Publications

Publication details [#70706]

Turnšek, Maja and Petr Janecek. 2019. “America First, the Netherlands Second” on YouTube: “Spoofing” destination marketing with political satire. The European Journal of Humour Research 7 (3) : 26–45.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English

Annotation

This study attempts to provide initial tentative insights into the audience reception of intertwining political satire and destination marketing imagery by analysing the “America First, the Netherlands Second” video and a student sample audience response. In 2017, a series of YouTube videos named “America First” went viral. The video that started the viral phenomenon was “America First, the Netherlands Second”, responding in a satirical manner to the “America First” message of the inaugural speech of U.S. president Donald J. Trump. They achieved extreme popularity both in number of views and number of new memetic videos with similar satirical messages. These videos were a form of political expression and at first sight did not seem to have much in common with communication in tourism. However, the videos included typical destination marketing imagery, intertwined with satirical representations, thus representing a humorous “spoof” on destination marketing. The study analyses participants’ memory recall, eye-tracking movements and focus group responses in order to provide initial conclusions on how audiences respond to the intertwining of satirical politicalexpression and destination marketing imagery.