Destinations known | Tourism New Zealand takes aim at social media users’ tedious lack of originality online

We’re not the only ones to have noticed. In a recent video campaign (clearly designed to go viral), Tourism New Zealand takes aim at the tedious lack of originality online and entreats sightseers to stop travelling “under the social influence”. With calculated irony (we assume), the nation has enlisted comedian and “Snapchat Dude” Tom Sainsbury – who rose to fame for his impressions of former lawmaker Paula Bennett on social media – to star in the very shareable commercial.

Sainsbury plays a member of the fictional Social Observation Squad on patrol at some of New Zealand’s most snapped tourist spots. “People have been seeing those photos on social media and have been going to great lengths to copy them,” he says, as he ascends a hill to catch a couple in the act of doing just that. Among the offending image types are “hot tub back-shot”, “man sits quietly on the rock contemplating”, “hot dog legs” and “the classic one in these parts, the summit spread-eagle”.

“I’ve seen all this before, we all have,” he tells the pair he prevents from posing at the peak, before depositing them at a winery and telling them to “share something new”, which is ultimately what the campaign is encouraging, in an effort to get Kiwis travelling around their homeland. With non-citizens barred from entering the country until enough New Zealanders have been vaccinated so as to achieve herd immunity, the Land of the Long White Cloud hopes that domestic tourism can plug the gap left by the missing visitors.

In 2019, the nation recorded 3.87 million overseas arrivals, most of them from neighbouring Australia, who brought with them NZ$40.89 million (US$29.42 million) in spending money, according to government statistics. “Despite everyone’s best efforts, the domestic market simply can’t make up the losses,” reported The New York Times recently. “International tourists spend about three times as much per person as their domestic peers.”

So, like other destinations that are missing their foreign sightseers, New Zealand is asking its citizens to expand their horizons. And while the message of its viral video might seem to scorn those who are inspired by social media to travel, it is actually harnessing the power of the medium to get people out and exploring by asking domestic travellers to share their experiences using a hashtag. Meta!

It seems to be working. Kind of. At the time of writing, Instagram had counted almost 34,000 images tagged #DoSomethingNewNZ. Unfortunately, it seems to be a case of quantity over quality, with the top posts coming straight from the seen-before camera rolls of travel influencers. There is at least one fedora, there is contemplative posturing and there’s even a Lord of the Rings recreation – Sainsbury’s Social Observation Squad will not be pleased.

Perhaps the only way to avoid such unoriginality is to not post at all. By all means, do something new, but think twice about sharing it beyond a WhatsApp group. Especially if where you are is uncharted territory on social media – you’ll want to keep it that way.