It’s not mainlanders who need saving, it is us from demeaning campaigns like this one: here.
This two month campaign is pure bureaucratic job justification. Throw a dog a bone! Look! We’re doing something, so stop your whingeing.
Yes, you’re doing something but it is not sending out any sophisticated or enticing message about this beautiful island.
Tourism Tasmania has perfected misinterpretation of statistics. VFRs (lowest spend group) have always made up 20% of visitors. They are always going to come. They’ve got free accommodation and some meals! There is an 8% drop in overall visitor numbers, particularly the Long Term visitors (12 to 14 days). (Grey Nomads are a separate group). This means that VFRs now take up a higher percentage of visitor numbers, around 33%. The state is missing those bigger spend per capita per day tourists. You know, the ones who pay for accommodation, indulge in food and wine, wilderness walks, art and cultural experiences.
So what do clever, regularly paid from the public purse, Tourism Tasmania staff come up with? Yes, you got it. They target the lowest spend market who are coming anyway. What do the accommodation places think about this cleverness?
Comments from The Examiner and The Mercury on this misguided campaign are heavily weighted in the negative – offensive, stereotypical, crass, amateur, dreadful website designers, not a good look, embarrassing, money could be more wisely spent, cringe and they went on.
The majority of people looking at it would be the thousands of expat Tasmanians trying to get a free holiday to visit friends and relos. Even then the competition was a turn off, so I didn’t enter. Maybe they need to think about why they didn’t get 15,000 entries?
Posted by John now in WA, 18/06/2012 2:05:28 PM, on The Examiner
As has been said by others:
Tourism Industry Council Tasmania chief executive Luke Martin said the figures were encouraging but it was too early to tell if it would give the industry a much needed boost.
“The challenge will be conversion. On awareness it ticks the box but its conversion to increased bookings that will be the ultimate test,” Mr. Martin said. (18/06/2012 The Examiner)
How right you are, Mr. Martin. 15,000 ‘hits’ on a website, does not a successful marketing campaign make. Who is ‘hitting’ the website? Perhaps it is Tourism Tasmanian staff, pleased with their ‘cheeky’ cleverness, enjoying navigating and reliving the fruits of their paid labour, or the expensive band of consultants also basking in reflected glory, twittering and texting everyone they know to ‘hit’ the website. As we have all been indoctrinated, social media is the new god. Social media will save this state – the cure for all ills. It’s cheap. Just look at Tourism Tasmania. They have staff who spend 90% of their working day ‘ social mediaering’. The demographics for twittering and facebooking is 13 to 23 year olds – just the group with money to target.
How is this campaign to be measured? According to Tourism Tasmania’s own fact sheet:
Measuring & monitoring
The Save a Mainlander website will be used to monitor and track the performance of the campaign.
Translation: Campaign effectiveness can’t be measured.
The tried and true solution to some of our tourism woes is definitive marketing in the Sun Herald and Herald Sun in the Travel Supplement of the Sunday papers. People plan their holidays a year in advance. Tourism Tasmania needs to take a leaf out of Scenic Tour’s Marketing Strategy and have full page ads every Sunday. Forget the $320,000 billboards and the not clever, wasteful, self-indulgent campaign strategies. Concentrate, instead, on big newspaper advertising. Scenic Tours wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t work.
To the Tourism Tasmania Board who approved this off-the-mark campaign, WTF are you lot doing! Time for a new board.
I hate criticising all the time. I want to write a letter of praise about positive action from this department. Give us all something that reflects the true’ essence’ of this unique state.
