Italia much more (or much less?)
3 04 2009[youtube width="325" height="244"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcXM5LdgWp4[/youtube]
Brand: ENIT (Italian Tourist Board)
Execution: A one-minute youtube video that displays numerous Italian tourist highlights: from the Coliseum to Sicily, from Florence to Naples to name a few. ENIT (the Italian Tourist Board) commissioned a 10 million euro ($13 million) international advertising campaign called Italia Much More to reinvigorate its stagnating tourist industry and attract more international visitors.
Description: The video is divided in three parts (Rome, Venice and Naples) that can be shown separately. Each one of these segments is introduced briefly by a specific target market (even though it does not look that clear): Rome by a group of friends, Venice by a couple, Naples by a family. At the end, the video directs people to the www.italiamuchmore.com web site, which is just a landing page where you can watch the video and where you can find the links to the US, German and British Italian tourist boards.
What We Like: Italy is Italy and every screenshot you use… It is going to be beautiful.
What We Don’t: However, there is more of what we do not like here. The video is overloaded with sequences of sightseeing that are distracting. In spite of the fact that the three different parts of the video are introduced by 1) a group of friends, 2) a couple and 3) a family, the message to the audience is diluted. The whole thing does not speak to the senses. It does not connect to any specific lifestyle since it is more “look at me and I cool I am” sort of thing rather than see what we could experience together.
The landing page where the video directs looks on the cheap and does not invite to any call to action, but displays the URLs of the markets this campaign pursues. Plus, it is not search engine friendly: the title displays ENIT (I challenge any American, German or British visitor to guess what ENIT stands for) and does not use meta description, metanames and metatags in the HTML source.
Conclusions: A wasted opportunity for Italy. Much less of the sightseeing would have been better too.
Beside all we don’t like about how this much less interesting operation has been built, there is one clear result that’s really negative: once more our Country managers are showing the total lack of any vision, strategy and management capability about the incoming travel market (and not only…).
And the pity is that we’ve a lot of good examples around us, it would be enough looking at them….
Davide