My dad was instrumental in launching their Milo powdered chocolate drink and Nido powdered milk in the Philippines in the 1980s, and we always grew up believing that Nestle was the gold standard when it came to quality food products. That was my dad’s fault; his word was the law, and if he said something rocked, I was all too happy to concur.
Tony De Joya says: "Drink more Milo, bitchezzzzz!"
I will openly credit Milo, after all, for my world-class, Olympic quality, award-winning Greek god physique. I practically invented the Milo Dinosaur in my youth, partly because I loved the crunch of the powder while I was drinking, but mainly because I was too lazy to dissolve the granules properly.
The Milo Dinosaur in all its glory.
(“Why is it called a Milo Dinosaur, MDJ Superstar?” you may ask. “Because of the sound your tummy makes after consuming three of them, young Padawan!” I will gleefully answer.)
But I digress.
Nestle has been around a heck of a long time, and just last month, it celebrated its 100th year in the Philippines. They launched a commemorative 90-second TV commercial directed by the incomparable Stephen Ngo telling the tale of Nestle as it threads through the lives of the Filipino consumer.
It’s beautiful, and I will allow you to view it for yourself.
Everything about it is perfect.
The casting, the production design & styling that perfectly captures the milieu of each era, the acting, the storyline – if anyone has ever said that Stephen Ngo is only good for high-gloss, slick productions with acting as a secondary priority, then this spot should prove them wrong. But I need to point out the song written by APO Hiking Society member Danny Javier as the most wonderfully heart-warming element of the piece – it works so well with the visuals, and adds so much emotion and texture in a resonant, deeply personal way.
Nestle has been around 100 years in the Philippines. As a marketing professional working for a rival organization, I wish them ill, and intensely catastrophic business results in the immediate future. But as a consumer, I commend their longevity and steadfast commitment to a singular higher purpose – of bringing good food, good life, to Filipino consumers everywhere.
* The views above reflect my personal opinion, and do not reflect any bias or judgment against how I conduct my professional life.
Over my 8 year career as a marketing/advertising professional, I’ve produced a lot of TV campaigns.
A lot of them, I like a lot. Some others, I find very forgettable. Some were rooted in great insights, and resonated wonderfully with their respective target audiences. Others really had no emotional depth to them – dinaan lang sa production values, as some people would say.
There are a few I can’t find – mostly from the pre-YouTube era. I wish I’d hung onto them.
But anyway. Here are the campaigns I’ve done.
*****
1. Lady’s Choice Sandwich Spread: “Isipin Mo Na Lang”
My first ever TV commercial, and perhaps the one I’m the most proud of. It’s a simple story with simple production values, but very charming and engaging nevertheless. Mommies told us they loved the material; it painted a picture of Lady’s Choice as “mom’s invisible hand in her kids’ lunchboxes,” giving her a bit of reassurance as they go off to eat the one meal of the day that doesn’t fall under mom’s direct supervision.
A lot of people said this was a poor choice of endorser; this was Ate Shawie still recovering from pregnancy-induced weight gain. “Why would you choose someone like that to sell mayonnaise?” they asked.
Simple.
Because she captures the simple joy of eating like nobody else does – no pretensions, no inhibitions, just pure sensuous satisfaction. We should all learn to eat the way she does. I love her.
It’s true that we had to provide a lechon for each shoot day – but it wasn’t all for her, and she deserved it. Shooting with her was like a fiesta – so professional, no bad takes, wonderful rapport with co-talents and production.
Lady’s Choice Mayonnaise ”Endorsers”
Lady’s Choice Mayonnaise “Drama (30s)”
Lady’s Choice Mayonnaise “Drama (15s)”
Lady’s Choice Mayonnaise “Ikaw”
Lady’s Choice Mayonnaise “Balat Sibuyas”
3.
Lady’s Choice Mayonnaise “A Little To A Lot”
I don’t have a lot of memories on this material. I think we were midstream in transitioning the brand into a new positioning, but needed to capitalize on the key Christmas season.
I personally don’t eat a lot of macaroni salad. But some people do, and the sales we got over the duration of this campaign were astounding.
