Study Says 40% Filipinos Show Positive Responses on ‘Love the Philippines’ Campaign Amid Fiasco
Despite showcasing a majority of disapproval for the recent “Love the Philippines” tourism campaign by the Department of Tourism, a recent study from Capstone-Intel, a private research and intelligence company, revealed that about 40 percent of Filipinos expressed a “positive” response regarding the campaign. Capstone-Intel is a high-impact research company that uses innovative research technologies, tools, and methods to convert data and information into breakthrough insights and actionable intelligence outputs. It is committed to helping its clients solve problems, find solutions, grow markets and constituencies, build reputations, navigate risks, manage crises, and be the country’s leading private research and intelligence agency. ‘Love the Philippines’ On June 27, 2023, the DOT unveiled the new tourism slogan titled “Love the Philippines,” which then replaced the current “It’s more fun in the Philippines” campaign that has been used by the tourism department since 2012 up to the first half of 2023. Under the new slogan, the national government, through the DOT, seeks to uncover the many things to love about Philippine tourism. “Certainly, the world has noticed that there is so much to love about the Philippines, for while we have only reached half of this year, we have already been able to accept over 2.62 million international visitors, very near our 2.65 million arrivals for 2022,” DOT Secretary Christina Garcia Frasco said in her speech during the campaign launch last June. However, the new slogan has drawn criticism from various groups and social media users. Filipinos were quick to scrutinize the elements of the campaign, including the “foreign footage” used to produce the campaign video, for which its advertising producers “apologized” for the “highly inappropriate” usage, saying that no public funds were used to produce the video. According to the DOT, the “Love the Philippines” campaign was worth P49 million. Over the course of the tourism campaign fiasco, lawmakers probed the controversial slogan, with others urging the tourism department to drop the campaign. But the DOT stood firm with its decision to keep the slogan. Despite calls and adverse reactions, the tourism department still uses the campaign, while the tourism video with “foreign footage” has been taken down. But what does the data have to say? Methodology Capstone-Intel Corporation conducted the study from July 1 to August 8, 2023, in order to assess the response distribution of users towards the fiasco. Through gathering all publicly available sources on Facebook, Capstone-Intel was able to analyze the response of social media users through over 414 posts. Reaction distribution The result shows that out of the 18,366 reactions on various posts on Facebook, about 7,394 users, or 40.3 percent, expressed a positive response to the tourism campaign, which, surprisingly, came only second because the most significant share of responses online, accounting for 9,057 users, or 49.3 percent of the total reactions, showed a “neutral” position towards the campaign. Meanwhile, 7.5 percent, or 1,373 of the total reactions, are haha, while 253, or 1.4 percent, are wow reactions, and only 0.5 percent, or 205 angry reactions, were recorded, the data showed. Upon analyzing the data, this suggests that the users, for the most part, provided responses that may be categorized as “neutral” in response to the controversial campaign slogan. Top posts related to the ‘Love the Philippines’ campaign The DOT’s Facebook post about their joint celebration of T’nalak, which was accompanied by a promotional post about Tagum, Davao del Norte, is the most engaging of all the stories related to the campaign, garnering a whopping 597.7 engagement score. At the same time, regional tourism updates were posted for every region in the Philippines; the rest included news, editorials on tourism, casting votes, and promotional postings on Facebook, which also added to the number of engagements that were recorded for the campaign. Top sources of information on the ‘Love the Philippines’ campaign Capstone-Intel also revealed that the official page of DOT topped the list of sources visited by users in relation to the campaign, with a total fan count of 938,663 and an engagement score of 710.6 for its 24 posts. This was followed by regional sources, including the Department of Tourism – Soccsksargen Office with a reported 622.5 engagement score and 31,367 fan counts; the Tagum Tourism and Cultural Office came in next with a 575.2 engagement score and 34,975 fan counts; and the Sipalay City Tourism Office with a 430.5 engagement score and 22,697 fan counts.
