How online marketing campaign could avert thousands of targeted customers

Recently Queensland Tourism announced ‘the best job in the world’ campaign which attracted thousands of applicants from all over the world to islandreefjob.com. But one should not even waste time going to the website as most of the time it simply does not work.

The campaign led to thousands of disgruntled visitors who were creating videos for weeks but then failed even to upload them or were rejected because of technical glitches.  What a frustration and a waste of time from a user perspective ! And these were thousands of targeted, potential tourists to Australia.

The campaign cost a little over $1 million and already generated $80 million in publicity, with 34,000 applications submitted.  Not a bad ROI, especially given the fact that the organizers posted all received video applications on Youtube, a free hosting service and never secured a sufficient bandwidth for the website or manpower to process the applications.

Some of this publicity though proved to be quite embarrassing: applicants with disabilities are suing for discriminatory hiring practices while blogosphere exposed fake applications posted by organizers for which official apology had to be issued.

At the very start of the campaign the web traffic exceeded forecasts, with a flurry of articles about website crashes.  In interviews to the press the organizers cheerfully described how additional computers were hauled to their office to deal with the problem. They seemed to glee at severe under capacity issues, recognizing it instead as an indication of marketing success.

It is not clear how many more additional ‘computers’ were added and whether the campaign was managed from an idyllic hut on the deserted island with no IT infrastructure – but no increase in website bandwidth was ever done to meet the demand.  The campaign continued to be plagued by numerous, never-ending technical issues and glitches.

When uploading videos, thousands of applicants never saw the confirmation page that made them trying again and again, most of the time in vain. The organizers advised in website news to try at different time of the day which meant for some applicants to get to the home page at odd early hours and be deprived of sleep. The lucky ones got surprise emails confirming the upload and initiation of approval process.

Then the applicants were informed that 1.001 minutes long videos were rejected due to the ‘strict’ rules of a 60-second length and particular calculation principles of Queensland Tourism. These principles, nevertheless, contradicted the recorded length of several established and widely used video editing softwares.  At the same time, videos of many participants that were 1.01 minutes long were approved and posted on the website.

Rejected videos on the grounds of milliseconds non-compliance could have been re-submitted before the deadline, February 22. However, Queensland Tourism informed thousands about their failed application only on February 23.   In the emails they nevertheless  encouraged to re-apply, even though the submission was closed.  Too late, even if one is lucky to get to the website’s home page and prepared to upload for hours, waiting for a confirmation page.

In the weekend prior to the deadline 7,500 applicants submitted their videos. We will never know how many more who had spent weeks fine tuning their videos, then tried and failed to upload them, but the estimate will be a 5 or 6 digit number. The campaign started working against itself.

And now the 5 things that went totally wrong:

1. Constant crashes of the website due to insufficient bandwidth

2. Miscalculations of content management system for required video lengths

3. Failure to approve videos and communicate with applicants  

4. Online traffic forecasting and management

5. Ironic claims about ‘fairness’ once thousands of applications were rejected – a joke given the chaos of operations

Contrary to the good intention of organizers to create an interactive, entertaining online campaign visitors and applicants experienced substantial frustration. As a result, the campaign made thousands of enemies because of its unfairness and undoubtedly averted many more potential tourists than it attracted.

But there could still be time for the organizers to repair the damage and restore the lost confidence as the first-round short-listing is due in a week.

Queensland Tourism could allow a deadline extension for those rejected on technical grounds, or allow a 1 min 5 seconds maximum video duration or a direct upload to YouTube to address the technical issues of their content management system. Increasing the bandwidth for the website is also crucial as smooth voting for the short-listed candidates will not be feasible under current conditions.

A few minutes ago i tried to login using the home page of WordPress… and i tried… and tried but no luck… The fact is that i can’t do that. But no worry… i can still post on my blog… . Ok… now… besides this… i wanted to recomand you “ATB – Dooley’s World” … one of ATB’s newest songs… which by my opinion is one of the greatest. Enjoy… and Good Night.