Brief Explanation

The Philippines has a cripplingly-bad image problem preventing potential tourists from appreciating the positive appeal of visiting the country. Annual tourist arrivals had flat-lined at below 4 million, one of the worst performances in the region. In 2012, we developed a campaign to drive tourism numbers and to make the Philippines and the campaign the most talked about, shared, and searched about campaign in Southeast Asia. In so doing, we would help the Philippines increase visitors by 7%, breaking the 4 million tourist mark for the first time, and outperform our strongest competitor and their most effective campaign, Malaysia Truly Asia. To make up for our lack of marketing funding, we decided to tap a different resource – our people. Using Filipinos as both inspiration and media channel for our campaign, we came up with the slogan, “It’s more fun in the Philippines” to capture the idea that the Filipino people enhanced the experience of any tourist. And harnessing the power of social media, we turned 95 million Filipinos into a massive and creative tourism sales force. The campaign became the #1 global trend on Twitter just 2 days after its launch, with the slogan mentioned online once every minute. We achieved a 231% increase in Google hits for the Philippines. By the end of our launch year, tourism arrivals had increased by 9%, hitting an all-time high of 4.3 million, and bringing in more additional visitors than Malaysia, despite us having just 1/8th their marketing budget.