New Copies of NOLS Video, The Expedition, Feature…

…Cross-dressing Haitian Dancers!!! What the…?

Last week NOLS marketing manager Matthew Copeland was getting prepared to do a presentation at newest NOLS Preferred Retailer, Tents and Trails in New York City. When he popped the NOLS branded video into the player he was treated to a very weird video featuring several cross-dressers in a hotel room. There was “island” music and the dialogue was in French. Definitely not the NOLS video, The Expedition. Needless to say, the presentation went forward without the video.

Later we had the good fortune to view the whole video. It was just as described above: weird. No pornography as we feared, just a whole lot of bad video. Thankfully.

What we don’t know is if there are any other bad videos in the lot of 30,000 that we just purchased. Was there only one? How did it end up in there? About 2,600 of the 30,000 have already gone out the door to NOLS prospects. What to do?

After a good deal of thought we decided that we needed to contact the students and families that may have received the NOLS video, “Weekend at Bernie’s” edition. So the following email went out on Friday:

>Recently, we sent you a copy of the NOLS promotional DVD, “The Expedition”. It
>has just come to our attention that one and possibly more copies of our DVD,
>have been tampered with while in production at an external company. This
>tampering incorporated non-NOLS material.
>
>We sincerely regret that this has happened and request that you discard your
>copy of the DVD. If you have already viewed the NOLS DVD and found it to contain
>non-NOLS material, we would appreciate being made aware and we will send you
>a mailer to return the DVD to us. If you would like a new DVD to be sent to
>you, please let us know, and we will send one as soon as a new supply is available.
>
>The National Outdoor Leadership School is very concerned about this situation
>and we are working with the production company to rectify the problem. We
>apologize to anyone who may have been affected.
>
>We appreciate that you are considering NOLS for your outdoor education and we
>hope to see you on a NOLS course soon. NOLS has educated over 85,000 students
>during the past 40 years and we take seriously our reputation as the Leader in
>Wilderness Education. Should you have any questions or concerns about your
>course or the unfortunate matter which has made this e-mail necessary,
>please do not hesitate to contact me.

We have heard back from 71 of the 2,600 people notified with the email. So far it doesn’t appear that anyone received a video with the weird, non-NOLS material. We are still following up with a few of the respondents for more information.

If you have one of these tampered with NOLS videos, please contact us. We want to further understand how this happened and to rectify the situation.

This made for an interesting end of the week. I wonder what this week will bring!

Bruce Palmer, NOLS marketing director