‘This isn’t a movie . . . it’s a tourism ad for Australia’: The Dundee campaign and the semiotics of audiovisual tourism promotion

Introduction

The media have long been recognised for the crucial role they play in shaping discourses about travel and tourism as well as for their power to influence and construct tourist experiences (Lester and Scarles, 2013: 255). John Urry (2002), for example, argues that tourism practices are primarily concerned with visual consumption, particularly with the commodification of images produced by movies and television. If media objects such as tourism commercials, movies, TV travel series and virtual reality (VR) experiences are said to be essential to tourism marketing and promotion, what are their aesthetic, thematic and institutional characteristics? Also, what do these extremely different media forms have in common, in terms of their tourism promotional potential? And how is their promotional potential dependent upon their respective aesthetic and institutional specificities? This article aims to answer such questions by proposing the first theorization of audiovisual media promotion as a distinct media field. A theorization of tourism audiovisual promotion will shed new light on the ways in which media shape both tourism experiences and discourses about travel. Furthermore, the analysis of the aesthetic, thematic and institutional features of tourism audiovisual promotion will contribute to a better understanding of tourism marketing and communication more broadly.

Recently, the relationship between media and tourism has been receiving increasing academic attention. Scholars such as Friedberg (1993), Urry (2002) and Beeton et al. (2006) have explored the converging historical trajectories of media and tourism. Similarly, building upon Urry’s work, Crouch et al. (2005: 1) claim that in the digital age, film and TV viewers are already tourists who constantly cross boundaries through the physical and simulated mobility allowed by the omnipresence of electronic images. However, despite its omnipresence tourism audiovisual promotion remains severely under researched. Very few scholars, for example, have attempted to examine the aesthetic, thematic and institutional characteristics of the tourism audiovisual commercial (Gong and Tung, 2017; Pan et al., 2011, 2017; Pan and Hanusch, 2011; White, 2018). Bonelli (2018) formulated the concept of ‘tourism film’ to account for some of the various forms of audiovisual tourism promotion including films, TV commercials (TVCs) and digital videos; however, to date, there has been no significant attempt to develop a theorization of tourism audiovisual promotion. The field of tourism audiovisual promotion poses a significant conceptual challenge as it consists of a vast array of diverse media texts. While some of these texts have an explicit promotional function, others are not primarily conceived for promotional purposes. Furthermore, many of these media texts (either with primary or secondary promotional purposes) often fulfil other cultural, political and social functions. This article will aim to fill a major gap in the literature by developing a theorization of audiovisual tourism promotion. In particular, it will argue that the meaning and function of tourism audiovisual promotional texts are determined by a discursive framework which in turn is informed by textual and contextual factors. While the textual factors pertain to the aesthetic and narrative specificity of the tourism promotional texts, the contextual ones refer to the way in which these texts are circulated and received.

The article will provide an overview of the history of audiovisual promotion to illustrate the wide variety of its manifestations. Audiovisual tourism promotion consists of a plethora of various media forms which have relied upon an equally varied array of aesthetic strategies and have often borrowed each other’s stylistic and narrative conventions. From this point of view, this historical overview will provide essential context for the examination of a recent case study – the Dundee campaign launched by Tourism Australia in 2018. The analysis of the Dundee campaign provides a means to illustrate some of the semiotic mechanisms which underpin the production, circulation and reception of audiovisual tourism promotion.

In January 2018, two trailers for a film titled Dundee: The Son of a Legend Returns Home were released online. The trailers featured American actor Danny McBride, as the son of Michael ‘Crocodile’ Dundee, playing alongside a cast of Australian stars including Chris Hemsworth, Hugh Jackman and Margot Robbie. The trailers marketed the film as a new instalment of the popular Crocodile Dundee film franchise (1986–2001) featuring Paul Hogan. A few weeks later, a different version of the trailer was broadcast during the Super Bowl final. Midway through the video, the character played by Danny McBride claims that ‘This isn’t a movie . . . it’s a tourism ad for Australia’ thus revealing that the original trailers were part of a sophisticated marketing campaign orchestrated by Tourism Australia. Both the original trailers and the Super Bowl commercial circulated virally online and were followed by a series of spin-off videos inviting tourists to visit Australia as the ‘set’ of the film. In the months following its release, the Dundee campaign received several industry awards and was deemed to have contributed to a significant increase in tourist arrivals to Australia (Droga5, 2019).

Besides representing a successful example of a viral marketing campaign, the Dundee videos simultaneously illustrate and problematise the definition of the tourism commercial. The article will combine a textual analysis of the stylistic and thematic elements of the Dundee videos with a political economy examination of the context of their production and circulation, thus attempting to contribute to a better understanding of the tourism commercial as a constantly shifting media form.

