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By LOU ALBANO
April 30, 2020
Advertising executive David Guerrero was at home, with his laptop on the dining table, when he heard the news. Texts and phone calls started coming in.
The bad news was “unconfirmed at first, but once I’d heard from more than two sources, I realized it must be true,” Guerrero tells GMA News Online.
Ramon Jimenez, the former Tourism secretary under whose watch the “It’s More Fun in the Philippines” campaign came to be, had passed away at 64.
“He was someone I always counted on to be there,” Guerrero says. “The idea that he would go so quickly was hard to believe.”
Jimenez was appointed to the top Tourism post in the middle of 2011 amid a controversy surrounding “Pilipinas, Kay Ganda” campaign approved by his predecessor. A legend in the advertising world, Jimenez quickly buckled down to work to sort out the mess.
Shortly after taking the post, Jimenez declared that his strategy will tap the growing power of social media. “Believe in the beauty of your country. Sell it at every turn. Sell it on Facebook, on Twitter, on Multiply. Talk about your country because we deserve a visit from the world," he said in an interview in September 2011.
Still, there was a campaign to build from scratch, and only so much time. BBDO Guerrero had been the lone remaining bidder for the tourism campaign, but Jimenez and the agency’s chairman and chief creative officer David Guerrero decided to start things from square one.
“We both felt it would be inappropriate to have a pitch with only one agency!” Guerrero says. “So of course we agreed to re-start the process.”
The DOT held a two-day pitch, with the agency among eight competing for the prized account. “Presentations were set for two days, and we were the last that presented on the second day,” says Ombet Traspe, BBDO’s general manager who at the time was the director of marketing for the agency.
BBDO had began working on their pitch as early as October, coming up with three internal creative teams that would compete for the pitch.
“We had tried out a whole a roomful of ideas, eventually settling on a broad area around the feeling of ‘warmth’ that people instinctively respond to when they come here,” Guerrero says.
They kept debating and fleshing things out until the Halloween long weekend. Guerrero decided to proceed with his scheduled family trip to Boracay.
Guerrero went scuba-diving with his 12-year-old son. “Neither of us were very experienced divers so you can sometimes be left feeling a bit lost when everyone starts to expertly buckle up their gear and swing large oxygen tanks around,” he says.
“It was somewhere underwater with tiny tropical fish dancing around in front of me that the thought struck: It’s more fun here than it would be anywhere else.”
At 15 meters underwater and with no notebook on which to write his thoughts, Guerrero kept repeating it over and over again in his head. “Scrambling onto the shore, I grabbed my son’s schoolbook and scribbled it down, ‘It’s More Fun in the Philippines.’”
Back at the office, Guerrero shared the idea with his team. “And when we heard it, it was a kilabot moment,” Traspe recalls. “Before then, we had three different lines and there was a debate in the office, and for the first time, we were unanimous.”
BBDO Guerrero won the pitch on a unanimous decision, but there was little time to celebrate. They only had two months to launch. Jimenez asked the BBDO team to explore some concepts and tweak some things. Everyone worked through the Christmas holidays.
January 6, 2012 was going to be a big day for Philippine tourism. On that first Friday of the year,the team was finally going to show the press what they had been working on the last two months. Jimenez, the advertising legend who had just been appointed Tourism secretary, was leading the charge.
He showed three concepts: “Upstairs” displayed the majestic Banawe Rice Terraces. “Commuting” showed a boat amid gloriously clear waters. “Status Updates,” featured a diver with a camera in hand, taking a photo of a butanding.
With each came the iconic line: It’s More Fun in the Philippines.
“We need a line that is easily understood. Competitive. More fun in the Philippines is true. Kering-keri natin ang campaign na ‘to,” Jimenez told reporters at the time.
The reception upon launch was mixed. While it was the top trending topic on Twitter for the day, some loved it while others felt it lacked punch. Internally, there was the same apprehension, including from the highest level of government.
“Seeing the multi-stylized map of the Philippines on a multi-colored mat or banig, I must admit I was a bit apprehensive then, thinking the proposed slogan was another variation of the rejected campaign of his predecessor,” former President Benigno Aquino III admitted in a recent Facebook post after the death of Jimenez.
