As you can see at Geoff Meeker’s blog and at labradore, the provincial tourism departments advertising campaigns are marred by what amounts to fake photography.
That is, the company behind the campaign has taken a couple of shots and then through a series of deletions and additions created something that actually doesn’t exist all in aid of getting people to come here to experience something which is, according to one advert, as far from Disneyland as you can get.
Uh huh.
Now that might actually be true since the evidently invented, fanciful and ultimately fake stuff you experience at Disneyland or Disney World actually exists at the theme park.
The stuff in the pictures does not.
So at least in that bit they told the truth, just not in the way most people would take the meaning if they didn’t know the little photoshop of horrors involved.
To give you some sense of the manipulation involved both blog posts include both unedited shots and the doctored outcomes.
It’s worth taking the time to look at both just to see not only how much doctoring has been done but how much the sights didn’t need the creativity of the Picassos of pixilation.
This is just the latest in a string of problems in the tourism ministry over the past few years. The province’s energy corporation plans to drive a string of gawdawful high voltage electricity towers right through a UNESCO World heritage site. Never mind that one of the tourism television ads this year highlights Gros Morne as a destination known for its unspoiled natural beauty, as you’ll see in Meeker’s post.
Nope, seems the geniuses at NALCO think the rest of us just need to be “educated” on why their solution - 43 metre high towers right along key sight lines - is the only one that’s right.
Then there was last summer’s little round of bullshit - as we noted not once, not twice but thrice - with the billboard along the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto.
And all of that comes against the backdrop of an advertising campaign that is costing about double what it did four years ago but which isn’t seeing comparable growth in the actual numbers of real tourists.
In fact, the only real growth to speak of has been in locals who stay home in the summer. They are doing that not because of watching tourism spots on CTV Newsnet every 15 bloody minutes but because it’s cheaper to stay home than travel what with the dollar at less than par.
Now that lack of results is not so much an issue with the advertiser as it is with the department headed up by a minister who is, for the most part, one of those resident visitors to the capital city region his department likes to talk about.
You see, the minister hits the taxpayers with the bills for his visits to the office in St. John’s rather than buy or rent a home here out of his own expenses like the rest of us would have to do. He’s not alone either; almost half the cabinet nails the taxpayers for the cost of travel back and forth between their offices in St. John’s and their homes in various parts of the province.
To get back to the point: the problem is that the current administration’s whole master plan for tourism has been to simply throw money into advertising. That’s their phantasmagorical never-seen-before-in-the-history-of-human-civilization strategy, and despite the evidence that sheer volumes of dollars don’t work, they are determined to carry on with all the ingenuity of Douglas Haig.
When it comes to authentic tourism events, the minister – like his entire cabinet seatmates – don’t seem to know anything beyond trying to get the feds to pony up. The sorts of people who come to Newfoundland and Labrador go to places to see something different and real, something that actually is as far from Disneyland as you can imagine.
Too bad our whole tourism promotion is built around fakery.
-srbp-