Following in the footsteps of Queenland's "Best Job in the World"
campaign to find a caretaker for an Australian paradise island, the
Bahamas had 14 film-makers visit the islands to create
short films as part of a tourism promotion.
The Bahamas Tourist Office campaign, called the 14 Islands Film Challenge,was a six-month competition to find aspiring and professional film-makers in the UK to send to the Bahamas.
The
campaign aims to up the ante on the Australian effort, which Tourism
Queensland claims generated about £50m worth of media coverage, by
sending 14 film-makers to 14 islands in the Bahamas for – yes – 14 days
to create films about island life.
The first stage of the campaign, developed by agency Fox Kalomaski and Brik Digital,
requires applicants to submit a 500-word essay about an inspirational
person in their local UK community. Judges will choose 40 of the pieces
to be turned into short films. The makers of the best 14 of these will
be selected to head off to the Bahamas to make films about the islands.
An overall prize of £14,000 will be awarded
for the best films, with the possibilty that the footage will be used
to promote the Bahamas.
Although much controversy surrounded the films, the Ministry of Tourism's Chief Communications Officer, Basil Smith issued this statement to the media in February of this year:
In view of limited marketing budgets
this year, it was determined that our efforts in the UK and European
marketplace needed to be driven by one or two "big events" which
would have the benefit of creating significant buzz for The Islands Of
The Bahamas. One such event was Miss Universe Pageant 2009.
The other is the
14-island Challenge.
One of the principals of our UK agency,
who is a member of the British Association of Film &Television Arts
(BAFTA), proposed an idea, which he thought would be an improvement over
a similar and the highly successful promotion launched by Queensland, Australia,
by calling all filmmakers to sign up for the ‘second best job in the world’
as the Bahamas promotion was ‘14 times bigger’ than Queensland’s tourism
competition. (The Queensland Challenge invited applicants for the "Best
Job in The World", which was to be the island caretaker and blogger
for a year. It achieved huge global response and became something of a
standard for recent promotional efforts that professional marketers sought
to surpass.) Our promotion set out to have young British film makers show
The Bahamas through their eyes.
Thus began the 14-island challenge The
strategy has been to narrow down the selection after the initial response
from the nation-wide promotion in Britain by having competing candidates
produce a short film profile of a local hero. This gave the promotion further
mileage at local level in communities throughout Britain..
It would certainly have made headlines
in The Bahamas if, instead of devising a search among Britain's young film
makers to be selected to come to The Bahamas to shoot, we'd announced that
we were selecting 14 of our own people to shoot promotional videos of their
country to show in Britain, but it would have had minimal impact in Britain.
Aside from the interest British citizens will have in the output of their
own young film makers, their output is likely to be perceived as more credible
than material produced by Bahamians about their own country.
We are surprised of the criticism that
has been directed at this promotion. The critics of this promotion have
not taken an objective view of the promotion and the strategy that it has
applied to stimulating interest among Britain's population. We would no
more expect an uproar from Bahamian photographers if we invited people
who had visited The Bahamas to submit photographs of their vacation.
The 14 films that result from this exercise will be aired at a prestigious
red carpet event at the BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts)
Awards in March 2010, when the winners will be revealed, generating tremendous
excitement about The Bahamas and the 14 islands covered. Films produced
by non-British film makers are not eligible. Additionally, the use of these
young UK filmmakers has influenced our ability to have the winning films
shown in theatres across the UK.
We have also attracted major British
sponsorship for the competition, which was predicated on the fact that
the participants were drawn from the UK market, in which the sponsors do
business.
We must remember that the
14-Island
Challenge is a UK based promotion designed to create buzz in the UK
among UK citizens and residents and inspire them to visit The Bahamas.
In the process, The Bahamas will obtain high quality content for
our websites at a relatively modest cost.
Clearly, our use of local (Bahamian)
filmmakers for this Challenge would not have achieved the requisite level
of interest or excitement in the UK as is the case with the use of the
British filmmakers, who will through their eyes focus on those intriguing
aspects of our islands that present well on film, and which by extension
will create the level of interest and engagement we are seeking from the
UK consumers, ultimately driving their vacation purchase decisions and,
hence, create jobs for many Bahamians.
