ORLANDO CARVAJAL:
The country may have first broken the chain of bondage from Spain on June 12, 1898, but it has only been self-governing since July 4, 1946. Still, Carvajal believes last Monday’s Independence Day was meaningless to millions of Filipinos because, despite “our political, economic and cultural moves,” poverty and ignorance have not been eradicated while security is sometimes tenuous in some areas. Carvajal blames this on leaders who insist on retaining the authoritarian centralized economic and political systems of the colonizers, wherein the center sucks up all the economic, political and cultural resources of outlying regions, “which get back in return a mere trickle.”
You don’t have to see to feel you are home. That’s the message a Japanese retiree in the Philippines gets across in the promotional video the tourism department released last Independence Day.
The moment it’s uttered is when we realize that the gentleman in the video is blind. That revelation makes all his experiences before that moment—a boat ride on a breezy day, dancing near a grand view of the rice terraces, riding an all-terrain vehicle across sand dunes—even more special.
Unfortunately, the tourism department’s new video went viral for reasons other than its inspiring message. Less than 24 hours after the video’s release, a South African tourism promotion video began to make the rounds on social media. The copy and the tone differ—South Africa’s video is more pensive, while the Philippine version is more cheerful—but the concept, alas, is the same. Some of the shots, including those of a hand scooping sand in slow motion and the walking stick that reveals the storyteller’s blindness, even look the same.
In a statement, McCann Worldgroup Philippines quickly took full responsibility for the ad and acknowledged its similarities with the South African campaign, but emphasized there was no “intention to copy others’ creative work.” It said that the campaign was based on a true story and, as such, couldn’t have been copied from an older ad. The tourism department didn’t say whether it would keep running the ad or pull it. And it’s not much of a consolation that the previous “More fun in the Philippines” tourism campaign had also been compared to a Swiss tourism ad from more than six decades ago.
True story: the World Economic Forum recently projected that the Philippines is unlikely to meet its target of attracting seven million international arrivals this year. It brought up (yet again) the need to improve roads and other infrastructure, as well as address perceptions of security threats, to make the country a more competitive tourism destination.
This is a rough year, so far, for tourism, although the latest available figures don’t show it yet. In the first two months of 2017, 1.21 million international tourists arrived in the country, about 11 percent more than the arrivals in the same months of 2016. Visitor receipts, however, were down by nearly 19 percent at P40.08 billion for January and February combined.
Perhaps there are things our tourism officials can learn from South Africa, which 10.04 million international tourists visited in 2016—nearly double the number of international arrivals to the Philippines.
But surely we can see the need to come up with a fresh concept, for a start.