Nothing like a tourism cliche, the first yawn of the day

From time to time I will really work myself up about something, in a kind of Larry David way. And over the past few weeks, it's been our tourism advertising.

It's a theme I have visited before, but this time I was fired up enough to conduct my own research project. It wasn't conducted in laboratory conditions; in fact it was undertaken in my kitchen. But the results were conclusive. Tourism Australia should hand over its marketing budget to the Opera House.

The experiment was simple, if not scientifically robust. I played my wife two online films. Both were created to evoke Australia or a symbol of Australia. Both had the challenge of capturing things so familiar to many here and around the world that they had almost become caricatures of themselves. Both ''products'' had a multifarious nature, meaning a need for an approach that can capture their many dimensions. Both were set to a piece of music intended to be inherently Australian.

And both were designed to live online and be worthy of sharing based on the quality of the content. In fact one of them is titled ''Viral Marketing Video''. I'll leave it to you to guess later which one has this optimistic title.

You really only need to watch the first few seconds to see how each is going to play out. Interestingly the similarities continue as both essentially begin with a person at a piano. But at this point they each take their very different paths.

One with a nasal twang that tells us, ''There's nothing like the sunrise, the first wave of the day.'' The other has the words. ''Come sail your ships around me and burn your bridges down.'' In my experiment by this point my subject was welling up at both films but unfortunately for very different reasons.

One film yet again plays out a hackneyed, dated and dumbed down vision of Australia, a cultural cringe that is neither appealing nor informative. And it certainly has no hope whatsoever of becoming ''viral''. Yes, I mean the current Tourism Australia campaign with the abysmal There's nothing like Australia jingle.

The other takes a landmark so familiar one would think it hard to present it in a way that might actually force reappraisal. But it manages to deliver a beautiful film, as truly Australian as its opposite number in my experiment. It showcases the building, the diversity of its content and even the spirit of Sydney, maybe even Australia, in a way that moves you (something very hard to do in this marketing-savvy world) and makes you proud to be Australian.

In comparing the two films and the job they (could) do to present Australia to the world, one has an unfair advantage, or disadvantage, in that it wasn't created for that task. But in any event it beats its purpose-built competitor hands down in revealing an unexpected, imaginative and contemporary country.

So my question is this: why can we capture our most famous landmark in a way that exudes worldliness and self-confidence yet, when it comes to promoting Australia, we time and again revert to Crocodile Dundee, ''shrimp on the barbie'' dated, cliched wallpaper?

It is time our country had a campaign that makes Australia feel as imaginative, diverse and contemporary as the Opera House does through the Ship Song project.

Anthony Freedman is the founder and chief executive of Host.