Off-beat ads a hit in U.S.

Press, 25 February 1987, Page 18

Off-beat ads a hit in U.S.

From

JOHN N. HUTCHISON

in San Francisco

Off-beat advertisements have served New Zealand tourism promotion so well in reaching the American public that a new tongue-in-cheek campaign will be pitched at magazine readers across the United States again this year. A new series of ads is being developed for the Tourist and Publicity Department which will succeed that in which repeated apologies were made for the non-performance of a fictitious advertising writer, Harry Bright, in New Zealand. Mr Bright was supposed to be preparing texts for the advertisements, but never got around to his job because he was so entranced by his visits to New Zealand attractions that he never found time to write about them.

The Harry Bright campaign was recently entered in a nationwide contest with 368 other ad-

vertisements from 700 magazines and was chosen as one of 24 now being judged in the finals. The advertising agency which produces the winner will win a prize of SUSIOO,OOO. The New Zealand Government’s tourism . advertising in this country has won unusual honours before. It took a prestigious national first place in 1981 with an ad illustrated with a fanciful and colourful map which incorporated Alaska, England, Hawaii, Norway, Ireland, Japan and Switzerland, above a text beginning, “This is what New Zealand looks like to the experienced traveller.” The ad capitalised on the theme that New Zealand offers the visitor world-wide counterparts in one nation.

Mr John Rasmussen, New Zealand’s senior travel commissioner, headquartered in Los

Angeles, was in San Francisco recently to confer with the travel commissioner in San Francisco on a new campaign, which will also use an off-beat twist to intrigue potential American visitors.

“Massive uprising in New Zealand,” is the large-type headline on a colour photo of the lupines in new bloom along the Hollyford River. “Rush Hour Traffic in New Zealand,” another caption will read, over an illustration of a peaceful mob of pasturing sheep. “Life in the Fast Lane” is the title of a rural landscape showing a dirt road into a remote farm.

The ads subtly suggest to the reader thht not every travel destination today can offer the calm and security found in New Zealand.