Friday, November 5, 2010

Smoke and Mirrors Show...

My God this is too funny... is there some kind of brain washing chair they put those new Tourism Ministers in or is it just dizziness from the travel to China but how do you get "$22.6 million and counting" out of a TV show unless you're counting with monopoly money... surely it had to be a "consultant" who came up with these figures as it couldn't be one of those geniuses who work in our Tourism Department briefing the Minister?

But on the other hand maybe we could merger the Department of Agriculture with Tourism as a way of getting more value out of our potato industry. Just think of it this way. The latest figures I could find on PEI’s Agriculture’s web site to show how many potatoes we produce is for the year 2003 when Island potato producers planted 106,000 acres of potatoes which produced 26 million hundredweights (cwts) of potatoes or 2.6 billion pounds. The report goes on to say that the farm value of the potato crop is subject to large fluctuations but in the last five years values have ranged from 139.9 to 218 million dollars. So if the Agriculture “lads” reported to Tourism then they could use the .80 cents a pound we pay for "new potatoes" in grocery stores as a base line and "poof" we'd have a $2 Billion dollar potato industry... and then all our farmers would have enough money to join our Provincial golf courses.... and so on an so on!!!!

No, seriously.... I shouldn't be poking fun at these "guys and gals" as they just found a solution to bail out Ch'town's Cirque show with the $22.6 they saved us... now if they took $5 million of that and had advertised "Kenny Rogers" for Basil in S'Side then we wouldn't have had a bust their either.... and how about bringing "Alanis" back....

It's always entertaining waiting for the latest spin from the "Smoke and Mirrors Show" at Tourism....

P.E.I. government says Regis and Kelly visit worth millions in economic impact

Published on November 5th, 2010

The Prince Edward Island government says the media and marketing value of Live! with Regis and Kelly this summer has reached $22.6 million and counting.

Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa took their New York-based show to Charlottetown in July for four episodes.

The province spent $800,000 to attract the show, while the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency contributed another $200,000.

Tourism Minister Robert Vessey says the objective was to promote the Island as a culinary and vacation destination.

During the week the show aired, Prince Edward Island ranked number two in the top Google searches in the United States, and the number of visitors to the PEI Tourism website doubled.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's amazing how quickly they have determined the cash value of Regis and What's-her-name.
Kinda like a co-worker who said a friend of his had 100% occupancy for 2011 a week after the broadcasts.
I asked him how many cottages his friend has. The answer? One...
If only we could get Regis to endorse our roundabout budget!

Anonymous said...

I believe this is marketing/PR value - not cash receipts You are trying to compare apples and oranges. As I understand it, this was a marketing/PR exercise and as such, should be measured against its objective.