Where the bloody hell aren’t ya? A decade on, marketers still aren’t nailing localisation
From errors in translation to cultural differences, localisation still causes a headache for many marketers. David Barzilay explains why brands still aren’t nailing it.
What have we learned about global campaign localisation in the ten years since Tourism Australia’s $180 million ‘so where the bloody hell are ya’ campaign?
Intended to increase tourism from markets including the UK, Canada and Singapore, it was banned in the UK for using the word ‘bloody’, banned in Canada for using the word ‘hell’, and changed to the innocuous ‘so where are you?’ in Singapore.
Instead of further indulging our collective schadenfreude with another listicle of global campaign localisation fails, let’s look at why we as marketers are still getting things wrong in 2017.
Does Tourism Australia ever need to make an ad again?
Nearly 250k photo’s on Instagram hashtagged: #manlybeach Scrolling through them and all painting a very nice picture, with blues skies and azure ocean. Nowadays both locals and holiday makers are sharing their holiday photos for all to see and boy oh boy it creates demand… Doesn’t it?
1. Yes they will.
2. No evidence that it does.
I will hazard a guess that it really, really, reeeaaaalllllllllly does.
(Imagine a kid in the 80’s in the UK watching a ‘Come and say G’Day advert’ on TV. Perhaps that was backed up with ad’s in the weekend colour supplements and some daytime TV Australian related content. Social media creates demand and boy oh boy Australia is a very photogenic place.
I would love to see some research around it.