So you know, we got oil in Canada. Well not us, not all of us. They got it there in Alberta, in the tar sands. Okay it means making a mess of the land, digging it out, boiling it up, putting more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But it’s oil! It makes money and it makes sense and all you gotta do is communicate the right kind of mood. That just takes good old-fashioned know-how and initiative. As Martin Wainwright says in The Guardian:
The sea was blue, the beach was gold and the children skipping through the sand dunes seemed a testament to the healthy joys of holidays in the Canadian province of Alberta.
Well, yeah, it’s true that Alberta is landlocked. So ummm they filmed the ad for Alberta in Breadnell, Northumberland. Thanks UK! You did a great job standing in for the tar sands. It’s all sand right? And it only cost us Canadians around 30 million bucks. Great buy for a little beach. Isn’t that worth more than oh, say, 30 million dollars worth of textbooks? Medicine? Clean water on Native reserves?
Now that they’ve been caught out, this is Ottawa’s response:
Ottawa has responded by suggesting that the choice of Northumberland symbolised the fact that “Albertans are a worldly people”. Tom Olsen, head of media relations for Canada’s prime minister Stephen Harper [MP of Calgary, Alberta], said: “There’s no attempt to mislead here. The picture used just fitted the mood and tone of what we were trying to do.”
Uh huh. Sure, Stevie. I believe ya. Just look at these pictures. The resemblance is uncanny.
Alberta Tar Sands, Wikipedia Commons
Northumberland Coast by Michael Hanselmann, Wikipedia Commons
h/t alex wellington.
This is CRAZY.
I have been part of meetings where such rationales were being used for the lack of truth in advertising (or PR). I don’t understand it for a second.
LN — I was actually going to tag you on that meme, but then decided against for fear it might get in the way of your planned blogging. I’d be interested in your answers to those questions.
Did you like The Frozen Thames? Did you think any of the language was stilted? Was that just my ear? I LOVE the book, don’t get me wrong. But I wonder about some of the noun-verbyness of it.
Thanks Beth & I think I will do that. It was so interesting to read your meme.
I did like The Frozen Thames. I found it uneven though. Some of the stories were just fabulous. Others–I did find stilted, and those were the stories where I felt the historical facts just stuck out rather than having been seamlessly worked into the fabric and pov. Those stories felt to me more like an early draft that hadn’t yet been worked through.
CRAZY. That is so, so crazy. It just captured the mood?? What the…?!
This is sort of hilarious and sad. It says a lot about marketing meetings, amd marketing ethos altogether, that someone can come up with the bright idea of filming an advert for travel in a completely different part of the world to the one actually advertised. Just amazing.
There is something crazy and other-worldly about marketing. In any other field I expect it would be diagnosable.