eTravel Project

I am a news junkie. I do lots of my weekly reading on my subway commute to and from work. I was going through my copy of the Economist and my attention was totally caught in this week’s special report: “A world of connections“. The article argues that social networking is here to stay and will influence our life even greater in the future. However, what intrigued me more of this study was the graph shown on the left. The countries with the highest social networking traffic are: 1) Australia; 2) Britain; 3) Italy; 4) United States. So, this morning I conducted a little survey in the office. My Australian colleague thinks that Australia ranks first because of the remoteness of her country. This does not explain why Britain, Italy and the United States are in the top four though. It is a surprise that Italy ranks third since bandwidth penetration is relatively low and 49,9% of Italian families do not own a personal computer. Read the rest of this entry »

Video from iwikiphone.com

This coming October 13-14, I will be attending the 10th edition of the e-Tourism Summit at the Marriott Marquis in NYC with the Monaco Government Tourist Office. I am very excited to meet colleagues of other tourist offices across the US and share best practices. The program and the list off attendees sound interesting. I plan to tweet a lot, the hashtag for the event is #etsnyc. Follow me at www.twitter.com/etravelproject.

Interesting news from GoSeeTell Network: US/CA tourism organizations that have a presence on Twitter has grown to over 300. More than 70 destination accounts have over 1,000 followers.

For a complete list, please visit GoSeeTell.com

[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.