The gibberish that recently appeared on the Mexican flagship website was so bizarre that it could just as well have been co-opted by a competitor.
Earlier this month, viewers who saw in the English-language submissions on VisitMexico.com that many geographical names were literally translated. The state of Guerrero off the Pacific coast, named after a hero of Mexican independence, was rendered “Warrior.” The northern city of Saltillo became “Little Leap” – both translations seemed robotically correct because they were embarrassing.
There were more curiosities. The website provides a link to “Mexico Hyper” and explains that the colonial city of San Miguel de Allende was founded in the “XNUMXth” century. And to the delight of Twitter, Ciudad Madero simply “Logged”, and paid tribute to the assassinated President Francisco I. Madero.
Not all translations were literal. Tulum, the Mayan fortress overlooking the Caribbean, was somehow “Jumpsuit”, which is the boho that the neighbor thinks in the nearby audience, but is otherwise inexplicable.
The Ministry of Tourism in Mexico, known as Sectur, soon issued an apology, declaring that it would take legal action against those responsible for the damage. The website was frozen, stained with a photo of San Miguel and a promise that a new website would be ready by Thursday.
The comic episode is a cautious story about the risks of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s “Republican Savings” program, which has affected large areas of Mexico’s bureaucracy.
No one could defend the waste and mismanagement of Mexico’s former administrations, but López Obrador’s cuts are so close to the bone that they affect everything from health care spending to environmental protection and scientific research.
And when it comes to promoting Mexico abroad – as attracting foreign tourists as investors – López Obrador has seen no value in spending on outreach. He has just traveled outside Mexico once since taking office in December 2018 (his brief visit to Washington in July), and he attended the United Nations International Summits and Speeches that his predecessors used to project Mexican soft power. He famously tried to sell the presidency 787.
Instead, he has repeatedly argued that “the best foreign policy is domestic policy”, shortly before his twin goals to attack graft and reduce Mexico’s idiosyncratic poverty.
That one-sided focus on Mexico’s domestic affairs betrays a shaky understanding of how much Mexico has become intertwined with the rest of the world, and how countries must fight against each other, like it or not, for a share of global attention. Instead, López Obrador seems to believe that his beloved Mexico sells itself and does not need advertising. He also closes a federal agency charged with attracting foreign investment, as he seems to believe he can venture foreign investment with a phone call to a multinational CEO and a meeting at the impressive National Palace for Executives. t come to call.
And his approach to tourism dates back to an era of mega-projects of the 1970s, with a plan to build a “Mayan Train” around the Yucatán Peninsula. To finance the billions that Mexico will spend on the construction of the train, López Obrador shuts down the government’s tourism marketing arm and shifts his budget (financed by taxes paid by foreign visitors) to construction.
That agency, called the Mexican Tourism Tourism Promotion, was a clear example of the kind of inflated spending that López Obrador was trying to eliminate. In 2018, it spent nearly $ 300 million, ran 23 overseas offices and employed more than 200 people in Mexico and abroad. López Obrador claimed that the Ministry of Tourism and the diplomats of Mexico could replace the marketing function.
Among the board’s promotional efforts was the VisitMexico.com website, which had developed a rigid following, targeting visitors to cultural and natural attractions along with the beach resorts that are still Mexico’s main selling point. . Compared to the rest of the board’s extensive spending on salaries, events and advertising – it dropped $ 14.5 million in advertising during three NFL games played there in 2018 – VisitMexico was a relative bargain. In 2018, it cost about $ 260,000 to maintain, according to the Ministry of Finance of Mexico, although the content was developed by advertising agencies as part of contracts worth millions each year.
The chain of errors that led to the translation scandal is unclear and likely to remain obscure as the dispute goes to court. But the incident shows how quickly a valuable digital asset can disintegrate if they are placed in the wrong hands. And the saga of Mexico’s online portal to the world is growing badly for Mexico as the global tourism sector prepares for the return of the coronavirus pandemic.
