“Invest In Your Love”: Romantic desires,YouTube videos,and the online marketing of Tahiti

Image production from Captain Cook’s artists to YouTube contests

For many Westerners (like Greg and Lauren) “Tahiti” evokes the ultimate vision of “paradise.” As is true for most tourist destinations, this fantasized image obscures a deeper understanding of a place’s geographical, historical, and contemporary realities. To begin with, the name “Tahiti” is misleading. Tahiti, which is just one island, albeit the largest and best known of the 118 islands that make up the French territory of French Polynesia, has become a gloss for what is actually a very diverse group of islands. Together they cover an area that is three times the size of Western Europe, but has a total landmass that is only slightly larger than Luxemburg. Most Westerners, when asked where French Polynesia is or what it consists of, would have difficulty providing an answer. “Ask about Tahiti, however, and a vision of a beautiful tropical island rising from a deep-blue sea immediately materializes on the map” (Wheeler and Carillet, 1997: 10) even though knowledge of where it is might be vague. The diverse geography of French Polynesia, which includes high volcanic islands and low-lying atolls, creates an interesting irony when imagining Tahiti as “paradise.” Geologically, the high island of Tahiti is relatively new and, thus, has only a fringing reef. As a result, it has very few picture-perfect white-sand beaches. The beaches that fit the postcard image exist mainly on older islands like Bora Bora that have barrier reefs and expansive lagoons, or on atolls like Rangiroa. Paradoxically, to meet tourists’ expectations on the island of Tahiti, many luxury waterfront hotels dredge sand from the lagoon and deposit this over the otherwise gray, and occasionally muddy, natural beach. ⁴

This image of Tahiti as paradise has a long, complex history that is related to both colonial politics and innovations in graphic representation—whether oil paintings, engravings, postcards, color photography, cinematography, or digital imagery. Since the explorations by Samuel Wallis, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, and James Cook in the late eighteenth century, the islands that now make up French Polynesia have been heavily influenced by colonial powers. Less familiar than the image of Tahiti as paradise is the fact that French Polynesia remains a colony of France in today’s postcolonial world. ⁵ This history, which includes 30 years of French nuclear testing on the islands of Moruroa and Fangataufa (1966–1996), ⁶ has not always been as benign as it might appear when mediated through images of blue lagoons, white-sand beaches, coconut palms, and smiling Tahitian women. Producing this imagery of Tahiti as an irresistible paradise serves an important economic and political role. Like much touristic representation, these images veil an often-ugly colonial history, along with its unpicturesque consequences, from public awareness (Kahn, 2000, 2011). ⁷

The 250-year-long history of depicting Tahiti as “paradise,” a topic that has received much attention, ⁸ falls within a wider regional sphere of images of the Pacific—and especially of Hawai‘i—where connections between skimpily clad bodies and imperial power suggest the close connection between eroticism, exoticism, and political and military colonization (Jolly, 1997: 99). Most striking is the consistency, over the centuries, of the visual tropes of romance, exoticism, and paradise, as signaled by seductive “South Pacific” women, even though many of the women portrayed are not from the Pacific (Desmond, 1999; Johnston, 2002; Trask, 1987). Constructing these images supports and encourages stereotypes of gender and race, thereby silencing colonial histories, masking political tensions, and confounding issues of identity. The destructiveness of these icons is especially apparent in Hawai‘i, where images of a soft, feminine “hula girl” obscure the harsh economic and political realities of land alienation, the prostitution of Hawaiian culture, and economic inequalities (Trask, 1987). Imada (2012) specifically discusses the role of the hula girl, often portrayed as an “ambassador of aloha,” in legitimizing imperialism by encouraging people to have an “imagined intimacy” with Hawai‘i.

A brief review of the history of these images of Tahiti will provide a context within which to understand the role of today’s Internet imagery. In the late eighteenth century, at the height of European imperialist expansion into the Pacific, the artists who accompanied the European explorers were pivotal in giving visual form to images, informed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of the “noble savage” living in harmony with nature. When these artists returned to Europe, they followed the conventions of European romanticism, landscape painting, and pictorialism in turning their sketches into paintings and engravings that were exhibited widely throughout Europe. These images of tropical landscapes with verdant glens and tumbling waterfalls, as well as “exotic” Tahitian women, gave European men an unambiguous vision of an earthly paradise—the “Garden of Eden” that Bougainville claimed to have discovered.

