Double Fault: Nadal and celebrity advertising

Rafael Nadal has played his last match as the promotional face of the Balearics. An amicable parting of the ways between the Manacor muscle and the tourism ministry means that the latter will not have to cough up for the final part of its contract, some two million euros.

Is this a case of seeing sense that Nadal’s celebrity amounted to buying a pig in a poke when it came to the islands’ promotion? Actually not. There is an altogether different reason. The tourism ministry is technically bankrupt. It owes 47 million euros, much of the debt being in the form of repayments to financial institutions. The regional government has had to step in and find around 20 million to help the ministry out. The remaining 27 million will need to be recouped from what Joana Barceló terms a “stability plan”.

Stability and the tourism ministry. Chance would be a fine thing. One has to have some sympathy for the minister Barceló, only the fifth incumbent in the post since the current administration took office in 2007. We have come to appreciate, thanks to the various corruption charges and hearings, that the ministry, via its agencies, was out of control. We hadn’t appreciated, until now, just how much out of control it was. The ministry’s debt equates to 70% of its entire budget.

Some months ago, I spoke to Antoni Munar the new director-general of tourism development. Pleasant chap, Sr. Munar, jocularly telling me that there wasn’t any money. I knew about all the problems, he asked. Yes, I joshed in return. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Munar and Barceló face one hell of a challenge.

The first challenge is knowing where on earth the money’s coming from for promotion. The second is knowing on what to spend it. Wisely. And the celebrity promotion has been anything but wise: Douglas, Schiffer, de Lucia, Kournikova (Kournikova for heaven’s sake!) and Nadal – where has any of it led to?

The casting of celebrities has, to an extent, been understandable, assuming, that is, you adhere to the principle of celebrity obsession. In no small part, the use of celebrities reflects the perception, of some, that Mallorca is a celebrity island. Perhaps it is, but such a perception creates a falsehood of shallowness and an image that is unrelated to the lives of many who live in Mallorca and, more importantly, who come to Mallorca on holiday.

Just one of the problems with celebrity advertising, and indeed much of the tourism advertising full stop, is that it treats its market as being one. This is a nonsense. There is no one tourism market, be it in terms of geography, age, income, and any other distinction you care to mention. It treats its market as one, but in reality speaks to hardly any of it. Nadal might have seemed appropriate, but he is also immensely wealthy and he was careering around on a luxury boat.

As a consequence, the advertising excludes the “ordinary” tourist. There may be an element of aspiration, but this is meaningless to an altogether more savvy and cost-conscious tourist than might once have been the case. Turn the celebrity image around, if you will, and imagine someone more “ordinary”. For sake of argument, an actor such as Philip Glenister, one with some Mallorcan connection. Ordinary bloke. Believable enough. But ordinary blokes mean ordinary tourists. And this is exactly the point. Extraordinary celebrities mean extraordinary tourists, and they alone. Extraordinary tourists do not mean tourism in a Mallorcan style.

There were also logisitical and branding problems with the Nadal promotion. Adverts either not appearing or doing so at strange times of the night or on obscure channels. Nadal promoting a brand which doesn’t exist – the Balearics – as opposed to those which do, the Mallorcan brand or those of the other islands.

It is not as though this latter aspect and the need to differentiate between different groups of tourist are not understood. Looking back at the 2009 season, in an interview with “abcmallorca” given by the then director of IBATUR Susanna Sciacovelli, she said that “we want to address customers by areas of interest” and that “every island needs its very own brand image”. So what was with the Nadal promotion, then?

Celebrity advertising is well-established, but its effectiveness is very much open to debate. In India, cricketers are paid huge sums to endorse products. An article from rediff.com of September 2003 by Madhukar Sabnavis, the Ogilvy & Mather agency’s country manager, pointed to advantages, such as the attention-grabbing nature of such advertising, but also to negatives. Take these. “Celebrity advertising is seen as a substitute for absence of ideas.” “(The client) feels that the presence of a well-known face is an easy way out” (when a better alternative can’t be thought of). “Few agencies actually present celebrity advertising as a solution to client problems.”

Nadal was probably an easy way out. Mallorcan, famous, successful. He’ll do. Here’s Sciacovelli again: “TV advertisements featuring him … in the UK and Germany … are (were) highly effective.” They were? And they and Nadal cost a fair wedge. Money that is no longer available, if it ever was. Joana Barceló is hinting that, though there is a hope that Nadal can still perform a promotional function, the days of celebrity advertising are over.

