From Tourism Australia.
Americans have liked Australia since 1984 and still do not go, carrying a warm forty-year-old image of shrimp on the barbie. Awareness was maxed out; the country needed to feel like new information again.
Do not make a tourism ad. Make a fake blockbuster, 'Dundee: The Son of a Legend Returns Home,' let the world believe it is real for two weeks, then admit on the Super Bowl that the whole thing was Australia.
The Stupid/Smart of it
Stupid: Spending the budget convincing the entertainment press a fake film reboot was real, then revealing the bait on the most expensive airtime in America.
Smart: Faking a movie reboot to sell a country sounds like bait-and-switch, until you realise nobody wants to watch a tourism ad and everybody wants to watch a trailer, and the only difference is what they think they are getting.
Only Australia, cast with its own exported stars from Hemsworth to Hogan himself, can make the reboot gag land, because the joke and the destination are the same place.
The two-week deception makes the reveal a punchline the audience is in on, so a tourism ad finally gets watched like the movie it was pretending to be.
The joke only works in sequence: the teaser is the lie, the Super Bowl spot is the confession, and holding that lie in public for two weeks is the whole trick.
Idea-poweredIt works when you describe it out loud. You could brief this. Survives paraphrase.
The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in: