Thursday, July 17, 2008 So: Visitor’s guide By Michelle P. So Caught in the Net
THE visitor’s guide booklet “promotes too many bars” and contains “a lot of photos of girly bars, as if we’re one big city of bars.”
That’s Margot Osmeña complaining about the content of Big Island Visitors Guide, copies of which are distributed for free at the arrival area of the Mactan Cebu International Airport.
Like Cebu City’s First Lady, I’d like to complain too. Why aren’t there gay bars advertised in this guidebook?! Cebu City has a few of them, with at least one of them changing names every six months or so, kind of like Prince who was once The Artist Formerly Known as Prince who later referred to himself as an artist without a name.
I visited the website of the guide booklet and scrolled the portable digital files (PDFs) of its pages. FL Osmeña is right that “there are no bad pictures of women.” But the guide booklet carries ads of hotels, pension bars, dive shops, taxi services and restaurants as well as maps of Cebu, Bohol, Dumaguete and Siquijor and schedules of movies, flights, shipping and entertainment events.
It even has a crossword puzzle and Soduku, which I think is the page to linger on when you can’t decide where to go. It shows that when in Cebu, you have more time to answer the crossword puzzle and Soduku.
So I disagree with FL Osmeña that the booklet pictures Cebu as “one big city of bars,” unless I include the TV spots of girlie bars that air in SkyCable past midnight. I can’t remember in what channel it is shown but it is somewhere past CNN, which is Channel 50, and past those channels that run only religious programs.
I came across it recently as I was surfing channels, which I am wont to do at 1:30 a.m. The spots come one after another, 15-seconders and 30-seconders of girlie bars along Maxilom Ave. and Jakosalem St. The TV spots are explicit enough that they do not leave the viewer undecided to see what else they are going to show. (So now you know this is what happened to me.)
And then the TV spot of the Cebu Investment Promotions Center follows. The CIPC spot, which I think is a 90-seconder, features facets of Cebu City’s economy and business projections in graphs and multi-dimensional graphics.
I do not know if these TV ads of girlie bars are shown during the day because my TV viewing schedule is limited to late nights. But I find the sequence of the TV spots of the girlie bars and the CIPC inappropriate. The CIPC spot is the I-mean-business kind while the girlie bar spots are the Let’s-do-monkey-business kind. Either way, it’s business for the SkyCable station.
If CIPC is paying for the time slot, it’s not getting serious promotion. If the spot is just a filler, well, CIPC can take comfort that it is getting the awareness of the viewer who can’t wait for the spot to be over to see the next girlie bar commercial.
FL Osmeña said the girlie bars are “not what we want to offer. That’s not what we want people to come here for.” Among many reasons such as the beaches and the dive sites, foreign tourists don’t come to Cebu for the girls alone, they come for the boys too.
The guide booklet? It only offers choices. If the airport management sees it not the material appropriate to be displayed at the arrival area, then it can display the Santo Niño novena booklet at the terminal counters.
