Very Gold Co$t is Born
We developed several initiatives in service of this culture jam. This began with the development of logo to replace the unpopular 'Very Gold Coast, Very GC' branding promoted by Gold Coast Tourism until last year. Our replacement brand - Very Gold Co$t - has become a fully-fledged anti-corporate identity package over the last few weeks, including bumper stickers, windshield flyers, and posters. It was hoped that these would slowly and subversively attract the attention and curiosity of Griffith University staff and students and the wider community. We have been dispersing these bits and pieces randomly around the Griffith University campus and other 'hot spots' around the Gold Coast. While we haven't been able to gauge the attention received by this branding experiment, we know for certain that the posters have been noticed - they tend to be very quickly removed from ATMs and shopfronts.
Home for the Homeless on Facebook
The second route we took towards getting noticed by the community at large was a Facebook page that documents audiovisual artefacts of our jam around the Gold Coast. The Facebook page has only been active for a short time, but it has already received patronage from a handful of people who are genuine strangers to the members of our group.
Gold Co$t Calling Advertisement Video
After stumbling across an interesting advertising campaign designed by California Calling (tourism company for California, United States), we were inspired to develop a third course of action: a parody Gold Coast tourism video using our own reworked branding and focusing on the lesser-known aspects of the Gold Coast that are seen as important issues to Gold Coast locals. Given the significant rate of youth homelessness in Queensland, we thought it would be interesting to give the Gold Coast homeless a voice and feature homeless people (or rather, actors playing homeless people) as hosts of the ad. Originally, we wanted to approach genuine homeless and other struggling, disenfranchised, digruntled, and otherwise disenchanted Gold Coasters to appear in the ad. Our study schedules and the short time frame limited our efforts, however... and ensured that the end-product could not be misconstrued as defamation rather than parody!
Now that the California Calling ads have started to air on Australian National television networks, we feel that there is much potential for local and wider Australian audiences to relate to our slightly more skeptical version.
California Calling is also currently running a competition to encourage California locals to get involved in the campaign by creating their own videos. We will soon be uploading our video as an entry in this competition, as well as to YouTube, and sending the link to the Gold Coast City Council, The Gold Coast Bulletin, and our State Government representative for their convenient viewing pleasure. It is unfortunate that we cannot as yet comment on the impact of these actions, but I, at least, am motivated to continue developing this aspect of the culture jam and fully realise its potential to garner public attention and perhaps even ancourage positive changes on the Gold Coast.
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