Smirnoff Nightlife Exchange Project - you've got my vote!

It's not often that you watch an ad that truly captures your eye. However, the other night I was watching TV and was so intrigued by this ad for Smirnoff that I hopped onto Google and Facebook straight away to find out more about it! Here's the ad:



Basically, Smirnoff is setting out to show the world how other cultures party with their 'Nightlife Exchange Project'. Facebook fans of Smirnoff can add the 'Nightlife Exchange Project' application and then read or contribute thoughts on what makes their nightlife special in their country in terms of food, music, dance moves, entertainment and so forth. Great Britain, Brazil, Australia, South Africa, Lebanon, Canada, Poland, Thailand, Venezuela, United States, Argentina, Germany, India and Ireland are the countries involved. Some of the ideas I read under the 'entertainment' category for Australia were: have a ball pit - like the one's in primary school, a glow in the dark jumping castle, and my personal favourite; vodka jelly wrestling!

Each country's chosen curator will then sift through the ideas and select some of the most highly rated suggestions to create a culturally-authentic night out. These ideas will then be packed into a 'crate' representing each country, and on November 27th, each curator will swap their country's crate with another, unleashing 14 global nightlife events simultaneously. Can I just mention that our chosen curator is Dan Single (whoever the hell that is!), and I must say he definately drops the 'cool factor' of this project down a notch...just look at him:

And if you watch his video on the Smirnoff Facebook page it's even worse - does anyone else think his chest hair looks like some kind of dead animal? Anyway, luckily for Smirnoff, it can get away with having a wanker representing our country, because the awesomeness of the Nightlife Exchange idea makes up for it! It's only the early days of the campaign, but I really like what they've done. As I said the TV ad definately worked on me - the party scenes looked amazing, just the kind of thing I would want to be a part of...and then when it reveals that this is a global initiative, you realise it must be pretty freakin cool! It gives you just enough information about the project to get you interested but not quite enough - so then you HAVE to go look it up on Facebook as it tells you to!

Also, as we always go on about, Facebook is all about engaging your customers - the Nightlife Exchange Project is clearly very successful at doing just that! Smirnoff knows their target market: 18-25 year olds who love to party. What better way to engage them than to ask for their ideas on how to make an unforgettable party?! I even had a go at suggesting an idea myself; I said that everyone should wear morph suits (under the 'fashion' category). In reality, you'd have to pay me a lot of money before I'd ever squeeze myself into one of those, but I just wanted to have a go at suggesting an idea. I also posted a question on their wall asking how this event can possibly take place simultaneously in 14 different countries all at NIGHT on November 27 (surely different time zones would mean that some crate parties would take place during the day?!). A bit of a silly question but I really just wanted to see how quickly (and if they WOULD) respond. They responded approx 2 or 3 hours after I posted my comment! So kudos to Smirnoff for that! Pretty impressive considering they have over 100,000 fans to attend to!

Overall, I think the idea is a great way of engaging and creating conversations with customers, as well as building Smirnoff's brand personality. My only slight reservation about the whole idea is the fact that fans put all this effort into coming up with great party ideas and getting thier friends to vote for their ideas...and at the end of the day their ideas get swapped for those of another country! I guess it could be cool to see what crazy ideas other cultures come up with, but on the other hand, wouldn't those people want to get to experience the awesome ideas they came up with?

So what are your thoughts on the Smirnoff Nightlife Exchange Project?

There's nothing like Australia...especially our sense of humour!

I’m sure we’re all well aware that Australia needs a good tourism campaign if it’s to get over its last ‘bingle’ with Lara Bingle. Therefore, a new tourism campaign was launched in May this year with the tagline, 'There’s nothing like Australia'. I found it quite interesting to read about the details of the campaign. The campaign was designed around the finding that Australians are eager to get involved in promoting their country. With this in mind, Australians were asked to upload photos of their favourite place or experience in Australia to the campaign website and to come up with 25 words or less why they believed ‘There’s nothing like Australia’. The website received nearly 30,000 amazing photos and inspiring stories over 28 days, making it one of Australia’s most successful consumer-generated promotions ever.

Using these entries, Tourism Australia has built a searchable digital map of Aussie's favourite holiday experiences on the website. It's quite amazing to look at! Many of the photos have also now been used in their print and online campaign - showing those clichéed images we all know and love such as kangaroos, beaches, aboriginals etc...Here's just a few examples:

Feel free to look at more at http://www.nothinglikeaustralia.com/index.htm . ANYWAY, (here comes the interesting part...) I realised that when I searched, 'There's nothing like Australia' on Google, http://www.nothinglikeaustralia.net/  comes up third on the list of search results (as opposed to 'dot com'). This, I discovered, is in fact a parody website that is in no way affiliated with Tourism Australia! It's basically 'taking the piss' out of the Tourism Australia campaign by implying that Australia might not be quite so 'crash-hot' as we're leading on. The website displays their own version of 'There's nothing like...' photos that provide a humourous take on touchy Australian issues, blatant racism, political incorrectness and more! Ah...brilliant!! I guess that's what you get when you offer the tourism industry (ie. anyone!) free use of the campaign logo, tagline etc. via the Tourism Australia website! Here's a few examples from the parody website (apologies for any offence caused, I didn't make the photos!):

 

It's quite interesting that something so clearly unrelated to the genuine 'There's nothing like Australia' website came up so high on the list of search results. Obviously this would have occured due to the location and frequency of keywords on the page, the number of click-throughs generated by searches etc. However, I wonder what effect will this have on the real Tourism Australia campaign? I am sure many people have clicked on this link fully believing that it is the 'real deal' and they may have been quite shocked at what they found. Of course, for our Kiwi and Pommy friends, they would probably understand the sarcasm and therefore it would not cause too much damage to their image of Australia. But what about people from cultures distinctively different to ours that might not understand our sense of humour? There is the potential that they could look at this parody website and not like what they see. It may just ever so slightly decrease their chances of wanting to visit Australia. I don't think this is a great threat, but it does show that putting the campaign in the hands of 'everyday Australians' may have some ramifications. What do you guys think?