Best Island in the World?

Much as I love the industry press, I always approach it with a degree of caution for fear of buying in to to our own bullshit.

Perhaps more so than any other industry, we have our own pet topics and we talk things up. To an outsider who landed in our world, Twitter is apparently the zenith of communications and the Whitsundays must surely be the most visited islands on the planet.

Mumbrella recently reported that the Whitsundays aren't in fact enjoying quite the boom that hype about the Best Job in The World campaign has led marketers to expect. That's because, in the non-advertising world, the campaign ran, spiked popular interest in Hamilton Island and then gradually faded - a fact which escaped us, because it continued to grab the headlines in our press.

The graph below, from Whitsundays online blog (for the full article see the post below) shows the spike of interest at the time of the campaign, in terms of online searches for Whitsundays, Whitsunday and Hamilton Island in 2008 to 2009.

But, for the advertising industry, thanks to awards, PR and general frenzy, the chart is more like this:

So, I tune out, turn off and drop out of adland as often as possible. I have entirely random interests and tastes. If I'm going to have a warped perspective - which is inevitable, in the absence of a god's eye view - I try to make sure it's warped in all sorts of directions.