In the late nineteenth century, improvements to photography permitted images to be reproduced and circulated more widely than was possible with oil paintings or engravings in leather-bound books. Most notably, these advances in photography paved the way for the production of picture postcards. With the development at this time of reliable postal services and new printing techniques, travelers could now send images of exotic places to friends and family back home (O’Reilly, 1975: 8). As Europeans began to travel more widely in the early 1900s, black-and-white (and occasionally hand-colored) postcards became the most common form of depicting colonial life (Aldrich, 1996), bringing images of exotic “human types” and faraway places closer to home (p. 258). Postcard images displayed the “successes” of colonialism: robust infrastructures (wharves, roads, European-style houses, and churches), “civilized” Tahitians (wearing Western clothing, carrying French flags, playing the accordion, and reading the Bible), and strong native bodies hard at work (on the plantations, at the docks, and on the water). An image of a wharf with industrious native workers and bulging bags of copra, for example, illustrated the economic value of colonialism—in the form of native labor and bustling European commerce—to French citizens back home (see Figure 1). While colonized labor and products were entering into and circulating within European economies, postcard images visually entangled colonial resources, capital, and power. At this time, several European photographers set up studios in Tahiti to respond to the demand for postcards. Many of these postcards, after being sent to the métropole, were carefully placed in postcard collectors’ albums, a fashionable activity, especially among women, at this time (DeRoo, 2002; Mathur, 1999). ⁹

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Figure 1.

Le Quai du Commerce, Pape‘ete, Tahiti, early 1900s.

Postcards of images of romantic scenery were especially useful for maintaining French support for the colonial enterprise. Landscape postcards featured dramatic waterfalls, deep gorges, or lush valleys capped by the mountain peaks of Tahiti’s interior. A particularly popular postcard image (produced in various versions by different photographers) was a view of Rivière de Tautira modeled on the 1776 painting by William Hodges (who had accompanied Captain Cook) of Oaitepeha Bay, Tahiti (see Figure 2). This endlessly replicated suite of Arcadian images etched the illusions of a Tahitian paradise ever more deeply into the minds of Europeans.

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Figure 2.

Tahiti—Rivière de Tautira, F. Homes, 1920s.

Postcard images of Tahitian women were by far the most popular (O’Reilly, 1975: 9). These were posed studio portraits that were often hand colored. Lucien Gauthier, who arrived in the colony in 1904 and soon became the best-known photographer of the period, created a particularly popular series of portraits of individual women in various poses set against dark backgrounds. He grouped these together under the title Beautés Polynésiennes, hoping that postcard collectors would purchase the entire set (see Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Les Beautés Polynésiennes, 7. Terai, District de Pirae (Tahiti), Lucien Gautier, 1907.

Although tourism was not yet an established business in the early 1900s, these postcards helped to attract a sizable number of French citizens, especially young, single men from modest backgrounds, to Tahiti. Eventually, in spite of numerous challenges the settlers faced, a small French elite emerged to dominate commerce and politics.

By the middle of the twentieth century, mass global tourism was developing. It became necessary to make individual places appear desirable, accessible, and affordable in this environment of increased competition among tourist destinations. Color photography made it possible to replace the black-and-white images on postcards with more colorful images, and these soon were indispensable for the promotion of tourism. In Tahiti, Teva Sylvain, the son of a renowned French photographer and a Tahitian mother, began producing some of the first color postcards of landscapes, folkloric activities, and attractive bare-breasted “Tahitian” women. ¹⁰ While the postcards of the late 1800s and early 1900s valorized colonial activities, the images from the 1960s and 1970s (contemporary with the establishment of France’s nuclear testing program) camouflaged the less desirable consequences of colonial activity. Color cinematography—for example, the 1962 film Mutiny on the Bounty—further conflated the myth of Tahiti with its lived reality. Now the simple purchase of an airline ticket could make one’s dream of visiting Tahiti come true. With the opening of an international airport on the island of Tahiti in 1960 (built to facilitate the movement of personnel and equipment needed for the nuclear testing program), Western tourists could now consider traveling to Tahiti in search of the paradise they had been imagining but which had previously been too difficult and costly to visit. ¹¹

More recently (and concurrently with the end of the nuclear testing program in 1996), several factors brought about another technological change in the way Tahiti was represented. These included the development of new digital media and the increasing competition among vacation destinations, many of which were now beginning to look alike with the use of generic “paradise” imagery. Images from people’s trips to Tahiti now flood social networking sites like YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, and personal blogs. With the Internet now seen as the leading source for people to get information when planning a vacation, the boundary has become increasingly blurred between images created by and for the tourism industry and those produced by individuals who want to share their experiences about their travels. Not surprisingly, regardless of these new technologies for the production of images, the old tropes of romanticism, exoticism, and paradise have endured.

