Tourism Queensland’s highly-successful Best Job in the World promotion has sparked another copycat campaign in the US, with a Californian winery offering $60,000 to a successful applicant to blog and Tweet for six months about its wines.
David Ready Jr, head of the Murphy-Goode Winery in California’s Sonoma County, said he was inspired by the Queensland stunt, which attracted 34,000 applicants and will pay winner Englishman Ben Southall $A150,000 to promote Queensland for six months.
The Queensland promotion generated worldwide headlines worth an estimated $110 million in free publicity.
“We thought, ‘Wow, can we apply this to the wine industry?’ I guess we can,” Ready Jr told the Los Angeles Times newspaper.
More than 700 people have submitted video applications for the Murphy-Goode Winery promotion, called the Really Goode Job.
Face-to-face auditions were also held this week in New York.
Last month an Orlando, Florida, tourism body was the first to replicate the Queensland stunt, launching a competition to find a couple to live in Orlando for 67 days and document their experience worldwide via Twitter and other social networking sites.
The couple will be paid $25,000 and live rent-free in a two-bedroom apartment in downtown Orlando.