4. Lady’s Choice Easy-Squeeze Bottle “Worms” 30s
The last TVC I made during my Unilever career, for one of the most fun innovations I got to do – the upside-down easy-squeeze bottle. I’m not a gourmet chef, by any means, but I do try to be artsy with my food in little ways, and this little commercial shows the liberation to create when you have the right tools in your hands – in this case, a wonderfully handy squeezable bottle to put a little personal flourish on the food one puts on one’s table.
5. Royal Tru-Orange “Ilabas Ang Kulit”
My first ever TVC produced during my fabulously fun 2-year run in the advertising industry – a relaunch for the iconic Royal Tru-Orange brand, which had launched multiple legendary campaigns in the Philippines (RJ Ledesma’s “Joey” series, Francis M‘s “Ito Ang Gusto Ko”), but had fallen dormant in recent years.
The first material, “Battlebots” was incredibly stressful to produce. Direk Henry Frejas refused to rely on CG for the vendo robot – we actually had to create a real-life robot that could transform to and from its vendo and robot forms. What a headache. Each take required a 12-hour downtime to re-position all the parts back to their starting position. But it was well worth it. I can’t help but smile when I see that damn robot.
The follow-up material, “Bike,” was relatively easy to produce. We had a better grasp of what “kulit” meant in the eyes of tweens, and wanted to just have some fun with their very juvenile brand of humor.
This was the total opposite of “Battlebots.” Production was a breeze. Clients literally approved the offline and online materials in 10 minutes. Ganyan ang gusto ko!
6.
IAMNINOY “Glasses”
I am proud of this particular material not only as an advertising professional, but as a Filipino citizen. The Benigno S. Aquino Foundation had one simple objective – create a new breed of self-starting heroism in this country. I think the ad delivered.
As random trivia, please note how MDJ Superstar was the only one allowed to deliver one complete sentence in the entire material. Oh, the perks of being the Account Director on the project…
7. Eden “Recipes” Series
Our challenge to the creative agency, JWT, was to present a creative way on how to make a recipe instructional TVC in a span of just 15-seconds per material.
Did they deliver? I think so.
8.
Tang Pick & Go “Tang Goes To School”
I came onto this project mid-stream, when the storyboards had already been essentially approved, so my involvement here was mainly on the production side. I love working with kids, despite the DOLE limitations on how many hours per day they can shoot. And of course, the lead talent Xyriel Manabat, was a joy to work with. What an adorable kid.
9.
Tang Pulpy “Operation”
We told Ogilvy, the creative agency, give us a spectacular launch material for a first-of-its-kind innovation! Make it Spielberg-esque, but with a Peque Gallaga budget!
And they did.
* – Also of note, with this material, I have now officially worked with 3 of the 4 directors who did the 2010 Ad Congress “Ano Sa Tingin Mo” series. This was an AF Beaniza material, while I’d gotten to work with Henry Frejas on Royal Tru-Orange, and Carlo Directo for the prior Pick & Go material.
*****
I’m missing three key campaigns on this list, but I guess the fact that they aren’t on YouTube is very telling…
This is an old blog entry I came across from 2007. Funny how the 26-year old me had his thought processes laid out.
*****
“So why did you shift from Client side to Agency? Nobody does that. It’s Agency people who jump over to Client!”
That, in twenty-one words, pretty much sums up the biggest comment I deal with on a bi-weekly basis when people find out that I have shed my Marketing skin (the snake metaphor is quite apt), and plunged all naked and wrinkly into the Advertising world.
I ask, in return, why I shouldn’t have done so.
And they, in response, always point to an answer that seems as obvious to them as an two-testicled penis: “Marketing is better. When you’re the Client, you call the shots.”
(I hope you have noticed, at this point, that when one is an Account Dictator Director such as myself, one never spells “client” and “agency” with small c’s and a’s at the start. These words are Proper Nouns, and must always be accorded the dignity of capitalized, font size 42 first letters. In bold Haettenschweiller, no less.)
I have analyzed and distilled and condensed and filtered and subjected to reverse osmosis my answer to this comment. And what I have to say is this.
“Calling the shots” when you are a Client is an over-simplified truth. As a Client, you are genetically engineered to be capable of just two things: (1) writing a brief, and (2) disapproving (and occasionally actually approving) creative work. In between are gaps in your week that measure about six inches long on your standard wall calendar, filled with dreadfully boring activities that contain about 5% creativity, and 95% Microsoft Excel-driven inanity. Let me explain further.
