Web of deceit

By Yeoh Siew Hoon

Every now and then comes a destination marketing campaign that gets everybody talking.

Sometimes not in a positive light – who can forget Tourism Australia’s “Bloody Hell” campaign – but hey, all publicity is good publicity, right?

The latest campaign that’s got everyone talking is the rather inspired “Best Job In The World” stunt by Tourism Queensland.

As a piece of viral marketing, it’s brilliant. Google “best job in the world” and it dominates the searches. It’s appeared in nearly every medium you can think of – mainsteam broadcasters, business titles, trade rags, blogs, YouTube. This is publicity no amount of money can buy.

According to this piece in Springwise, Job Contest Spotlights Great Barrier Islands, “it began with strategically placed, small space employment ads in eight languages.

“Since then the website has endured traffic as high as 2,000 connections per second along with extensive global media coverage. In the first 24 hours 200,000 unique visitors came to the site, which has already received close to 500 applications. Which will surely do for the region what no mass market ad ever could.”

It called the campaign “one to learn from”.

The problem though is with such success, there is no room for mistakes.

Thus, when the news emerged that the lady seen getting a tattoo to apply for the job was a fake and was an employee of ad agency, CumminsNitro, all hell broke loose.

A blogger wrote, “Tourism Queensland, We TRUSTED You! Oh, wow. I am tremendously disappointed to learn that Tourism Queensland have been fibbing to desperate would-be Queenslanders, because I AM ONE OF THEM.”

Tourism Queensland has admitted it “messed up” by not making it clear the video was an example of the creativity it wanted to see among entries and not an entry in the $150,000-a-year job contest.

So the campaign got even more publicity … which Tourism Queensland can’t be too unhappy about.

What it also does is cast even more doubt over what we can believe – or not – on the Internet.

The lady with the tattoo is hardly the first case of Web fakery.

Remember “Heidi Clarke”, the Australian woman who launched an online search on YouTube for a mysterious man who left his jacket in Jet Café Bar.

Turned out she was an actress hired by a marketing company to promote a new menswear line. Apologising for her stunt, Lily (real name) said, “Why did I do it? Well, to be honest I’m a hopeless romantic and like a lot of you guys I love a good love story.”

In his article, “Trip Advisor, where truth is a matter of opinion”, Martin Kelly of Travel Trends says, “TripAdvisor now has nine million members and features more than 20m reviews. But can the rants and raves of this community be regarded as the truth? Let’s be blunt here – absolutely not.

“The reviews are opinion, nothing more. And in many cases from people you normally wouldn’t give the time of day.”

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in the documentary, “Enemies of Reason (Episode 1 )”, argues the Internet is dangerous ground for those who would want to hoodwink or deceive us, particularly in this age where we would rather believe hearsay than science and evidence.

The enemies, he says, are “irrational superstition”, “spirituality” and “new age gurus” and “those who profit from obscuring the truth”.

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive .

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