Case Study: Palau Pledge
Palau is the world’s 13th smallest nation. But in a country where tourists outnumber the population by eight to one, there is a danger of Palau’s famously pristine environment succumbing to ecological disaster. So a group of volunteers teamed up with Palau’s First Lady, Debbie Remengesau, to create the Palau Legacy Project [PLP].
Together with Host Havas, they would create a convention-busting campaign to commit every visitor to look after the local environment and culture: The Palau Pledge.
The brief
In 2015 new tourist routes created a huge upsurge in tourist numbers to Palau. As this happened, the PLP saw first-hand that the infrastructure wasn’t set up to handle that many visitors: drinking water was limited and sanitation ill-equipped for such numbers.
Tourism made up to 85% of the country’s GDP, so it was important to maintain the industry, but it needed to be more sustainable. So the PLP approached Host Havas to help them change the behaviour of the 160,000 annual tourists to the island nation.
Host Havas ECD Seamus Higgins was the lead on the project. He claims the success of the Palau Pledge comes back to the unusual nature of the brief. “It’s something that doesn’t really fit within the normal realms of advertising, but that’s because it wasn’t a normal brief at all – it was a genuine problem that needed solving with creative thinking.”
The insight
With this unusual brief in hand, Havas set to work researching their target market of tourists, primarily from China, South Korea and Japan.
It became clear that there were vastly different cultural approaches to travelling between these nations. But the team realised that the common ground was to appeal to tourists’ humanity: “Our starting point was that we need to change people’s behaviour. To do that we had to make a genuine human connection with them,” explains Higgins, “We had to make sure that whatever we did, every single tourist would be forced to make that connection.”
They came up with the concept of ‘for those who follow’; by asking visitors to do something for Palau’s children, they ensured the emotional, human cut-through they wanted. Higgins explains, “Suddenly it became very human. Nobody could deny wanting to leave a better world for our children. That’s shared in every single culture.”
They set about looking at elements of institutional architecture that could be used. They considered using the nation’s currency, as was leveraging the name of the country itself, but eventually the act of passing through customs won out. It would ensure that no tourist could enter Palau without encountering the campaign.
The idea
The team at Havas mapped each touch point of a tourist, from consideration through to their visit, and sharing the experience afterwards. The idea was that the Palau Pledge would present itself throughout a tourist’s journey, and the lynchpin would be the pledge itself.
The team at Havas and PLP hosted workshops with children from every region of Palau. From these sessions they discovered the elements of the country that the children would like to protect, and from this the pledge itself was written. The commitments within the pledge focus on ‘responsible, sustainable tourism’.
The pledge would be stamped into tourists’ passports, which the visitors were asked to sign before entering the country. The act of signature was a important element, as Higgins details, “When people sign something they’re much more likely to act on something than if they just verbalised it.“ The passport itself is a personal item, which is carried everywhere; by integrating the campaign directly into this document, it become intimate and powerful.
The execution
The campaign logo was based on the Palau flag, a yellow circle on blue. It was abstracted to become the ‘sign here’ box in the pledge. Further iconography was developed following the stamp aesthetic to illustrate each specific action in the pledge. All of the Palau Pledge materials were translated into the five languages of the key inbound tourist nations: Japan, USA, Korea, China and Taiwan.
Meanwhile, it was absolutely crucial that the people of Palau themselves were invested in the project. The archipelago’s traditional chiefs, senators and ministries had to be brought on-board. During the campaign a general election was held; had President Remengesau not been re-elected, the entire project could have been in jeopardy. Remengesau won, and made a permanent change to the immigration legislation, to enshrine the pledge in official policy.
Training documents were distributed to educate immigration authorities and customs officers on why this was important. And of course the public themselves were consulted and educated.
Another crucial mandate was that all in-bound flights to Palau were required to play the Palau Pledge in-flight film ‘The Giant’. A huge creative project in its own right, The Giant, directed by Evan Viera, shows a giant coming to Palau, and meeting the children of the islands. On the importance of the film, Higgins explains, “It was critical, we wanted to get them excited and educate them without waving fingers at them. That’s where the story of the giant came from.”
With so many creative touchpoints, it would be easy to lose coherency, and consistency. But Higgins mobilised the inhouse design team at Host Havas to ensure the craft element was as strong as the idea, “Once we had arrived at the critical campaign elements we looked at each one and focussed on making each one as good as it could be for that stage. I’m a massive believer in the craft, and that’s why D&AD is my favourite awards show. "
The launch
On the day the Pledge went live, the first batch of passengers were welcomed at the airport by President Remengesau himself. Then, at the immigration desks, they were met by children dressed as customs officers. These co-ordinated efforts generated maximum media exposure for the project, which had no paid media budget at all.
The response
Demonstrating the breadth of the idea and execution, the campaign won eight D&AD Pencils, spread across Direct, Media, Writing (for Design and Advertising) and Integrated categories, with the Black Pencil awarded in Branding.
Since the launch in November 2017, all tourists coming to Palau have watched the film, received the stamp in their passport and signed the pledge. To date that number sits at 97,000 and rising.
With the Pledge enshrined in the countries immigration process, Palau has become a beacon in the global shift towards responsible, sustainable tourism.
What happened next