AUSTRALIA’S FIRST SURF PARK: URBNSURF
Creating so much hype Chris Hemsworth showed up.
THE
BRIEF
URBNSURF Melbourne is Australia’s first surf park located just minutes from Melbourne Airport in Tullamarine. Shaped like a baseball diamond, its crystal clear two-hectare surfing lagoon (similar in size to the MCG) can produce up to 1,000 waves per hour.
Bastion Effect is URBNSURF’s PR partner and has been working collaboratively with the team to help craft its earned media launch plan ahead of the park’s opening in January 2020.
In mid November the park hit a key milestone – its perfect waves were pumping and being surfed for the first time. We set out to leverage this moment to drive awareness and attendance for when the park opens to the public.
THE
STRATEGY
What better way to celebrate than with an epic media moment? Members of Team Australia and World Surf League professional athletes Julian Wilson and Sally Fitzgibbons along with Australian junior champions joined Andrew Ross, the founder of URBNSURF, representatives from Melbourne Airport, Three Blue Ducks (URBNSURF’s food and beverage partner), Surfing Victoria and Surfing Australia to come together at the surf park for a media event that showcased the waves for the first time and gave everyone a sneak peak of what’s to come.
The media moment also lined up with URBNSURF’s first round of foundational memberships going on sale and the announcement of its “wave menu” (which includes its fiercest slab wave called The Beast).
News crews, snappers, surf media and stakeholders watched on as we marked this huge moment with speeches from all involved and then Roary (URBNSURF’s wave generator) pumped out the waves and the surfers hit the water.
THE
RESULT
How about more than 140 media hits and counting?
A reach of more than 28 million…that’s a lot of surfers.
A Herald Sun front page, a live weather cross on Today, all major news crews in attendance, news choppers flying overhead and even a celebrity drop in when Chris Hemsworth showed up to get all superhero-ey in the surf.
WE ARE PART OF BASTION
Bastion is a truly integrated, full-service marketing and communications agency founded in 2009. We are Australia’s largest independent agency, with an ambition to achieve the same feat in the USA.
We offer a wide breadth of specialist capabilities across the communications spectrum including market research, brand and creative, advertising, corporate and change communications, PR and social media, digital and customer experience (CX), sponsorship and experiential, film and content production, merchandise, Asia marketing and communications, data analytics and panel management.