Nic Gabunada was among the campaign volunteers of candidate Rodrigo Duterte during the 2016 presidential campaign. Some say, he played a key role in steering volunteer campaigners during the campaign. Whatever detractors say about his governance, we were and still are, happy and proud to put the man from the south – Mayor Rodrigo Duterte to Malacanang.
In this seven part series, first published on Facebook, veteran journalist Edwin Espejo wrote about how the then political opposition to President Duterte tried to decapitate the so called people behind his successful and innovative campaign.
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Decapitating the ‘trolls’ of Duterte
First of a series
By Edwin Espejo
(June 28, 2021)
A known communication specialist during the 2016 presidential campaign identified with the then Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte campaign camp was recently in the headlines after he reportedly bagged a contract with the Department of Finance to help in developing the agency’s “brand and communications strategies.”
Nicanor Gabunada, a resident of a sleepy town of Padada in Davao del Sur, is a retired top marketing man of ABS-CBN who surfaced and appeared inonline and television interviews several weeks after Mayor Rodrigo Duterte was proclaimed winner of the 2016 presidential elections.
Gabunada was a former student activist but graduated magna cum laude in management engineering at the Ateneo de Davao University.
Low-key and unassuming, Gabunada was not engaged in public relations prior to his involvement in the 2016 presidential elections.
In fact, no one in the communications group of Duterte was engaged in the profession that is public relations.
Rappler’s core of editors, including Maria Ressa, was a contemporary of Gabunada at ABS-CBN, albeit in different departments. He in the marketing arm and Ressa as head of its news and public affairs department.
Gabunada retired from ABS-CBN in 2005 while Maria Ressa and her associates went on to establish www.rappler.com, an online news outlet now more known as Rappler, in 2008.
He went into freelance consulting practice and joined Omnicom Media Group, a media ad placement agency, but resigned in 2015 to join Duterte’s team.
Unlike the high-profile communication and PR teams of the 2016 major presidential candidates, Duterte’s media group was composed of media volunteers and journalists from Davao City and nearby provinces. Its video production teams were a ragtag band of amateur events videographers and photographers with no previous media production outputs of national import.
(to be continued)