Eye Spy: Tourism WA

I’m not one of the people who considered it his ‘patriotic duty’ to hate Tourism WA’s new campaign on principle because it was done out of this state. The Extraordinary Taxi Ride wasn’t breathtakingly original but at the time of the launch I thought it was pretty good and had potential. The key was going to be in its execution.

In that regard, this online ad I saw last week is very disappointing.

The great appeal of online advertising is the ability to expand beyondwhat initially appears, but the first task is to do somethingintriguing, entertaining or exciting enough to encourage us to click onthe ad and open it up.

Whatever intrigue is generated by the headline in this ad is immediately undone by the next line:

“We’ve just visited one of Lonely Planet’s top 10 regions for 2010.”

Ooh – I wonder what that could be.

“South-west region WA.”

Oh, no need to go any further then.

I suppose Tourism WA would argue that Taxi Ride is intended primarilyfor people outside of WA, who aren’t so familiar with the south-west,but the placement on WA Today means it’s targeting locals too (High networth locals at that. And I’ll bet that a good proportion of WATodayreaders are also already pretty familiar with the odd Margaret Riverwinery or two).

The campaign leans heavily on telling the stories of the people takingthe journey – but they’re not in the ad. Instead, the photograph lookslike one of the generic ‘taxi’ shots taken before the Taxi Ride evenstarted. That seems a bit lazy. How hard would it have been tophotograph the lucky travellers ‘in situ’? At least that might haveencouraged me to find out a bit about them and their journey.

As luck would have it New Zealand’s new campaign was running on thesame site at the same time. “Which New Zealand are you?” isn’t exactlya stunner but it is much more invitational.

It’s a disappointing execution for a campaign that promised a lot. 1/5

Martin Trevaskis