Unoriginal

The Department of Tourism (DOT) says it will conduct public consultations regarding its controversial campaign logo. That is quite unnecessary.

The world of social media has spoken. The ad has been trashed. It is not only uninspiring; it is also unoriginal.

Trust the world of social media to uncover what might have been thought to be undiscoverable. The new DOT logo has been found to be “plagiarized” — it uses the same font and basically the same colors as Poland’s tourism campaign logo.

Tourism Secretary Bertie Lim tries to play down the obvious unoriginality by saying the Pilipinas Kay Ganda logo has more colors. Yes, just one more color. Okay, there is a tarsier there to help clutter that logo along with the dictionary entry.

That is such a lame defense. He could have gone on the offensive by proclaiming that the controversial logo, by being as cluttered as a jeepney’s hood, is truly Filipino.

The font, however, is still Poland’s. With all the visual art talent we have around, couldn’t the DOT have found someone to render the logo manually?

Aren’t we the design and advertising powerhouse of the region? We are now told Filipinos designed and executed the “Malaysia Truly Asia” campaign. That is a classic in messaging.

Why did we have to drastically shift our advertising logo anyway? There is value in using the same logo or tagline over a long period. Retention takes time; familiarity produces value. If we keep on changing our campaign motif, it will not be remembered. There will be no accrual of value. The icon will not stick.

There is nothing wrong with the old tourism campaign logo. The DOT, it appears, wants to change it simply because there has been a change of administration. But it adopted an inferior campaign motif whose design is uninspired and whose message is unclear.

Any ad executive will tell you that the success of a promotional campaign rests on having a unique selling proposition. The new motif does not have that.

The Polish icon from which DOT copied its proposed one has only one word. So is the tourism promotional logo from many other countries. Spain’s colorful promotional logo comes to mind. Why did the DOT choose this one?

Using computer-assisted design is simply too lazy. The logo will, after all, be the centerpiece of a multi-million dollar global campaign to lift our tourism industry from the dustbin. It deserved greater effort in design and messaging.

Because the DOT did not invest due diligence in reissuing the tourism promotional campaign, the entire administration pay the political price of ineradicable impressions formed through the social media networks. That political price is being compounded with every careless incident like this one.

The hostage fiasco inflicted on this administration the impression that it is callous and incompetent. The Mislang affair inflicted the impression that it is petty. Now this small thing about a campaign logo inflicts the impression that this administration is indolent and unimaginative.

That is the truly damaging thing. The impressions build upon each other, reinforce the other.

In this age of social media pervasiveness, a consensus could be formed in the public mind within hours. That consensus is freely arrived at by all the participants in the sum of all blogs and tweets on a particular matter. It is, therefore, a consensus that can no longer be reversed.

We were made to understand that the “strategic communications group” — or at least part of it — was organized to manage the social media environment. That was, as we now see, probably and erroneous premise. Indeed, how could the social media be managed? How could this administration even dare aspire to manage the social media environment?

When the hostage tragedy happened, government portals were flooded with hate mail. Some portals were actually taken down by the sheer volume of mail coming in.

When Mislang made that casual comment about the quality of wine served by the Vietnamese, the outrage over the sheer lack of manners and pure pettiness of the comment flooded the blogs. Special websites were set up as impromptu public billboards to accommodate all the indignation expressed.

This week, the provocation is that completely unoriginal DOT campaign logo. This is a controversy that ought to have been avoidable. Before making that logo public, the DOT might have quietly conducted focus group discussions. They did not. They simply threw out that logo to the public to be feasted upon by the bloggers.

Today, for all intents and purposes, the public resoundingly rejected that logo. No need to do “public consultations.” That is so 20th century. The public review is done. It was accomplished in the world of social media. Traditional media can only echo the consensus that only social media can forge at such speed.

In all the previous encounters between this administration and the social media world, the administration response is late by what could be a lifetime. Ironically, this is an administration among whose first acts was to set up an apparatus to preempt if not overwhelm the social media.

There is much to learn about this latest encounter — and it’s not primarily about logo design or the brass tacks of mounting an advertising campaign. It is about the swiftness with which a constituency could respond to a slip or an act of utter carelessness. That swiftness will make any effort to “manage” social media futile.

Funding a “strategic communications group” will very likely be futile. What this administration must do is build an ethic of due diligence among the cadre it has chosen to run this government.