The Campaign

The Philippines. Fantastic beaches. Friendly people. But compared to Thailand’s 19 million and Malaysia’s 25 million tourists, we were only getting a fraction — 4 million to be exact. And there wasn’t much money for a global media campaign. But 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 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. This was seeded in one-on-one meetings with key journalists and bloggers in the days preceding the official launch to over 100 media practitioners. So that on January 6, 2012, the campaign became the No.1 trending topic on Twitter, turning 95 million Filipinos into a massive tourism sales force.

The Brief

The campaign needed to achieve two things — internally, get the buy in from key stakeholders in the industry and the country’s online population of 27M, externally, increase awareness and consideration for travel to the Philippines. We also needed to gain support from the Philippine President and the country, given the controversy that plagued the previous campaign from another agency.

Results

External Results 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 Internal Results • We sparked off the creation of over 40,000 examples of what quickly became the meme. • Country’s biggest TV network gives approval rating of 80% for the campaign Source: ABS-CBN TV Patrol •Tourist arrivals shoot up to 1,148,072three 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

Execution

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. We released three online posters — in a matter of days, it sparked the creation of over 40,000 examples of what quickly became the meme. And they in turn formed the basis of promotional posters, newspaper and magazine ads, and even a global TV commercial – entirely from crowd-sourced ideas.

The Situation

‘In the Philippines, tourism is everyone’s business.’ says the new tourism Secretary, Ramon Jimenez, Jr. The previous campaign from another agency was so widely criticized, it cost the last Secretary his job. We needed to give visitors a reason to come, win the support of the entire nation, and for a fraction of the competition’s budget.

The Strategy

Our strategy was to tap the country’s strength in social media. ‘It’s more fun in the Philippines’ is a claim, but when backed up by more than 40,000 unique voices, becomes a truly compelling argument for choosing the country. With each Filipino providing an authentic testimonial more powerful than a manufactured tagline. Since the ideas were crowd-sourced, we were able to keep costs down while increasing tourism arrivals by 16% just three months after launch. And compared to our closest competitors, we have significantly more Google Image results, search queries, website visits, and mentions per minute for the campaign line.