Tourism audiovisual promotion: a conceptual challenge

Tourism promotion has often been understood as a component of destination image formation (Beerli and Martín, 2004; Govers et al., 2007). According to Gartner (1994), for example, tourism relies heavily on ‘image formation agents’ to construct desirable destination images for prospective tourists. According to Urry (2002), advertising plays an essential role in enticing tourists to visit a certain destination:

Overtime via advertising and the media, the images generated of different tourist gazes come to constitute a closed self-perpetuating system of illusions which provide the tourist with the basis for selecting and evaluating potential places to visit. (p. 7)

Although a number of scholars argue that advertising is crucial to destination image formation and more broadly to the survival of the tourism industry (Govers et al., 2007; McCabe, 2010; Morgan and Pritchard, 1998; Urry, 2002), very little attention has been devoted to both the aesthetic characteristics of tourism commercials and the contexts of their production and circulation. In their pioneering study about tourism TVCs. Pan et al. (2011) deploy video content analysis procedures to examine the ‘framing’ of New Zealand destination images. Pan et al. draw upon Entman’s (1993) concept of ‘framing’ as the selection of certain aspects of reality to make them more salient, in order to examine how tourism TVCs shape New Zealand’s destination image. Building upon Pan et al. (2011), several other scholars have investigated the impact of tourism commercials on destination image formation. Pan (2011), for example, argued that tourism commercials which combined familiar and exotic images and showed people interacting with a pristine environment were positively related to audience desires to visit the destination depicted. In a similar study, Leung et al. (2017) found that the repetition of certain shots in Destination Promotion Videos (DPVs) for online circulation is effective in positively enhancing travellers’ perceived destination image. Gong and Tung (2017), by contrast, point out that promotional videos which revolve around a fictional narrative have a stronger impact on increasing the desire to visit the destination in question. Gong and Tung draw upon the growing body of literature on film-induced tourism (Hudson and Ritchie, 2005; Kim et al., 2007; Riley and Van Doren, 1992) to claim that viewers could be motivated to travel to a certain destination by a film’s characters, actors, plot and settings. In one of the most comprehensive accounts of film-induced tourism, Sue Beeton (2016) argues that although that is not their main economic of artistic goal, feature films and TV dramas can often act as promotional vehicles for certain destinations.

In their respective studies about early tourism promotional films, Peterson (2006) and Leotta (2011) concluded that early tourism films played a crucial role in both forging a sense of national identity and boosting civic pride in a number of Western countries. Similarly, White (2018) discussed how Qantas, the Australian national airline, relied upon the construction of a ‘commercial nationalism’ in its recent tourism advertising. In their analysis of, respectively, Korean and Australian case studies, Pan et al. (2017) and Fullerton and Kendrick (2011) found that tourism TVCs are also important ‘soft power’ tools in the context of international diplomacy. While the majority of the studies on this topic have focused on the attempt to measure the effectiveness of tourism TVCs on either destination image or soft power, very few scholars have accounted for the historical evolution of audiovisual tourism promotion. A significant exception is represented by Leotta and Ross (2018) who in their analysis of a set of international VR travel documentaries discussed the aesthetic differences and similarities between contemporary VR travel experiences and early tourism films. Another major contribution to the historiography of audiovisual tourism promotion is represented by Bonelli (2018) who attempted to trace the evolution of the representation of Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand, in tourism audiovisual advertising from the early twentieth century until the late 2010s. Bonelli (2018) also formulated the notion of ‘tourism film’ as a bridging construct which covers some of the formal manifestations of tourism audiovisual promotion. According to Bonelli (2018), tourism film is ‘an audiovisual media form that features one or more geographical locations’ (p. 41). Tourism films are often the result of cross-institutional collaborations and have ‘an explicit or implicit promotional goal inviting viewers to virtually or physically experience the location depicted’ (Bonelli, 2018: 41). Bonelli’s conceptualisation of the tourism film is indebted to John Urry’s (2002) notion of the tourist gaze as he argues that the representation of place in tourism film is framed by a socially constructed way to look at the land, shaped around certain pre-existing representations and expectations about the landscape. Although the term ‘tourism film’ evokes a celluloid-based material support, it connects some current forms of tourism promotion such as the TVC to a long history of film-based texts.

One of the major challenges for the existing scholarship on tourism audiovisual promotion is characterised by the lack of a unanimously accepted theoretical framework and terminology to account for the multiplicity of its media forms. Scott McCabe (2010) acknowledges the range of tourism advertising channels, but does not engage in a discussion of their specificities. Pan et al. (2011), Pan and Hanusch (2011) and Pan (2011) focus on tourism TVCs, while Shani et al. (2010) and Leung et al. (2017) discuss promotional videos conceived for online distribution which they define as DPVs. Neither Shani et al. (2010) nor Leung et al. (2017), however, attempt to define the differences and similarities between tourism TVCs and DPVs. Similarly, Gong and Tung (2017) refer to certain types of online promotional videos as ‘mini-movies’ while Fullerton and Kendrick (2011) refer to similar videos as simply ‘tourism advertising’. Finally, Bonelli used the term ‘tourism film’ in relation to a number of different media objects including TVCs, DPVs and actual films, but omits from his discussion platforms and technologies such as VR, augmented reality (AR), user-generated videos and so on. None of the terms mentioned above – TVC, DPV or tourism film – accounts for the variety of tourism audiovisual promotion texts which includes a plethora of media forms such as tourism and travel films (both short and feature length), travel TV shows, safety videos produced by airlines to promote their countries as tourism destinations, user-generated content (such as amateur footage circulated by tourists on social media) and so on.