With less money around, let us hope that what there is will be spent wisely, but don’t discount the celebrity making a return. Sabnavis also said that a further reason for celebrity advertising was “a desire to rub shoulders with the glitterati”. And such a desire is the fault not just of those who commission such advertising. It is the double fault of an element of local society that is in thrall to celebrity. Be very careful what you wish for.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

It’ll Be Lonely This Christmas Without Andy Murray

Sports commentators have developed a style of expressiveness which, at moments of triumph, combines a knowing tone of we-knew-it-would-happen-didn’t-we with a precision of stating each word as though followed by an imaginary full stop. We might describe this inflection as “doing a Motson”, after its earliest known exponent. Dan Maskell would never have intoned thus. The only way we knew Dan was still with us was when he would stir from his slumberous drone with a suddenly animated “ooh, I say” with which to startle awake his television audience. Sports commentary of the current day has, by contrast and thanks to Sky, Five Live and talkSPORT, added hypomania to the Motsonic glottal stop. And so it was the other day. On a whooping Five Live. “Rafael. Nadal. From. Manacor. In. Mallorca.”

The words had a strange effect on me, one of a sense of territorial superiority. It was the specific mention of Manacor that emphasised it. I know that place, thought I, even if my acquaintance with the town is limited to sitting in a rush-hour traffic-jam. Nadal has gone from being from Spain, to being from Mallorca, to being from Manacor. It is no longer sufficient for commentators to refer just to the island. Nadal’s celebrity has made him über-Mallorcan. The detail of his Mallorcan-ness grows with his every Open championship; at the Australian we can expect to learn the names of all his neighbours. Dan would never have stood for this. He wouldn’t, for example, have let on that Roy Emerson came from Blackbutt, which was probably just as well.

Nadal is famous not just for coming from Mallorca but also for being the only famous Mallorcan ever. There are others who have had fame thrust upon them, but they are famous for not being famous, like the Catalan author and polymath Ramon Llull. No, Nadal is that famous that he has become Mallorca, or is it the other way round. And he is one of us. Which of course he isn’t, if you happen to be British. But Nadal has been adopted because of the alternative – the Scottish Player, one forever cursed by monotonic moroseness and by slipping up in the third round, so it is best not to mention his name in order to avoid the bad luck that doing so would bring.

One of Nadal’s virtues lies with his being perceived as “a nice boy”, something to which the Scottish Player would find it hard to aspire. It is this, together with the fact that he is the only Mallorcan anyone has ever heard of, that secures him gigs as the face and chest of Mallorcan (Balearic) promotion. And Nadal has just won his first US Open. Now might be the time for a bit of Mallorcan marketing stateside. The only problem is that tourism chiefs are spending their time either about to go into prison or in China, enticing a breed of Chinese tourist with promises of cheap bazars on every Mallorcan high street. That’s not the only problem.

Sadly, despite Nadal’s celebrity, tourism promotion involving him has been a complete disaster. Admittedly, it doesn’t help having an uncle/trainer who slags off Parisians as being “really stupid” when you’ve forked out 400 grands worth of promotional budget to target the French market – as was the case during last year’s French Open. And it also doesn’t help when the director of Spanish tourism in Paris agrees with Uncle Toni. A tourettic momentary lapse of diplomacy perhaps, but it was symptomatic of the Nadal nadir of Mallorcan tourism marketing.

What else, with hindsight though, could you have expected? We now know, courtesy of testimonies before the judge in the corruption case involving the tourism promotion agency (IBATUR), that there was such uncontrolled and unmanaged profligacy at the agency that it doubled the money for the French campaign in providing for a museum of tourism that never came about, while it is alleged that the agency was never subject to proper financial governance. If the agency was capable of playing fast and loose with public money, which it was, it was equally capable of being incompetent when it came to doing what it was meant to do – marketing. Nadal should seek to distance himself from any association, however indirect, with the agency’s cowboys and their legacy.

But Bon Nadal, good old Mr. Christmas, will probably find himself still featuring in ads on some obscure channel at two in the morning, just after an equally obscure sports commentator has finished his Motson at the end of an under-19 handball event from the Ukraine. And come Christmas, as the holiday ads start to kick in, he’ll still be there, floating somewhere in satellite land. But at least he will be there, unlike the Scottish Player; you wouldn’t even get him as the face of a wet week in the Highlands and Islands. It’ll be lonely this Christmas without … Don’t say it, just don’t say it.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Joy To The World

The tourism dignitaries have gathered in London for the World Travel Market. Today, Balearics Day at the trade fair, will see the premiere of the new Rafael Nadal advert for the Balearics. Let joy be unconfined.

What does any of this achieve? The World Travel Market is, in no small part, a set of shop windows for the industry, one that already knows about Mallorca and the Balearics. The same applies to corporate advertising, of the Nadal style. Not everyone may know about the Balearics, which does of course beg a significant question, but they (the consuming tourist public) know about Mallorca. Both the trade fair and the advertising act, at best, as a means of putting Mallorca in the “front of mind” of the industry and the consumer. But so does that of every other destination.

