Imagine launching an expensive new tourism promotion to encourage visitors to your country - and then finding yourselves a global laughing stock.
That's what happened to the tourism officials in the Philippines, who took their time to realise their new promotional video actually contained images from other countries around the world.
The "Love the Philippines" campaign - pretty weak tagline, to be honest - was launched last week.
Within days its ad agency came under fire for using footage of other countries - including rice terraces in Indonesia and sand dunes in Dubai - in the video.
In a statement, the Department of Tourism in Manila insisted it had sought confirmation on the originality and ownership of all materials used in the video multiple times and was “repeatedly assured” by the agency that everything was “in order.”
Ad agency DDB Philippines issued a statement “profusely” apologising for the “highly inappropriate” use of foreign stock footage in the video, which has since been taken down.
“While the use of stock footage in mood videos is standard practice in the industry, the use of foreign stock footage was an unfortunate oversight on our agency’s part, DDB Philippines said in a statement to CNN.
The agency added that it is “fully co-operating” with an investigation.
The error resulted in a social media activity storm with images of global landmarks being posted with the tagline "Love the Philippines".