“Invest In Your Love”

Following the 2008 world economic crisis, interest in pursuing leisure travel to places like Tahiti plummeted. Marketing experts at TTNA ¹² saw this as an opportunity to re-energize an old brand. Targeting Americans in particular (who make up the majority of tourists to French Polynesia), they hoped to distract people away from their financial woes and toward something more worthy of their time—a reinvestment in themselves and their personal relationships through the experience of travel to Tahiti. As Al Keahi, the managing director at TTNA, stated,

Traveling is an essential tool in investing in your relationships. During these challenging times, cutting back on each other should be the last thing any family or couple should do. Tahiti is the perfect place to invest in your relationship as the islands are secluded, serene and are continually ranked by top travel outlets as the most romantic destination in the world for couples of all ages. (Polikarpov, 2009)

Soon after the beginning of the financial crisis, TTNA used ideas about money (investment in stocks, bonds, and 401(k)s) and love (investment in personal relationships) to launch a campaign called “Invest In Your Love,” featuring a contest where people could win a “love stimulus package,” namely a free trip to Tahiti. As stated on TTNA’s web site,

stocks, bonds, 401ks … oh my! Looking for a better return on investment? It’s time to invest in something real … your love. Known as the most romantic destination in the world, a trip to Tahiti is an investment that will pay dividends for a lifetime … ¹³

Instead of watching the line on the stock market graph plunge, people could look at the contest logo on TTNA’s web site and see that the right side of the “V” in the word INVEST spiked upward to suggest a more rosy future. The deliberate use of color was also uplifting. The word LOVE, with a heart in place of the “O,” was pink, with the other words in various shades of purple, set against a bright blue background (see Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

The logo for the Internet contest.

In 2008, TTNA called for “more website promotion,” especially “dynamic packaging on the Internet” (Tahiti Tourisme North America, 2008: 3). In an interview with Jonathan Reap, Director of Communications for TTNA, ¹⁴ I learned that marketing experts from Tahiti Tourisme’s offices in both Tahiti and Los Angeles discussed ways to use the Internet to respond to the economic crisis:

We knew that the economy had gone south and were trying to come up with an idea that would keep Tahiti in the top of people’s minds so that when the economy improved people would think about going to Tahiti. (Reap, personal communication, 2010)

The result was the “Invest In Your Love” campaign, developed by the Phelps Group of Santa Monica, California, which primarily targeted a heterosexual ¹⁵ North American audience: “Looking for an investment that will pay off for years? How about love? The ‘Invest In Your Love’ video contest will send six winning couples or families to the legendary and exotic islands of Tahiti” (Consumer Launch Press Release, 2009). ¹⁶ Or, as stated more fully on Tahiti Tourisme’s web site,

Want to go to Tahiti? Well, we want to send you there for a week—on us! For a chance to win the getaway of your dreams, send us a video from 25 seconds to 3 minutes in length showing us why you and your loved one(s) NEED and DESERVE a trip to Tahiti to Invest In Your Love. Viewers will determine the top ten finalists, and the winner will be chosen by a panel of expert judges. So get crazy, get creative, but most of all get on video why you NEED a trip to Tahiti now! ¹⁷

The contest consisted of six rounds, launched at roughly monthly intervals, beginning in April 2009. According to Reap, “One of the most fun aspects of the contest was putting together the video on how to submit your video.” The microsite included a 44-second clip about how to do this in “three easy steps.” These were (1) make a video, (2) upload your video to YouTube, and (3) fill out the entry form on the web site. Then tell everyone to watch the video and vote for you. This instructional clip opened with a woman singing to seductive music, “And you say that fame and fortune is a sham … I want to love you …” ¹⁸

TTNA used the “Invest In Your Love” microsite to “drive viral penetration and public relations, as well as support the campaign with traditional media including online banners, search engine marketing, and print advertising” (Rogers and Dooley, 2009). The site also featured special offers, a deal of the week, and trip planners. A quote ticker at the bottom of the page scrolled with personal reminders such as, “If you had spent your money on a trip to Tahiti, you wouldn’t have lost it in the market” (Polikarpov, 2009). A downloadable Tahiti widget was also available to entice you with imagery as well as interactive travel maps and an up-to-date (and rarely unpleasant) weather report (Polikarpov, 2009). Bridal Magazine, Budget Travel, Islands Magazine, Saveur, and Travel and Leisure provided publicity for the contest, as did Ellen DeGeneres, who promoted it on her television program. ¹⁹ According to Reap, “From a media perspective the contest was very successful … the ‘pick up’ alone was excellent. Public feedback was generally along the lines of ‘Oh, this is so much fun.’” The contest was also able to capitalize on the popular awareness of the 2009 feature film, Couples Retreat, which was filmed on Bora Bora.