Still, Jimenez was unfazed, rallying Filipinos to support the new campaign. “This is not my campaign. This is not BBDO’s campaign. This is not DOT’s campaign. This campaign belongs to everybody,” he said at the launch.
The mixed reaction of the public fazed the tired BBDO team that had spent two months working on the campaign, slugging through the holidays. They drew their strength from Jimenez.
“He was so sure of it, of what he bought into, of what he approved, of what he had the President approved. He was so sure of what he was presenting to the Filipino people that even if there were people objecting to it, he defended it. Hindi siya natinag. And because of that, things turned around. All of a sudden, people started embracing it. And so from the get-go, tumaas talaga ‘yung respeto ko sa kanya,” Traspe says.
Aquino says he and the Cabinet came around on the campaign after Jimenez presented a video that “was not just short and entertaining with its catchy music but was informative and very worthwhile.”
“It fulfilled our need to promote the Philippines with a very limited budget yet would have a significant appeal to the target market that we were trying to reach. That meeting ended with all of us so energized as we were convinced that we had a winning campaign.”
All the advertising materials “contained the Secretary’s signature,” says Guerrero .
Dale Lopez, the creative director of the campaign, agrees. “I remember presenting the ideas to Mon J and he was looking for this particular touch, the Filipino touch. We were showcasing the Mayon Volcano and Mon J’s touch was, how do we make it more Filipino?” he says.
Lopez recalls the campaign being divided into phases, to showcase every region of the Philippines. It was an idea, Guerrero says, that Jimenez himself introduced. Working with Jimenez also gave Lopez invaluable lessons about pushing the envelope – and knowing when to stop.
“As a creative, I want to push things and look for new ways of showing a subject. How can we improve it? How can we show it in a different way? In working on Mayon, when you Google Mayon, it’s all the same shots. So my personal challenge was, how to show Mayon in a new light,” Lopez says.
“I thought of using a top view aerial shot and presented it to Mon J, and he was like, Why would you revise something so iconic?”
For Lopez, working on the campaign remains “one of the best experiences in my advertising career.”
Iking Uy and Gianpaolo De Leon Acosta were already senior account managers when they joined the campaign, but the opportunity to work with Jimenez turned them into excited fanboys.
“To have Mon J and David Guerrero in one room, para siyang masterclass. I was a senior account manager but I felt like a kid in the room,” Uy says. “I had a notebook on me and I would write down quotes [from the meetings]. They both discussed things very simply. Mon J makes things simple.”
Acosta, meanwhile, admired Jimenez for the “clarity of his thoughts.”
“It’s very simple but very compelling. When you see him distill his thoughts, when he gets right down to it — his brilliance is in his simplicity,” Acosta says.
Guerrero admired “the way he conducted his business.”
“The loyalty he inspired in his people, and the easy charm with which he brought clients and colleagues along with him,” Guerrero says.
Jimenez also fostered a culture that allowed the best ideas to come out. “He built a collaborative and helpful team that aligned with him, and with how he thinks,” Uy says. “The team that he built, the culture that he built. I think everything is top down. The culture that he built around him was [admirable].”
“I don’t think he was ever mean,” Acosta adds. “He brought out the best in people by being kind. The feeling I got was, I wanted to give him my best because he’s a good person. I was never late in any meeting. I wanted to be prepared whenever we met with him. He made us feel like what we did mattered.”
Jimenez surprised all of the guys from BBDO Guerrero when he turned out to be as great a client as he was a legendary ad man.
“He was one of the best clients I’ve ever had in my life,” Traspe says. “You go there and he gets it. With other clients, we’ll have to walk them through. But siya, he gets it — and at the same time, he was very respectful of the work of others.”
Traspe talks about being in the room with Guerrero and Jimenez, “both creative people, both heads of agencies, and David is selling an idea to Mon, and the Secretary would be appreciative and respectful. He sees it. He’ll give a comment, but he’ll leave it all to us.”
Guerrero adds: “We agreed a surprising amount. The main thing is that he trusted that we were dedicated to the success of the campaign, and we would always, always seek to fulfill that trust.”
