Fresh Thinking at Jamaica Tourist Board please!!

The adverts are back. They are enticing; seductive; alluring; beautiful. They display scenery only found in Jamaica and it is indeed Jamaica that the ads are promoting.
More specifically they invite the observer to come and visit Jamaica. There’s nothing wrong with that, surely, a beautiful advert?
But there is a lot wrong with it.
I stare at the advertising billboard as I await a train to London from a train platform in South London. It’s a big billboard and the advert is part of a London-wide campaign so it’s bound to have cost a lot of money - money from the Jamaica Tourist Board that the Government and people of Jamaica can ill-afford to waste. But this is a waste of money for sure.

That billboard fills the foreground of my vista and in the background the sky is grey. Yes, wouldn’t we all rather be there in sunny Jamaica than be here under the grey skies of England. But in the mid-distance there is a partly completed building just outside the grounds of the train station. This is an unfinished 4 storey apartment complex which would have been worth a few million pounds upon completion. It has on its grounds a 50 foot builder’s crane which hasn’t been used for the past 3 months. In fact there hasn’t been a single worker on this building site in the same 3 month period and the chances are that is not likely to change for the next year or so.
A year ago such apartment complexes were a sound investment for the average London citizen but now it’s all as though a dream. Now London is full of unfinished developments and people are losing their jobs left, right and centre. My how the world has changed in a matter of months!!

This unfinished building represents what comes between UK prospective tourists leaving the grey skies of London behind for a trip to beautiful Jamaica. For those who were unaware, we are in the midst of a major financial and economic crisis in the UK. So trying to get people to spend money they don’t have on any far-flung holiday with this shotgun, blunderbuss, marketing approach is a waste of money.

In a way it sadly illustrates the bankruptcy of ideas at the current Jamaica Tourist Board.
Its Old Hat!! No innovation!! The JTB is relying on expensive billboard advertising London-wide campaigns to market Jamaica but it’s woefully out of step with the average customer’s reality.

This sort of campaign campaign is now an invalid approach to bolstering the flagging tourism industry in Jamaica.

So thank you JTB for brightening up the London skyline with beautiful photos of Jamaica and making me feel homesick. But stop wasting the Jamaican tax-payers money and start some real innovative cost-effective, 21st Century marketing that will more cost-effectively entice likely travellers - those who can and will - to visit Jamaica.