At an age when taking a plane or going for a car or bus ride has become a chore, at a time when the security industry has taken every traveler hostage, at a period when climate changes are wreaking havoc with travel plans, the tourism industry is reinventing itself.
Finding the hot button to initiate a new wave of customers is certainly not easy. Quebec City mayor, Labaume, has hired Dr. Clotaire Rapaille, a well-known marketing guru, to carry out a sort of makeover exercise to rediscover the essential “code” of the city. (Dr. Rapaille claims marketing success with his unorthodox methods applied to other large cities, such as Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as to the auto industry and several fortune 500 companies that he names at every turn – thus marketing himself via traditional, repetitive, branding techniques.)
An old obsession resurfaces to the delight of the press
In the Canadian press, we see mixed reviews: some comment on the $300,000 contract with Rapaille, while others are happy to refuel the French-English saga that has always been an easy subject for the press. Rapaille points out that Quebec City’s obsession with French-English relations is a love/hate relationship and, according to him, makes for a very long-lasting “couple”. (He says: “There is pleasure in sadomasochism,” but, as we well know, he also likes to spice up his own image and play to the press.) All that is lots of fun to observe, but the reality is quite desperate. This destination needs reinventing.
The game
Quebec’s population is quickly aging (something that tourism is facing worldwide) and, as a result, the city is in danger of losing its market share as a desirable destination. It is tempting to say that this poking at the French-English, emotional button in the Quebec affair is possibly Rapaille’s way of creating a media buzz, polarizing attention on his notoriously theatrical ways of proceeding (the marketer selling the marketer). But it works. Everyone, or at least the Canadian press, is thrilled with it: “the cost”, “the controversy”, “the flamboyance of Rapaille”, etc., are all superficial snippets, with little to no analysis, reflection, or much attention paid to the fundamentals or to the urgency of the exercise. Nevertheless, the need to reinvent, reaffirm and keep marketing alive is certainly part of the game, and this on all levels, including journalism – a game, I must add, Rapaille plays like no other.
Marketing with a “code”
When we look at the tourism industry across America, it is by and large facing an urgent need to reinvent, to re-launch itself into a quest for the hot tourism button. To re-discover the “code” that would literally move people to travel to a destination. So, I applaud the initiative and the boldness of Quebec’s mayor, and what I find particularly positive is that the exercise is not a superficial undertaking, but, rather, that the intent is really to gain a better understanding of the product’s culture, before launching into yet another marketing campaign. It is a look into the core of this destination. Looking into what it is in contemporary terms, what is its very make-up, its actual product culture. The point is not that this specific exercise or the use of Dr. Rapaille may not be the right way to go, but, rather, that it positions knowledge of product culture squarely as the priority over doing advertising as usual with the risk of a focus that is no longer relevant.
Posted by nelsonvigneault 
“CleanPix is so good…” a January 4th 2010 feedback comment from a German journalist user prompted me to write the following:
Today Internet is on cloud nine. Bravo! It has changed the way we live. 40 years ago, spam was something I put on my toast. Like many of us, I was not wired, 8 to 10 hours a day, in front of a computer screen, did not wear reading glasses, nor did I drive home from work with my GPS and my iPhone in one hand and the proverbial cup of coffee in the other, watching simultaneously the weather forecast projection on the windshield of my hybrid, while the energy consumption indicator pulsed in a 3-D rendering on the LCD dashboard. Let’s celebrate!
Coincidence or not: Bats are migrating during the month Halloween is taking place. As a result, Enmax, one of our local energy magnum’s, has mandated a slow down to stand-still of it’s windturbine farm during the bat migratory season. The reason: The turbulent trail of the 3 winged eolian energivores has been found to be deadly to the little bats or at best making them “sickly” green, gasping for air. As a results, the poor things are found by the thousands with their lungs collapsed, lying dead at the feet of the towering white giants.
Improvements in photo taking with smart phones are fueling the newsworld. Uncontrolled, uncensored, irreverent and totally suited for Web and TV publications, these fast growing devices, now often with 3 megapixels, are giving an all new perspective to the notion of free press.