Uy shares a memory of working on a television commercial involving Mayon Volcano while showcasing the Filipino’s bayanihan spirit. “It had a lola having her kubo moved around because she wanted to have the best view of Mayon,” Uy says.
The lola eventually finds her spot and exclaims “Perfect!” in an animated manner.
“It was such a stinger,” Uy says of the punch line, “but last minute, David wanted to change it. I don’t know. We all wanted to keep it but maybe he felt it was a little too strong.” So they went for a last-minute edit before they presented to the secretary.
Upon presentation, Jimenez only had one comment. He asked if the sound bite was changed last minute. “The discussion between David and Mon was a classic,” Uy laughs.
They changed it back to the animated “Perfect!” and that was that.
For Lopez, that video perfectly shows Jimenez’s brilliance. “It had a very Filipino touch, and it had a very Filipino humor. ‘Yun ‘yung touch ni Mon J,” Lopez said.
“He’s very funny and very grounded, and very engaging,” echoes Traspe. “In his most unguarded moment, he was very funny. In his board room, tatawa ka nang tatawa.”
But while Guerrero believes all the ads of the “More Fun” campaign carried the Secretary’s brilliance and humor, it was the ad they came up with after Super Typhoon Yolanda that best personifies the guy.
“We created something unique and brave in response to the devastation from Typhoon Yolanda, which simply showed that the country had confidence to say Thank You for the aid that was given and showcased the Filipino spirit in response,” Guerrero says.
Acosta adds: “It was an impromptu campaign and one that he initiated himself.” The video featuring Filipinos saying thank you would play on billboards in key cities around the world.
“It had the most heart, and the most compelling proposition of humility, and of being optimistic,” Acosta says.
The It’s More Fun campaign would run until 2016, winning international awards, attracting visitors, becoming a major contributor to the economy by creating jobs.
“The original target for 2016 for domestic tourism was 35.5 million tourists. But this was surpassed in Mon’s first year at the DOT with 37.5 million domestic tourists. Domestic tourism receipts more than doubled during his watch, from 713.8 billion pesos in 2010 to about 1.5 trillion pesos as of the end of our term,” President Aquino wrote in his tribute to Jimenez.
“International arrivals grew at an annual average of 8.8%, from 3.52 million tourists in 2010 to 5.36 million tourists in 2015. International tourism receipts increased from 135.5 billion in 2010 to 274 billion pesos before we left office.”
Beyond the numbers, the campaign was also successful in at least one more important thing: rallying Filipinos to show their pride in their country.
When it was all over, Jimenez kept in touch with the BBDO crew. “We obviously became a lot closer as a result of this campaign,” Guerrero says. “We continued to see each other every few months after he had moved on from government and I had visited him in his home in Tagaytay last August.”
Traspe says post-DOT, Jimenez continued to be a client. “We continued calling him Sec Mon J, and he’d say, I’m not the secretary anymore. Please call me Mon. Simply Mon. But I’d tell him, ‘I don’t think I can do that’ because he will never be Mon. I respect him too much.”
As the coronavirus 2019 disease threatened the country in March, Traspe decided to check in on his client. “He’s a man of a certain age and because of the situation, I wanted to make sure he was fine,” Traspe says. “And he didn’t give me any indication that he was sick. In fact, he turned it around and asked how I was. He told me to stay safe.”
Learning of his demise last Monday stunned Traspe. “I really had no idea [he was sick].”
For Lopez, it signaled an end of an era.
Uy recalls he “was in a middle of a meeting when I saw the post of David Guerrero. It was so sad.”
Meanwhile, Acosta “immediately messaged” Lopez upon learning of the news. “He replied and said he was going to message me, too! Then I saw Iking post about it.”
It was almost the same as when Mon J, as the boys liked to call him, was alive. Like fostering that famous collaborative culture for which he was known, Jimenez brought them back together again, just like old times.
“I always wanted to spend a bit more time with him,” Guerrero says. “I would have liked to talk more about the his story in the business – and the history of the business as well. In the end I’m glad for every meeting we had – and will always be grateful for the time we spent together.”
He adds: “It’s hard to think of anyone who has done more to raise the profile, appreciation, and dare we say, love of creativity in this country than Mon Jimenez did.”
