Pilipinas kay Ganda

New Logo of Philippines Tourism-Pilipinas kay Ganda

In his complaint relayed personally during the APEC summit to leaders of countries that issued a travel advisory warning their citizens about going to the Philippines, President Aquino mentioned about the November 15 launching of a new tourism logo.

Less than 24 hours after “Pilipinas kay Ganda” was previewed (it was not yet the launching, Tourism Secretary Alberto Lim stressed) the accompanying site - www.beautifulpilipinas.com -was taken down because they found out that there’s an existing porn website also using the key words “beautifulpilipinas.”

Why they didn’t find this out before the preview defies common sense.

Tourism Undersecretary Vicente Romano said they have created a new website – www.tourismphilippines.com – to promote the P100 million new Philippine tourism brand that they have created.

Anton Diaz of Awesome Planet website, who was at last Monday’s preview said, “It does not help that Beautiful Pilipinas is a double-edged branding that promotes the natural beauty of the Philippines but also insinuates we have Beautiful Filipinas (which is a porn site if you look online).”

wow philippines logo- I believed this is more catchy to foreigners

Tourism retreats, cancels new marketing campaign

THE government on Wednesday yanked out an Internet campaign to re-brand Philippine tourism a day after it went live and was widely criticized as uninspired and unintelligible to foreigners.

“We have pulled out the new site after getting a lot of criticism about wrong grammar,” Tourism Secretary Alberto Lim said, referring to a new Web site that used the new slogan “Pilipinas Kay Ganda” (literally, Philippines How Beautiful).

“[The new brand] was only a preview, subject to changes after we conduct focus-group discussions involving foreign visitors, because the opinion that counts here is the opinion of the market, the foreigners,” Lim said in a phone interview.

The brand, launched Monday, was supposed to replace the “Wow Philippines” campaign.

Lim said the Tourism Department would be starting focus-group discussions soon and use the results for another “creative process” in January.

The ad placements in the P200-million campaign would only be released two or three months after the “creative process” had started, he said.

“We are only at the creative stage of the testing. The actual execution will only be done after we approve the concept,” Lim said, adding “there is a possibility that it will be changed if people have better ideas.”

Lim said his department was spending about P200 million on the entire promotion, and most of it would be allotted for ad placements in the second quarter next year.

“We haven’t spent much yet because we want to test it before we spend real money,” Lim said.

The Tourism Department’s site with the new logo and slogan went off-line Tuesday after drawing flak for grammatical errors and allegations of plagiarism.

Other critics complained that the Web site’s address, beautifulpilipinas.com, sounded too much like a pornographic site.

“We have pulled out the new site, but we are coming out with a new one,” Lim said.

He said the use of the national language, different from the usual English brand of other Asian countries, was his department’s way of getting ahead of the country’s neighbors.

“We have to be more daring to have an edge over our competition because they have more money than us in placing their ads,” Lim said.

“Using our own language is the one we think will work.”

His remarks seemed aimed at the critics who complained that the new slogan would not be understood by non-Filipinos.

A comment on a social network said: “It is okay if Pinoy and Balikabayans are the target market. It should be English if they want to target foreigners.”

Another comment said: “How would it be compared with ‘Amazing Thailand’ or ‘Incredible India’?”

At the launch ceremonies Monday, Tourism Undersecretary for Planning and Promotions Vicente Romano III defended the use of Filipino in the new slogan.

“While every country is trying to own an English word or phrase as a brand description to promote itself, we are using our own native name and the local vernacular to express our national pride and tell our story in our own way to make it rise above the competition,” Romano said.

“Every domestic and foreign tourist will tend to mouth the phrase ‘Pilipinas Kay Ganda’ in the same fashion that Hawaii has successfully popularized the expression ‘Aloha’ on a global scale.”

But the reactions outside his department were not too optimistic.

“I don’t think they thought this through very well,” Senator Juan Miguel Zubiri told GMA News.

“I think someone was drinking on the job.”

Did The "Pilipinas Kay Ganda" Logo Copy Poland's Tourism Logo?

The Philippine Department of Tourism has launched their new campaign slogan and many are now happy about it. Many claim that "Pilipinas Kay Ganda" is not only ineffective as a slogan, but the logo itself is plagiarized.

Apparently, the Polish National Tourist Office has a very similar logo; prompting many to say that the Philippine DOT copied from Poland.

This apparent lack of creativity by the Philippine DOT is now being criticized in various social networking sites like Twitter, Plurk and Facebook.

A few days ago, when said that the slogan "Pilipinas Kay Ganda" will not be catchy to foreigners who do not understand "Filipino". Also, some say that the DOT should use something as versatile as the old slogan "WOW Philippines" which can easily be tweaked for various marketing campaigns.

For us, we think that the Department of Tourism should just continue the "WOW Philippines" campaign because it already has brand equity and has proven to be simple and effective.

Aside from volunteering their opinions on the matter, critics have also poked fun at the "Pilipinas Kay Ganda" campaign. Several Facebook users have changed their profile pictures to customized versions of the new logo, created via an online application, which has been taken down by Facebook but is still available elsewhere.