Australia is an adventurer’s fantasyland. It’s got the marine wonders of the Great Barrier Reef, the red sands and outback skies of the interior, and a variety of outdoor activities that would suit anyone’s fancy. And it’s not surprising that a country surrounded by water has bred a nation of consumers hooked on fishing.

The country is full of diverse fishing environments and scores of marine life, ranging from Cairns in the tropical north (the black marlin capital of the world) to Tasmania’s mountain streams and lakes (perfect for trout fishing). You can hardly avoid all the propaganda hyping the fishing charters, professional tours, and organized trip packages that seem to be publicized everywhere. And both locals and tourists always seem ready to grab a pole and some bait in order to sample the island’s potential catches.

So it’s not surprising that a promotion capitalizing on what amounts to a national past-time might succeed very well — even if the fishing was only “virtual.”

Telstra, the leading Australian telecommunications utility, got consumers to put away their real fishing poles, tackle boxes, waders, and bush hats and turn on their computers with an online promotion that created awareness for the company’s new Internet portal. Telstra ran a contest offering a grand-prize Toyota Echo and 30,000 prizes worth more than $300,000 Australian (about $150,000 U.S.). “That’s a sizeable prize structure given the terrible economic problems in this market,” notes Mike Da Silva, principal at Mike Da Silva & Associates, the Sydney-based agency which handled.

Telstra is majority-owned by the Australian federal government. The company’s two main competitors are Optus, which is currently a subsidiary of Singapore Telecom, and the U.K.’s Vodafone. Telstra was the first Australian telecommunications company to develop its own portal (at www.telstra.com), but the last of the major players to do so. With landline coverage in just about every Australian household, Telstra hoped to use the new platform to generate revenue for its other services.

Using an “It’s your dot-com” tagline, Telstra invited consumers to visit the Web site and create their own personal home pages with up-to-the-minute information about their horoscopes, stocks, and favorite sports.

After they set up their pages, consumers were encouraged to navigate around the portal to learn about its offerings, which include free e-mail, chat rooms, and specialized channels on news, sports, money, business, technology, and entertainment in addition to information about Telstra’s billing/payment services, product catalogs, and cellular phone service.

Dropping a Line

The Fish Around & Win promotion employed a scavenger hunt theme. The game rewarded participants for searching the portal to find five different variations of hundreds of strategically placed fish icons, which revealed point values when clicked on. The icons were moved regularly and point values changed to give each area of the site equal exposure and keep the promotion fresh. Participants who needed extra help could click on “clues” buttons scattered throughout the site which directed them to the fish.

Telstra tracked the point totals of participants. Reaching 15 points made them eligible for such prizes as CDs, movie tickets, and $5 and $10 vouchers redeemable at eHomeware.com; 50 points made them eligible for $100 gift vouchers, PCs, color TVs, software packages, Quickcam cameras, cordless mouses, and round-trip tickets to Los Angeles; and 130 points made them eligible for the Millennium Gold Toyota Echo (valued at about $10,000 U.S.). Prizes were awarded weekly.

The four-week campaign was supported by regional radio spots in addition to the various online activities. Telstra partners Toyota and Sausage Software were stocked with their own fish, which they distributed on their Web sites to help drive traffic to the promotion. “Both brands reported good traffic,” Da Silva says.

Consumers took the bait. Telstra signed up more than 140,000 customers, and traffic to the Web site was 32 percent higher than forecasted. The company invested $800,000 Australian in online advertising, “the largest spend to date” in the country, according to Da Silva.

Sounds like Telstra used the right bait.

At least one company has come up with an idea for addressing the dearth of business-to-business e-mail lists on the market – for smaller marketers, that is.

Online advertising company Flycast Communications has introduced eDispatch, a service that allows Web marketers and other firms like yellow pages publishers to build their own e-mail lists with a set of services combining list management, customer acquisition and retention programs, says executive vice president Larry Braitman.

“No technology platform exists for e-mail lists now,” claims Braitman.

Specifically, the eDispatch service will offer and manage e-mail advertising campaigns across thousands of individual Web sites and online forums. It will also centralize media buying, ad trafficking and performance tracking.

Present clients include companies such as BiblioBytes (www.bb. com), which offers texts of books online. Glenn Hauman, president and publisher of BiblioBytes, said in a statement that he feels eDispatch has given his service added value and strengthened loyalty, noting that it “offers new revenue opportunities from a previously untapped source.”

At press time, the San Francisco-based company was lining up online merchants, small newsletter publishers and even local merchants to communicate with their customers and prospects via e-mail. Direct response advertising agencies and large corporations are also being targeted.

These efforts call for Flycast to run its own e-mail campaigns as well as conventional advertising and – more than likely – form ventures with other Web marketers.

“We’re also going to target companies like travel marketers who offer very specific products like vacations at different destinations,” says Braitman.

In a few months, eDispatch will offer opt-in e-mail lists by aggregating individual proprietary files with Flycast’s total company database of more than 25 million names.

>From these efforts, Flycast is looking to achieve a “critical mass” of >marketers to make this work. Braitman says this would amount to at least >”about 100 nice-sized newsletters.”

Companies that are affiliated with eDispatch will be able to get in on other Flycast advertising programs and will also be able to participate in ongoing Flycast customer retention programs.