Tag: Philippines

Manila, Philippines – Local telecommunication holdings giant PLDT has announced that several of its key executives either resign or retire from the company, according to its recent stock filings at the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE).

Wilson Bobier, the company’s vice president for network build, program resource and integration management has voluntarily resigned from his position effective April 16. Mary Rose Dela Paz, the senior vice president and chief procurement officer has also voluntarily resigned from her position, effective April 14.

Meanwhile, Mario Tamayo, senior vice president and network head; and Anabelle Chua, senior vice president, chief financial officer and chief risk management officer; have both opted out for an early retirement from the company, effective April 14 and 16 respectively.

Lastly, Alexander Kibanoff, vice president of learning and development, has opted for the availment of the company’s manpower reduction program.

According to the stock filings, there are no immediate successors to those who have vacated their positions. No reasons were also laid out for the recent executive exits.

PLDT came under fire in 2022 after it reported that the company has overspent PHP48b from 2019 to 2022 in capital spending, without the scrutiny from both internal and external audit teams. The company reasoned out that all of these overspending was justified to improve their services to the customers.

The company has since then reported in March this year that the budget overrun has been reduced to PHP33b following its settlement deals with major vendors.

Manila, Philippines – An online map website generator that lets users keep track of which provinces they have visited across the Philippines has recently been all over Filipinos’ social media feeds. Several local brands in the country were quick to jump onto the trend and chart their own proof of Philippine jet setting — or rather something else – a witty jab at the map visualisation if you will. 

The website, created by Singapore-based Filipino software developer Denz Del Villar, allows users to generate a map of the Philippines – a personal and colour-coded representation of the various provinces the user has either lived in, stayed, visited, passed, or alighted from. Using these metrics, the map also generates a numberical level determined by the nature of these visits. Each category selected – whether lived or passed on – carries a numerical score, and when added up, results into the travel level of the user.

Following its virality, audiences see local brands do their own trend jacking one after the other. A huge amount of these social media posts come from several banks in the country, both traditional and digital banks. Banks such as LandBank, MetroBank, Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI), and GoTyme Bank have posted their own take on the map.

Meanwhile, popular convenience store chain 7-Eleven also jumped into the bandwagon. 

In more wittier posts, fast food chain McDonald’s took on the trend, replacing the levels with what users can ‘expect’ from their chains in different provinces. Even local pharmaceutical company Katinko also posted a witty post using the map template, showing that all aunts and uncles across the country have used their products.

Katinko Social Media Post
McDonald’s Social Media Post

Meanwhile, entertainment entities have also joined in the fun. The popular public affairs show Kapuso Mo, Jessica Soho from GMA Network shows that their team had already visited all of the provinces across the country to cover feature stories. Moreover, the local band Ben&Ben has also joined in the trend, showcasing which provinces they already performed in. 

Ben&Ben Social Media Post
Kapuso Mo, Jessica Soho Social Media Post

However, not all brands that crafted their own take on the map were received in a positive light. A social media post by land developer Camella Homes, which used such template to showcase the provinces they have current land developments,has inadvertently caused a backlash. Many netizens pointed out that some of the lands being used by were formerly agricultural lands, more specifically rice fields. The social media post has been deleted since.

Manila, Philippines – Consumer finance app, BillEase, and in-app commerce platform ChatGenie have announced their partnership targeted at empowering micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSME) through integrating its buy now, pay later (BNPL) solution in the platform.

The partnership is expected to bring a new level of convenience to both consumers and merchants, with retailers now being able to offer shoppers three cardless instalment options at checkout with interest rates between 0% and 3.49%.

According to the release, the BNPL service will enable underserved consumers to enjoy a more flexible payment option, while merchants can increase their sales by offering a wider range of payment methods.

“We are excited to partner with BillEase to provide our merchants with a broader payment solution that will help them grow their businesses. ChatGenie is committed to providing our retailers with opportunities by maximizing the world’s biggest apps; this collaboration is a testament to that commitment,” said Ragde Falcis, chief executive officer of ChatGenie.

Georg Steiger, CEO and co-founder of BillEase, added, “This partnership is a significant step towards achieving our mission to provide financial services that are accessible and convenient for both retailers and consumers. By offering our BNPL service through ChatGenie’s innovative platform, we are providing a frictionless payment option that aligns with this shift toward digital transactions.”

Previously, BillEase has also partnered with tech company OpenFabric to launch an integration stack for large enterprise merchants and payment gateways looking for same-day integration of BNPL service.

Manila, Philippines – Local pay television provider Cignal TV has tapped Canadian software company Quickplay to aid them in the expansion of its existing video streaming service called ‘Cignal Play’, as well as the launch of a sports app–a first in the country.

