Brief History of “Colombia is Passion” video

“Good advertising can only make a bad product fail faster.”

By Pedro Pizano
Jul 15, 2009

In the art or science of thrusting things into people’s attention when people do not believe that they deserve to be there, (i.e. MARKETING), the “Colombia is Passion” video has made its claim to fame.

This three-minute clip has been broadcasted over the Internet and on national TV, both in English, Spanish, French and German, as part of a nation-wide campaign to change the world’s perception of Colombia.

The story is as follows. In 1996 the Colombia Government approached one of the leading authorities on country branding, Mr. David Lightle, to ask him to create a marketing campaign to improve the country’s image. Mr. Lightle went to Bogotá, looked around and said, “Don’t waste your money,” according to Matt Moffett from the Wall Street Journal.

When the new government headed by Alvaro Uribe called Mr. Lightle again in 2004, the country seemed to have become better organized (or in the very least had money to waste) and Mr. Lightle accepted the offer and designed the “Colombia is Passion” campaign of which the video is its flagship.

The video has become so popular that, on YouTube alone, many different groups have uploaded about 300 videos on the same subject. Some of the titles are as follows: “Find out the truth about Colombia,” “The Colombian army is full of Passion”, and “The risk is wanting to stay”.

The original video “Colombia is Passion”, designed by Mr. Lightle, has been watched almost one million times on YouTube. It uses a little sweet-voiced Colombian girl that speaks in English to narrate a carefully constructed discourse. For example she says, “and all of them share one thing….[a] passion for peace. Perhaps, now you will think differently about my country because what I have just showed you reflects who we truly are. Colombia is all about Colombians, that’s why Colombia is Passion!”

Apart from the obvious grammatical error, the angle from which is made seems to be quite clear. That is, the over-the-top hyperbolic reworking of Colombia’s élan vital with the objective to change the world’s perception of a country that in the 1990’s had been put on the U.S.A. black list with countries such as North Korea and Cuba.

The clip starts off with the sounds of coffee beans splashing across the screen falling at the rhythm of rapid-fire drumming, and then moves on to show the famous emeralds, a parrot to endorse the country’s biodiversity and finally in a carefully constructed transition we start hearing new-age operatic voices while we watch the beaches and mountains of Colombia as if seen from the window of a private airplane. Afterwards, we hear for the first time the voice of the little girl, while at the same time we are shown a picture of a blonde girl perched upon a tractor. In the next clip we see her cuddled by her mother. She says: “This is how my country looks from the outside. Now I want you to see it from the inside.”

And so it continues, the girl is always the narrator, and the positivist images, coupled with slide-shows, come in rapid succession as the girl describes them. “There is progress, exquisite coffee, countless beautiful women and orchids… we have art, just think of Master Fernando Botero’s art. The man who made the world fall in love with the chubby ones…”

It is very well made and carefully constructed. The girl provides emotional appeal, the images visual stimulation. The film-making leaves you breathless and at the end your perception of Colombia has been changed forever and for the better. Let’s just hope that the prophetic words of Bill Bernbach don’t hold true in this case: “Good advertising can only make a bad product fail faster.”

Picture taken from nation-branding (Good resource about this advertising phenomenon)

First sentence by Simon Anholt.