The Campaign

The Philippines. Fantastic beaches. Friendly people. However, compared to Thailand’s 19 million and Malaysia’s 25 million tourists, we were only getting a fraction; 4 million to be exact. There also wasn’t much money for a global media campaign. However, we had the pride of millions of Filipinos. So we needed a rallying cry, and a way to bring it to life. Rather than just another ‘people’ campaign we created a ‘people’s campaign.’ One where the voice of 95 million Filipinos (27M of whom are active on Facebook) could be expressed in one idea: It’s more fun in the Philippines. So that on January 6, 2012, the campaign line became the #1 trending topic on Twitter, turning 95 million Filipinos into a massive tourism sales force.

Success of the Campaign

Compared to our closest rivals we had (Jan-Apr 2012): • Three times the number of Google searches. • Twice the number of site visits. • 7.49 million hits in Google for the campaign line (vs. 464,000 for Malaysia Truly Asia). • 45.9 million Google image results (vs. 2.7 million for Malaysia Truly Asia). • Campaign line mentioned every two minutes (compared to every three hours for closest competitor). Source: socialmentions.com • We sparked off the creation of over 40,000 examples of what quickly became the meme. • ‘Mountain Bikes’ named one of Mashable’s Top 10 Memes on Twitter. •Tourist arrivals shoot up to 1,148,072 three months after launch – a 16% increase from last year (Industry benchmark is a 90-day lead time between consideration and travel) Source: CNN & Interaksyon News 5.

Describe how the campaign/entry was launched and executed across each channel in the order of implementation.

The idea was seeded in one-on-one meetings with key journalists and bloggers in the days preceding the official launch to over 100 media practitioners. More importantly we sparked off the creation of over 40,000 examples of what quickly became the meme and inspired user-created ‘ad-maker’ sites and iPhone, Android, and Windows Apps. The individual memes covered the entire spectrum of subject areas in the tourism promotion masterplan; many others that weren’t. They in turn formed the basis of promotional posters, newspaper and magazine ads, and even a global TV commercial – entirely from crowd-sourced ideas.