In this article, I will use the term ‘audiovisual tourism promotion’ to refer to a variety of media technologies, aesthetic forms and platforms for distribution. As mentioned earlier, not all these texts are originally conceived as having a primary promotional purpose. Similarly, some audiovisual texts which are explicitly designed as destination promotional tools often serve other functions such as the promotion of civic pride and the forging of national identity. Despite their significant formal, thematic and production differences, these media texts share a certain commitment to both place and the shaping of the viewer’s tourist gaze. According to John Urry (2002), a prevalent mode of the tourist gaze is the ‘mediatized gaze’ shaped by movies and television, ‘a collective gaze where particular sites, famous for their mediated nature are viewed’ (p. 151). The proliferation of representations of material reality, which Baudrillard (1994) calls ‘simulacra’, has led to a ‘regime of signification whose fundamental trait is de-differentiation’ (Lash, 1990: 5). The endless production and circulation of images of tourism destinations across different media platforms and aesthetic forms have fostered a gradual conflation of layers of meaning, which in turn has transformed these places into ‘floating signifiers’. As signifiers with a vague signified, ‘floating signifiers’ mean different things to different people, standing for many or even any signifieds. Cultural theorists like Stuart Hall (1997) deployed the concept of floating signifier to explain fluid social constructs such as race. Similarly, BRoland arthes (1977) used the concept to refer to the fact that certain non-linguistic signs are so open to interpretation that they constituted a ‘floating chain of signifieds’ (p. 37). The notion of floating signifier aligns with the encoding/decoding model of communication formulated by Stuart Hall (1973). According to Hall, media audiences are presented with messages that are decoded, or interpreted in different ways depending on their personal experiences, cultural background and economic standing. Audiences’ decoding processes play a crucial role in determining the way in which texts featuring tourism destinations are read. From this point of view, it is the audience that ultimately filters the way in which a media text contributes to their perception of a given destination. In this article, however, I will argue that ‘mediated places’ in audiovisual tourism promotional texts are not ‘entirely floating’ signifiers. Such images are structurally anchored to meaning by a discursive framework which in turn is informed by textual and contextual factors.

The idea of discourse constitutes a central element of the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault. According to Foucault (1972 [1969]), power relationships in society are expressed through language and behaviour. Discourse is a way of organising knowledge that structures the constitution of social relations through the collective acceptance of the discourse as social fact. According to Foucault (1972 [1969]), discourse produces ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (p. 135). The discursive framework, namely, the way in which place and space are understood in audiovisual tourism promotional texts, is informed by textual and contextual factors.

Textual factors include narrative structures, aesthetic conventions and enunciative strategies that might appeal to the so called ‘tourist imagination’ of the viewer. Crouch et al. (2005: 1) formulated the concept of tourist imagination to explain the sense of global physical and virtual mobility engendered by the daily consumption of the media in the digital age. Narrative structures might stimulate the viewer’s ‘tourist imagination’ by constructing space as an active character in the story. In the feature film Under the Tuscan Sun (2003), for example, the foregrounding of place as a narrative element endowed with transformative power might explain the tourist spin-off generated by the film (Stransky, 2016). At the aesthetic level, certain generic conventions of tourism films and TVCs (for example, aerial views of a spectacular natural landscape) might emphasise certain visceral responses in the viewer, possibly influencing their desire to visit the locations depicted on screen. Enunciative strategies refer to the way in which the intended receiver of the text is inscribed in it. For example, many tourism TVCs address viewers as prospective tourists by featuring images of travellers enjoying the interaction with the landscape. These TVCs often encourage the identification with these characters while suggesting potential ways of relating to place and space. Enunciative strategies often affect the construction of certain narrative structures as, for example, the foregrounding of the tourists as onscreen simulacra of the viewers in tourism TVCs often implies a narrative which revolves around notions of travel and exploration.

The contextual factors refer to the ways in which the promotional texts are circulated and received. Such factors include platforms and modes of distribution, the time and space of exhibition, media discourses surrounding the circulation of the texts and the composition of the audiences. The context of circulation and reception of these texts plays a crucial role in determining their performative function. For example, the screening of a tourism TVC about Glasgow for an audience of Glaswegians might boost a sense of civic pride rather than stimulating tourism growth. By contrast, the screening of a feature film such as Roman Holiday (1953) within the context of a tourism fair might be considered as a promotional tool potentially contributing to an increased interest in visiting Rome.

The discursive framework, namely, the textual and contextual factors that inform the reading of these texts is influenced by power dynamics. More specifically, the production and circulation of audiovisual promotional texts about tourism both express and reproduce dominant power relations (Morgan and Pritchard, 1998). The majority of the audiovisual promotional texts is produced by institutions or companies endowed with economic and political power, and the way in which place is represented reproduces these economic and political interests. Similarly, the way in which such texts are distributed, exhibited and discussed is also often framed by the economic and political interests mentioned above. In order to produce and distribute a TVC, a Destination Management Organisation (DMO) needs to be endowed with significant financial resources. Certain DMOs possess more financial or political resources than others leading to an unbalance in the media coverage of certain destinations. Similarly, the strategic decisions of a DMO, which in turn might affect the representation of the destination itself, are also informed by internal power dynamics (for example, different national stakeholders competing for hegemony), potentially resulting in privileging the representation of certain places or activities. Audiovisual tourism promotion is a discursive framework which is constantly renegotiated by technological innovations, power dynamics, economic imperatives and historical contingencies. Both the overview of the history of audiovisual tourism promotion and the in-depth analysis of the Dundee campaign will illustrate some of the factors that shape the boundaries of such framework.

