A few months ago, I posted a little summary of who the top 20 overall advertising spenders were in Q4 of 2009. You can find it here.

Big headlines back then – despite being surrounded by the certified big guns of the FMCG world, i.e. Unilever, P&G, Nestle, Colgate-Palmolive, and Unilab, Manny Villar managed to artfully squeeze himself into the Top 20 with a jawdropping PhP1.3-billion pesos in advertising spend, based on rate card*.

(That’s roughly the equivalent of the total 2009 GDP of Tuvalu and Niue, by the way. I saw it on Wikipidia. Therefore it must be true.)

But that was six months ago.

The big question is – was Villar able to sustain his spending into 2010, leading up to yesterday’s national presidential elections? And how much did the front-running Noynoy Aquino spend?

I’ve got the answer.

Based on estimated rate card spending from AGB Nielsen, here’s how the Q1 advertising spend played out.

First headline: Yes, when it came to sustaining ad expenditures, Villar kept it up.

PhP1.23-billion advertising in Q1 2010.

Hard to envision that much money? It’s enough to buy roughly 1.5 kilos of rice for every single one of the 16-million Filipino households (or, if you’re a little bit more in a doting mood, roughly enough to get a one-piece ChickenJoy meal per household).

And he blew it all on advertising.

Put Q4 of last year and Q1 of this year together, and you’re easily looking at a bill of over PhP2.5-billion in a six-month span just to win a seat in Malacanang.

Makes you almost feel bad for the guy. Mainly because he lost is losing.

Second headline: Noynoy, on the other hand, had almost non-existent ad placements in Q4 last year – and it wasn’t needed, after all. With the passing of President Cory Aquino still fresh, he had an organic buzz going for him, and didn’t need to draw from his resources to play up his image even further.

But he was no small spender either. The AGB Nielsen reading above says that in the first quarter of this year, he still shelled out over half a billion pesos in advertising funds – even more than Coca-Cola, Smart, and PLDT each did!

I’m not quite sure where he got the money, but it quite possibly could have come from a garage sale involving Kris Aquino’s incredibly garish aluminum foil gold couch..

Final election results are still pending as of this writing, but it seems that Mr. Aquino has built up an insurmountable lead, despite just 1/5 the ad spend of Team Villar.

I wonder how this ties into this nice little article I found on the ABS-CBN.com website, which says, the Cojuangco/Aquino wealth depends on Noynoy’s presidency…

But the most interesting number here is a very rough computation indicating the money-spent-versus-votes-achieved ratio for both men.

As of noontime today, Noynoy had scored about 12.6-million votes in the Comelec partial results. That works out to about PhP42 per vote, assuming PhP530-million spent in advertising.

Villar on the other hand is running at just 4.5-million votes. At PhP2.5-billion spend, that works out to a whopping PhP555 spent per vote.

It’s crazy. I don’t know what to say. Was that money well-spent, for both men?

What would you have done with the money, if you wanted to make a change?

* For those of you not familiar with media buying, “rate card” refers to the standardized rates published by the media networks for a standard commercial spot, although depending on negotiation skills and volume commitments, certain large advertisers may secure massive discounts off of rate card – therefore actual money paid out by each advertiser could theoretically be 50-60% lower than what is listed here.