Not that I am in the habit of drooling over photo gadgets, but I must say, when my partner Inese Birstins give me the BBC link below, I was truly dazzled. Our previous entry was all about archiving and the issue of storing/archiving files, ever-increasing in number and size. This new panoramic photo system is breaking all records in this regard: it is about to deliver a gargantuan appetite for storage but, nevertheless, an amazing visual and affordable way to create such files. This is all too dangerous. It works, it costs around $350-$500 (including a low-end digital camera), and it’s fun. The truth is there have been less than practical attempts to replace the legendary Swiss-made Alpa ROTO 360 panoramic camera that cost, in the eighties, a mere $25K. This just does it… I need one.
We are getting our telescope ready and are hoping for a clear view of the sky. The CleanPix team is happily switching off all lights on the inside and outside of our headquarters building for Earth Hour. In addition we will be unplugging all non-essential computers during this time. We’ll be enjoying the calm in concert with the millions of others who are joining in on this notable gesture. We are aware that living on Earth is a privilege.
Is there a definitative digital archive solution?
April 20, 2009Here are some of the factors at play: File formats change constantly, the software versions that read these formats as well as the hardware and their operating systems seem to thrive on obsolescence. The sheer amount of digital bits, the cataloguing/indexing methods, the need for redundancies of storage and location are all part of the archival equation. And most important is ease of retrieval. (We already know: “Your call is important to us, we are busy serving your competition, please stay in the queue… then push the pound key to listen to this message again.”) Talking about pounds, it comes to mind (not to discourage anyone), that that the human body has more retentive ability to preserve fat than any digital system has for the files it so gluttonously ingests!
Here are some interesting notes:
Although this article was published in 2002, (this article was first published on guardian.co.uk at 10.51 GMT on Sunday 3 March 2002 ) it appears that at least the concept in this article and its relevancy remain preserved to this date.
In further digging on the subject and the science of digital preservation, I retrieved this “touché” webpage that should, if nothing else, poke a serious dent in the illusive notion of digital archiving. (Note, in this case I took a picture of the webpage for fear of imminent evaporation.) Perhaps we should not just yet add “digital archive” (an oxymoron?) to Wikipedia.
There are, in fact, serious efforts and new conceptual approaches to solve the dilemma, but first, I think, we have to really look beyond IT and it’s terabyte devices to the professional librarians who, from Alexandria to now, have been in the business of dealing with archives. One thing that particularly struck me conceptually is that it appears that digital is better at being live than archived. So why not give it life? Here is one librarian, Brewster Kahle, revealing that the secret to the organization’s success is in keeping it simple in a vision opting to give access to the world of knowledge freely to the world. In his words: “We are allergic to secret sauce.”
Thinking about it, I have written on this WordPress blog platform now for several months. Did anyone at CleanPix make a copy of all this stuff, anywhere but on WordPress? … oops!
The latest digital archiving solution has a problem of its very age
Making alternate copies is likely core to any 101 classes on digital archiving. I must say that when I did my graduate studies at R.I.T. in photography, the museum practice course did not include “digital” anything in the subjects…yet. In the mid 1980s, the Encyclopedia Britannica was in its heyday in its printed voluminous form. Now it exists in its entirety in a complex configuration of zeros and ones. But the core archiving methodology learned then remains still valid: to date, not enough time has elapsed to definitely validate any digital archiving practices. This simply means that the latest digital archiving solution has a problem of its very age. This is the nature of new evolving digital technologies.
At CleanPix we are prone to say, in the context of a “green environment’”, that “dealing with digital files digitally is the only way to go” (using the internet as opposed to flash drives and CD burning etc.). This slogan may turn up to be more true on more levels than we first thought. For the shear pleasure of it, if we interpolate from the famous E=mc2 equation where mass contains all its energy, we could derive a parallel where digital is energy, and when stored as mass (mechanical) it becomes “heavier” to deal with. I knew that sooner-than-later I will find a twist to insert Einstein in this blog and perhaps share with you this awesome NOVA video that put relativity, relatively understandable and certainly entertaining. Here is an abstract of the video: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/preview/q_3213.html