OPEN IN VIEWER

A history of audiovisual tourism promotion

In the precinematic period, the most widespread form of audio-visual tourism promotion was the travelogue, a public lecture about travel accompanied by photographs or magic lantern slides. Photographer Burton Holmes was a pioneer in this media form, catering for the escapist fantasies of the American public (Holmes and Taschen, 2006). The increasing popularity of both mass tourism and pre-cinematic media forms such as the travelogue, the panorama and the magic lantern played a crucial role in the invention of the film medium. In her analysis of the emergence of cinema in the nineteenth century, Anne Friedberg (1993) defines the new aesthetic of reception found in film spectatorship as the ‘“mobilised” and “virtual” gaze’ (p. 37). According to Friedberg (1993), movie-going as a leisure activity was prepared on one hand, by the mobilised scopophilia of the nineteenth century flaneur and tourist and, on the other hand, by the virtual gaze promoted by pre-cinematic devices such as the panorama and the diorama.

Travel and images of exotic people and remote locations were popular topics of early silent cinema (Peterson, 2006). Early travel films consisted of a few shots (or sometimes a single one). In these early films, a static camera is often placed at a distance from the landscape or the local people portrayed on screen. At times, the camera pans 180° or 360° to show what is beyond the frame. Such films were often shown as part of a programme which featured several other films focusing on a variety of topics or as part of a public lecture or a travelogues (Gunning, 2006). Benelli (2006: 177) suggests that the popularity of the film travelogue in the early period was due to the fact that it could be relatively inexpensive to produce bypassing the importance of stars as well as the need for state of the art photographic and sound technology.

Film travelogues as well as ethnographic films catered for a desire for novelty and spectacle. According to Tom Gunning (2006), however, the popularity of films about exotic people and locations in the early decades of the twentieth century should also be understood within the context of western industrial and colonial expansion. The moving images of far-away (often colonised) or picturesque locations provided Western viewers the opportunity to make sense and symbolically master the rest of the world. Such films are imbued with power relations as the camera embodies a colonial gaze which literally and symbolically appropriates the locations depicted on screen. From this point of view, the slogan used by several film companies – ‘the whole world within reach’ – could be understood as a way of establishing routes of power and appropriation from the gazer (coloniser) to the object of the gaze (colonised) (Gunning, 2006).

In the early twentieth century, the production of travel films gradually shifted from individual showmen and private production companies to local stakeholders or DMOs such as national tourism boards. As cinematic technology became cheaper and more widespread, local stakeholders could afford to commission films about the destinations they intended to market and promote thus retaining more control over their representation. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the cinematic representation of tourism destinations increasingly aligned with the economic and political agenda of the local authorities or stakeholders who commissioned such films. During this period, the most popular form of audiovisual tourism promotion was represented by the ‘tourism film’, namely, a film commissioned or produced by a DMO for the explicit purpose of promoting a tourism destination. The length as well as the narrative and stylistic approach of these tourism films varied widely. While some of these films lasted only a few minutes, others were conceived as full-length features (Bonelli, 2018).

In the politically divided climate of the first half of the twentieth century, tourism films were mainly circulated within the confines of the national market before the screening of feature films or as part of special events (Bonelli, 2018). As suggested by Hillyer (1997) and Leotta (2011), during this period tourism films played a crucial role in both boosting domestic tourism and forging the national identity of the places or countries they represented. Peterson (2006: 80) points out how tourism films commissioned by the major American railroad companies played a crucial role in establishing the scenic West as the core of American identity. In 1911, for example, The Great Northern Railroad contracted a series of scenic films to be made in the cities along its line (Peterson, 2006: 92). The West in such films was characterised as the American landscape par excellence, the embodiment of national identity as opposed to the urban and industrial character of Europe and the East Coast of the United States.

Outside the national market, tourism films were mainly screened at international exhibitions, international tourism or trade fairs, foreign embassies, and, less frequently, foreign movie theatres. The circulation and exhibition of tourism films was particularly prominent between countries which shared strong economic and cultural ties. For example, in the first half of the twentieth century, Australian and New Zealand tourism films were widely circulated within both Britain and other British colonies as part of an attempt to encourage migration to these British dominions (Leotta, 2011). In many tourism or propaganda films produced by settler countries, the discursive framework is ambiguous. As these films catered for both prospective migrants and tourists, landscape is often depicted as both beautiful and potentially productive (Bonelli, 2018).

Bonelli (2018) discusses how the aesthetic evolution of the tourism film as a specific media form was influenced by a number of factors such as technological innovations (the introduction of more portable cameras as well as the emergence of synchronised sound and colour) and the influence of other genres and modes of film-making (such as cinema verité, experimental film and animation). The period between the 1950s and the 1960s was a key transitional moment characterised by a number of economic, cultural and technological transformations which in turn affected the production and distribution of audiovisual tourism promotion. At the economic and cultural level, the establishment of both the first specialised international tourism film festivals such as the Brussels International Tourism Film Festival (Belgium), the Tourist Film Festival (France) and the Tourfilm Festival (Czechoslovakia), as well as the first major international tourism trade fairs, influenced the way in which tourism films are distributed and circulated. At the technological level, the emergence of both Cinerama and television as a popular mass medium in most developed countries influenced the aesthetic form of the tourism film as well as its modes of circulation. Images of travel and tourism were particularly popular in the first Cinerama productions. For example, This is Cinerama (1952), the film designed to introduce the Cinerama format, showcases famous international tourist attractions such as the Niagara Falls, the Venice canals and a Spanish bullfight. Like the nineteenth century travelogue, the immersive qualities of the Cinerama encouraged both armchair travelling and actual tourism. Furthermore, in the 1960s a number of tourism boards and stakeholders used Cinerama or similar formats such as IMAX to produce spectacular films to showcase their respective destinations (Bonelli, 2018).