The Cignal Play expansion will allow subscribers in the Philippines to access an all-in-one entertainment platform with multiple tiers of live and on demand content from Cignal TV, in addition to third-party apps and streaming services, regardless of their broadband provider.

The sports app, meanwhile, will use the same Quickplay infrastructure of Cignal Play on mobile and handheld devices. It will be a single source for live events, timely sports news and information, interactive experiences, and other unique content that cater to the varied interests of Filipino fans around the world.

Cignal TV is working with Quickplay to create these two market differentiators that will be launched in the coming months, running on Google Cloud.

Jane Basas, president and CEO of Cignal TV, said, “Streaming has given viewers greater control over a wider range of choices regarding the content available on the devices they use. The Quickplay platform has the agility and high performance that we need to quickly and efficiently provide the big screen viewing experience and live sports action that our subscribers want.”

Meanwhile, Goutham Vinjamuri, chief operating officer and co-founder of Quickplay, commented, “Cignal TV has been a leader in using the flexibility and extensibility of our platform to achieve market differentiation and better business outcomes. We look forward to helping Cignal TV unleash 10-foot Cignal Play experiences on smart TVs, as well as live sports coverage through their sports app in the near future.” 

He added, “We will continue to work with them to find new ways to forge meaningful connections among their subscribers and their commercial partners.”

Manila, Philippines – Local digital advertising company ONGO Smart Advertising has announced a partnership with local media and entertainment company Viva Communications. Said partnership aims to promote Viva Communications’ product and services across ONGO’s smart tablets placed across TNVS vehicles operating in Metro Manila and other nearby provinces.

The partnership between Viva Communications and Ongo Smart Advertising marks a significant milestone in the evolution of in-car advertising in the Philippines. With this collaboration, both companies aim to set new standards for effective marketing and customer engagement.

By leveraging the power of in-car advertising, the company hopes to increase brand awareness and drive sales, while providing a unique and engaging experience for consumers.

Jeff Alias, CEO of ONGO Smart Advertising, said, “We’re delighted to be working with Viva to help them achieve their marketing goals. Our platform is designed to deliver highly targeted and effective ad campaigns, and we’re confident that this partnership will drive significant results for Viva Communications Inc.”

Meanwhile, Jocel Adorable, vice president of pay TV marketing at Viva One, commented, “We’re excited to partner with Ongo Smart Advertising to drive our marketing efforts forward. Their cutting-edge technology and expertise in in-car advertising will allow us to engage with our target customers in a more personalised and impactful way.”

Manila, Philippines – ShopBack Philippines has recently concluded its first-ever Users’ Choice Awards event last 30 March at Fairmont Makati. The physical gathering was the culminating event of the rewards platform’s voting exercise which lasted for the whole month of March where users got to vote for their most favourite brands on the platform. 

In the in-person event, more than 100 merchant partners and media attended the night filled with fruitful discussions and celebrations. Awards granted included the Trendsetters’ Choice, Smart Shoppers’ Choice, Foodies’ Choice, and Mommie’s Choice, amongst many others.

 Prashant Kala, the GM of ShopBack Ads APAC and acting country manager for the PH market.

More than 200,000 votes were garnered during the campaign period and winners were determined based on the number of votes received, the number of users who visited the merchant online via the ShopBack app, and the number of bookmarks via the Watchlist feature.

Here were the full list of winners: 

  • Smart Shoppers’ Choice (Marketplaces category): Lazada
  • Trendsetters’ Choice (Fashion category): Zalora
  • Foodies’ Choice (Food and Grocery category): Foodpanda 
  • Mommie’s Choice (Mom and Baby category): Edamama 
  • Revenge Travelers’s Choice (Travel category): Agoda 
  • Glow Getters’ Choice (Health and Beauty category): Shopee
  • Fitness Junkies’ Choice (Sports and Fitness category): Nike
  • Tech Savvy’s Choice (Tech category): Samsung
  • Supefans’ Choice (Brand loyalists category): Adidas 
  • Top New Merchant: SHEIN
  • Brand Trailblazer Special Award: Lazada
  • Local Groundbreaker Special Award: Edamama and Metromart 

ShopBack opened the in-person event with a look back at 2022. Timothy Tuason, commercial director for ShopBack Philippines, emphasised the high conversion data in the platform which pushed for tangible business results for its merchant partners. 

The brand also teased what’s to come this 2023 and the highlights included were optimisations on its newly launched search ads and livestream features, an upcoming podcast series, and its 8th birthday celebration this June. 

