEvoy – the man who markets Australia - The Star Online

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McEvoy: ‘We are selling a holiday and a good time. That is not a hard sell.’

ANDREW McEvoy makes no apologies he is passionate about Australia. “It’s a magnificent country. A country which has been taken for granted by many Australians,” the country’s tourism chief says.

“But all that is changing now. Australians have woken up to the fact that there is a lot to see and do right here … at home.”

At 48, some would say he has one of the best jobs in Australia.

A recent newspaper story described him as the “man who sells Australia” but McEvoy says “the man who markets Australia would be closer to the truth”.

Since taking over as managing director of Tourism Australia in 2010, business has been good.

Visitor arrivals to Australia last year were up 4% despite fierce international competition, the high Australian dollar and economic problems plaguing some of Australia’s more traditional high-volume markets.

“A 4% rise in the current global economic climate is a credible performance,” McEvoy says.

“Even the US, where we have been struggling over the last couple of years (as a source for visitors), arrivals were up 4.2% last year. But the big growth story has been Asia and in particular China, which now outranks the UK as our main source for tourists.”

Tourism Australia is the nation’s global marketing agency, playing a leading role in Australia’s A$96bil visitor economy targeting leisure travellers and business events under the slogan “There’s Nothing Like Australia”.

A career in tourism, however, never figured on McEvoy’s employment radar when he left school in 1981.

“Far from it,” he tells China Daily Asia Weekly.

“I saw my future in journalism. At the time journalism looked exciting. I remember as a kid watching and reading all those big stories that were taking place locally and internationally … But I guess the business (journalism) was different back then … before the digital age changed everything.”

Sitting in the Freycinet room at Tourism Australia’s new offices in downtown Sydney, he speaks with great enthusiasm about all things tourism. Behind him the ceiling-to-floor windows command sweeping views across Darling Harbour and, on a clear day, the Blue Mountains further to the west. Over his shoulder to the south you can watch aircraft taking off and landing at Sydney Airport.

Smiling, he remembers his final school report that read, “I should do something that was interesting and had variety.’ I guess that was journalism. I didn’t give tourism any thought back then.”

While studying for a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Melbourne, he worked part-time for a group of suburban papers in Melbourne and the local Uni paper.

McEvoy’s first job when he left university was with The Herald, an afternoon broadsheet based in Melbourne.

By the time he joined the paper, which was owned by The Herald and Weekly Times, the group had been taken over by Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd and the afternoon paper eventually merged with the morning tabloid.

“The paper doesn’t exist anymore, which is a pity,” he laments. “It was a good newspaper with a proud history behind it.”

The turning point came in London where he won a scholarship to do a Master of International Communications at City University.

“Some of our lecturers were Fleet Street legends such as John Pilger,” he recalls. “A lot of students that were doing it with me were straight out of university and looking at being foreign correspondents.”

McEvoy had been a journalist for six or seven years at this stage but began to question if this was the career he really wanted to pursue.

“I guess you can say it was a mid-20s career crisis. I remember someone saying, or perhaps I read it in an interview, what you read today is tomorrow’s fish wrapping.”

Coming back to Australia, McEvoy says he began to explore his options.

“I was young, had experience in media and I still had a job to go back to.”

It was his father who found an advertisement for someone to run the media section with Tourism Victoria.

“I was 26 or 27 and thought why not, and I guess I never looked back,” he says.

It was a time when Victoria had just voted in a new premier, Jeff Kennett. The state was then a basket case, politically and economically.

Kennett, who was premier from 1992-1999, put a broom through the entire state. He focused on infrastructure, events, marketing and tourism.

He gave approval for the A$750mil Crown casino a first for the state. He refurbished old, run-down inner city areas, built exhibition and conference centres, roads, railways, bridges and tunnels.

He pushed for Melbourne’s airport to operate around the clock, unlike its northern rival Sydney, which is limited to a curfew.

And it was Kennett who was behind Tourism Victoria’s “Jigsaw” campaign, one of Australia’s most respected and successful tourism marketing and advertising initiatives. The slogan was simple: “You’ll love every piece of Victoria” and it is still relevant even today, 20 years after it started.

“It was an amazing time to be in Victoria and involved in tourism,” McEvoy says.

“So much was happening and so much was achieved. I felt very fortunate to be involved at the start. Not long after I started I remember thinking I really like this industry’. But I realised there was a gap in my knowledge.

“I came from media and knew that side of the industry. I learnt a lot about marketing, research and understanding consumers’ needs. But how does the (tourism) industry operate? That was something I didn’t have a great understanding (of) … how to package it.”

After three years with Tourism Victoria, a job came up to run the tourism department in Ballarat, a historic gold-mining town 105 kilometers northwest of Melbourne. It was here that the Eureka Rebellion had begun in 1854. The gold miners’ uprising against British colonial rulers was Australia’s first and only armed rebellion.

“I had learnt a lot from Tourism Victoria but this position gave me the opportunity to learn from the grassroots, if you like, and that is, how to get people to turn up,” he says.

After a stint running the South Australian Tourism Commission, he was headhunted to run Tourism Australia.

He sees his job as head marketer for the country is to convert interest into “real people turning up in Australia and spending money”.

“The challenge is how to extract a better yield from those visitors and give them something really unique.”

McEvoy admits there are big challenges ahead, such as the creation of better-quality hotels in regional Australia, but on the whole he is quite content with the infrastructure.

“Hotels in all the major capital cities in Australia have the highest occupancy in the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development region). We will need more capacity just to keep pace with our growth areas. Tourism (to Australia) out of China, Indonesia, India, Malaysia and Singapore is growing exponentially.”

He sees China continuing to drive growth in the Australian tourism market.

“The Chinese market is growing at a phenomenal rate. We are finding Chinese visitors, when they go back home, are advocating for us to their friends and colleagues as a place to visit. They come to have a holiday just like you or I would do.

“We are selling a holiday and a good time. That is not a hard sell.” – China Daily

Andrea McEvoy – the man who markets Australia - The Star Online