The emergence of TV as a popular mass medium affected the evolution of audiovisual tourism promotion in several ways. At the aesthetic level, the fast paced editing characteristic of the television format influenced the stylistic features of the tourism film. More importantly, in terms of production and distribution, the emergence of TV meant the rise of the TVC as a new form of tourism audiovisual promotion. Tourism stakeholders such as commercial airlines were pioneers in the use of the TVC as a destination promotional tool. For example, a 1964 Air France commercial (Come Home with Us to Paris) promotes the French capital as a vibrant, top class tourism destination. While during the 1960s and 1970s tourism films and tourism TVCs coexisted, in the 1980s the parallel decline of international film audiences and the rise of TV viewers meant the progressive disappearance of the tourism film as a destination promotional tool. The TVC, however, is not the only form of audiovisual tourism promotion associated with television (Hanefors and Mossberg, 2002). Television travel series such as British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) Holiday (1969–2007) showcased holiday resorts both at home and overseas. The advent of TV cable channels such as Discovery Channel and Travel Channel along with the emergence of portable, digital high-quality digital video equipment further popularised TV travel series. Fictional TV shows which did not explicitly focus on travel also contributed to tourism destination promotion. For example, Walt Disney’s Disneyland (1954–1958) was a major promotional vehicle for the Disneyland theme park, which quickly became one of California’s major tourism attractions. Similarly, The Jackie Gleason Show (1966–1969) shot at the Miami Beach Auditorium explicitly promoted Florida as the ‘sun and fun capital of the world’ (Mormino, 2005).

The emergence of digital technology alongside major innovations in communication technology and the gradual disappearance of barriers to global trade marked the beginning of a new stage in audiovisual tourism promotion. As discussed in the previous section, feature films and TV dramas always played an important role in shaping the image of tourism destinations. The western genre, for example, played a crucial role in propagating certain iconographies of the American West, thus contributing to the popularity of US destinations such as Death Valley, Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon and so on (Bregent-Heald, 2007). In most cases, however, the tourist spin-off of films and TV dramas was not pre-planned and occurred serendipitously as the main goal of film and TV producers was audience entertainment rather than destination promotion (Beeton, 2016). In the 1990s, however, the wealth and speed of information exchange allowed by the Internet increased feature films and TV dramas’ potential to promote the locations featured on screen. In her account of the making of The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy in the early 2000s, for example, Kristin Thompson (2007) discusses how, on the one hand, the Internet allowed tourists to find out about the LOTR locations in New Zealand, on the other hand, it also offered the film producers and the government officials with co-marketing opportunities to promote both the films and its locations as tourism attractions. The Internet, for example, was one of the major marketing tools deployed by the New Zealand: Home of Middle Earth campaign which associated the country with Tolkien’s fantasyland (Leotta, 2011). The spectacular impact of LOTR and the Harry Potter franchise (2001–2011) on, respectively, New Zealand and British tourism, showed the world the importance of leveraging film-related spin-offs (Beeton, 2016). Discourses about film-tourism have been partly responsible for driving the increasing globalisation of screen production. A growing number of Hollywood productions, for example, are conceived in Los Angeles but produced and post/produced elsewhere for artistic or economic reasons. The geographic dispersal of screen production has been caused by increasing mobility, telecommunication and transport innovations, and expanding markets for film and television which in turn have enabled greater levels of collaboration of film production at the global level (Goldsmith et al., 2010). Local, regional and national governments are increasingly aware of the economic benefits associated with attracting major globally dispersed film productions. Since the 2000s most countries have implemented film-friendly policies such as tax and producer incentives to attract major, Hollywood productions in the hope of boosting both the local economy (through the creation of jobs and infrastructures) and local tourism (Goldsmith et al., 2010). Tourism marketing campaigns are often embedded in the preproduction plans of large blockbuster movies. For example, New Zealand film director Peter Jackson used permanent materials to build the set of Hobbiton for The Hobbit trilogy (2011–2014) foreseeing the fact that the location would become a major tourist attraction (Leotta, 2015).

The emergence of digital technology and the Internet also provided new platforms for the promotion and distribution of tourism commercials. As demonstrated by the Dundee campaign, DMOs often commission commercials for both TV broadcast and online circulation. Social media marketing is now an integral part of the promotional activities undertaken by DMOs (Hays et al., 2013). The online distribution of DPVs is often cheaper than TV broadcast and it has the potential of reaching more targeted audiences. The prominence of social media such as Youtube and Facebook alongside the increasing availability of digital video technology mean that official DPVs often circulate alongside amateur travel videos produced by tourists. Such amateur tourist videos contribute to shape a destination’s image and, in some cases, DMOs exploit their promotional potential by sharing them on social networks.

New technologies such as AR and VR are also increasingly used by DMOs, media producers and ordinary travellers to showcase tourism destinations. As pointed out by Leotta and Ross (2018), however, VR tourism experiences differ significantly from other promotional tools such as films, TVCs and DPVs. As the viewer is left free to roam the image, the possibility of emphasising or ‘framing’ one specific element of the landscape, which according to Pan et al. (2011) is a key element of tourism TVCs, is reduced while the potential to interact with the landscape is enhanced.

