Well I fell for it, hook, line and sinker! Take a pretty girl, add a beautiful exotic accent (well, I thought it sounded sexy), a sob story and voila … you have instant marketing campaign reaching millions of people on the internet and mainstream media.
They call it guerrilla marketing. An advertisement strategy concept designed for small businesses to promote their products or services in an unconventional and inexpensive way. This involves high energy and imagination focusing on grasping the attention of the public in more personal and memorable level.
The concept … use a local girl, one who might seem believable as a love-sick French tourist, who has flown back to Australia to find the man of her dreams. Name her Natalie Amyot and have her post a clip online claiming to have met the one while visiting the Sunshine Coast.
Now add the drama. Something that might be somewhat controversial. ‘Sacre bleu’! … let’s have her knocked up by some tall, blonde tanned surfer dude who she dreamily portrays as the ‘man of her dreams’. This all happened after a steamy but ‘beautiful’ one night stand on her last night in one of the country’s tourist hot spots!
However, Natalie must be careful to only reveal her pregnancy after returning to Paris – but to her horror has lost her phone and his number! And there we have it, you can almost predict the crawl through on the television:
“We want to help this tourist find the man of her dreams! If you have any details, let us know!”
The trick is … leave just enough holes in the story so that a number of things can happen. Firstly, there must be room for the moral righteous to scream about not using contraception.
Secondly, it must appeal to the mostly feminine romantic tragics who just can’t wait to share this on Facebook to help this gorgeous girl reunite with her soul mate. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, let the hook dangle for no more than 24 hours or so. Timing is everything in this game – and you can’t wait too long for the reveal.
And here it is, yet another video, this time with the lost romantic proclaiming “I’ve found him” – before steeping off camera for some marketing bloke in a crisp white shirt with a sly grin letting us all in on the prank – that it was all a bit of a plug for a Sunshine Coast resort town.
As the French would say … fin de l’histoire.
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