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?