As revealed by this brief historical overview, tourism audiovisual promotion encompasses a wide range of aesthetic forms, media platforms and distribution practices. This plethora of media objects which include, among other things, short films and feature films, TVCs and TV series, digital videos and VR experiences have relied upon an equally varied array of aesthetic and narrative strategies including the foregrounding of spectacle and the sublime, documentary approaches, fictional narratives, an emphasis on tactility and visceral immersion and so on. These various media forms have often borrowed each other’s stylistic and narrative conventions to the extent of blurring their aesthetic boundaries. The emphasis on a sublime, spectacular landscape in certain feature films is reminiscent of the aesthetics of tourism films or commercials. By contrast, as discussed by Gong and Tung (2017), more and more tourism commercials deploy a fictional narrative to enhance their promotional potential. New technologies such as VR and IMAX enhance the immersive qualities of the traditional tourism TVC while still relying on imagery of exotic peoples and locales which was characteristic of pre-cinematic media forms such as the panorama or the magic lantern. The proliferation of media representations of tourism destinations has transformed the images of these places into ‘floating signifiers’. The analysis of the Dundee campaign will reveal how the meaning and function of these floating signifiers is informed by the context of their production, circulation and reception.

The Dundee campaign

The promotional videos produced as part of the Dundee marketing campaign orchestrated in 2018 by Tourism Australia illustrate the complex nature of contemporary audiovisual tourism promotion. Australia has one of the most positive and stable destination brands in the world (Fullerton and Kendrick, 2011), yet the country has often struggled to convert this positive destination image into an actual increase in tourist arrivals (Pike et al., 2010). Historically, domestic tourism accounted for the great majority of the country’s tourism revenues, with international visitors contributing a small percentage. This is attributed to Australia’s status as a country-continent isolated by the ocean on all sides (Fullerton and Kendrick, 2011). Australia has often explicitly targeted the American market which is perceived to having a significant growth potential. The country made a big entrance into the American collective psyche with the first Australian Tourist Commission (ATC) TVC featuring Paul Hogan, which aired in the United States in 1984 (Fullerton and Kendrick, 2011). In the TVC. Hogan invited Americans to experience Australia’s beaches, outback and relaxed lifestyle, adding the memorable line, ‘I’ll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you’. The ‘Shrimp’ advertisement is now recognised as a classic in the world of advertising and following its release, visa applications to Australia increased by 40% (Baker, 2018). Hogan’s commercial condensed the image of ‘a place in the sun’ and a ‘land of long weekends’ which still lingers on several decades later (Chalip, 2000). The release of Crocodile Dundee (1986) and Crocodile Dundee II (1988), which also featured Paul Hogan in the titular role, contributed to significantly increase Australia’s awareness in the tourist market (Fullerton and Kendrick, 2011). According to The Economist Intelligence Unit (1990) report, the influence of these films was so pervasive that the high profile enjoyed by Australia in the United States during the period of their release was worth US$50 of publicity for every dollar spent on advertising. Crocodile Dundee was the case study in the first major research project on film-induced tourism (Riley and Van Doren, 1992). In this study, the authors suggested that this movie played a major role in boosting American tourism to Australia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. According to Riley and Van Doren (1992), the reasons why Crocodile Dundee was so successful in stimulating Americans to travel included the use of natural environments as a spectacular backdrop to action, an uncomplicated portrayal of indigenous lifestyles and the interaction between the characters and the environment (p. 273).

The Dundee marketing campaign orchestrated by tourism Australia in 2018 capitalised on the enduring popularity of the Crocodile Dundee films in the American market. The A$36 million campaign realised by advertising agency Droga5 had the ambitious goal of growing the US market from A$3.7 billion in 2017 to A$6 billion by the year 2020 (Travel and Tour World, 2018). As part of this campaign Tourism Australia commissioned the production of two fake trailers for the next instalment of the Dundee film franchise, Dundee: the Son of a Legend Returns Home. The trailers which were circulated online in January 2018 featured Danny McBride as Brian, the hapless son of Mick ‘Crocodile’ Dundee (the original character played by Paul Hogan). The trailers show Brian Dundee arriving in Australia where he is welcomed by bushman Wally Jr (Chris Hemsworth) who is surprised to discover that the seemingly incompetent Brian is Crocodile Dundee’s son. The trailer suggests that Dundee: the Son of a Legend is a comedic take on the original films, as Brian fails to replicate some of his father’s tricks with hilarious results. The trailers also introduce a number of other characters in supporting roles played by major Australian stars including: Hugh Jackman as ‘the Prime Minister’, Margot Robbie as ‘Lil Donk’, Russell Crowe as ‘JP Steele’, Isla Fisher as ‘Dr Clark’, Liam Hemsworth as ‘Wes Windsong’, and Luke Bracey as ‘ The Cricket Legend’. During this stage of the campaign, Tourism Australia was not publicly associated with the trailers which featured the logos of Screen Australia and Rimfire Films. To increase the believability of the trailers, the campaign designers created a IMDB page featuring a short summary of the film and the full list of cast and crew.

