The social reactions to
Open to Meraviglia
, the new international tourism promotion campaign by the Ministry of Tourism and Enit, were not long in coming.
And both the minister
Daniela Santanchè
and the communication agency that oversaw its creation,
Armando Testa
, responded to the numerous criticisms leveled against the advertising campaign.
ANSA and DataMediaHub
analyzed online conversations (social media + online news + blogs and forums) on the topic from the day before the launch to midnight yesterday.
In the period considered, there were
just over 18,000
online citations relating to Open to Meraviglia , by over 3,000 unique authors, whose contents involved (with likes + reactions + comments and shares) more than 155,000 subjects .
The peak was on April 23 in the morning, when it emerged that the domain with the claim of the campaign had not been registered, and on April 24 in the afternoon, when it was discovered that part of the promotional video had been shot abroad, in Slovenia, and not in Italy.
Despite the relatively modest volumes, the media echo was significant and in fact the citations generated a potential reach, the so-called 'opportunity to be seen' (the opportunity they theoretically had on the basis of these volumes of conversations to be exposed to content related to the campaign), of more than 5.3 billion impressions.
It can be reasonably estimated that the effective reach stands at
265 million impressions
, of effective views of content relating to the topic in question, thanks precisely to the media coverage recorded.
Every Italian would have been exposed more than four times to content on the subject.
Online conversations have a clear prevalence of negative connotations as regards the sentiment, the share of emotions and, precisely, feelings contained in the online verbalizations on the matter.
Even some inaccurate translations and the alleged purchase of followers on Instagram by @Venereitalia23, i.e. the official profile of the campaign (linked to the site http://Italia.it) have generated many adverse reactions.
The impression is that, however, these are conversations generated mainly by insiders.
It is no coincidence that among the professions declared by those who mostly participated in the online debate we find that of journalist, author/writer, and also marketing, with communication professionals who were particularly critical of the ironic thanks from Armando Testa, who bought a page in the
Corriere della sera
to reply to the criticisms received for the promotional campaign devised by the agency.
On the other hand, however, it should not be overlooked that many foreign newspapers, including the British
The Guardian,
have taken up and amplified the 'lightness' of the campaign launch.