“You should get this man.”
That’s what Boo Chanco — then vice president of the news division at ABS-CBN — said to Sergio “Serge” Osmeña III sometime in the 1990s, while pointing directly at me. I still don’t know if Boo was serious or just enjoying himself at my expense. But Serge took him at his word. That offhand introduction turned into one of the defining professional relationships of my career, one that would take me from the newsroom into the war rooms of some of the most consequential campaigns in modern Philippine political history — including the campaign that put Noynoy Aquino in Malacañang in 2010.
Understand who Serge Osmeña III was before you understand what he taught me. Born December 13, 1943, he was the grandson of Sergio Osmeña Sr., the fourth president of the Philippines, and the son of Sergio “Serging” Osmeña Jr., who ran against Ferdinand Marcos for the presidency in 1969. Politics wasn’t a career choice for Serge — it was inherited terrain he’d been navigating his entire life, long before I ever walked into a room with him.
I’ve been asked more than once how someone goes from monitoring election coverage in a TV newsroom to running media strategy for a presidential campaign. The honest answer is: one relationship, one lesson, one election cycle at a time. This is the story of how that happened, and what it taught me about what actually makes a campaign work.
The Introduction That Started It All
Serge Osmeña III wasn’t just a senator and grandson of a president — he was, as I like to say, a seasoned political campaigner in his own right, even if the general public never quite saw him that way. When he decided to bring me on for his first Senate run, he didn’t just ask me. He asked my boss, Geny Lopez Jr., for permission to borrow me.
Geny Lopez and Serge Osmeña went back further than most people realized — they had been cellmates during the Marcos era in the 1970s. Both men were arrested and detained at Fort Bonifacio after Martial Law was declared in 1972, and — in a detail that still amazes me every time I tell it — the two of them later escaped together from that maximum-security jail. That’s not a bond you build in a boardroom. Lopez once told me, only half-joking, that he’d spent more nights with Serge than with his own wife. So when Serge came asking, Geny didn’t hesitate. “Let’s help my friend,” he told me. And that was that.
I share this origin story not out of nostalgia, but because it says something important about how campaigns actually get built in this country: they run on trust networks that predate the campaign itself. Nobody hires a stranger to run their war room. They hire someone whose judgment has already been tested — often in rooms that have nothing to do with politics.
Learning to Read Bias Before “Data-Driven” Was a Buzzword
Before I was a campaign strategist, I was head of research and business analysis at ABS-CBN. Every election season, part of my job was to track the horse race — who was likely to win, who wasn’t, and how each campaign was actually performing on the ground and on air.
But the more instructive part of that job was something subtler: monitoring media bias. We were constantly checking whether the network’s own reporting was tilting toward a particular candidate or party. If you train your eyes and ears for it, you start to notice these biases almost instinctively — a word choice here, a camera angle there, the order in which candidates are quoted.
That skill became a discipline. I still train my people to spot these patterns today, and — just as importantly — to understand how they can be used to a campaign’s advantage. Long before “data-driven campaigning” became a term strategists put on their LinkedIn profiles, we were already doing a version of it: reading the information environment closely enough to know where the real leverage points were.
Traditional Media Was the Name of the Game
When people talk about political campaigns today, the conversation almost always starts with social media. But for most of my career with Serge, the battlefield was entirely different. For most of my career with Serge, there was no social media. So we put our energy where the votes actually were: television, print, and radio.
Serge understood this terrain better than almost anyone I worked with. He was so serious about the craft of campaigning that he’d come back from trips abroad with stacks of books on the subject and hand them to me. In a pre-internet era, that collection became an invaluable library — the internet in the Philippines back then was too slow to really rely on Google or any search engine. You learned from books, from experience, and from each other.
When he brought me into Noynoy Aquino’s campaign in 2009, my role was exactly what I’d built my career on: media planning and strategy. Serge was commander-in-chief. I was there with him the whole way.
