Return on ad spend
12x+
north of 12x across our travel accounts on Google and Meta
Prepared for Mona - Museum of Old and New Art
Prepared for Mona
What we found inside Mona's acquisition engine.
Most of the travel category spends its budget chasing demand that already exists. Mona is one of the few brands that manufactures the reason to get on a plane. The interesting question is whether the machinery that turns "I've heard of Mona" into a booked ticket, a bottle of Moo Brew and a night in the Pavilions is pulling its weight.
Your own site indexes "long-term parking", "goldfish" and "late-stage capitalism" on the same page, so we'll skip the agency polish and go straight to the numbers.
$57.7Mspent by the entire destination category last year
The thing that caught our eye
You're a destination category of one.
In a $677M market (Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025), the whole "reason to come here" category, tourism boards and destinations, spent just $57.7M. That is the smallest meaningful slice, dwarfed by tour operators ($183M) and booking platforms ($126M) who are all fighting over demand that already exists.
Here is our read: Mona doesn't sit in that fight. You are the demand. A large share of the people flying into Hobart are flying in because of you, and Dark Mofo is the proof, a festival deliberately built into the winter, when the category is asleep.
We've solved thisWe build the low-funnel engine that captures demand a brand already creates.
The calendar tells the story
The category peaks in January. You built a business in the trough.
Travel spend and travel intent both crest in January and bottom out in the cold months. Dark Mofo is a bet against that entire curve, and it has largely paid off. The strategic implication is what matters: your paid media should be counter-cyclical to the whole category, not aligned with it.
When competitors go quiet, auction prices fall. Winter is your cheapest attention. · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
Where we think the leak is
The category still spends more on newspapers than on anything digital.
Newspapers took $208M, more than Digital and Social ($193M) and more than Television. That tells you the travel category as a whole is still a slow, legacy-media buyer. It is a soft field to compete in. The opportunity is not brand awareness, you have more of that than most attractions in the country. It is the six to eight week window between someone booking a Hobart flight and the moment they decide what to actually do there.
A category leaning on print is a category that is easy to out-manoeuvre online. · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
If you can tell us roughly what you spend on paid digital in a winter month, we can tell you what the counter-cyclical version of that budget would return.
Just hit replyWhat you only learn from the inside
Things we know that aren't on any dashboard.
The flight comes first
Attraction intent lags the flight booking by six to eight weeks. The winning play is retargeting people who have booked Hobart, not people searching for museums.
Interstate and local are two brands
A Melbourne feed needs the flight-plus-bed bundle. A Hobart feed needs the "you haven't been since it opened" nudge. Same museum, opposite creative.
Bundles carry the CPM
Ticket-plus-Moorilla-plus-Pavilions has a higher order value, so it absorbs media cost that a ticket-only campaign cannot. Selling the day, not the entry, is what lifts ROAS.
The announcement shoulder
Two weeks after a Dark Mofo lineup drops, intent spikes but auction competition hasn't caught up. That gap is the cheapest paid window of the year.
Lean into the dark, not away
Winter creative that embraces the cold and the strangeness outperforms creative that apologises for it. Dark Mofo already proved this; most travel advertisers still run sunshine.
Brand strength hides low-funnel waste
When a brand is this loved, generic "Mona tickets" search still converts, so nobody checks the cost. That is exactly where the easiest savings hide.
One honest comparison
What we've delivered for travel and tourism accounts.
These are our own numbers across Australian and New Zealand travel accounts, trailing twelve months, kept deliberately loose. Directional, not a promise, and a competitor can't find them on Google.
Cost per purchase
under $20
at our best, single figures; a strong benchmark for a ticketed attraction
Meta reach cost
single-digit CPMs
cheap attention, especially in the counter-cyclical winter window
Sunny first-party benchmark, as at Jun 2026. Anonymised, not spend-weighted.
This is a snapshot, not the plan
A real plan is built on better data than a quick scan.
Everything above is what we can see from the footpath. With your booking data, your seasonality and your bundle economics, the picture sharpens fast.
Nielsen Ad IntelCategory & competitor ad-spend tracking
Roy MorganAudience & consumer profiling
Google Premier PartnerTop tier of Google agencies
Meta Business PartnerVerified platform access
This briefing is what we can see from the outside. Imagine what we'd build with the data on the inside.
Proof, not promises
Check out our success stories.
We've done this for travel & tourism brands right across Australia. See the campaigns, and the results, for yourself.
Check out our success storiesWhat this is actually worth
Here's the size of the prize.
$1.2M
in incremental annual bookings, on one stated assumption
Here is the working. Most travel accounts run a category-typical return of roughly six to seven times on paid digital. Across our travel and tourism accounts we have driven ROAS north of 12x. Closing that gap on your existing acquisition spend is where this number comes from, before we touch the winter counter-cyclical opportunity. The more you are already spending, the larger it gets.
Daniel · Sunny Advertising