I LOVE visiting the Northern Territory and particularly Darwin. It’s not just crocs and snakes, there’s something free and relaxing about the place. Some weird and wonderful types live there too, well reflected in the daily newspaper, the NT News.
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Headlines from the outrageous front pages of the NT News attract worldwide attention on the net. It is great publicity for the NT. Many are turned into free tourism advertising via T-shirts and so on.
So a picture of a naked couple on a verandah several storeys up earned the headline ”Eyeful Tower”. The sub-heading read “Crowds flock to see Sex in the City”.
“Topless heroine puts out hotel fire” another NT News front page read. “Once she had the blaze under control she got her bikini top under control” the sub-heading added, as if there really would not have been a story if a topless model hadn’t been the firefighter.
Almost the whole front page in January last year was covered with “Man arrested after cops spot suspiciously small package in his undies.” The editor is quoted as saying that when “… we read the police release with the words ‘suspiciously small package in bloke’s undies’ ... well ... saved us the trouble of having to think of a front page headline, didn’t it?” The 34-year-old had amphetamines, as you would probably have guessed, but the posed photo inside the NT News of course suggested something else!
So against that background of risque and at times quite improper headlines, perhaps the latest advertising suggestion from the Northern Territory should come as no surprise. The NT News reports that an “unofficial” campaign to promote the Northern Territory has thought that using the slogan, “See you in the NT” would be catchy. It is, except that the slogan is shortened to “CU in the NT”
The capital letters are very large, in white, superimposed on a deep orange Uluru. The words “in the” are small, so I’ll leave your imagination to guess what the sign reads at a quick glance. Just in case the reader is particularly naive, the slogan below reads, “The Top End is different from the Bottom End”.
T-shirts are available with this logo, and I’ll bet that they sell to overseas tourists by the thousand. The average American tourist would think that nothing beats that T-shirt in illustrating the crudeness and rough-and-tumble nature of the place.
Under the heading “Advertising campaign promoting the Territory is ‘not funny or witty’, according to industry body” the NT News reports that “Among its latest batch of determinations, the Advertising Standards Board upheld a complaint against the “CU in the NT”.
“The advertising industry’s toothless watchdog has determined a controversial ‘guerilla marketing’ campaign promoting the Northern Territory is ‘obscene’ and doesn’t meet industry standards”.
The people behind the campaign of course defended their slogan claiming that the offending phrase is “in fact not offensive.” and rejecting the complaint “that its campaign was derogatory to women.”
“(We) do not advocate anything other than an appreciation of the natural beauty of the Northern Territory,” their statement added, probably illustrating their sense of humour.
An old saying goes, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”
Growth in domestic visitors to the Northern Territory boomed 17.5 per cent in 2016. Maybe I’ll meet you on the road in 2017?