Can you see what’s wrong here? The WA ad the government had to fix
Tourism Australia has had to make some major changes to its new campaign for Western Australia after someone spotted this unfortunate error.
It just looks like a dreamy picture celebrating the beauty of Western Australia — but when you spot the mistake, you can’t un-see it.
Tourism Australia has been forced to re-do this new advertisement for its UnDiscovered Australia campaign after a glaring error was spotted in the first version.
The original image shows a couple sitting on a hill in Kings Park, WA, while taking in the spectacular view of the Perth CBD at sunset. The caption reads: “Catch the sunset here”.
The problem is, the sun in the image appears to be setting in the east — even though the sun famously sets in the west.
Reporters at the West Australian spotted the mistake and pointed it out to Tourism Australia, which said the ad would be fixed.
An edited version has now been released.
The ad is part of a campaign aimed at British tourists to showcase lesser-known parts of the country.
But the mistake earned scorn on social media, where commentators said it showed “how little Canberra boffins know or care about our state”.
“It’s the government, cant even be honest about where the sun sets,” someone wrote on Facebook.
“Hope they had a sunset clause in the contract,” someone else said.
Government-led tourism campaigns aren’t immune from embarrassing — and sometimes very offensive — mistakes.
Last year, the Fijian government was forced to apologise for accidentally mistaking a church for a toilet in a tourism video.
The embarrassing faux pas appeared in a video that attempted to showcase everyday words in the local itaukei language to foreign visitors.
The words “Vale ni Lotu” were translated as “toilet” — but they actually meant church or place of worship.
Once the error was realised, Tourism Fiji quickly pulled the offending video from its Facebook and Instagram accounts and issued an apology, blaming the gaffe on a graphic design error.
And in 2016, the small nation of Lithuania — which is beautiful in its own right — splashed out $193,000 on its “Real is Beautiful” tourism campaign, which featured stock images of various Nordic and eastern European countries.
The head of Lithuania’s State Tourism Department resigned in the wake of the scandal.