The South Australian Tourism Commission (SATC) will overhaul its policies about engaging with social media personalities following a review into its handling of an exclusive Sam Smith concert earlier this year.
The State Government reviewed the event after questions and concerns were raised about the commission's marketing campaign.
The commission invited 30 influencers to attend the sunset concert, held at d'Arenberg winery in January, and paid for 10 influencers to travel to Adelaide from interstate, which included paying for flights and accommodation.
About 300 people attended the invite-only event, including journalists and 114 radio competition winners.
The review found the SATC should have a "greater level of transparency" when choosing which social media influencers it engaged with.
SA Tourism Minister Zoe Bettison said she wanted the South Australian public to understand what arrangements were in place for the "new marketing" strategy and what could be done to strengthen it.
"I think that it was a very unique opportunity — we went for it — the return on investment was incredibly high," she said.
"What we need to do is be more transparent and be clearer about what we're doing."
Figures released in the review showed the influencers reached 2.4 million people, while the television advertisements reached 8.3 million people and the national radio competition reached six million listeners.
Ms Bettison said the advertising value equivalent of the campaign was $32 million, however the cost of attracting the event and the British pop star to SA remained "commercial in confidence".
Opposition spokesman John Gardner labelled the $32 million figure as "bogus," instead claiming the event was "terrible" value for money.
"For the government to claim that this was good value for money for South Australian taxpayers is pretty rank," he said.
"Sam Smith got great value for money out of this, South Australia's taxpayers did not."
The review found the SATC should update its social media influencer selection model and implement a social media monitoring platform to help provide definitive outcomes when working with influencers.
It also found a new contractual agreement should be implemented between the commission and all paid and unpaid influencers.
SATC Chief Executive Emma Terry said the changes would be in place within three months.
"We're keen to get moving on it quickly," she said.
"We want to strengthen our contractual arrangements both for paid and unpaid media influencers.
"We also want to look at a platform where we can monitor in real-time the performance of those posts."
It comes after the ABC revealed influencers were asked to "ideally" post Instagram stories of the event, which last 24 hours, but were not obligated to upload content.
Some attendees were also asked to publish one or two TikTok videos and an Instagram post, but checks showed multiple guests did not have any permanent posts of the trip on their accounts.
Ms Terry said all influencers the SATC engaged with posted and met the commission's expectations, but it wanted to continue to evolve its processes.
She said the campaign was much bigger than just influencers and included a five-week national radio promotion.
"Advertising is a very cluttered field," she said.
"We wanted to make sure we were covering all different channels and all different mediums, which this did."
Ms Terry also appeared in front of a parliamentary committee on Monday where she was questioned about the 'River Revival Vouchers' which were given out to attract tourists back to the River Murray after the summer floods.
She said despite 139,000 people registering interest in the ballot to win one of the 12,000 vouchers, just 37 per cent of the first-round vouchers were redeemed, which was much lower than the 60 per cent redemption rate that the commission expected.
Ms Terry said the SATC was now assessing how it could increase the redemption rate for the next two rounds of coupons.
