If Paris is to France what Sydney is to Australia, the French Tourist Bureau’s charge to Reborn in 2011 was to shift the spotlight away from the well known, and introduce Australians to everything else their country has to offer.

To promote travel from Australia to France, the French Tourist Bureau decided to hold a competition for two round-trip tickets, eight nights at the Accor Hotel and unlimited Rail Europe passes. In order to win, Australians would have to learn about three of France’s lesser known but equally fabulous regions: Aquitaine, Riviera, and Languedoc, Roussillon and Montpellier. The tourist uureau’s goal was to attract high-quality entries, rather than high quantity of entries—Australians who showed a genuine interest in learning about their country.

A true sense of place, virtually

The idea behind Reborn’s response to the French Tourist Bureau’s brief was simple: develop a website full of information about these key regions, engage visitors about this information and enter respondents into a draw. It was our execution of the idea that really brought this project over the line and beyond the tourist bureau’s expectations.

“Our biggest challenge was portraying three very different regions of France in a single space, and achieving a true sense of each region,” says Adrian, a senior designer at Reborn. “So using the imagery provided to us by the tourist bureau, we took a paper collage approach to the site design and started layering. Think Monty Python and cutout animations.”

Bringing collage to life

Channeling the spirit of exploration that’s intrinsic to tourism, we built content into those design layers, behind Easter eggs, associated with image hotspots and tucked into the topography. At any time during their site experience, users could request a quiz question or use the right and left arrows of their keyboard to drive their avatars and look for more clues.

“This website is honestly one of my favourites,” says Cooper, a senior developer at Reborn. “We used parallax scrolling to animate three panes of site design at three different speeds to achieve the effect of depth and dimension.”

“The client was so pleased with how the experience was taking shape, we didn’t hesitate to suggest social integration,” he adds. “It was beyond our scope, but Reborn knew the payoff of personalisation would be too good to pass up.”

Social integration for richer personalisation

Reborn gave users the option to enter the site anonymously or by logging in through Facebook Connect. Those who chose the latter approach experienced subtle integration for a richer experience, with opportunities to check in at the Riviera, post a status update from the Aquitaine or share their final quiz score with friends.

The Explore France interactive experience and quiz generated 20,000 competition entries and one thrilled winner.

“Given the site engagement requirements for entry, and an average quiz response time of 5–6 minutes, these were exactly the kind of high-quality entries the French Tourist Bureau were looking for,” says Reborn Co-founder and Managing Director Sabir. “Another very happy client, and a critical success for us that’s opened the door to business with tourism boards in Ireland and Japan.”