In “The Sunday Times” at the weekend there was a double-page colour advert for Andalucia. Some of the advertising for this region of Spain has been sensational. Its TV advert, luscious colours, dramatic scenery and vibrant flamenco chill music, was outstanding. But it was still an advert for a region. Just as advertising, of the Nadal variety, is for a region. It may all create attention and therefore, possibly, some action, but that is all it does. 

In the case of the Andalucia advert, there is a scrawled blurb across the two pages: “I want you to share my energy, my happiness, my strength, my warmth … A thousand monuments beyond compare. And just one question: When are you coming?” This last bit, the question, is the only good part of this. The rest is utterly ridiculous and pretentious. An attempt to make personal the impersonal, supported by a photo of a beach at sunset and a church in daytime. Whatever good it may achieve is undone by a small logo at the bottom which refers to “Junta de Andalucia”. Someone might have pointed out that the word “junta” has negative connotations where the British are concerned. 

Be this as it may. Advertising for Andalucia, for Turkey, for Egypt, for wherever you may care to mention, it all follows the same pattern. Mediterranean destinations tout the same things, the same sorts of images; they display warmth, sun, sea, culture, people, scenery. There is no differentiation. It is why much of the advertising is questionable. Its main purpose is to be there. In other words, it would be conspicuous by its absence. 

This advertising is part aspirational and part image-making, but it fits a particular aspirational class and one attracted by a specific image. For all that it is intended to promote the whole gamut of a destination’s offer, it does nothing of the sort. Holidaymakers are not a homogeneous group. They differ in all manner of respects. For this reason and for all the attention that gets paid to the Nadal-style corporate advertising (by the media and letter writers), it can only ever act as a starting-point (if that) or as a reinforcement to those already familiar with the island. 

How do those who sanction this promotion believe that the process then works? Do they assume that there exists a hierarchical decision-making system? At the top comes Nadal, then there is a series of moves before the holidaymaker chooses a specific resort or hotel. Is this how it is meant to work? If it doesn’t, and I don’t believe it does, then what’s the point of the thing at the top? This is how it used to work, back in the days when the family would be assaulted by Boxing Day adverts, opt for Mallorca and then head off to the nearest travel agency and pretty much have the choice of resort and hotel made for them.

Consumers take more or less as read the elements of a Mediterranean destination, be it Mallorca, Andalucia or wherever. They do so because the advertising and the images are essentially the same. As much as some consumers may work down from image advertising, they also work upwards, if not more so, in making their choices, without necessarily specifying a destination. And they all have different priorities, the satisfying of which is made in no small part through the informal channels of the internet – the forums, the blogs, the this, the that. The choice of a Turkey over a Mallorca lies largely with word of mouth, with a critical mass of recommendation, with a curious incuriosity that is the consequence of somewhere having become the latest in-place, and with a sense of “oh, let’s give that a try”. And much of this is predicated on price, on hotel (often all-inclusive), on specific offers, on what there is for the kids and all the rest. It is with the very detail of the holiday that the decision lies, not with the broad sweep of a Nadal on a yacht.

The tourism chiefs have singularly failed to understand the new dynamic of holiday decision-making or to appreciate the subversive influence of the internet; subversive in that, though these chiefs see the immense value of internet promotion, the internet acts independently of the corporate advertising. The real challenge lies in attempting to formalise the informal, of working this subversive element so that it favours a particular destination, and not just an island or a region, but a resort or even a particular complex. These chiefs need to cotton on to the reality of how consumers function on the internet, through social networks and so on, and to exploit these subversive factions themselves. If they don’t, all that lavish spending on corporate advertising is a waste.

Same Old Story

Just as sure as night follows day and as Real Mallorca slump from one financial crisis to the next, so the winter tourism woes arouse a regular “Bulletin” statement about the need for a “bit of imagination”. Oh, the imagination of calling for a bit of imagination. But against a backdrop of the regional government’s tourism minister bemoaning the fact that he has only a mere 30 million or so to spend on promotion, I do agree with the view in the same piece in the paper that diverting a large part of that wad towards Rafa Nadal makes arguable sense. Has the presence of the Manacor muscle made any discernible difference to Mallorcan and Balearic tourism since he has been used for advertising? No, I don’t imagine it has. Much as Nadal may be an obvious “face” of local tourism, perhaps that’s the problem. It’s so obvious, no-one takes any notice. There is also the problem that, Mallorcan boy though he is, his world is quite different to that of most mere tourism mortals who do not earn vast fortunes on the tennis circuit and take to yachts bouncing across the waves off the south coast of the island. It’s all a matter of making a connection. They should scrap the whole thing; it isn’t working.

