My job sucks.

Ok, that’s not really true. I love my job but sometimes it sucks. Last weekend was one of those times when I found myself sitting in the middle of a muddy rugby field being pelted by the wind and rain for 12 hours straight. The only thing that kept me from freezing to death was my $40 pair of gumboots, man I love those gumboots.

There is nothing like a situation like this to make you ponder your career choices and it was here that I started thinking about the best job, not a job or career choice specifically but more of the marketing promotion that took the world by storm in 2009.

Basically, the idea was a job as a prize where instead of being caked in mud on a cold field I could have been sitting in my very own villa that overlooked crystal clear waters surrounded by a white sandy beach with not a person in sight.

That was the prize. That was the job.

The idea was for Tourism Queensland and is probably the greatest promotion ever done. They offered an opportunity to apply for the best job in the world a job that entailed being the caretaker of Hamilton Island, a beautiful island situated near the Great Barrier Reef. All you had to do was look after it. Yup you heard that right, look after this idyllic island for six months and they would pay you $130k, literally the best job in the world.

So there it was, the best job on offer and all they had to do now was tell people about it. Now they could have done a global TV campaign about it but what they did was simply genius. They used the one place that people use to search for jobs. The classifieds. Yup, a small spaced black and white classifieds ad was what they used to promote the best job in the world. Such a clever idea.

They took this small spaced ad, translated it into multiple languages and placed it into every newspaper around the world. Then they sat back and waited for the applications to come flooding in.

And boy did they come flooding in. Their website was receiving over 4 million hits per hour which at the time was more hits than Google was receiving. They received over 1.4 million applications over the 6-week promotion with over 34,000 of those being video entries.

Imagine that, 34,000 videos made by applicants to apply for a job during a time when making a video entry was deemed as a bad idea for any competition mechanic. Not for this though, some of those video entries were so creative and so amazing that it surprised everyone and some even made the news.

As you could imagine with such an amazing prize on offer as well as the huge amount of interest it was generating it didn’t take long before that simple little classifieds ad was being celebrated on every news channel around the world. It was estimated that the campaign achieved over $80 million worth of coverage as well as over 6000 news stories being covered daily, all in just 6 weeks of this competition running.

It caused such a frenzy that people were resigning from their jobs just to apply and in the end, there could only be one winner. That lucky person was a guy by the name of Ben Southall, an Englishman from the UK. With this prize, he became the most talked-about person on the planet and possibly the most envied too.

So enough about the best job in the world. There I was sitting in my very own mud island thinking of the greatest promotion ever done when another thought struck me. Mr Southall had the best job in the world for six months, then it ended. Now he is probably back behind a desk somewhere in the UK doing something he hates whilst I was sitting there actually doing the best job in the world, even if it was knee-deep in mud.

I Wish I Had Done That.

Gary