Scotland

Yet again Visit Scotland has annoyed it’s customers. Another scandal and another black mark against a company that continually fails to meet it’s remit. In the lasted shameful episode in the Visit Scotland saga we have the invasion of the nudist surfers. Apparently the small island of Barra in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland is a nudist paradise with nude surfers on every beach. Well maybe not as bad as that but it may as well be.

In one of Visit Scotland’s highly expensive advertising campaigns they shot a sequence on the Isle of Barra to show some outdoor activities. Much to the astonishment of a local priest the surfers were in the nude with all of their dangly bits swinging in the pure clean air of the Hebrides. The parishioners of the small Parish on Barra were up in arms and Visit Scotland faced some serious complaints.

The shocking thing about all this is the total lack of consultation. This ridiculous milking of public funds continues on an epic scale and I really mean the word EPIC. The sequence showing the nude surfers displaying their genitals proudly was meant to be a ‘viral video’. They must have thought themselves very funny but the joke would always have been on them. How can such a company fail to understand the very nature of the Internet when they have such large funds? How many accommodation providers out there have had to learn about Internet behaviour, trends etc. so that they can promote their own web sites? Plenty because Visit Scotland is nowhere in the search engine results, and what is their excuse? There isn’t one. This company is PURELY profit motivated and while the nude surfer video may be considered misguided I see it as blatant abuse. If this was a government body (as it once was) and was accountable to the public – who are damn well paying for it – then heads would have rolled for this incompetence. Yet again Visit Scotland shrug their shoulders and rub their hands together as the PUBLIC MONEY just keeps on rolling in. 

A previous advert filmed on Barra was part of a £2.7m campaign – yeah get that $5.4 MILLION can you believe it? The damn thing was by the Oscar nominated Peter Webber. The really funny thing is that Visit Scotland thoroughly believe that this campaign will boost tourism revenue to such a degree that you can virtually add a zero or two to the cost. They think that they can increase it to $12bn by 2015 but it is currently at $8bn so such an increase is highly likely without such a campaign as there are a great many people doing their own promotion of Scotland because they have to! They have to because Visit Scotland is failing them terribly. Yet again this company has failed to supply accommodation providers with customers and that is their main purpose.

What are they playing at I get the feeling that the biggest pricks/dicks are in the head office of Visit Scotland and not swinging about on a remote Hebridean beach.