In talking about the video submissions, the managing director of TTNA said, “We want to see everything from romantic and heartwarming to fun and offbeat” (Seale, 2009). Entries ranged from serious pleas to romantic fantasies to outhouse humor. For example, one couple lamented that if they did not win, they would have to resort to a Kentucky hillbilly honeymoon, which they then enacted. In their video, the husband fills a child’s shallow wading pool with a hose, attempts to snorkel in the pool, and “swims” with an inflatable plastic dolphin. Later, he and his wife eat bean soup, climb into a hot tub, and “make their own bubbles.” The majority of the videos, however, juxtapose the couple’s humdrum life at home with idyllic images of Tahiti, cleverly making images of their current situation (dreary offices, desks overflowing with paperwork, piles of laundry, family rooms overrun by children, and jobs in factories and sewage plants) transform into a Tahitian paradise (empty, sun-splashed beaches, romantic overwater bungalows, bronzed couples in aloha shirts and bikinis, and tropical sunsets).

When the contest ended in February 2010, there were 206 entries, nearly a quarter of a million video views, more than 50,000 votes cast, and six winning couples. Reap summed the success up succinctly by telling me, “The campaign took off very well. It was fun, pretty, ‘feel good’, and everyone could smile” (Reap, personal communication, 2010).

Product branding, lovemarks, and customer-made value

The “Invest In Your Love” contest, like all advertising, relies on the manipulation of signs and symbols to create perceptions of value and to trigger feelings of desire. The commercial use of images, driven partly although not solely by technology, was widely used already in late nineteenth and early twentieth century advertising, during the growth of modern consumer goods, applying many of the same themes used in the campaign—love, romance, luxury, happiness. Several authors have discussed the idea of hyper-reality and how these images and reproductions often seem more vivid and effective than the original (Baudrillard, 1983; Bruner, 1994; Eco, 1986). People desire many things, especially those (like Tahiti) “that resist [their] desire to possess them” (Simmel, 1978: 67). Baudrillard (1981) pointed out that complex economic mechanisms influence human values and desires, which are then often rationalized as needs (show us “why you and your loved ones NEED … a trip to Tahiti”). In the contest, something of value—money, pension plans, stocks, and bonds—was intentionally entangled with a different valuable—romance and personal relationships. Both of these were then mapped onto the idea of Tahiti as a consumable commodity and a sound investment, in terms of financial assets as well as romantic bliss.

The image of Tahiti has been a powerful object of people’s dreams and desires for centuries. Continually changing as it adapts to new mediums and technologies, the image has never ceased to circulate and seduce. Tahiti acquires its perceived value through the use of imagery depicting the pastoral landscapes of late-eighteenth–century paintings, virile men and seductive women in Hollywood films, postcards of white-sand beaches, blue lagoons, and smiling Tahitians, and now Internet images of the same. Through the manipulation of these signs and symbols, value becomes externalized, objectified, commodified, and deeply desired. For Tahiti, marketing research has shown that specific images evoke particular ideas or emotions, such as “friendliness,” “exoticism,” and “romance.” As Christel Bole, the Marketing Manager for GIE Tahiti Tourisme in French Polynesia, explained to me, “Each image stands for something. Smiling Tahitian children indicate people who are friendly and welcoming. Dancers in colorful regalia communicate the idea of cultural traditions. A couple standing in front of a sunset will make tourists think of romance” (Bole, personal communication, 2001). Marketing experts then select these images from databanks and arrange them to appeal to different segments of the target audience (see Kahn, 2011: 104–09).

Malek Alloula, in analyzing picture postcards of Algerian women circulated by French colonists in the early twentieth century, refers to this type of purposeful and misleading synthetic arrangement of signs and symbols. He discusses the need to saturate the postcard image by accumulating accessories and setting glittering traps of detail for the eye. He calls it “counterfeit realism” because it requires only a modicum of truthfulness and, instead, much painstaking attention to detail (Alloula, 1986: 52). This imagery

proves to be so pliable because the “art” of the exotic postcard is an art of sign and not an art of meaning. The few signs distributed here and there over the reflective surface of the postcard … are its true subjects. (Alloula, 1986: 64)

This process causes the signifier and signified to collapse into one another: “Fragments cohere into apparent wholeness, standing for irreducible truths” (Edwards, 1996: 216). This kind of meaning, where the world of images seems to create a world of valued things, is made all the more possible with the new media. Interacting with images and sounds of Tahiti on the Internet can create a strong desire to travel to Tahiti and a counterfeit, but convincing, sense of being there. It is through these interactive processes that marketing strategies such as product branding, lovemarks, and customer-made value all come into play.