The paper goes on by reckoning that half this promotion budget should be thrown at winter tourism. All well and good, but not much use if the airlines don’t fly, the hotels don’t open and bars and restaurants are shut. And doubly not much use when aspects of the winter scene are currently so poorly promoted. Let me give an example. The regional government’s tourism website is meant to give information about the so-called “Winter in Mallorca” programme. This may not amount to a lot, but it still amounts to something. There is a PDF of the monthly schedule of events. For October. November’s has still to be uploaded. That’s how good promotion gets. 

Whether winter or summer, the internet does, nevertheless, hold the clue to much promotional effort. Elsewhere in the paper, it says that the tourism minister is looking to exploit the internet. Good for him, even if the omens are not good. As ever, there is reference to cultural, gastronomic and sports tourism – all the same old thing – as well as to online reservations. It is not as if there are not already innumerable ways of booking via the internet. It makes one despair if this is all the tourism ministry has to say. Then there are the sites themselves. As with the Nadal advertising, which itself features on the Balearics tourism site, there is a sense of making people feel good about all this – the people being the tourism authorities themselves. Look at us! We’re doing something! 

The informational style of websites, allied to advertising, is largely old hat. For all the good it does, the tourism authorities would be better off placing promotions on the likes of Alpharooms and all the other booking agencies which are just as important, if not more, than the corporate websites for the Balearics and Mallorca. But for all this, there is a complete failure to recognise the shift in internet usage – towards Web 2.0 and towards social networks. Even if there were to be the odd myspace created, chances are it would be done half-heartedly and moreover with a non-native speaker controlling it and therefore communicating incorrectly with the target audiences, be they British, German, Russian or whatever. 

Were the tourism bods to appreciate that there is a whole different way of conveying messages and interactively communicating with the markets, they could build a far more meaningful internet presence. But they are most unlikely to. And the reasons why not lie with, yes, that lack of imagination, but also the obsession with corporate-style sites that are operations in promotional self-aggrandizement. 

I have a solution to the tourism minister’s lack of funding. Slash the budget even more and then make them think how they can make their money work harder. Because currently, there is no evidence that throwing greater amounts at promotion would be any more valuable. You would end up with more Nadal, more elaborate promotional literature stacked up in the tourism offices, itself largely an exercise in job creation for all those who can find no other employment than design, and more of the same informational, corporate websites.

We Are The Robots

The Calle Bot in Puerto Pollensa. So bad they named it after someone’s arse. But that was then. Back then when a local road was still an ankle- and axel-breaking adventure, when it was pitted and potted, cratered and crumbling, not so much a road as the aftermath of a cluster-bomb attack, a lunar landscape to be tackled preferably by amphibious landing craft, especially when it had rained and the craters would become sealets of untranquillity dived into by several tons of truck and engulfing the unwary passer-by in a tsunami of water, sand and shit. Oh my Bot of long ago.

 

Here was the finest example of non-road, a thorough thoroughfare misrepresentation, a whole collection of holes. Magnificently decrepit, it was perfect in its symbolism of an imperfectly functioning system that was once what we knew to be Mallorca. Not anymore. Firstly they tarmacked it over, took away the traps, the obstacles, made it smooth, a soulless short cut-through past the Pollensa Park where previously had been the joy ride of joyous swerving past collapsed whatever passed for the surface. Yet they still maintained a two-way street where barely one street could be accommodated. All those failed manoeuvres past the parked delivery lorries in the hope of a pull-in point, only to find none and to be confronted by the leviathan of a coach and a terminally impatient driver waving with the back of his hand as though he was swatting away a fly. And to your rear an hombre de furgoneta blanca, himself backed up by a growing jam of vehicles. Oh my Bot of less long ago, a van driver hooting up the backside.

 

But now they have made it one way. The bottom has fallen out of Calle Bot. When two-way at least it was still a case of number two’s. Now but one in Bot. They should re-name it.

 

 

Nadal’s chest

The muscle is back, and is displaying more muscle than normal. Rafael Nadal is to appear in a new promotional campaign aboard a yacht, the wind blowing his hair and his “torso desnudo”, it says provocatively in a “Diario” report. That doesn’t mean he’s got his kit off, but has forgotten to button up his shirt. To coincide with the World Travel Market in November, the new, windswept Rafa will further be the face and now also the chest of Balearics promotion. By the time they get to the third promotional campaign (this new one will be the second), perhaps he’ll be in speedos. Something for somebody to enjoy no doubt. What effect all this Nadal-ing has on the masses coming to the islands one doesn’t really know. It would still surely make more sense to have promotions for the individual islands. The Balearics just do not hack it as a “brand”. Any brand should be supported by the right advertising. Get him to advertise Mallorca and leave it at that, kit diminuto or otherwise.