When reasonably intelligent, well-bred, stunningly sexy individuals such as I are in college, we are brainwashed to believe that Marketing is the hottest profession since sheepherding went out of fashion in the late 1700’s. You’ll do advertising campaigns!, our professors squeal with pride, You’ll launch innovations, change lives! You’ll be able to sell shampoo for P2.00 a sachet!
The tragic reality is that 70% of your day as a Marketer is spent slumped at a workstation, churning out demand plans, profit & loss statements, and forecast variance analyses. You spend hours in meetings with some of the most left-brained people in the world, from factory managers, to financial analysts, to production line workers, to research technicians. You condition yourself to believe that a 15-minute dialogue on the nifty new macro installed in the new SAP upgrade passes as “small talk”. Occasionally, you do get some excitement when your drab little workspace is invaded by sleek, black-clad, turtleneck-and-Gucci-wearing individuals from the Advertising world, but those moments are few and far between.
Things are different when you live the Agency life.
In the Advertising world, you are constantly immersed in a social solution consisting of 90% purely creative people, and just 10% worth of odd contaminants with such curious names as “Production Traffic” and “Finance”. Your meetings are full of copywriters, art directors, producers, and production designers, all of whom are armed with sparkling white (or occasionally black) MacBooks and distinguishedly scruffy pairs of Chuck Taylors. You spend at least ten hours a week chugging down buckets of beer sponsored by some excitable Creative Director, while debates rage around you on whether Comic Sans MT is more evil than your local Church of Satan, or if red Sith lightsabers pack more punch than blue or green Jedi ones.
And really, every day in the Advertising life is a day of exciting output. It could be a clever new print ad, a hilarious new storyboard, or even just a pretty contact report. You get to sit and watch as creative ideas are born, nurtured, and dragged into wild puberty by a room of mildly-inebriated concept teams. You get to be a writer, a designer, a dreamer, a doer, all in a span of just thirty minutes.
You open Excel only about five times a year, and two of those rare moments are just to check if two and two still add up to four in the 21st century (my secretary tells me they still do).
I could go on and on. I’m just so happy.
I do want to establish however that I hold no angst towards my four year Marketing stint. It’s really helped me a lot. I can discourse intelligently, for example, on how a 0.3% cost reduction on a mayonnaise formulation actually helps bring vitality to 80 million Filipino lives. I have learned the difference between induction and conduction sealing. I know how to work thrilling software innovations like ACNielsen I-Sight 6.2 and Microsoft Binder. And most importantly, I can make you believe that increasing my logo by 3/10ths of a centimeter on an advertorial actually helped improve my sales in Tuguegarao public markets by 7% for two weeks last February.
I was really good at my old job. I spent two years on the High Potential list at U-Will-Never, I got to pretend I was Category Manager for six months, and I was always reminded by my advertising, activation, and media Agencies that I was one of their favorite Clients (it was my plunging necklines and plaid pants that did it).
But I really love my new career. If I could pick any Karen Carpenter song to sing about it, I would probably sing a disco remix medley of “Top Of The World” and “Sing (Sing A Song)”.
“Calling the shots” is an overrated cliché. What I do now as an Agency person is far more important, and far more fulfilling. It’s called “living my dream.“
And that, at the end of the day, is why I did what I did.
(By the way, this is a highly editorialized opinion piece, so none of you are allowed to speak up in defense of the Marketing side of life.)
I didn’t spend very long in the advertising industry. Two years. That’s a blink of an eye, by advertising standards.
I did however, get to work on one campaign that remains, to this day, incredibly meaningful to me.
It was the “I Am Ninoy” brand launch, commemorating the 25th anniversary of Ninoy Aquino’s martyrdom to save a country.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not exactly the most upstanding person on the planet. But I do remember how, for that one year, I was inspired to be a better person, a better Superstar, someone who was not afraid to stand up and proudly declare, for the world to see, that I, in my own, was a Ninoy too.
(On a slightly vain note, do you notice that I’m the only who got to deliver a complete sentence within the whole material? Ahh.. the perks of being the Account Director for the project.)
And the full story behind it.
A drawing I made the day that Tita Cory passed away.. it was awesome working with her.
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.
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.
