France wants tourists to come and visit. So much so, in fact, that a tourism campaign used images of a South African beach to represent the type of beautiful scenery that France has on offer. Cheeky or what?
The Irish Independent reports that a French tourism campaign has completely backfired after it was revealed that France was really touting a beach located 5,500 miles away in Cape Town, South Africa. The tourism campaign was designed to entice British tourists across the Channel this summer when the Olympics are taking place in London.
French tourism officials ploughed money into the high-profile advertising campaign, spending over half a million euros putting the posters all over the London Underground and buying up expensive supplement space in newspapers and magazines.
You have to wonder how none of them realised that the beach in one of the pictures didn’t actually belong to France. In fact it was a fashion photographer who spotted the mistake first (if it was a genuine mistake rather than a cheeky marketing ploy, that is). However French officials have claimed that it was a simple mix up at the British advertising agency that created the posters. Hmm…
Bradford Bird lives in London at present but he grew up in Llandudno, Cape Town – the area that houses the beach in the pictures.
“I grew up in Llandudno and so I recognised the beach as soon as I saw it. I thought ‘that’s a little bit cheeky’ and put a picture of the billboard up on my Facebook page,” he said.
After being altered to the error, tourism officials from France replaced the image on their website immediately.
The British advertising agency that created the posters that feature the Cape Town beach have issued an apology for the error. The managing director has said it was “a simple and unintentional error.”
Apparently the images for the pictures were taken from a source of 3,000 stock photographs of French beaches. By mistake some images from around the world were included in the search and no one copped it.
The advertising agency has said that it is now putting new systems in place to make sure that a similar mistake never occurs.
Again though, we have to ask, why didn’t the French themselves realise that the beach wasn’t actually in France?
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