At last week’s official launch of the Boomtown regional economies and media initiative, Westpac’s head of media Toby Dewar highlighted some learnings from a GroupM regional markets bus tour that went from Queensland to Tasmania.

He says he quickly learned that city types were definitely in a bubble. 

Dewar was quick to not call it a holiday – three days, 10 people and 3,000km in a bus was hardly that.

“In short, we went from Cairns to Townville to Mackay in rapid fire spending time with the locals, local newspapers and so forth. It was fascinating,” Dewar told the Boomtown guests. After three days, Dewar and his crew were swapped out for another batch of clients. 

Cairns, he said, was highly transient and driven by tourism. Townsville was an economy underpinned by a huge army base and Mackay was a mining city, deep in the middle of the Adani mining debate. 

“You really quickly learn as you get out of the bubble of Sydney or Melbourne what’s happening in those markets and the three we did, in particular.”

His takeout? "On a good day we would buy regional Queensland. On a better day we might buy Far North Queensland but what everyone came to appreciate at the same time and what you appreciated from that drive was how to connect better locally with those different communities, whether tourism, army or mining." 

The Boomtown regional media program might just be on to something.