South Australians once thought a previous campaign to sell the state missed the mark. Matthew Abraham says it was a PR high point compared to a new strategy keeping taxpayers in the dark.
Come back, Old Mate, all is forgiven.
When it first aired, the former Liberal Government’s Old Mate tourism campaign was widely mocked as a dud.
‘Old Mate’ tears up in SA Tourism Commission’s uplifting 2019 ad encouraging east-coasters to jet in and soak up the vibe.
The “viral” SA Tourism videos featured an old codger in tears after discovering all the fun and thrills he’s missed by not visiting South Australia as a young party animal. That seemed to be the message, anyway.
Like the Yellow Pages “Not Happy, Jan” and IKEA’s “Start the car, start the c-a-a-r”, the term “Old Mate” quickly found a home in our local vocab. In a trademark, self-mocking Adelaide way, we’ve adopted him.
Sure, it was a hokey attempt to boost tourism, but it was a step up from former Liberal Premier Dean Brown’s plan to put some lead in our pencil.
He wanted “SA: Going All The Way” to be enshrined as the state’s new numberplate slogan. That one never quite got out of the jacuzzi.
Old Mate looks like a stroke of pure marketing genius, however, compared to the “influencer” strategy now being pursued by the SA Tourism Commission.
It’s been a megabucks trainwreck for the government and the strategy’s defender-in-chief, Tourism Minister Zoe Bettison.
Being Tourism Minister has to be one of the softest gigs in Cabinet.
But Zoe and the Influencers has hit more bum notes than Meatloaf’s performance for the MCG masses at the 2011 AFL Grand Final.
It all started to run off the rails in January with influencers being flown in for a top-shelf, all-expenses-paid night grooving to UK singer Sam Smith, at the d’Arenberg Cube in McLaren Vale.
Smith was paid a secret amount, but likely somewhere north of $500,000, to perform for the juiced-up crowd that InDaily reports was made up of “about 300 social media influencers, personalities and radio competition winners”.
Deputy Opposition Leader John Gardner said this week: “Sam Smith got great value for money out of this. South Australia’s taxpayers did not.”
The Oxford Dictionary defines an influencer as a person with “the ability to influence potential buyers of a product or service by promoting or recommending the items on social media”. That’s not the half of it.
The social media may be Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok or whatever rings their cash register bells.
It can be dressed up to the nines by marketing geniuses, but when stripped down to its undies, SA’s influencer strategy is capitalism in the raw.
Social media “influencers” from interstate or overseas are being invited by the government to attend events in SA and have a good time, all paid for by taxpayers.
They then beam photos or videos of themselves enjoying said lovely time to their many thousands of “followers”.
This raises “brand awareness” among the followers, who flock here in their dozens.
It’s how the influencer game works. It plays people for suckers. They should be called manipulators, not influencers. Governments shouldn’t touch this stuff with a barge pole
Influencers rarely, if ever, disclose who’s paying for their junkets, because it’s sure not them.
This last bit is the key to the marketing power of the influencer. It also goes to the insidious dishonesty at the core of using influencers to market our city and state.
Strict rules apply to all mainstream media, particularly talk radio, to disclose if a product, service or policy endorsement has cash or strings attached. This enables people to make a judgement about the merits of the goods or services being spruiked.
If it’s a hidden “cash for comment” deal, the media regulators come down on it like a barrow of bricks.
But the entire, unregulated influencer game relies on undisclosed cash for comment – be it a text, photo, meme or video.
It’s how the influencer game works. It plays people for suckers. They should be called manipulators, not influencers.
Governments shouldn’t touch this stuff with a barge pole, and instead should educate people, especially the young, about the pitfalls of being professionally “influenced”.
This week, the government released the results of an “evaluation” – it sounds better than calling it an “inquiry” – into the Sam Smith influencer affair.
Minister Bettison stuck to her talking points, declaring the event generated an “advertising equivalent value” of $32 million.
Incredibly, the government even claims the Smith concert generated a potential “global audience reach”, whatever that is, of 1.58 billion people. The Liberals point out this means it attracted 80 million more viewers than the FIFA World Cup final.
While the government happily spruiks the “advertising equivalent value” of the concert, it goes all coy on the cost to taxpayers, hiding behind the good old “commercial in confidence” excuse.
Bettison, however says it was “under $1 million, quite substantially under that amount”. Premier Peter Malinauskas has previously said it was around $500,000, so pick a number, any number, it’s only your money.
In a grilling by FIVEaa’s Jade Robran on Monday, Bettison said the event was a “unique and disruptive opportunity”. She seemed to like the word disruptive, whatever it means, using it a few times.
When pressed on the behaviour of influencers gargling free grog, the Minister said the government needed to update its “social media influencer selection model” and needed to “implement a new contractual agreement for that influencer activity”.
“I think we need to make sure those interactions are credible,” she said. “We want them to be authentic, we want them to be organic, we want people to connect with who their followers are, but I think we should be clear on those contractual arrangements.”
Has it only just occurred to the SA Tourism Commission, the Minister and the Government that it needs rigorous processes for selecting influencers and clear contracts on what they do in return for government cash?
Bettison argues that it was a “unique opportunity” to stage the “promotional event” because “we know that if it wasn’t here in South Australia, it was highly likely to be somewhere like Sydney, under the Harbour Bridge or the Opera House”.
The influencer review means the government plans to have a “social media monitoring platform to help support and provide definitive outcomes when working with influencers”.
It’s a shame this revelation – it’s called probity and taking care of taxpayer cash – has come too late to stop an even dopier influencer campaign revealed this week.
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Young TikTok “creators” are being invited to traipse around SA with fabulous free trips while uploading videos stating they’re “ready to run amok in the most boring state ever”.
Here’s a thought missing from the influencer “evaluation”: Just ditch the whole influencer marketing game completely.
Not only is it an ugly business with dubious, fuzzy benefits, it has another, more fundamental moral problem.
The AFL Gather Round last month – largely funded by taxpayers – was an affordable and fun four days for tens of thousands of South Australians. Everyone was invited to that party.
In the middle of a crushing cost-of-living crisis, influencers are being paid to have a good time by taxpayers who aren’t invited to their expensive, exclusive parties and, even if they were, many simply couldn’t afford a glass of lemonade at the bar.
As Old Mate might say, that makes it a dud.
Matthew Abraham’s political column is published on Fridays. Matthew can be found on Twitter as @kevcorduroy. It’s a long story.
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