Branding is one of the most effective ways of putting signs and symbols to use in advertising: “In today’s intensified world of global interconnectedness, full of movement and mixture, contact and linkages, the brand is regarded as the centerpiece of marketing theory and one of the most valuable constituents of advertising practice” (Geary, 2013: 38). Although, in the past, a brand referred simply to the manufacturer of a commodity, usually as a trademark to guarantee quality, more recently, brand names themselves have taken on the quintessential value that commodities acquire in the minds of consumers (Foster, 2007; Klein, 2002; Mazzarella, 2010). Because of the ephemeral nature of brands, consumers must continually be encouraged to behave in ways that endorse brand value (Arvidsson, 2005: 244), essentially blurring the boundaries between the production, circulation, and consumption of the commodity. Some items need little branding. Others, like laundry detergents, breakfast cereals, soft drinks, and tourist destinations—all of which might speak to one’s self image and social status—rely heavily on it. Marketing specialists describe Tahiti as known for offering specific “brand attributes.” These are luxury resorts, overwater bungalows, secluded beaches, and romantic settings, all of which, as research has shown, appeal to people who are educated, affluent, and seekers of exotic destinations (Tahiti Tourisme North America, 2008: 3). Tahiti, though, is even more than a brand; it is romantically fantasized about, deeply desired, and heavily invested in. Tahiti is “loved.”

Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide of Saatchi and Saatchi, took branding to the next level by identifying what he calls “Lovemarks” (Roberts, 2004). ²⁰ He noted that not only is emotion important to consumers when they connect to a product but that love is the strongest emotion of all. As he said, “LOVE was the only way to ante up the emotional temperature and create the new kinds of relationships brands needed” (Roberts, 2004: 57). Lovemarks appeal to the senses, arouse passion, connect to people’s personal stories, tap into their dreams, and have the ability to become myths and icons (Roberts, 2004: 75). Their key ingredients are intimacy, sensuality, and mystery. The importance of the idea of love in creating brand value cannot be underestimated (Foster, 2008: 16, 14). As Roberts explains, marketers can sell anything by tapping into love. Think of bricks, he says. There is nothing emotional about bricks, so then you talk about what the bricks stand for—home, family, personal achievements—and the bricks will sell (Roberts, 2004: 148). Some psychologists have even suggested that when people connect with commodities that they “love,” their behavior may tap into the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine, activating the part of the brain associated with feelings of love (Lindstrom, 2011: A19).

The idea of love—and more specifically, the compounding of different kinds of love—definitely drives the “Invest In Your Love” contest. Tahiti has long been associated with “love” and the campaign makes the most of this. ²¹ As stated on the main web site, “It’s time to invest in something real … your love.” From the moment people enter the microsite it is clear that various signs and symbols of “love” permeate every aspect of the contest, both aurally and visually. As people listen to the woman singing, “and you say that fame and fortune is a sham … I want to love you …” they see that the “O” in the word love has changed into a gently throbbing heart that gradually expands to fill the entire screen. As the singing fades away, another woman starts talking about investing in love, ingeniously blurring the boundaries between financial investing and investing in romantic love. Contestants need to playfully scrutinize and publicize their love life, with all its warts and hoped-for remedies, and send this visual message on a (hopefully) viral journey. Most importantly, they must link their personal love to a trip to Tahiti, indicating how being there will intensify their love relationship and also transform their lives. Although loving a person and loving a brand are obviously quite different, the contest intentionally conflates the participant’s love for one with love for the other. While professing devotion to the person one loves, one is also expressing love for Tahiti. Within the framework of the contest, a contestant cannot proclaim passion for one’s lover without participating in the marketing campaign, promoting TTNA and its advertising agenda. This compounding of different types of love fits with the “long-held notion on Madison Avenue that the consumer is a woman who must be seduced” (Helm, 2007), although here Tahiti itself (herself) also becomes “the woman.”

The trend in marketing has not only been toward the branding of Lovemarks, but also toward the interactive co-creation of brand value (Foster, 2007, 2008; Roberts, 2004). Some have even referred to this form of personal involvement as a “love affair” between producer and consumer (Foster, 2007: 715; Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004). This trend, dubbed “Customer-Made,” is defined as

the phenomenon of corporations creating goods, services and experiences in close cooperation with experienced and creative consumers, tapping into their intellectual capital, and in exchange giving them a direct say in (and rewarding them for) what actually gets produced, manufactured, developed, designed, serviced, or processed. ( Trendwatching.com , 2006)

