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 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 linebecame the #1 trending topic on Twitter, turning 95 million Filipinos into a massive tourism sales force.

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.

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