Marketing Through Eugene's Eyes

I was reading through Stacey Barry’s blog on Tourism Australia’s 2006 campaign blunder (see commercial here), which depicted various attractions in Australia such as the Great Barrier Reef, the Sydney Harbour Bridge and views of rural Australia. It was a marketing campaign designed to boost Australia’s international tourism industry, but it all went horribly wrong because of two words, “bloody hell” in the campaign’s tag-line, “So where the bloody hell are you?”.

So what the bloody hell went wrong?

Like Stacey, I’m an Australian myself and I concur with her statement that the tag-line “was a bit over exaggerated and extreme”. However, unlike her, I am not of the opinion that the phrase, “bloody hell” is not one commonly used in Australia’s general population. To be honest, I personally do not say “bloody hell” very often at all but it would be erroneous to say that it is not a phrase used commonly by quite a large proportion of the Australian population in casual, informal settings. I can imagine it being said more often amongst the rural communities, which are generally more what many non-Australians think of a typical Australian – ocker-accented larrikin such as Paul Hogan (the “Crocodile Hunter”) and the late Steve Irwin. To me, “bloody hell” has become somewhat assimilated to the Australian culture and to deny such a fact would be similar to denying the atrocities of the Holocaust.  

However, I can understand how some cultures, particularly the more conservative ones, can decode the phrase in the sender’s message as something other than a friendly, innocent tongue-in-cheek phrase. I can imagine the “English English”, the ladies, the gentlemen and the conservatives in the United Kingdom being slightly offended by the tag-line, which is why it wasn’t surprising that the UK banned the advertisement. Similarly, Singapore changed the tag-line to “So where are you?”, which doesn’t seem to quite carry the same punch to it. Therefore, in agreement with Stacey, Tourism Australia could have toned down the tag-line so as to prevent misinterpretation.

In spite of this, this controversy generated great publicity for the promotional campaign. I guess any publicity is good publicity but in this case, I think it worked against Australia because tourist numbers actually dropped.