Customer-Made, as a strategy, is considered to be important “because tapping into the collective experiences, skills and ingenuity of hundreds of millions of consumers around the world is a complete departure from the inward looking, producer versus consumer innovation model” ( Trendwatching.com , 2006: 1). Not surprisingly, marketers note that, “the easiest way for brands to dip their toes into Customer-Made … is to announce a product … contest” ( Trendwatching.com , 2006: 2). ²² “Customers want to express themselves [and] be involved with the brand … Our customers get more involved, and we get insights into who they are and what they’re doing. It’s better for both of us” (Taylor, 2006). It is important for consumers to interact with the brand (Arvidsson, 2005: 246–47), to play with it, and to take ownership of it (Taylor, 2006). The quintessential platform for consumer co-creation is the Internet (Burgess and Green, 2009). Within these virtual spaces, consumers are given the raw materials to express themselves, creating social relations and shared meanings while actively engaging in constructing the value of the product. This kind of Customer-Made branding is also desirable economically because it involves the unpaid work of consumers who invest these brands with their identity (Foster, 2008: 15). ²³ Costs for producers are transferred to consumers, and with the use of new media, this cost can remain relatively low. Indeed, Customer-Made branding has been hailed as a “low-cost, high-involvement formula” (Taylor, 2006).

TTNA took the idea of Customer-Made even one step further by asking participants to use the Internet to produce their videos, and to disseminate these by posting them on YouTube. Although conveyed as a way for the contestants to win more votes for themselves, the request for them to “tell everyone to watch the video and vote for you” enhances the promotion of TTNA and their product. Interestingly, the “Invest In Your Love” contest did not ask consumers to design new products, as many Customer-Made contests have done, but instead to promote a product that already exists. In the videos submitted, people tended to imitate and reproduce the familiar depictions rather than envision Tahiti in a new way, perhaps precisely because the idea of Tahiti is so oversaturated that it has become its own referent. Contestants preferred to use recurrent visual tropes of white-sand beaches, coconut palms, and seductive women, using images of Tahiti downloaded directly from the web site of TTNA or other tourism companies. ²⁴ In keeping with the erroneous notion that one tropical setting can be substituted for another, people often chose Hawaiian imagery (lu‘aus, leis, and hula girls, as well as Hawaiian music) to signify “Tahiti.”

Of course, none of this—today’s Internet-supplied imagery, the hyper-reality of Tahiti, and people’s active engagement with and manipulation of the images—would be possible without digital technology, which makes the creation and circulation of Customer-Made Lovemarks relatively easy to accomplish and accessible to many.

Private dreams and public videos of the twenty-first century

Over the centuries, technological changes in the production of images of Tahiti, as well as their subtexts, have changed dramatically. In the eighteenth century, only the elite could view oil paintings in private homes or ponder engravings in leather-bound books, and few could imagine visiting a place so distant and different. Tahiti was generally unknown to the Western world. There was, of course, no tourism and there were only embryonic stirrings of desire.

Late-nineteenth-century postcards with images from the colonies traveled farther afield, crossing oceans to friends and family back home. Europeans were also exposed to similar images of Tahiti that appeared on chocolate wrappers, soap packages, and postage stamps, and in board games and exhibits at colonial expositions (Kahn, 2011: 50–51, 58–59). These images still presented a distant place and people with whom the viewers had little direct connection. Colonialism promoted well-defined relations and ambiguous desires between people and places. Postcard collectors, who were typically women, could sense that the European women pictured in the postcards occupied an ambiguous place of choreographed leisure. Photographed in their ruffled frocks, they were usually depicted enjoying a Sunday outing in a horse-drawn carriage or sitting demurely at a lakeside picnic. Rather than portraying these women as feeling at home in Tahiti, the postcards

reveal the anxieties that were generated by the uncertain place of white women in the colonies … [and] assured their audiences at home that European women were being properly managed within the precarious relations of race and gender that structured the colonial public order. (Mathur, 1999: 108)

Postcards that were produced after the beginning of mass tourism in the 1960s were vastly different. They were intended to influence the viewer, and especially Western men, by provoking sexual fantasies and desires. They were circulated widely, yet still within a select group. Teva Sylvain, who introduced this particular postcard strategy and continues to have a near monopoly on it today, explained that he mainly employs non-Tahitian women for his popular bare-breasted vahine (female) images, and then adds identifiable Tahitian details—a crown of flowers on her head, a hibiscus flower behind her ear, or a woven coconut-leaf basket in her hands—to make the women appear Tahitian “because the men who visit Tahiti want a woman that they already possess in their head or in their libido” (Teva Sylvain, personal communication, 1995). His goal is to connect these men with the images, although more so in their imagination than in reality. As he noted, the seductive women on his postcards are not what men would necessarily find “on every street corner” in Tahiti (Sylvain, 1994: 64). ²⁵

Today’s digital images, like those in the contest videos, are again quite distinct and serve a slightly different purpose. They can circulate to millions, instantaneously, and can be seen by complete strangers (demonstrated by the fact that I can write about Greg and Lauren’s dreams and even know what their living room and kitchen look like). Living in an increasingly technologized age, where most of what we experience is mediated, our world is often one of fabrication—what Baudrillard (1995) has called the “Simulacrum” and what the Wachowskis have called the “Matrix.” Digital technology allows us to create remixes and mash-ups fairly easily, thus altering our ideas about time and space and about what kinds of realities are possible. It encourages engagement in imaginary travel and self-transformation. Today we live in a copy-mad world, where the remix is the heart and soul of the digital where information circulates online, pushed along by people with little knowledge or understanding of the political and historical realities of a place or situation.

