WOW plagiarism

I don’t mean to flog a dead horse, but like many other Pinoys perplexed and dismayed by the abortive “Pilipinas Kay Ganda” slogan of the Department of Tourism, and as an occasional travel writer, I think that DOT Undersecretary Vicente “Enteng” Romano did the decent and honorable thing by owning up to the responsibility for the failed campaign and resigning from his position.

I have no problem believing that he and the DOT had the best of intentions in wanting to replace “WOW Philippines” with something new. Unfortunately, in this case, something new also turned out to be something awful  an ill-conceived idea that should have been shot down the minute it was raised, simply because it was pitched to the wrong, non-Tagalog-speaking market, a case of misplaced or confused nationalism.

I must admit to some bias in this opinion, because I wrote the yet-unpublished biography of former senator and DOT Secretary Richard “Dick” Gordon, whose idea “WOW Philippines” was. To add some perspective to this issue, let me quote from the draft of that biography:

“[Gordon] also wanted something new and powerful  a catchy slogan he and everyone else could use to sell the Philippines abroad. One day, he found it, and announced it to his staff  only to be met almost universally by profound dismay and disapproval. The tagline was ‘WOW Philippines’  a worthy match, in Dick Gordon’s mind, to ‘Malaysia, Truly Asia,’ ‘Incredible India,’ ‘Amazing Thailand,’ and whatever the country’s regional competitors had come up with. WOW Philippines? What was that?

“He had come up with ‘WOW Philippines’ after a meeting with Bert Labog, a fellow Atenean who specialized in advertising. Gordon wanted the country to have a nickname that was both grand and happy. When he mentioned that he wanted tourists to ‘Go wow!’ upon visiting the country, Labog encouraged him to stick with that idea, and Gordon began to see why. His marketing experience at Procter & Gamble and in Subic told him that he had stumbled on something special.

“But again, and typically, ‘Nobody liked “WOW Philippines” at first,’ recalls Rosvi Gaetos. It seemed too flat, too plain, and dead in the water  at least, until Gordon began walking them through its possibilities. ‘WOW’ could mean a plethora of things, beyond a simple exclamation: Wealth of Wonders, Wear Our Wares, Warm Over Winter, Wacko Over Wildlife, Watch Our Whales, Walk Our Walls, Walls of Worship, Women of Wonder, etc. The variations were endless. The idea caught on, and the DOT went to work to flesh Dick’s vision out  never an easy task, with Dick looking over their shoulder, fussing over the details of his pet notion.

“‘The conception of the original WOW Philippines poster layout took many months,’ says Rosvi. ‘I had to convene the DOT undersecretaries at 10 in the evening so we could come up with the final layout.’ Nina Carpio, one of Dick’s executive assistants at that time, recalls that ‘When he presented the WOW Philippines program to the Cabinet, nobody slept in DOT until 6 a.m. But it was all worth it, because the DOT’s budget, which was just P800 million, was increased by P200 million more.’

“Dick brought the slogan to the airwaves  on CNN, which he knew was watched all over the planet, and on which a placement, however brief, made a strong impact. But he didn’t have even a fraction of the billion-peso budget that countries like Malaysia had for their tourism campaigns. Again he turned to old friends and to his negotiating skills. The ads were produced by BBDO Guerrero at a steep discount, and better yet, he was able to get CNN to accept his placements at a similar markdown. ‘WOW Philippines’ came on the air.”

Of course, it takes much more than a catchy slogan to bring paying visitors to our shores, but perhaps the new people at the DOT could leave well enough alone and focus their efforts on substantiating that “wow” factor in our tourist offerings.

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Another item from Undersecretary Romano’s resignation letter caught my eye  his assertion that “Getting inspiration from existing designs is not an uncommon practice. In fact, in one of the definitions of plagiarism, it is stated that ‘While plagiarism is condemned in academia and journalism, in the arts it is often a major part of the creative process.’”

It’s an interesting statement, and coming from Enteng (he graduated from the Philippine Science High School a year or two after me, and is well known to and highly regarded by his fellow alumni, including myself, so I can presume the familiarity), I’m sure he understands that it needs to be nuanced even if it contains more than a germ of truth.

Indeed, artistic creation often begins with unabashed imitation. Back when people had fuzzier notions or cared less about copyrights and what we today would call “intellectual property,” writers often filched plots and stories from one another, or from those who came before them. Many of Shakespeare’s plays were drawn from previous sources  compare Hamlet, for example, to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. (As Dryden once said cattily of Shakespeare, “He invades authors like a monarch, and what would be theft in other poets, is only victory in him.”)

The “imitation-as-inspiration” argument in art is easier to accept, however, when the resulting product  as in Hamlet  emerges vastly superior to the original (and, in these IP-conscious times, properly acknowledges its source). In contemporary music, “sampling” or the practice of using parts of another artist’s recording in one’s own song has been advanced by some musicians  mainly rappers  as a way of conversing, if you will, with another artist, but most musicians today seek prior permission and pay fees to do this.

Mere copying, lifting, or fiddling with just one or two minor details will get you in trouble, as even the big-name author Alex Haley realized in 1978 when his bestselling and groundbreaking 1976 novel Roots was discovered to have lifted “significant and extensive” portions from an earlier novel by Harold Courlander, for which Haley had to pay a hefty out-of-court settlement. In other words, plagiarism goes beyond simple imitation or inspiration  it’s the stealing and the use of whole, identifiable elements or blocks of text without proper attribution or permission.

It doesn’t help, of course, that our Supreme Court now seems to have basically said that anyone can commit plagiarism except its own members, particularly if the act is not accompanied by “malicious intent to appropriate another’s work as our own.” Can our honorable Justices indeed be too noble or too intelligent to possibly plagiarize?

Unfortunately, from my own experience in school, I’ve found that it’s the smarter ones who often cheat and copy, thinking perhaps to outwit and to show up their professors. In grad school, I had a classmate  a cum laude graduate from a prestigious university  who got a 5.0 on his final paper because our professor had read exactly the same thing elsewhere; and as a professor, I had to change a student’s grade from 1.25 to 5.0 (yes, she was graduating with a cum laude standing) when it turned out that she had merely translated an old Tagalog story word for word into English, and tried to pass it off as her own original story.

Thank God those cases never went to court.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.