Nishant D’Souza, Edamama Co-Founder, then provided a keynote presentation on the topic of how to make a flourishing Filipino start-up, sharing Edamama’s journey to becoming one of the top shopping apps in the country. 

ShopBack also invited other merchant partners for a fireside chat to talk about the synergy of growth and profitability. The discussions touched on the need to constantly adjust strategies in the ever-changing macro environment. The speaker line-up included:

  • Ricardo Ortuoste – Head of User Growth, Lazada Philippines
  • Amer Bakshi – Head of Strategic Partnerships, Foodpanda Philippines
  • Cris Tan – Marketing Director, Zalora Philippines
  • Nathalie Salcedo – Growth Lead, Metromart Philippines

“We are happy to spend this night with our esteemed partners as a way to show our gratitude for a great 2022. More exciting things are coming ahead this 2023 and looking forward to strengthening our partnerships with all of you,” Tuason shared. 

Last 17 March, ShopBack Philippines also launched yet another media gathering to mark the start of the summer season. In partnership with Zalora, the platform kicked off the season with ‘Summer Playground’, a lifestyle event that gathered KOLs and media as well as the platform’s key partners.

Manila, Philippines – The local creative agency GIGIL, through its recent tech arm GIGIL Metama, has launched a new campaign initiative called ‘Divine ArchiTech’, which allows users to convert their prayers into non-fungible tokens (NFTs), allowing users to create NFTs to earn funds for their own faith-based cause.

The new initiative comes days before the Holy Week festivities by Catholics, namely Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday.

‘Divine ArchiTech’ combines faith and technology in a mission to help build churches around the world, while noting the lack of physical churches to service the faithful.

As part of the initiative, ‘Divine ArchiTech’ launched its pioneer project called ‘Made with Prayers’. By donating to the cause, you will gain access to this unique feature that allows you to convert your prayers and hopes using AI to create artwork that can be minted and stored in personal digital wallets. 

Aside from storing them in digital wallets, you may also choose to donate your artwork to the Divine ArchiTech’s gallery and allow them to mint it into an NFT to earn more funds for the cause.

The new NFT project follows its recent one where Kool Pals, a popular comedy group in the Philippines, launched an NFT project which turned hate comments into NFTs.

Manila, Philippines – Media giant ABS-CBN has announced a partnership with Indian over-the-top (OTT) service MX Player to bring several of its shows to India, dubbed in multiple languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, and Malayalam.

Some of these shows include “The General’s Daughter”, “Hanggang Saan” (A Mother’s Guilt), “A Love to Last”, “Mea Culpa”, and “Love Thy Woman”.

According to ABS-CBN, its recent partnership reflects its cross-border endeavours, such as international co-productions, content adaptations, and multilingual distributions, which is deemed a ‘timely opportunity’ for them.

Maribel Hernaez, managing director for Asia-Pacific at ABS-CBN Global, said, “In this partnership, ABS-CBN and MX Player are able to show to a wider range of audience the shared culture of Filipinos and Indians, and – more importantly – a true humanity through exceptional storytelling. Whether it’s about revenge or a love story, crime or action, family or society, viewers will surely find a story apt to their taste.”

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for MX Player said, “MX Vdesi is a content category that is performing extremely well on our platform, and we strive to bring viewers compelling stories from around the world in an Indian language of their preference. We’re delighted to expand into a new international territory with the addition of these five Filipino titles and we believe the highly relevant and relatable narratives will strike a chord with Indian audiences.”

The new partnership comes after a recent partnership by ABS-CBN with Warner Brothers Discovery to bring several of its lifestyle programs across APAC viewers. ABS-CBN has also teamed up with media giant rival GMA Network to bring several of its ‘Star Cinema’ movies to the network, as well as partnering with Hong Kong telco SmarTone to provide Filipino entertainment content in Hong Kong.

Manila, Philippines – With companies actively doing background checks when hiring someone, viewing someone’s social media can get confusing for employers. With some potential applicants still hiding under anonymity, employers often have less transparency to look into as to what type of individual their next employee is.

And that is exactly what the latest ads from JobStreet Philippines show: instead of relying on social media for hiring, companies can get ‘real talent’ by visiting the JobStreet platform.

The ads, conceptualised by local creative agency GIGIL, feature a series of hilarious situations when an employer interviews someone from social media. Instead of a real person, they interview a fictional character, an avatar, or even the whole family of the applicant.

For Soleil Badenhop, associate creative director at GIGIL, humour has been an integral part of most of their campaigns, even for a formal brand such as JobStreet.

“Hiring can be really taxing for HR managers. We wanted to come up with content that would break the monotony and entertain them, get their attention while getting the message across clearly,” Badenhop said in an exclusive statement to MARKETECH APAC.

