By Vernon Velasco
Poised to take to the malls to host a Pinoy salo-salo and a gamut of other ways to celebrate its now whopping 21 million users, Viber is up with a new gimmick—#JuanVibe, its latest campaign that shows how the chat app leader has become every inch part and parcel of our daily Pinoy lives.
“We at Viber are really excited about #JuanVibe as it’s all about how we treasure our relationships with family and friends in the most Filipino way,” Viber Philippines Country Manager Crystal Lee said. “Whether on mobile or via the Viber Desktop app, it’s a call for everyone to bond and celebrate the most important things that make us Pinoy.”
Last year’s colossal and colossally successful music festival #OneVibePH: One Nation. One Pride., held at the Mall of Asia concert grounds, brought out the champagne for what was then an already phenomenal 18 million Filipino users. And now it is reinventing a hashtag personification of national pride with a deeper focus on Filipino values and culture through #JuanVibe.
“If you ask me how we earned [a 21 million-subscriber success], I guess that, compared to competitors or other brands, Filipinos really feel that we are present in their happy lives. Twenty-one million is just the beginning for us,” Lee said.
“We created #JuanVibe because we want the whole world to know that we are a Viber country,” Viber PR and Creative Head Carlo Velasco added.
The nationwide hashtag purple flower power movement invites (read: all) Viber users to join the #JuanVibe social-media campaign by showing their purple skirt—este, Pinoy pride (as, through Viber, purple is no longer exclusively associated to gay pride)—by posing this P21-million question to their Viber group: “Anong mahalaga sa‘yo bilang Pilipino?”
Viber users should then post their chat screenshots on Twitter and tag @ViberPH with the sound bite hashtag #JuanVibe. Nobody knows what awaits participants if they’re really, really, lucky: perhaps a year’s supply of—chaaa-daang!—Razon’s purple halo-halo or a deadly take-home treat of lechon de leche. (Participants really ought to stay tuned for announcements in the #JuanVibe city invasion series. Soon.) And talking about invasion (and because going to malls is very much identifiably a Pinoy thing), Viber will take to the malls to host a contemporary barrio fiesta that, Lee said, will hopefully take place on weekends from July to August. “We’ll be starting in Metro Manila. We made sure that the malls that we chose are popular malls,” Velasco said. “Expect to see a lot of very Filipino things that we want to celebrate and highlight. You’ll see everything—from halo-halo and street food, to Filipino snacks. And all our setups will be very Filipino, be it a jeepney or an MRT station,” Lee said.
“We want more Filipinos to use it. Our way of doing this is showing them scenes where we imagine them using the app,” Lee added. “Whether tatambay kayo o nasa jeep kayo o nakapila sa MRT, we hope you use Viber. Why be alone when you can talk to family and friends on Viber?”
We do, Ms. Lee. I text and know a lot of friends who Viber out while jostling through a speeding MRT car. You know, it’s something very Pinoy we also can hashtag: #MRTViberdaMoves #para-paraan #buwisbuhay.
