Cebu advertising in the spotlight

This week could very well be declared as Philippine Advertising Week as a big number of people engaged in the business of advertising – ad agency practitioners, advertisers, media and production suppliers, marketing communications specialists, professors and students of fine arts and mass communications – will fly or sail to Cebu City to attend the 19th Philippine Advertising Congress to be held from Nov. 16 to 19. The convention’s executive committee is ensuring that the event will be truly worth the hype and excitement. Relevant presentations and discussions on issues of great import will be mixed with a string of leisure and entertaining activities that stressed-out workaholics of the ad industry truly deserve. Learning while having fun. That’s what everyone at the 19th PAC will definitely be getting.

Of course, it helps that Cebu City Mayor Tommy Osmeña promises a red carpet treatment for the delegates. He wants to bring out the best that Cebu can offer – from world-class convention facilities to amenities-driven rest and recreation facilities to surprising discoveries in food, like the much-talked about sutukil, a merry medley of sugba ( grill), tula (tinola) and kil (kinilaw), shopping (from high-end malls, local exotica boutiques and ukay ukay), and pasalubong treats ( the mandatory danggit, pusit and dried mango) that can be picked up in Taboan. Indeed, the Queen City is ready for the great advertising invasion.

Making Brands Stay Relevant

Speaking of readiness, I had a spirited talk with Alex Uypuanco, creative director of Campaigns Cebu to dicuss his assessment of the state of advertising in Cebu. "Who knows? There are just too many variables," he says, and quickly adds, "Maybe the best thing is just to talk about who we are and what we do. Maybe the idea is to measure our existence in the context of what we ‘automatically’ achieve as practitioners of marketing communications in the regions outside Luzon."

Uypuanco believes that what Cebu advertising has achieved to date can be summed up in one word – relevance. And this achievement ties in to who Cebu advertising practioners are. He declares, "We are ‘regionals’ working in our self-contained world. We don’t just put local flavor into our work, we are local flavor. We go beyond mere concept or message translations and we relate to almost three-fourths of the country’s population."

Marketing communications presumes a clear understanding of the elements involved in the process, and this understanding leads to relevance of what advertising and its allied fields can deliver. Uypuanco enthuses, "Most of us in the Cebu practice are asking the questions, ‘Is the Philippines a culturally fragmented nation?’ Is this why some brands rate high in Luzon but do not soar in Visayas and Mindanao? All we know is that our clients rate high in our own world. The primordial concern of most Cebu-based advertising agencies is to help clients‚ brands become relevant and continue to stay relevant in the market."

Uypuanco emphasizes that since Cebu advertising’s mission and the vision is to deliver relevance, it must be able to do it consistently, or else it will wither and die. He believes that the local ad operations wouldn’t have lasted this long and, moreso, flourished if they had not been able to prove their importance, and therefore, their indispensability. He states, "Allow us to say that we are relevant not only to our world – the VisMin market. How so? Some forward-looking corporate giants see the point of a ‘culturally fragmented nation.’ They have always attempted to create separate messages for the Visayas and Mindanao. But these messages are just a little bit better than hit or miss since they are distilled and diluted somewhere else. More often than not in some office in Manila, and concieved by a great mind with information supplied by an equally qualified sales person. Somehow, ‘lost in translation’ can be an expected result from this equation."

A Probinsyano’s Assimilation

Cebu-educated and Cebuano-speaking probinsyano marketing professionals also get hired by Manila-based ad agencies. In the process, they easily get assimilated and are eventually eaten up by the cosmopolitan lifestyle of the capital city, and its New York or London-inspired advertising modalities. Sometimes, they get assigned to work on VisMin advertising requirements for national advertisers, with a strong assumption that they are familiar with the Cebu culture, traditions and dialect having been born and raised in the area. "Yes, they come from VisMin, but the more important question is, are they still attuned to the VisMin ways?" Uypuanco underscores. "Let me cite a painful eaxample. There’s a TV beer commercial with four men extolling the merits of the brand in Cebuano. The trouble is, they look like urbanites speaking in archaic Cebuano," he laments. In other words the hard-core flavor is not there, making the connectivity with hard-to-please consumers more difficult.

Referring to the same beer commercial, Uypuanco questions, "How relevant would an ad be if it had four Greenbelt habitues speaking in archaic Tagalog and speaking it as if it were their daily tongue?" He points out, "We understand about the treatment and all that but there obviously was no attempt at humor on this beer ad. Someone, somewhere didn’t know any better. And the query remains, did the ad become relevant to VisMin? Probably not."

A most common question thrown at Cebu ad practitioners is whether they know what they’re doing or where they are headed. At this point, Uypuanco confesses that most ad agencies in VisMin are homegrown entities which, to put it kindly, learn as they go along. They pick up new approaches – the hit-or-miss way. Some of them learn pretty fast and become de facto event management, public relations, or local production teams for many Manila-based agencies. "But believe me, that isn’t all of us," he stresses.

Some of Cebu’s ad practitioners have more than 15 years of experience doing work in Manila. Some of them have degrees in marketing and understand the implications of research information and consumer insights. Some know who Neil French is, although they don’t necessarily agree with his opinion about women creative directors. Some of them have worked or are currently working on national accounts too.

"The bottomline is," Uypuanco concludes, "all of us understand whom we’re communicating to. With that, we have a purpose. We can contribute in evolving the marketing communication industry." To him, the question is not, "Is Cebu ready for the Philippines?", but rather, "Is the Philippines ready for Cebu?"

My own take? I say Cebu advertising can be NGILNGIG!, the Cebuano term for magaling, naiiba. It can be a differentiated practice. And surely it can thrive in its own uniqueness.

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E-mail bongo@vasia.com or bongo@campaignsandgrey.net for comments, questions or suggestions. Thank you for communicating.