When asked how GIGIL came up with the idea for these ads, she said that while the brief for the ad was to simply market the service for free to HR managers, they wanted to dig deeper into the insights from HR managers to conceptualise the ads.

“We dug deep for true insight and found that HR managers still hire largely on social media simply because the Philippines is still the social media capital of the world. The funny thing about hiring on social media is, you don’t know whom you’re talking to because most profiles use cartoon pictures, avatars, group pictures, and fictional characters. By showing the reality of hiring there, we were able to push JobStreet as the reliable yet free option for hirers,” Badenshop told MARKETECH APAC.

Meanwhile, Kim Martin Viray, country head of marketing at JobStreet Philippines told MARKETECH APAC that aside from promoting said service to HR managers, the overarching objective of the ads was about addressing unstructured hiring, particularly on social media, where it is prone to scams and fraud.

“We have seen ads with humour and lightness to engage better with Filipino audiences, especially on digital. Our ‘Hire With Real Talent for Free’ campaign is one of the first-ever hyperlocal ad creatives we’ve produced for JobStreet Philippines, fronting our employer franchise that is emotive and targets real situations of HR professionals when hiring on social media,” the company told MARKETECH APAC.

They added, “Specifically, the already-heavy and often stressful situation of an SME hirer and then only to get low-quality candidates. To resonate more with the target audience, we re-imagined that situation lightly and with humour while highlighting our key message on what JobStreet can deliver better.”

Manila, Philippines – ShopBack, the shopping, rewards, and payments platform in APAC, is launching its first-ever Users’ Choice Awards, which will inaugurally be focused on the Philippines. The platform is handing the power to users to determine the top-performing brands on the platform. 

As of current, ShopBack boasts over 600 partnerships with some of the most trusted retailers in the Philippines across industries ranging from travel and fashion to tech and marketplaces. According to the platform, the year 2022 saw the onboarding of several exciting new partnerships, with more than 50 brands, including collaborations with notable fashion retailers like SHEIN and Puma, onboarded on the platform. 

For its inaugural Users’ Choice Awards, to be launched in the Philippines; there will be a total of 9 awards up for grabs for the flagship categories.

The recognitions, namely, are the ‘Smart Shoppers’ Choice’ for the Marketplaces category, the ‘Glow Getters’ Choice’ for the Health and Beauty category, the ‘Fitness Junkies’ Choice’ for the Sports category, the ‘Trendsetters’ Choice’ for the Fashion category, the ‘Foodies’ Choice’ for the Food and Grocery category, the ‘Tech Savvy’s Choice’ for the Tech and Gaming category, and the ‘Mommies’ Choice’ for brands that cater to mom and baby essentials. 

True to the current times we have now, the roster includes an award for the top travel brands, aptly called, the ‘Revenge Travelers’ Choice’. In addition, serving as a bit of an icebreaker to the category-inclined awards is the ‘Superfans’ Choice’, which will be contested amongst brands with the highest brand loyalists. 

During the night of the awards itself, aside from the aforementioned, special awards will be given such as the ‘Top Growing Brand’ and ‘Top New Brand’, amongst others. 

The voting period, which has commenced last 10 March, will allow users to vote for their favourite brands per category on ShopBack until 27 March. This leads to the official awards night on 30 March which will be held at Fairmont Makati.

To vote, users will need to utilise ShopBack’s ‘challenges’ feature, where one can earn bonus cashback based on one’s purchases or certain actions on the app. For the Users’ Choice Awards, users can look forward to getting up to P100 from the challenges.

Brand winners would be determined based on the number of votes received (50%), the number of users who visit the merchant online via the ShopBack app (25%), and the number of users who added the merchant to their watchlist (25%). 

“This is also our way to show our gratitude and appreciation to all our merchant partners for the trust and collaborative partnership that we’ve had in the past few years,” commented Prashant Kala, the GM of ShopBack Ads APAC and acting country manager for the PH market.

Last November, ShopBack launched its livestream feature on the ShopBack app in time for 11.11. At present, the platform revealed that it is also currently in the midst of testing other solutions, such as search advertising and segmented audience optimisations.

“It takes less than 2 days for users to convert to purchase on ShopBack. This gives us a huge opportunity in terms of experimenting on new features for users and providing solutions for partners,” said Kala.

He added, “2023 has just begun, but we are already seeing it as a very promising year. Definitely, more exciting things to come from ShopBack.”

In H2 of 2022, ShopBack announced that it has raised fresh funding of US$80m which will go into further building and growing the platform in APAC. A few months following, the platform unveiled its expansion to Hong Kong, which saw the onboarding of over 250 local to global merchants.