MANILA – The government of the Philippines attracted criticism instead of tourism for a video aimed at bringing in more tourists to the country.
The country’s tourism department launched a video to advertise the holiday destination but it showed pictures from other countries which was noticed by a blogger and then by many globetrotters.
The Department of Tourism of the country removed the promotional video from Facebook shortly after uploading after a Filipino blogger pointed out the blunder.
The tourism video was part of the tourism ministry’s “Love the Philippines” campaign worth $900,000 (£7,08,298), launched on 27 June but instead of promoting tourism, investigations have been launched into what caused the blunder.
In a statement, advertising agency DDB “profusely” apologized to the Department of Tourism, acknowledging that it was an “unfortunate oversight” on their part.
“While the use of stock footage in mood videos is standard practice in the industry, the use of foreign stock footage was an unfortunate oversight on our agency’s part,” DDB Philippines said, adding the agency should have adhered to proper screening and approval processes.
“The use of foreign stock footage in a campaign promoting the Philippines is highly inappropriate and contradictory to the DOT’s objectives,” it said but calrified that no public funds were used for the video as it was DDB’s initiative.
On the other hand, the Department of Tourism said “alleged use of non-original shots” is under investigation and added that it was assured by the agency of the originality of the video.
The controversy erupted after blogger Sass Rogando Sasot pointed out in a Facebook post that stock images of a lake in Thailand were used besides other images from Indonesia’ Bali and Dubai. Whata exacerbated the situation was the fact that the video showed aerial shots of sand dunes from Cumbuco in northeastern Brazil and a man driving a buggy over sand dunes in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
It s to be mentioned that according to data from the Department of Tourism in the Philippines, the country received a total of 8,260,913 international tourists in 2019.