The timeline of that campaign is worth remembering, because it shows just how compressed and improbable the whole thing was. Corazon “Cory” Aquino, Noynoy’s mother and the icon of the 1986 People Power revolution, died on August 1, 2009. Forty days later, on September 9, 2009, Noynoy announced his candidacy for president at Club Filipino — the same venue where his mother had been inaugurated in 1986. Mar Roxas joined the ticket as his running mate less than two weeks after that. By May 10, 2010, Aquino had won the presidency with over 15.2 million votes, in what was, notably, the first fully automated national election in Philippine history. He was proclaimed on June 9 and took his oath as the 15th President of the Philippines on June 30, 2010. From a standing start to Malacañang in under ten months — that’s the kind of compressed timeline that makes disciplined media strategy not a luxury, but a survival requirement.
From 120 Minutes Total to 120 Minutes Per Station
Here’s a detail that tells you everything about how tightly regulated — and how strategically demanding — campaign media planning used to be. For the 2010 elections, COMELEC rules capped campaign ads at a total of 120 minutes across all television stations combined. That number, 120, was the ceiling you built your entire media strategy around.
That meant every single minute had to be negotiated, justified, and spent with precision. On one side, you were negotiating with networks for airtime slots. On the other, you were negotiating for the budget to actually fund that airtime — all while making sure your candidate’s message and platform got out without tripping any COMELEC wires. It was less “creative strategy” and more high-stakes logistics under a very tight ceiling.
By 2016, the rules had loosened considerably — 120 minutes per station, not across all of them combined. On paper, that sounds like more room to maneuver. But by then we already knew the ground had shifted underneath us: social media was becoming the dominant battlefield, and the old math of counting minutes on network TV no longer told the whole story of a campaign’s reach.
I bring this up not just as trivia for history buffs, but because it’s a useful reminder for anyone in political strategy today: the rules of the game change generation to generation, but the discipline of understanding exactly what your constraints are — and building your entire plan around them — doesn’t.
The Benevolent Dictator
If there’s one lesson from my years with Serge that I’ve carried into every campaign since, it’s this: a political campaign needs a dictator. A benevolent one — but a dictator nonetheless.
Without that single point of command, a campaign scatters. Everyone has an opinion, every advisor has a pet theory, and the candidate ends up pulled in a dozen directions by well-meaning people who all think they know best. Serge understood this instinctively, and he made it a non-negotiable condition of every campaign he ran: if you want to work with me, you follow what I say.
That discipline extended all the way up to the candidate. When Serge said, “drop everything, I’ve scheduled a shoot for you today,” the candidate showed up. When he said, “don’t go to that rally, let’s shoot a commercial instead — we need to protect our media budget for what actually matters,” that’s what happened. No debate, no second-guessing in the moment.
That was the backbone of the 2009 Noynoy Aquino campaign. Serge brought order. He brought unity of command. And I genuinely believe the results — the campaign’s coherence, its message discipline, its ability to execute under real constraints — spoke for themselves.
Serge practiced what he preached in his own campaigns, too. In that same 2010 election cycle, running for his third Senate term, he campaigned on a comparatively shoestring budget — without the volume of posters and billboards his better-funded opponents put up. He leaned instead on television advertising, which he judged the more effective and more prudent way to reach voters. He placed tenth and won. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a man who trusted his own strategic discipline enough to bet an entire campaign on it.
Why This Still Matters
I tell this story now not because I’m precious about the past, but because I think campaigns — and honestly, a lot of organizations outside of politics too — keep relearning this lesson the hard way. Technology changes. The rules change. The 120-minutes-total campaign of 2009 and the influencer-driven, algorithm-shaped campaigns of today look almost nothing alike on the surface.
But underneath, the fundamentals barely move. You still need someone who can read the information environment honestly, including its biases. You still need a strategy built around your actual constraints rather than your wishful thinking. And you still need one clear, trusted decision-maker who can hold a campaign together when everyone around the candidate has an opinion.
When I moved into the Duterte campaign later in my career, I knew immediately that it needed a Serge-like figure — someone or some team capable of imposing that same order. But the lessons from that campaign were different, shaped by a media environment Serge and I had never operated in together. That’s a story for another entry.
Stay With Me for the Next One
If you found this useful — whether you’re a strategist looking for lessons that actually transfer across eras, a student of Philippine political history, or just someone curious how these campaigns really get built behind the scenes — subscribe so you don’t miss the next entry, where I’ll walk through what changed (and what didn’t) when I stepped into the Duterte campaign. And if you know someone who’d get something out of this, share it with them. These lessons are more useful passed around than kept to myself.
Email: nicgabjr@gmail.com X:@nicgabunada