Two weeks after the release of the trailers, another version of the videos was broadcast during the Super Bowl final in the United States which was watched live by more than 100 million Americans (Travel and Tour World, 2018). The Super Bowl commercial opened with the same sequence featured in the original trailers, an extreme long shot of Brian Dundee looking at the rugged landscape from the edge of a canyon. In the following shots, the camera closes in on Dundee which utters the same iconic line given by his father in the original films ‘that’s not a knife . . . that’s a knife’. The commercial deploys the same sequences featured in the trailers until 45 seconds when it shows some new shots of McBride and Hemsworth interacting with the Australian landscape. These images are accompanied by a series of titles not featured in the original trailers: ‘They’ll explore beautiful beaches’, ‘Discover amazing wines’, ‘Dine at World Class Restaurants’. As Hemsworth and McBride sit at what seems to be a sophisticated restaurant, McBride claims, ‘Wait, hold on . . . this isn’t a movie . . .’. As the background music stops and Hemsworth replies ‘no’, McBride sadly acknowledges that ‘. . . it’s a tourism ad for Australia’. Hemsworth consoles McBride claiming that ‘you are the best Crocodile Dundee since Crocodile Dundee’, as Paul Hogan appears in a shot sipping a beer in front of Sydney’s Harbour Bridge. The rest of the commercial showcases a number of Australian attractions and tourist activities such as snorkelling in the Great Barrier Reef, Kangaroo watching and a jet boat ride in the Sydney Harbour. The commercial ends with a shot of Hemsworth and McBride admiring a beach sunset as the Tourism Australia logo and slogan (‘There’s nothing like Australia’) appear on screen. The third phase of the campaign began in October 2018 when Tourism Australia released a series of promotional videos in which Luke Hemsworth (Chris’ brother) invites US tourists to visit the ‘Set’ of the Dundee movie. The videos feature a large collection of Australian tourist attractions including the Great Barrier Reef, the Nitmiluk National Park and Cottesloe Beach.

Tourism Australia considered the campaign to be a major success as the videos spread virally online. Dundee was the number one viewed, searched and shared Super Bowl campaign generating more than 14,000 media articles for an estimated value of A$84.4 million and leading to a 900% increase in booking enquiries (Droga5, 2019). The campaign, which won a number of industry awards including a Titanium Lion at the Cannes Festival of Creativity, was widely praised for its innovative character (Sinclair, 2018). In their discussion of social media as tourism marketing tools, Hays et al. (2013) noted that less-visited destinations (such as Australia) are forced to be far more active and innovative in their social media marketing efforts. Tourism Australia has often attempted to capitalise on non-conventional publicity tools. In 2008, the Australian tourism board invested A$10 million on a co-marketing campaign to promote the country alongside Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (Sweney, 2008) which tells the story of a woman (played by Nicole Kidman) who ‘has lost her sense of self but who finds adventure, romance and her true self’ when she visits the country. In the same year, the Australian tourism body spent an additional A$40 million to produce and broadcast a series of commercials (Come Walkabout) directed by Baz Luhrmann and loosely inspired by the narrative premise of Australia (Sweney, 2008).

The success of the Dundee campaign resides in the convergence between the textual and contextual factors which informed its discursive framework. At the textual level, Dundee (like Come Walkabout before it) capitalised on the promotional potential of a fictional narrative which revolved around a journey and, more specifically, the physical and symbolical interaction with the landscape. Chen (2015) suggested that commercials which encourage viewers’ immersion into the story are more persuasive. In this particular case, viewers’ immersion into the narrative was facilitated by the establishment of a textual simulacrum of the viewer, the American tourist (Brian Dundee) as the main character of the story. From this point of view, the casting choice of McBride as an adventurous yet hapless middle-aged American tourist capitalises on the ‘likeable dumbass’ comedic persona the actor established for himself in action comedies such as Pineapple Express (2008) and Tropic Thunder (2008).

Hudson and Hudson (2006) suggest that given their nature, viewers are less likely to regard the destination featured in a film as ‘advertising’ as the location is built into the storyline. Gong and Tung (2017) found that tourism commercials structured around a fictional narrative may reduce viewers’ ‘reactance’, namely, the motivational status of an individual who perceives his or her freedom of choice to be threatened. As Schwarz (1986) pointed out, the highly explicit attempts to persuade characteristic of advertising hard-sell pitches have limited persuasiveness. By contrast, the success of the Dundee campaign resides in the fact that the commercial was initially perceived as a trailer. The convergence between the film trailer and the tourism commercial, in turn, is made possible by the fact that the images featured in both texts are floating signifiers. The floating signifiers in the trailer are exemplified by both the director’s casting choices and the representation of the landscape. With the exception of McBride, all the performers featured in the trailer are Australian actors (Hemsworth, Robbie, Jackman, Crowe and so on) who have starred in both Australian films and Hollywood blockbusters. As such, these actors are simultaneously well known figures in the American market and plausible choices for an Australian film production with global ambitions. As Australia’s most recognisable individuals, some of those actors had already performed a tourism promotional role. In 2015, for example, Hugh Jackman had been appointed as Qantas tourism ambassador, while in 2016 Chris Hemsworth was contracted to be Tourism Australia generating an Estimated Advertising Value of A$170.97 million (Daily Mail, 2018). Jackman, Hemsworth, and the other stars featured in the trailer are constructed as floating signifiers as they connotate a kind of ‘Australianness’ that can give glamour and credibility to both a local film production and a tourism ad.

