Tag: Wil Anderson

Cross promotions

Wil Anderson just made this bold claim on the Gruen Transfer:

“The McDonalds Golden Arches are now more recognisable than the Christian Cross.”

True or false?

It kind of fails to take into account the historical brand recognition and needs to be more specifically defined.

A little bit of googling suggests that this was either a piece of corporate indoctrination fostered by McDonalds that has now become fact – or that there is an obscure survey that I can’t find from the late 90s conducted in Australia…

Your thoughts?

May 20, 2009

Gruen man

The Gruen Transfer returned to TV tonight. It’s a brilliant show. Tonight’s topic – tourism advertising. A subject close to my heart. Made some interesting observations about how tourism marketing works and the basic formula.

A couple of years ago at a marketing workshop with Virgin Blue marketing guru Sean Cummins (from Cummins and Partners) showed two tourism advertisements from different states with the soundtracks switched – and it was almost impossible to tell the difference.

Tourism ads are by and large formulaic and in the past were too focused on iconic shots of postcard landmarks – and apparently what we’re really into is collecting experiences rather than pictures.

Tourism marketers are limited by government funding and the fact that the tourism industry is a disparate bunch of small businesses who don’t really want to throw much money into advertising a destination rather than their own businesses.

I’m going to make my own tourism ad on their website and figure out how to put it up here.

March 18, 2009