Background

Social media has a large influence on the tourism industry. Research has shown that at least 40% of travelers choose destinations popular on Instagram. But influencer marketing is costly, especially for the environment—with at least 8 tons of carbon emissions going into every hour of film production. The Department of Tourism’s 2019 campaign is focused on sustainable tourism. So we wanted to demonstrate how we could make #ItsMoreFunInThePhilippines trend again without increasing our carbon footprint.

Describe the creative idea

4.2M people have already shared their photos on #ItsMoreFunInThePhilippines. We didn’t need more influencers. We already had 4.2M people sharing the fun—we just needed our friends on social media to turn their content into ads. So we launched a 100% crowdsourced tourism campaign, led by a font. BE PART OF THE FONT—the typeface that turned everyone’s content into a tourism ad. We invited users to download the font and form letters of the alphabet using their bodies. Each letter they formed completed a word that described the Philippines. We suggested words that described destinations such as ‘MAJESTIC’ ‘BREATHTAKING’ or ‘CHILL’. But travelers came up with their own words such as ‘YASSS’ for mountain views and ‘HEAVEN’ for dives. Be Part of The Font allowed us to bombard social media with millions of traveler content, without the carbon cost of flights, sets, and shoots.

Describe the strategy

Despite having the fewest visitors and lowest tourism budget in SEA, the strength of the Philippines has always been its people. With a population of 108 million, it is the 13th most populated country in the world. Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), who are estimated at 2.3 million, also ensure that the Filipino culture reaches nearly every corner of the world. Filipinos love to share—making their natural online behavior the perfect free media channel, with many even citing the Philippines as ‘the social media capital of the world.’ Leveraging on this, we endeavored for a campaign that would reach international tourists by engaging Filipino travelers (and past visitors to the Philippines) to create and disseminate travel content for us. The plus: aside from footage and online content being freely available—and therefore more sustainable, it is also totally authentic. Thus serving as credible real-life endorsements of travelers for the Philippines.

Describe the execution

4.2M people have shared why #ItsMoreFunInThePhilippines. We didn’t need more influencers. We needed our friends to turn their social content into ads. So we launched a 100% crowdsourced campaign, led by a font. BE PART OF THE FONT—the typeface that turned everyone’s content into tourism ads. We invited users to download the font and form letters of the alphabet using their bodies. We suggested words that described destinations such as ‘MAJESTIC’ or ‘BREATHTAKING’. Travelers came up with their own words such as ‘YASSS’ for mountain views and ‘HEAVEN’ for dives. We released Facebook frames and Instagram stickers with pre-written words to increase engagement. Content shared was translated into different languages. Be Part of The Font allowed us to trend, without the carbon cost of flights, sets, and shoots. By getting people to be part of the fun, we were able to promote the Philippines while helping preserve it, too.

List the results

Everyone was invited to join the co-creation party and scores of original content began to stream in as soon as the campaign launched—with an immediate increase to 4.9M shares on #ItsMoreFunInThePhilippines. 2019 hashtag usage is expected to reach 875k, a 45% increase vs yearly average. The tourism font became a focal point of the campaign, earning a +147% increase in mentions of #ItsMoreFuninthePhilippines within the first 6 weeks of the campaign—making it the most active for tourism in the Southeast Asian region. Working on a budget 1000x smaller than the largest in SEA, the country experienced a remarkable spike in positive sentiment over other countries within the region. Overall, Philippine tourism saw an 11% increase in search results directly correlating to arrivals—for literally a fraction of the carbon footprint.