Similarly, the landscapes featured in the trailer (a rocky canyon, a desert road and the bush) are both associated with internationally known Australian films such as the Dundee movies, Wolf’s Creek (2005) and Australia (2008), but they have also appeared in countless tourism commercials. The types of landscape featured in the trailer enhance its credibility as they are consistent with internationally accepted perceptions about Australian cinema. At the same time, however, such images are also plausible within the context of the ‘commercial’ as they are in line with traditional Australian tourist imagery. The versatility of landscape as floating signifier is demonstrated by the fact that, as mentioned earlier, the first 45 seconds of the Super Bowl ‘commercial’ virtually feature all the shots which appeared in the first part of the ‘trailers’, including an aerial view of McBride standing on the edge of a canyon, a wide shot of McBride and Hemsworth standing on a desert road in the Outback, and a wide shot of McBride attempting to perform the ‘buffalo trick’ in the bush. Danny McBride self-reflexive realisation that ‘this is not a movie’, but a tourism ad for Australia occurs only after the characters are shown visiting three locations not featured in the trailer: a beach, a vineyard and a fine-dining restaurant. McBride’s suspicions are aroused by Hemsworth’s ‘salesy’ tone; however, the final revelation is not caused by a shift in the aesthetic tone, but rather by the fact that the locations gradually move away from Dundee’s traditional playgrounds, the bush and the outback, towards a more sophisticated and urban environment. After the reveal, McBride, who has now relinquished his status of movie hero, is shown enjoying some of the traditional Australian tourist activities such as snorkelling, Kangaroo watching and jet boating.

The Dundee campaign plays on the blurring of two allegedly distinct aesthetic modes, the movie and the tourism commercial. As the third phase of the campaign invites tourists to visit the ‘set’ of the (fake) Dundee movie, it also suggests that the conflation of these two media forms is actually possible in the spectacular and adventurous Australian landscape. The analysis of the Dundee campaign reveals the porous boundaries of a number of media forms (the feature film, the trailer, the TVC) which are thought to be distinct, but can all seamlessly serve a tourism promotional purpose. The study of the campaign, however, also serves to illustrate another key element of tourism audiovisual promotion, the shift in the discursive mode deployed to understand landscape. The campaign relies on the long-lasting popularity of the Crocodile Dundee films which still inform the international perception of Australia (Fullerton and Kendrick, 2011). The promotional effectiveness of the campaign, however, does not merely rely on specific representations of the landscape (which are the same in the ‘trailer’ and in the ‘commercial’) but rather in the way in which they are talked about. The success of the Dundee campaign resides in the effective performance of a discursive ‘twist’ (what was considered to be a trailer is actually a tourism commercial), which in turn leads to a sudden shift in the way in which place and space are understood. Following their release online the trailers spread virally generating hype about the new Crocodile Dundee film; however, after the Super Bowl broadcast, the discursive framework of the trailers changed radically. The primary function of the trailers quickly changed from film to tourism promotional tools. This radical and rapid shift in the discursive framework of the trailers was possible thanks to the broadcasting of the commercial during a major hallmark media event such as the Super Bowl. This radical discursive shift in the understanding of the Dundee trailer would have not been possible without the significant financial investment of Tourism Australia. Although the exact cost of the Dundee commercial slot as part of the Super Bowl broadcast was confidential, it is estimated at more than US$10 million (McCarriston, 2019). Only a DMO endowed with significant financial resources such as Tourism Australia would have been able to afford the resources to perform such a radical discursive shift.

Conclusion

The historical overview of audiovisual tourism promotion reveals that it encompasses a wide range of media forms, platforms and technologies. While some of these texts are explicitly conceived as primarily advertising tools, some others were not initially produced for promotional purposes. Rather than attempting to categorise its constantly shifting manifestations, it might be more useful to understand audiovisual tourism promotion as a discursive framework which is informed by textual and contextual factors. The theoretical model proposed in this article can account for the promotional effectiveness of certain media texts. More specifically, it suggests that the promotional potential of these texts is heightened by the convergence of the textual and contextual factors which inform their discursive framework. This model has also the merit of explaining the promotional effect of texts which were not originally designed for promotional purposes. For example, the tourist spin-off of films such as LOTR can be explained by a series of textual factors (the foregrounding of landscape as spectacle, the construction of space as an active character, the focus on the journey as the main narrative drive and so on) and contextual ones (the widespread circulation of the films, the pre-existence of a wide fan base and the role of the New Zealand government in framing discourses about LOTR for the purposes of promoting tourism). This theorization of audiovisual tourism promotion also accounts for the role of power dynamics at play in shaping the discursive framework of these media texts. For example, the production and circulation of early travelogues was informed by certain ideas about race, culture and colonial power. Finally, this model also accounts for the other functions that these texts perform beyond tourism promotion. For example, as discussed earlier, a number of scholars have investigated the important role of tourism films or tourism TVCs in forging a sense of national identity or serving the foreign affairs strategies of certain countries (Pan et al., 2017; Peterson, 2006). In most cases, these political or cultural functions were not intended or even foreseen by the producers of the texts and can only be explained by the specificities of their contexts of circulation and reception. This article contributes to current debates about the relationship between media and tourism as well as theoretical discussions about tourism marketing communication. Future studies on this topic might deploy a quantitative approach to test some of the theoretical hypotheses formulated in this article.