Tourism campaigns are designed to attract tourists and promote cities to boost a country’s economy. However, some ads can be embarrassing, cringy, and even appalling. Italy’s latest tourism campaign titled ‘Open to Meraviglia’ is facing backlash for using an AI version of Botticelli’s Venus as an influencer traveling across different tourist spots in Italy.
The campaign has caused Italians to be furious, with one netizen saying, ‘Only a poor mind can transform one of the greatest masterpieces into an influencer with trendy little dresses!’ Meanwhile, another wrote, ‘They look like lousy prints from a Venetian tourist shop.’ An eagle-eyed observer noticed that the winery featured in a video explaining the tourism campaign was actually in Slovenia, not Italy.
In 2016, the Syrian government released a series of cringy and bizarre ad campaigns to woo tourists and boost the economy of the civil war-torn country. One of the ads used clips from Aleppo and featured the theme song of the popular TV series Game of Thrones for no logical reason. The ad carefully omitted scenes of destruction while promoting the war-ravaged city, which did not sit well with many netizens.
In 2016, Lithuania’s state-funded ad campaign featured stock images of various Nordic and eastern European countries, ironically titled ‘Real is Beautiful,’ leading to the head of Lithuania’s State Tourism Department, Jurgita Kazlauskiene, resigning in the wake of the scandal in 2017.
Rhode Island was mocked mercilessly online for using pictures of famous eateries located in Massachusetts for their own 2016 ad campaign. The ad also featured a confusing slogan, which triggered a meme-fest online, and Rhode Island’s chief marketing officer had to resign as the backlash grew.
In 2014, Singapore’s Tourism Board released a cringy ad aimed at the Philippine market. The three-minute-long video featured a young couple celebrating their anniversary, and they were just seen pointing at things and saying cliche phrases like – ‘I like coming to Singapore’ and ‘Honey, look!’ The video was deleted from Singapore Tourism Board’s official YouTube page as soon as it started going viral for all the wrong reasons.
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