Aruba Ads

About ten days ago, I blogged about the ongoing, grassroots travel boycott against Aruba. In general, I don't feel like I hear much about Aruba, so I was really surprised days later to find front-of-the-book full-page ads touting Aruba in the March issues of both Budget Travel and Travel + Leisure. The ad campaign - with the tagline "90,000 Friends You Haven't Met Yet" and featuring comedian Lewis Black - apparently kicked off in October 2009 so I either hadn't seen or noticed it before. But it seemed like a weird coincidence, which is why I bring it up.

The campaign features ordinary people who live in Aruba and seemingly love their lives. In the T+L ad, Mary Ann is a masseuse who moved to the island about five years ago after falling in love with it on a visit. In the Budget Travel ad, Osmar is an Aruba native and dive instructor who once managed to recover a newlywed's wedding ring from the sandy bottom. (I kind of laughed at this ad because it reminded me that I had the single worst dive of my life in Aruba.)

But what's really interesting about this campaign, I think, is its interactive, social-media component. If you go to Aruba.com, you can "friend" the people in the ads and send them messages, like on Facebook. You can also set up a profile for yourself. These sorts of open social networks (ahem, MySpace) seem to have a lot of skeevy dudes floating around - which is the last thing Aruba wants or needs - but who knows, maybe this sort of networking is the future of travel (or at least, a future aspect of travel). I hope not, but stranger things have happened...