Although digital remediation can be relatively simple, the results—that are reassembled in fragmented bits and bytes constructed from a plethora of available images—can be disorienting. Whereas a painter carefully creates images on the surface of a canvas, “new technology allows us to chuck a piece of dynamite at it [and] then reassemble the pieces” (Prouty, 2009: 1). These fragments reshuffle experiences of space and time, creating a new—and potentially disorienting—awareness of what is possible. Space and time become distorted, as in Alice’s wanderings in the fantasyland down the rabbit hole. For example, the winning video for round three, “Tahiti or Bust,” shows the contestants, Joe and Julie, playing out their “lifelong dream” by spatially and temporally manipulating images. As they go to bed Joe says, “When [Julie] goes to sleep at night almost every time thoughts of Tahiti fill her dreams.” Next we see a cartoon image of a plane flying to Tahiti, after which we see Joe and Julie suddenly waking up in Bora Bora in a spacious overwater bungalow. “I can picture us there one day,” says Joe. Later he tells us, “our bags will practically pack themselves,” and we see a suitcase move into the frame and prop itself open, as flip flops, a bikini, a camera, a flower lei, and a stuffed animal wearing sunglasses all slide in. When the suitcase closes itself, we see a sticker on its lid with the words “Take me away to Tahiti.” These videos, with their visual mash-ups, can have jarring sound elements as well. In Joe and Julie’s entry we hear Hawaiian—not Tahitian—ukulele music throughout the video, which was also the case in Greg and Lauren’s video. Michiko Kakutani (2010) has noted that “digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research” as everything is “broken down into bits and bytes” with a growing emphasis on immediacy and subjectivity (p. 23).

Walter Benjamin noted that the 1890s’ invention of the movie camera allowed us to travel beyond the confines of our daily lives:

Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and our furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. (Benjamin, 1936: 236)

If a movie camera can accomplish all this, consider how even more profoundly using the Internet can reveal new ways of refashioning and imagining the self and one’s capacity for physical mobility and psychological transformation. New technology encourages self-imagining as an everyday social project where one can choose to move across various times and spaces. By reorganizing ideas of “here” and “there” one creates new forms of daydreaming. By blurring the boundaries between physical and imaginative mobility, one problematizes the sense of “being there.” As people reconfigure the setting, so too do they reconfigure their identities. ²⁶ In short, technological innovations can change ever more profoundly our ability to transcend our lives, transform our images of ourselves, and alter our place within the world. With a click of a mouse we can refashion our “selves” by manipulating mediated bits and bytes (see Boellstorff, 2008).

The notion of dreams is pivotal to these new structural formations of the subject. In the “Invest In Your Love” contest, routine lives are dissected and scrutinized in an effort to win the object of one’s dreams and desires. In many of the videos, places in which the contestants live and go about their daily lives appear lackluster and depressing. Through digital manipulation of the images, this world disappears and a dreamlike setting of Tahiti emerges in its place. As Kracauer (1960) has said, “Images blow up our environment in a double sense: they enlarge it literally; and in doing so, they blast the prison of conventional reality, opening up expanses which we have explored at best in dreams before” (p. 48).

Dreams, in various shapes and forms, figure prominently in the marketing of Tahiti. Appadurai (1986: 48) argues that the greater the geographical and cognitive distance between the production and consumption of a commodity, the greater the dreamlike quality of the stories about the commodity will be. For example, people wanting to visit Tahiti might remain relatively ignorant about many of its historical and political realities (for example, that it is a French colony, that it has an artificially inflated economy, or that there are few picture-perfect white-sand beaches on the main island of Tahiti). What they imagine takes on a heightened, dreamlike, almost mythical significance, which is very much in keeping with marketing tropes. The brochures and web sites of several travel companies say, “Close your eyes and imagine an oceanfront Garden of Eden for you and your Adam—or Eve—and you’ve probably just conjured up Tahiti.” ²⁷ The promotional literature of TTNA clearly states that Tahiti is “a destination so exotic, it exists only in one’s dreams.” ²⁸ The “Invest In Your Love” videos often refer to this dreamlike portrayal of Tahiti. In one video, the husband says, “I love my wife so much, I want to give her the dream of her life.” The winner of round one, says, “We have won the Tahitian vacation of our dreams.” The plot of another winning video shows the couple falling asleep and going to Tahiti in their dreams. In the case of Greg and Lauren, their dreams have become major “hallucinations,” becoming so powerful that they interfere with their daily lives.

