SO it turns out that Bermuda is not another world after all. It isn't even another luxury resort in a travel marketplace increasingly crowded with sand-fringed, sea-kissed islands that consumers already have difficulty telling apart.

Bermuda is actually Hawaii with a little bit of the Seychelles thrown in, a sickly-sweet cocktail destination sporting a little paper umbrella rather than a unique brand with its own distinct and robust flavour.

The revelation that Bermuda's Madison Avenue image-makers employed a stunt beach in Hawaii and the waters off the Seychelles to stand in for the island's own tourism wares is just the latest in a recent domino-fall of setbacks that have embarrassed the island and diminished both its product and reputation.

There are any number of faces at the Tourism Ministry and Arnold McGrath advertising agency which should be as pink as the digitally retouched sand in the now notorious ads. But that doesn't seem to be the case.

The Tourism Minister, resorting to Wall of Sound discordancy that is now as much her trademark as Phil Spector's, is attempting to shout down what is rightly being condemned as the marketing answer to identity theft. The advertising firm is clumsily parrying the unwelcome facts with oleaginous industry jargon, attempting to double-talk its way out of this fiasco with 20-dollar-a-word bafflegab used to convince naive clients at account meetings that big lies are actually no worse than the smaller variety in a world where most people don't want to hear the truth anyway.

The fact is that in both the eyes of potential customers and any Bermudian with an IQ larger than his or her shoe size, this latest episode as yet another painful reminder of how degraded the selling of Bermuda has become and how cavalierly those charged with promoting the island now discharge their remit. Bermuda, a Rolls-Royce resort for the best part of a century, is now being marketed like the Edsel - an intrinsically sound product doomed never to find its market because of the complacency, arrogance and crassness of the sales force.

Of course, generic backgrounds are employed as a matter of course in advertising. The creative directors at firms with budget-conscious clients can convicingly make Paris, Texas pass for Paris, France if necessary by employing the smoke and mirrors of their craft. They are skilful illusionists whose marketing tricks, when successful, induce a type of reflex action in target audiences - making hands reach for wallets in impulse-purchases that entirely bypass the logical centres of the brain. Even the smallest advertising agencies boast catalogues of stock photos; they are as much a part of advertising tradecraft as saw-the-lady-in-half cabinets are in the conjuring field, generalised images designed to evoke a desired mood or style or sense.

But in this instance the photographs adopted for use in the Bermuda campaign were not in fact generic. Rather they were entirely too specific. The Hawaiian shot, featuring a willowly model demurely disporting herself on a beach, was instantly recognisable. It had only run in last month's Travel & Leisure, part of a portfolio clearly identified as having been shot on those Pacific islands.

Adding a computer generated bikini top to the model (this is still Bermuda, after all, where a bared female breast is considered more of a threat to public order than a knife-wielding maniac) and some umbrellas no more obscured the photo's provenance than, say, plugging the gap between David Letterman's front teeth would disguise his identity.

THIS was the cheapest and most unconvincing of counterfeits, a marketing lie so clumsily conceived and executed it could no more go unnoticed than Pinocchio's elephantine proboscis after a particularly extravagant falsehood.

While the various backdrops used for showcasing products may be considered interchangeable in the advertising field, the products themselves usually are not. For instance, an advertiser could sell anything from insurance to breath mints to condoms in a print ad featuring a young couple walking down a standard issue tropical beach towards a flaring sunset.

The precise location of the beach - it could be Bermuda or Bali - doesn't matter. The mood the image creates in the potential customer does. However, Heineken would be dismayed to discover, say, that the Teutonised Romeo and Juliet in the award-winning "Germans Don't Do Romance" TV spot had awkwardly toasted one another with foam-crowned pints of Schlitz. And Pepsi isn't in the habit of using Coca-Cola in its advertising except to embarrass the competition in taste tests.

Bermuda, employing the sort of inverted logic we are becoming increasingly well known for, has now inadvertently employed the polar opposite of the Pepsi Challenge in its tourism marketing - suggesting our competitors are in fact more alluring than we are, burnishing Hawaii's image at the expense of our own.

Ethical shortcomings notwithstanding, the ads in the vanguard of Bermuda's newest marketing thrust are nothing if not routine; the pilfered Hawaiian image has been incorporated into what's known as a B2 in advertising speak (boobs, beach). This hardly represents the sort of mould-shattering departure that had been promised, the kind of irresistible Pavlovian lures that would condition East Coast professionals with six- and seven-figure incomes to start drooling and book Bermuda vacations directly they spotted these advertisements in their favourite magazines.

Over the last five years the returns on Bermuda's tourism investments have been in almost directly inverse proportion to the amounts Government has spent on advertising and marketing. The island would have been better served sending truckloads of crisp new dollar bills to the airport dump; enough land would have been reclaimed by now to solve the island's chronic housing shortage for a generation.

Based on the severity of these latest self-inflicted wounds, it would appear that Government has entered into yet another marketing suicide pact by commissioning Arnold McGrath, its dubious talent for selecting the wrong advertising industry partners undimmed by either cost or painful experience.

For many years Bermuda set the industry standard when it came to successfully marketing an upscale resort destination; today, rightly, the island is regarded as an industry laughing stock.

In a bad made-for-TV movie that aired a few seasons back, two young advertising executives are ruing their latest account - microwaveable shishkababs that the manufacturer thinks will wipe out the rest of the fast-food industry.

"Any moron can sell Bermuda; it takes a certain genius to sell meat on a stick," one ad man says to the other by way of a half-hearted reassurance.

That we had such morons on the payroll now.