The Kent Film Office and Screen South hosted a reception to celebrate the premier of ‘The Calling’ starring Brenda Blethyn. Brenda congratulated Gabrielle Lindemann and her team at Kent in their work; we were please to hear her mention the MovieSite databases.
Untangling the players in film tourism.
Just who should be taking part in and leading film tourism? This appears to me to be the hard question, and the one delaying uptake of the confirmed economic benefits, particularly in the UK.
There are four clearly interested parties for any significant development of film tourism: a tourism agency, a screen agency / film office, an economic development agency and tourism businesses.
The organisation and relationships necessary to deliver meaningful results on the front line of tourism requires significant input from tourism businesses themselves and not just a top-down approach from agencies that find difficult to resource and co-ordinate.
Giving Tourism Celebrity Status
The idea of allowing tourism business take control of film tourism in their area may be unusual to some, particularly when co-ordination and logistics are considered. However, in this new age of the Internet (Web 2.0) it is possible for agencies to market regions and empower businesses at the same time.
The benefits of using Web 2.0 techniques to market regions and countries and then deliver content and services to business groups in a cost-effective way is powerful. To be sustainable there must be a commercial rationale. If marketing is entirely centralised there has to be some soviet-style delivery vehicle (‘one size fits all’) with onerous tracking and recording. Why not provide the marketing tools that businesses can simply make use of with the added benefit that marketing and activity information comes back to the agencies with little effort?