Rates of COVID-19 infection and deaths have yet to start falling in Mexico because the government has not brought the pandemic under control, and the US is still advising to take action against the country. But the tourism sector in Mexico is already looking forward, like many Caribbean competitors, to the winter-high season in the hope that some travelers may be tempted to travel again, even before the coast is fully declared clear.
In the competition for such limited demand for global tourism, though, Mexico cannot run risk-aversions – such as continued mockery of its flagship travel website.
“There is damage to the brand’s reputation,” said Francisco Madrid Flores, director of the Center for Research and Tourist Competitiveness at Anáhuac University in Mexico City. The loss of visitors may be less severe, he added, because low demand means that few people were likely to consult the website.
Before the pandemic hit, international travel to Mexico had been steadily rising in recent decades, and the country ranked seventh in the world in the number of tourists it received in 2018, with 41 million visitors. The growth was driven by the improving economy of the United States (at least until the pandemic hit) as well as marketing by the tourism board and by private tourism companies, said Madrid, who was also a former deputy secretary at Sectur from 2000 to 2008.
“Some of Mexico’s states and resorts are running their own marketing campaigns, although one of the most recent has hit a definite false note.”Mother“I’m in Acapulco,” a social media campaign portraying ultra-Orthodox Mexicans with a decidedly pre-COVID density, was quickly withdrawn amid an onslaught of criticism.)
Now Sectur is facing the global collapse of the tourism sector without a marketing budget – or, it turns out, a website that offers the digital tools that many destinations use to highlight their offerings, streamline travel planning, drive traffic send to hotels and tour operators, and collect visitor data.
The problem goes back to the way the Secretary of Tourism, Miguel Torruco, chose to solve the problem created by López Obradors cuts. To keep the VisitMexico website up and running, Torruco donated the trademark and exploitation of the site to a private company called Braintivity, which promised to fund the site through advertisements and payments from state governments.
Not a single peso of federal money would go to VisitMexico, Torruco promised, to explain why the contract did not go for a public bid.
Braintivity, a digital media company that does not seem to have a website, is run by Marcos Achar, a businessman who sold his family’s painting business for $ 2.3 billion in 2014. Or he could pass that success on to tech and the tourism industry was never in question.
Sending a public website did not sit well with everyone in the ministry. Torruco “privatized the brand,” said Simón Levy, who resigned as secretary of tourism shortly before the Braintivity agreement was announced. “That’s 100 percent what the problem was.”
Achar promised an overview of the website, but when the months were over, there was no sign of it. At least one contractor named Achar publicly quietly left the project after having problems collecting Braintivity payments. Then, at the end of July, the problems erupted when Braintivity’s web hosting company, Tecnocen, shut down the site, claiming it had not been paid. A few days later, Tecnocen said it was handing over the site’s codes and archives to Sectur.
The page went back up – complete with the diminishing translations. Sector said Tecnocen had hacked the site. Tecnocen said it was asked to move the site’s content to a new platform and that the automatic transfer led to the bungled translations.
While the site remains frozen, the question is whether the damage will last long or simply be recalled as an absurd chapter in Mexico’s marketing story. Meanwhile, VisitMexico loses the valuable backlinks and the other data that help it rank in Google’s search engine optimization rankings.
Levy and Madrid both say the site’s reputation and prominence can be revived. “It will take time and it will take investment,” Madrid said, warning that Mexican tourism needed government spending to support it, especially after the collapse caused by the pandemic. Until the coronavirus struck, tourism accounted for nearly 9 percent of Mexico’s economy and more than 4 million jobs.
And the radical sobriety of the president, coupled with the widespread suspicion that some of the large budgets of previous administrations have disappeared in thin air? Madrid repeats a version of an old advertising position: “Half of what you spend on marketing is wasted. The problem is which half. ”
Future Tense is a collaboration between Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that explores emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
