When the Philippines’ Department of Tourism announced that they would be spending 100M on New Media promotions in 2011 they received a lot of criticism on Twitter and Facebook. Some users are saying that this is another source of corruption to pay back the primary movers during Aquino’s campaign. Apparently the Undersecretary in charge of this effort used to head the new media strategy of President Aquino. In a press article on GMA news, DOT Undersecretary Romano gave a rough breakdown of how the money would be spent.
And I quote:
In an email interview with GMANews.TV, Romano said the budget allocation will go towards:
- developing the DOT website;
- search engine optimization;
- social networking;
- the establishment of an industry linkage platform;
- online advertising; and
- special projects.“(Social networking) will be an important component of all our campaigns, both offline and online. Pinoys are among the heavy users of Facebook and Twitter, and we see the Pinoy online communities as both target and partner in promoting the Philippines,” he said. Romano explained that the agency aims to develop a “search” system to make it easy for tourists to look for resorts, hotels, transport providers, tour operators, and other businesses in the local tourism industry.
“The idea is to try to make it as easy as possible for would-be travelers to book everything online after being excited by what they see,” he said.
Romano also hinted that the DOT is eyeing the development of social games “ala Farmville” to promote the country’s tourist destinations. However, he did not give specific details.
This is definitely the right direction to take for DOT. Reaching a global audience is definitely much more cost effective through the internet. 100M might sound like a lot of money but that amount actually pales in comparison to the regular budget of multinationals for marketing. I think the ultimate challenge here is how DOT will allocate the 100M in their various digital efforts.
As an Internet Marketing consultant and taxpayer, I want to see where the 100M will go to down to the last peso. I’m worried that a company or group will take advantage of the 100M and sell to DOT insane programs that are made to just generate insane revenue margins for the supplier/vendor at the cost of the government’s lack of understanding of the medium. For example here are some questions I’d love to ask:
- What model will be used for advertising? CPC or CPM?
- What’s the CPC or CPM rate?
- How will the agency or supplier make money? Will they just charge a 15% service fee?
- How much is the cost for the website development?
- How will they go about Search Engine Optimization? White hat? Black hat? Which keywords?
- Define “special projects”?
- How will they spend on “social networking”?
Once these questions are answered I think a lot of people in the industry will have no more doubts if the government is paying the right rates for the services they are getting. If you think about it though, the Department of Health is paying 400M to give away contraceptives. 100M for a tourism campaign which will generate potential revenues for the country is definitely a wiser spend. If the questions above are addressed then the government should just dump the 400M condom fund into digital marketing since at least that will have actual returns.
400m is a huge pile of condoms. i think their target are families that do not access the net for information about family planning. that’s why the “mano-mano” (say, face to face marketing) method is applied. or did I misunderstand your last paragraph?
I’m not saying that they should put 400M in an online campaign to teach reproductive health. I’m saying that 400M is better spent on a digital campaign that will bring tourists to the country as opposed to using our tax money to give away condoms.
It’s about time that the government will “invest” in digital marketing. I also agree on your set question, specially on how to measure metrics (ROI to be exact).
As Seth Godin said, “Marketing is a process, not a moment”, so they should take time to work on planning (planning very well to exact) before implementing. God bless the Philippines! (^_____~)
Thanks for clarifying. A big yes to that then!
Kudos to this! Finally! We hope this works (meaning: the money actually goes into the project) and we hope that this becomes a benchmark for all other government and even private companies:)
Yep! 100M is a huge budget for digital. I’m really interested in seeing how they will use it.
The project is too much expensive, that is about 17000 license of Windows OS. Imagine facebook it didnt even cost 1/2M pesos while they developed the website as starting point. Also, they can use opensource platform to cut down the expenses. They can use Drupal Content Management System for the website, social networking and industrial linkage platfom and its also SEO Friendly. For the Advertisement in Google or in Facebook it will not cost that much.