Carnival Corporation has launched Play Away, its first major local campaign since absorbing P&O, breaking cruise advertising conventions with humour, distinctive brand assets and a media-first strategy. Developed with INNOCEAN Australia, the platform is designed to boost mental availability, differentiate Carnival in a crowded category and endure for decades in the Australian market.
Carnival Corporation has taken a bold new direction in Australia with the launch of its Play Away brand platform, breaking conventions in cruise advertising to invite Aussies to rethink what a cruise holiday can be. The campaign, the first truly local effort since Carnival folded the iconic P&O Cruises Australia brand into its global operations, isn’t just another set of travel ads — it’s a fresh cultural attempt to embed Carnival’s personality into the minds of Australians, and a statement of intent in a category crowded with predictable creative.
At its heart, Play Away is a celebration of fun — cheeky, self-aware, and unabashedly playful. The creative work eschews the clichés of cruise marketing, such as “Colgate smiles” and feature-heavy montages, in favour of something far more distinctive: ads that speak directly to the audience with humour, rhyme, and a memorable cruise horn motif that creates an unmistakable audio brand device. The campaign’s voiceover, delivered in a dry, witty tone by Australian voice talent Angus Sampson, juxtaposes ordinary life — traffic jams, boring commutes and daily routines — with the joy and spontaneity of life at sea, triggering a sense of FOMO that, the team hopes, will translate into bookings.
Nicole Bradbury, Carnival’s senior marketing manager in Australia, explains that the brief was clear: Carnival needed to be more memorable in a cluttered market. Despite being the biggest cruise brand in Australia, tracking showed the company was losing mental availability among consumers — meaning people liked cruise ads generally, but couldn’t distinguish one from another. The Play Away platform was conceived to cut through that sameness and establish distinctive brand assets that could endure for decades.
To achieve this, the work leaned heavily into media-first thinking and strong distinctive brand assets (DBAs). From bold out-of-home executions with impactful, pared-back copy, to radio spots that use sound design to conjure the feeling of the holiday while listeners commute, each touchpoint was crafted to be unmistakably Carnival. In outdoor advertising, the strategy was simplicity itself: big, bold text paired with playful imagery that invites Australians to literally Play Away from their everyday surroundings. Meanwhile radio spots eschew standard feature lists and instead rely on storytelling through ambient sound — the calm of waves, laughter, the sensory cues of relaxation — to transport listeners into Carnival’s world.
Behind the creative was INNOCEAN Australia’s team — including creative and strategic leads — who worked closely with Carnival to ensure the idea landed with impact across platforms. Senior strategist Jack Cornwell noted that early brand tracking revealed the imperative to stop making “nice-but-forgettable” work and instead hammer home consistent, memorable assets that would stick in people’s minds. The focus on media planning was part of this: understanding where audiences are, and how to speak to them in moments when they might be most receptive to dreaming about holidays.
The campaign also carries strategic significance beyond its creative boldness. It marks Carnival’s effort to reintroduce itself to Australians after the integration of P&O Cruises Australia into the Carnival Cruise Line family — a move that saw the long-loved P&O brand sunset after nearly a century of local operations and the rebranding of its ships under Carnival’s banner. The transition, driven by operational efficiencies and a desire to unify the brand experience, presented both challenge and opportunity: Carnival needed to reassure Australians that the fun and quality they loved would endure, even under a new flag.
Bradbury emphasises that while Carnival’s essence of fun has always been central to the brand globally, tailoring it to the Australian context — where humour and laid-back playfulness resonate strongly — was key to this campaign’s strategy. It wasn’t about abandoning the brand’s core identity, but amplifying it in a way that felt fresh, relevant and unmistakably Carnival to local audiences.
In a category often defined by monotony, Carnival’s Play Away campaign represents a deliberate pivot to something more culturally tuned, media-savvy and brand-forward — a platform designed not just to drive bookings this season, but to build long-term memory and preference in the minds of Aussie travellers.
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