Business | Opinion
More than just a campaign to entice tourists to visit
Targeted advertising has its place, but the uniform worldwide tourist ad campaign has probably had its day.
- By Michael Skapinker, Financial Times
- Published: 00:03 July 24, 2008
So where the bloody hell are you?" One of the advertising world's most derided taglines was formally buried this month when Tourism Australia appointed the DDB Worldwide agency to find a new way to entice visitors to the country.
You can still catch the old advertisement online with its school-play acting and excruciating lines ("We've been rehearsing for over 40,000 years", chirps an Aboriginal dancer).
The UK broadcasting authorities briefly banned the ad from television because of the "swearing", but even that publicity kick was not enough to redeem it. Kevin Rudd, Australia's prime minister, has described the campaign as a "rolled gold disaster".
Other national tourist authorities have not been having an easy time either. The UK government is cutting VisitBritain's grant by 18 per cent over the next three years, even though the UK tourist body claims to generate £36 in visitor spending for every pound it receives. (This figure sounds as if it has been carefully sucked from someone's thumb, but the National Audit Office in 2004 declared the calculation method broadly correct.)
British tourism has done well recently, with foreign visitor numbers up from 25.7 million in 2004 to 32.7 million in 2006, but VisitBritain(whose funding should be cut to zero unless it restores the space between the words) is concerned about the future.
Worrying time
This is a worrying time for the travel business. The northern hemisphere summer is usually the busiest part of the season, but the credit crisis and rising airline fuel costs mean many more people are likely to stay at home. Stephen Dowd, a UK tourism industry leader, told a House of Commons Committee that he expected 2008 to be difficult, with an increase in air passenger duty giving people an additional reason not to come.
The slowdown is already evident in Australia, where tourist arrivals - 5.6 million during the year to the end of May - showed no growth on the previous year.
Is there anything tourist bodies can do? DDB plans to capitalise on the Baz Luhrmann movie Australia, which will be released in November. According to the advertising blurb, Australia, set on the eve of the second world war, features an English aristocrat (Nicole Kidman), who travels to Australia and meets a rough-hewn local (Hugh Jackman). Together they cross hundreds of miles of the world's "most beautiful yet unforgiving terrain, only to face the bombing of the city of Darwin". Hmm. I am not sure bombed cities are what people look for in a holiday.
The "see the film, visit the country" idea is not new. Captain Corelli's Mandolin did wonders for the Greek island of Kefalonia (although both book and film were lost on me).
In Oxford, the tourists line up outside Christ Church College to view the dining hall, site of the sorting hat scene in the Harry Potter movie.
Even more successful was the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, said to have enticed thousands of tourists to New Zealand. Visitors increased by a healthy 5 to 6 per cent annually in the early years of this decade, after the release of the films. They leapt 10.4 per cent in 2005 before dropping slightly in 2006 and then rising by a mere 2.8 per cent last year.
Films do make a difference but, as we see in New Zealand's case, it is not easy to sustain. In spite of the hype, it is also not clear how many people in fact come because of the movie.
People who visit a country purely because they have seen a film tend to be slightly unusual. One Tolkien- obsessed US visitor to New Zealand, jan howard finder ("all lower case, like e.e.cummings"), told The New York Times in 2004 that part of the joy of a Lord of the Rings trip was travelling with "15 other nut cases".
A survey of 1,100 travellers worldwide, published in The Journal of Travel Research last year, found that 6.9 per cent got their holiday ideas from movies. By far the largest proportion, 23.5 per cent, said television was their most important source of information, closely followed by their own travel experiences.
Friends were another important source (19.1 per cent), as were magazines (13.4 per cent). The internet scored surprisingly poorly at 8.4 per cent, even though this was an online poll. Only 4 per cent said they were prompted by travel advertisements.
"The findings of this study indicate that the relative importance of overt induced agents, such as tourism promotion, seems to be limited," the article said.
People travel for a variety of reasons, not just one, and their reasons are not the same. The more sophisticated travel companies segment their market, appealing to different groups in different ways.
Eighteen-year-olds planning a gap year do not respond in the same way as 65-year-olds contemplating a trip. Targeted advertising has its place, but the uniform worldwide tourist ad campaign has probably had its day.
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