French Row Recalls Bermuda Photo Debacle
France has taken a page out of Bermuda’s old tourism marketing book — and not everyone is impressed with the results.
A recent tourism promotion designed to lure British vacationers to France this summer hit a major snag when a scene of a family jogging along an idyllic, boulder-fringed beach turned out to be taken thousands of miles away — in Cape Town, South Africa.
The poster in question, “Sprint finish on the Northern France Coast”, actually showed a beach in Llandudno, a suburb of Cape Town. London fashion photographer Bradford Bird, who grew up there, recognised the familiar outcrops and told the “Mail Online” newspaper: “I thought “that’s a little bit cheeky” and put a picture of the billboard up on my Facebook page.”
French tourism officials have replaced the offending images on their website, and the British advertising agency in charge of the campaign has taken responsibility for the incident, saying the coastal scenes were selected from among 3,000 stock photographs of French beaches.
In 2003, Bermuda found itself on a similarly sticky wicket when magazine ads showcasing the island included photos taken in Hawaii and Florida.
“USA Today” reminds readers today [Apr.2] that Bermuda tourism officials stood by their advertising agency’s decision to use stock photos from other vacation destinations to promote the island.
“It’s clearly not a Bermuda beach,” Bermuda photographer Graeme Outerbridge complained to the “Honolulu Advertiser” at the time. “It’s pretty outrageous for us to be using elements of other tourist destinations in our advertising campaign.”
Renee Webb, Bermuda’s Minister of Tourism, argued there was nothing wrong with using stock photos.
“What is important about the stock photography is that it does not misrepresent Bermuda,” she told ABC News.
She told the US network’s John Stossel stock photos were cheaper, because it would cost thousands of dollars to hire a photographer and model to get that shot in Bermuda.
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Nothing new in the promotion world. On a smaller scale, but still deceiving, a now defunct Bermuda tourboat company used to use a photo of people on a beach that they never took people anywhere near in their promotional material.