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.