Penang Global Tourism’s new international campaign launched in the Lion City.
A LONG TIME AGO, I was standing on a London tube platform watching rats scurry under the rails. Something caught the edge of my eye, a vaguely familiar beach scene on a giant billboard where the shapes of the rocks and the hills all triggered off tiny electric currents in me. I looked up and realised that the expanse of tropical paradise stretched along the grimy tunnel was part of a tourism campaign for Penang.
Golden beaches, turquoise sea and blue skies, all the prerequisite visual clichés stared back at me. I remember feeling rage quickly descend. “This is a lie! This is a lie!” I wanted to hysterically scream at commuters. Thousands of miles away from Penang on a drab winter’s day I was confronted with a caricature of the home I was sorely missing; my happy memories clouded by lazy advertising trickery. “Damn you, Tourism Malaysia,” I grumbled as I shuffled to work.