Study Shows ‘Love the Philippines’ Slogan Receives ‘Moderate’ Internet Presence Amid Fiasco
Amid controversies surrounding the “Love the Philippines” campaign slogan, recent data gathered by Capstone-Intel shows that the latter slogan received a “moderate” internet presence despite drawing broad criticism from various users from June 30 to July 31, 2023. Capstone-Intel is a high-impact research company that uses innovative research technologies, tools, and methods to convert data and information into breakthrough insights and actionable intelligence outputs. It is committed to helping its clients solve problems, find solutions, grow markets and constituencies, build reputations, navigate risks, manage crises, and be the country’s leading private research and intelligence agency. Data from publicly available information were analyzed in order to scrutinize the internet presence of the “Love the Philippines” campaign during the height of the fiasco, resulting in public denunciation both on the national and international scene. Number of searches According to recently released data examined by Capstone-Intel’s advanced analytic tools, there were 1,950 queries made using the key phrase “Love the Philippines” on the search engines Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Following a search by users for the exact phrase or subject, the campaign obtained a total of 17,247 visitors from organic search results. This means that there is now a moderate “Love the Philippines” internet presence, but in order to expand the presence of the campaign, the national government, through the Department of Tourism, should consider extensive information drives to increase its online visibility. Keyword insights In terms of the keyword insights of the “Love the Philippines” campaign, Capstone-Intel found 73.2 percent zero-click searches over the issue period. The term “zero-click searches” refers to queries performed in search engines that do not take consumers to a third-party website when they are presented with organic search results. Meanwhile, Capstone-Intel evaluated that the intent of users searching the campaign is purely “informational,” which means users are not familiar with the campaign and are exploring the campaign to acquire additional information. In a nutshell, the 73.2 percent searches that contained the phrase “Love the Philippines” and associated phrases were informational, showing a need to learn more about the deeper context and relevance of the branding slogan. Traffic share When it comes to traffic share, the state-run news media Philippine News Agency (PNA) led the website traffic for the “Love the Philippines” campaign, accounting for a 15.4 percent share of traffic online, followed by PhilSTAR at 13 percent and international news agency The Guardian at 10.1 percent. On the other hand, video-sharing platform YouTube recorded a 9 percent website traffic share, while INQUIRER.net came in fifth with a 7.55 percent traffic share. Interestingly, mobile reported a different traffic share with regard to the campaign. Youtube dominated with a 40.1 percent traffic share. Philstar also performed well on mobile, with 18.3 percent of traffic, followed by radio network Bombo Radyo at 7.94 percent, Rappler at 6.25 percent, and PNA trailing at just 3.56 percent mobile share. Traditional news outlets and government websites controlled the most online traffic, but YouTube has surpassed them as the primary traffic driver on mobile devices. When these patterns of traffic across channels are understood, insights into the most effective content strategy for each platform can be gained by agencies attached to the tourism campaign slogan.
Sentiment Analysis of ‘Love the Philippines’ Campaign Fiasco
During the latter week of June, the Philippine government, through the Department of Tourism (DOT), unveiled its “Love the Philippines” campaign slogan. This replaced the more than a decade-old “It’s more fun in the Philippines” slogan of the country, which spanned the leadership of the late and former president Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III and former President Rodrigo Duterte. In the earlier weeks of July, the issue became the topic of discussion online both in the national and international scene after public scrutiny revealed that the campaign video used “foreign footage” from other countries and not the Philippines. Amid the height of the issue, Capstone-Intel Corporation conducted a sentiment analysis that reported and gathered the sentiment of social media users across various platforms from July 8 to August 8, 2023, and aimed to see how the “Love the Philippines” campaign was mentioned on both social and non-social media platforms. Capstone-Intel is a high-impact research company that uses innovative research technologies, tools, and methods to convert data and information into breakthrough insights and actionable intelligence outputs. It is committed to helping its clients solve problems, find solutions, grow markets and constituencies, build reputations, navigate risks, manage crises, and be the country’s leading private research and intelligence agency. Sentiment score Using Capstone-Intel’s advanced analytic tools, it revealed that Facebook reported the highest percentage of mentions, with 41.2 percent accounting for 746 of the total mentions in various Facebook posts. The news comes in second with 518 mentions, or 28.6 percent of the total mentions. Videos have 10.6 percent of the total mentions, and X has 9.1 percent of the total mentions. The data indicates that the primary platform where the “Love the Philippines” campaign was mentioned, whether it was a positive or negative mention, is Facebook. Sentiment Analysis of Speaking Authors In terms of the sentiment of speaking authors, authors from different platforms like X (72.6 percent) and Facebook (5.8 percent) showed positive sentiments towards the controversial tourism campaign. Meanwhile, authors from the platforms mentioned above, specifically a Facebook page operated by UNTV News Rescue, tallied a 56.6 percent negative sentiment and a 13.2 percent negative sentiment for Twitter. Topic analysis of the ‘Love the Philippines’ campaign Additionally, Capstone-Intel also identified the topics where the “Love the Philippines” campaign was mentioned. The “Tourism Campaign” garnered a 40 percent share of voice, but it can be seen that the topic had a 0.8 percent interaction share, while the topic “Marcos SONA Economy” recorded a four percent share of voice while its interaction share was 0.3 percent. The topic “Prices decrease, Love for Philippines” reported a 3.3 percent share of voice and a 0.2 percent share of interaction. Lastly, the topic “Tourism deals” got a 3.3 percent share of voice with no interaction share. This only suggests that although these topics highly mentioned the “Love the Philippines” campaign, they recorded a lower level of interaction among the users. Other topics that were not categorized and mentioned amassed the highest share of voice at 49.4 percent and a 98.7 percent interaction share.