From the discussion above, we can see that the blurring of traditional boundaries—between producer and consumer, here and there, and private dreams and public videos—has become commonplace. In the words of Mitchell (1992), the digital revolution serves as “the de-centered subject’s reconfigured eye.” (p. 85) Images that can be “so easily distributed, copied, transformed, and recombined” (Mitchell, 1992: 223) have the tendency to blur the distinction between fact and fiction. The images rendered are no longer indexical because their easy manipulation erodes categorical boundaries. ²⁹

As seen with the “Invest In Your Love” contestants, the Internet gives everyone (in principle) the chance to become an author, a photographer, a videographer, or a film producer (see Burgess, 2010; Reed, 2005, 2008). Not only could average people become YouTube producers, but they could also become contest winners and instant celebrities. Because the skills necessary for entering the contest were easy to learn, there was a sense that anyone could participate. The winners of the first round, Edward and Nyoka, remarked, “It was simple and easy to submit a video and now we have won … We are encouraging all of our friends and family to submit a video for the next phases of the contest.” ³⁰

One of the most fascinating boundaries to be blurred is the one between producer and consumer, not only of images but also of commodities, as evidenced in the way the campaign cleverly induced viewers to assist in the marketing efforts of TTNA by promoting its own business goals. Today, because of increasing competition in the tourism industry, elevated expectations of consumers, the world’s market-driven economy, and the dominance of digital technology, everything begins to look like a commodity. In the contest, the line between love and money, and professing love for one’s partner and performing love for a brand, became hazy.

Conclusion

As described above, much has changed over the centuries, not only in technologies of image production but also in the subtexts of the images produced. These undertones have ranged from trying to convince the French people of the value of colonial ventures, to nurturing sexual desires and luring tourists to Tahiti, to encouraging tourism in times of economic downturn while getting ordinary people to assist with destination marketing.

The form of desire has also changed. Although Tahiti has continued to evoke a notion of “paradise,” what that represents is interpreted anew in personal and historical ways. In the eighteenth century, Rousseau’s notion of the “noble savage” created a desire among Europeans for a simpler life where one could exist in harmony with nature. Colonial competition of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries turned desire into a perceived need to “civilize” the Tahitians and valorize colonialism. By the time mass tourism arose in the 1960s, Tahiti evoked a desire for a paradise that was isolated, restful, and romantic. The participants who entered the “Invest In Your Love” contest were motivated to win the object of their dreams—something they deeply desired. The contest appealed mainly to younger, American, heterosexual couples where, according to their videos, the paradise they craved represented freedom from their daily grind, a change of place and pace, and perhaps a more exciting and romantic sex life. Over the centuries, these different notions of desire have influenced the images that people choose to represent paradise.

What has not changed—in spite of the changes in techniques of image production, subtexts of the messages, and forms of desire—is the idea of Tahiti as paradise. These icons and tropes, which include images of seductive Tahitian women, Hawaiian hula girls, leis, coconut palms, grass skirts, the turquoise color of the lagoon, and ukulele music, have remained surprisingly stable. This redundancy of imagery seems to capitalize on a highly efficient mode of communication. Christopher Steiner has interpreted such highly repetitive messages as semiotic shorthand for establishing credibility. Just as language patterns need to be repetitive for people to understand linguistic meaning, visual patterns that are repetitive establish representational authority and create their own sense of “truth.” According to Steiner (1999), a person’s ability to see images as “real” and “accurate” depends not on their originality, but on their adherence to the familiar (p. 92). Tahiti’s long history of narratives and images in the Western imagination is redundant to the point of having created and maintained Tahiti as its own referent. As a result, people who market Tahiti today—whether these are the representatives of TTNA or the participants in their contest—can be seen as merely engaging in “a self-referential discourse of cultural reality that generates an internal measure of truth-value” (Steiner, 1999: 95). The durability of stable icons and tropes amid major changes in technologies of image production is consistent with marketing strategies, which recommend, “refinements may be made … but essentials of the brand personality should remain constant” (Morgan et al., 2002: 13).

This stability of imagery and the success of the campaign speak volumes about the unique place of Tahiti in the Western imagination. The “Invest In Your Love” campaign worked well for Tahiti because the place, as a tourist destination, has long been intertwined with images of love and desire. Had the campaign targeted other islands in the Pacific—for example, the Northern Mariana Islands, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, or the Republic of the Marshall Islands—it is doubtful that it would have met with much success.