Dubai, Flight Shaming, Breaking Out of Lockdowns, and Marketing Miscues

by Robert McGarvey

“It is nice to know that everybody’s kind of in their trackies, apart from those b*****s who went to Dubai.”

So Jake Quickenden moaned to the Manchester Evening News. He’s a Dancing on Ice winner and something of a UK celeb. The Dubai incident – where a bunch of British social media influencers and reality TV stars were treated to a junket and as they posted snaps of their holidays online, the British, indeed the global, public roared in angry resentment – has got to give anybody pause before jetting off to anyplace exotic.

Quickenden continued: “We’re all trying to get through this lockdown at the end of the day so that we can get on with our lives.

“People can rebuild their businesses, people can rebuild their relationships and their mates. We’re all trying to do that, apart from the ones who went to Dubai.”

Ouch.

This is flygskam – flight shaming – on steroids.

Know that Quickenden is just one of literally thousands of voices raised in condemnation of the skin flaunting influencers in Dubai and therefore you might think that the brands and locations that have tossed junkets to influencers might have pulled away from this marketing tactic, if not out of disgust at unnecessary travel in a pandemic but simply out of a survival instinct.

Which raises a key question: Are the brands that sponsor and host such events morally irresponsible?

The British influencers, by the way, traveled legally in that they claimed their Dubai hop was business travel and, for them, it was.

Sure, the British public, much of it, did not see the junket in the same light. But if you are earning money by showing some skin in the sun then, yes, such trips are business for you.

Legalities aside, however, the PR blowback was intense and negative. So it has seemed.

But appearances may deceive.

Indeed The Drum – an online pub that covers digital marketing – now reports that Dubai may not be forgotten but brands nonetheless are pushing forward with marketing plans built around influencers traveling abroad.

Is this nuts? Maybe not, says UK web design firm Rouge, which relates:

“we analysed the Instagram accounts of 50 popular social media stars who have been pictured abroad this Winter. And the results are somewhat surprising…

Likes per post for influencers abroad are up a staggering 144 percent compared to their average.” 

The Drum added: “The influencer marketing landscape is forecast to grow by 15% in 2021 to a whopping $5.86bn.”

The New Statesman elaborated: “Kaz Crossley, one of the Love Island stars currently in Dubai, gets 50k-60k likes per post on holiday versus nearly half that (roughly 30k likes) on posts she shares of herself in the UK. Another example is Molly Mae Hague – a Love Island 2019 runner-up… – who posts regularly to YouTube…. While her video stats vary, ranging anywhere between half a million and a million views, her travel vlogs in the pandemic have been some of her most successful ever. Her vlog from Crete this summer has 1.4 million views and a trip to Ibiza has a whopping 1.9 million; a trip to the Maldives in December has 1.3 million and – you guessed it – a vlog of her trip to Dubai that same month has 1.2 million.”

We – you and I – are drawn to this content and therefore the influencers and their sponsors are simply serving up what we apparently crave. As we are in lockdown – by government fiat in the UK, or simply by personal choice for many US travelers – we have our eyes on those who have broken out.

But a money question for the hosts and sponsors of these junkets: Yes, visits to influencer posts and content went up but did any visitor actually make any purchases? My guess is no, especially not among the core UK travelers who remain in lockdown.

Never confuse site visits with end results. I should have thought that part of the Marketing 101 class. But, evidently, it isn’t.

Just because we surf to a site doesn’t mean we are transacting.

Site visitor counts be damned, the Dubai campaign failed. Period.

If we ain’t buying tickets to fly there, or booking hotel rooms to stay, it’s one big fail.