They say seeing is believing, and if that’s the case, it’s not hard to understand why a new commercial produced for the Tourism Department’s latest marketing campaign is being accused of straight-up plagiarizing a spot from a South Africa tourism campaign just three years ago.
The one-minute video for the “Experience Philippines” campaign, released on Independence Day, features M. Uchimura, a Japanese citizen who retired in the Philippines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6w7fwDrIzo
“Here, you don’t have to see the sun to discover radiance. You don’t have to see colors to experience vibrance. You don’t have to see smiles to know you are safe. You don’t have to see to feel you are home,” he narrates in the video.
The commercial then wraps with a twist ending calculated to stir heartstrings: he’s blind.
It’s an effective piece of work, unfortunately, it features the exact same twist ending of a 2014 South Africa tourism video, something netizens were pointing out within hours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJcLC-SA5KA
The Department of Tourism allotted PHP 650-million, about $13 million, for its ad campaign in 2017.
This is the second tourism campaign released by the government this year. The first one, released in January, features the tagline “When you’re with Filipinos, you’re with family.”
Read: Watch: New tourism ad highlights Filipino hospitality
On the thread called “The Philippines’ new tourism video is a copycat of South Africa’s from last year,” Filipino Reddit Users expressed their dismay over the incident.
“Watched both and it was clearly plagiarized. What a shame,” said a Reddit user.
“The problem with creative theft is that it’s very, very hard to screen,” explained another. “It just takes one lazy copywriter with an obscure enough source for it to go as far as where this tourism ad got. Creative work is largely built on trust that work is original as it’s simply too hard to proof of theft and too easy to get caught once it’s out in the market.”
Unfortunately, this is not the first time something like this happened.
In 2012, the government rolled out the slogan “It’s more Fun in the Philippines,” which was allegedly copied a 1951 Swiss National Tourist Office ad which proclaimed “It’s more fun in Switzerland!”
Copycat? Coincidence? You decide.
