Saturday, January 17, 2009

A brilliant marketing strategy

I just heard about a posting for "The Best Job In The World", and at first I was thinking "Are they serious?" Then after thinking about it for a bit, I realized what a brilliant marketing strategy it is.

What am I babbling about, anyway? It's called the Island Reef Job, and it's a six-month contract as caretaker of Hamilton Island just off Queensland, Australia. Basically, all you do is to wander around, sleep and fart most of the day, go snorkeling or scuba diving, dip your toe into the ocean here'n'there, and take pictures/videos of things you see along the way, then post about it at least once a week on a blog. That's it. Meanwhile, Tourism Queensland is going to compensate you by providing a 3-bedroom villa, technical gadgets to blog with, airfare to and from your home, and, oh yea, $150,000 AU Dollars (which comes to about $125K Canadian).

At first, I was thinking, that's crazy to be offering so much money and perks for a six-month contract. You'd think that people would knock each other down to get this job for a mere $25K or so, or even be willing to do this for free if you just paid their way over and provided 3 square meals a day. But then you see that the Island Reef Job website has crashed so often due to server overloads in the three or four days since the posting was announced, and that thousands of people have already applied for the job. The competition is going to be real fierce, and possibly, bloody - quite fitting for the land that brought us Aussie Rules Footy.

Think about it, imagine how much attention Hamilton Island is going to get and the onrush of tourism it will get after this strategy. The buzz is so great already, and I had never heard of Hamilton Island -- until now -- so it's clearly working already. If you check out some pictures of Hamilton Island online, you'd see how gorgeous it is. It's a 'Survivor'-worthy site.

Maybe I ought to apply... the job description sounds like it's right up my alley (well, who wouldn't be a good fit for this position? :-) ), and I have a little over a month left to come up with a creative storyline to put into an one-minute video. Kinda like applying for 'Survivor'... A bonus, I could post on OT for 20 hours a day and nobody would care if I did that while on Hamilton Island.

Ideas are always welcome for the application video.


2 comments:

Pam Kersting said...

Woo and Hoot! Where do we apply, Pepe!?! You forgot to put a link in your post!

macgyver13 said...

You don't think, perhaps, that I left out the link on purpose? :-)

It's islandreefjob.com -- and be prepared for frequent server crashes on that site.