Costa Rica News – Two years ago the Costa Rican Tourism Institute (ICT) developed a campaign to promote the positive things in Costa Rica and used the “Happiest Country in the World”, to being people to Costa Rica for travel and tourism.
A total of six international awards were given to the international advertising campaign “Costa Rica’s Million Dollar Gift of Happiness”, developed by the Costa Rican Tourism Institute (ICT).
A plan to promote an effective word of mouth campaign( Wommy Gold Award ) and the use of a mobile application for “accurate” (Enviromixer) campaign were two of the honors received.
This application, created for Apple’s iPad, was a component of the “Gift of Happiness” which allowed users to create melodies with sounds of Costa Rica and share them using Facebook, Twitter and email.
It was recognized with awards with Gold and Silver Addy’s, granted by The American Advertising Federation.
The strategy began in October 2011 and ended on February 5th this year. The entire campaign, in two phases cost of $6.4 million.
The campaign aimed to generate conversations about Costa Rica and facilitate the exchange of experiences mainly in social networks to contribute to the country’s position as a tourist destination.
In response, the ICT awarded just over 200 people (couples or families) who subscribed www.visitcostarica.com page or on the official website of the Facebook campaign with a visit to Costa Rica.
The pattern in traditional media such as USA Today, National Geographic and Budget Travel as well as websites like Trip Advisor, The Weather Channel and NBC were part of plans to promote the initiative.
All awards were presented in 2012.
I hate to be the one that states this but there are some this not being said about this which will not be brought ot light by the Costa Rican media:
1. ICT contacted its tourism site out to a company in the USA showing that it did not have faith in its own governmental agency to perform that task.
2. The Happiest Country in the World award is not based on happiness. Read Here.
3. The tourism numbers were inflated by the tourism board a they include Nicaraguans going in and out of the country as part of the tourism numbers to over inflate this statistic
4. Kind of hard to see past the shark finning being allowed in its waters (for all of you that believed it is no longer happening because of a law banning it was signed you are being fooled)
While the campaign was a great campaign and did being tourist to the country it is not with out a dark cloud.
