Why Social Media Was the Real Tipping Point of the 2016 Philippine Elections

July 21, 2026

Series: Inside the Campaign First of 10 Parts Reading time: 6 min read Key Takeaways: Social media in 2016 was no longer a youth or elite medium — it reached every corner of the Philippines With 42 million active social media users and free Facebook from telcos, the platform was effectively free for millions We spent a fraction of what our competitors did on traditional media — and won Social media scales both authentic messages and disinformation equally — discipline is non-negotiable For strategists: stop treating social as supplementary. In many campaigns, it IS the campaign. For years, the conventional wisdom in Philippine politics was simple: if you want to win, you dominate television. TV was king. Radio was queen. Everything else was a footnote.

Inside the Campaign: 10 Lessons from the 2016 Duterte Digital Playbook

July 21, 2026

A 10 Blog Series for Marketers, PR Professionals & Digital Strategists ABOUT THIS SERIES This is Inside the Campaign — a 10-part series drawn from my direct experience in the Communications Group of then-candidate Rodrigo Roa Duterte during the 2016 Philippine presidential elections. My role covered TV and radio strategy and the overall management of the campaign’s social media effort. What I witnessed — and what we built — permanently changed how I think about media, messaging, and movements. These posts are written for marketers, PR professionals, political scientists, and digital strategists. The lessons are not confined to politics. Every principle we applied in 2016 maps directly onto the challenges facing communicators and brand builders today. The schedule: The series launches Tuesday, July 21, 2026,

Illustration of a chessboard cleared of toppled pieces, with a single crowned king left standing under a spotlight and held up by puppet strings; headline reads "The Illusion of Justice — Philippine Charter Change 2026."

The Illusion of Justice: Why the 2026 Political Spectacle is a Trap for Philippine Democracy

July 16, 2026

The Bread and Circuses of the Present Right now, the Filipino public is being treated to the ultimate political bloodsport. In one corner of the world, a former president sits in an ICC detention facility in The Hague. Closer to home, a sitting Vice President is undergoing a grueling Senate impeachment trial that completely monopolizes every headline, tweet, and broadcast. To the casual observer, it looks like a long-overdue reckoning—the wheels of justice finally grinding down an empire. But we must look past the theater. While accountability for past or present misdeeds is necessary, we are blind if we do not see that the real story of 2026 is not the trials at all—it is Philippine Charter Change 2026, the quiet effort to use this

A white chess queen on a dark checkerboard, its crown cracking apart in red, circled by a faint clock dial with "16 of 24" marked beside it — illustrating the Senate vote math behind Sara Duterte's impeachment trial.

The Trial Isn’t About the Money

July 14, 2026

I wrote a piece a while back about why the Pink and Yellow factions appear to be propping up an administration they spent years opposing. Moral decoupling, I called it — the cold discipline of separating a player’s flaws from their usefulness and running the two ledgers separately. Readers liked it. A few asked the obvious follow-up question, the one I’d ask if I were still in the room: fine, but what would you tell the other side? So let’s do that. Let’s sit in the other war room for a minute — the one defending Vice President Sara Duterte as her second impeachment trial opened last week — and read the same board from that chair. I’ll say this up front: neither the Vice

Diagram of one root labeled The Left forking into two arrows: Makabayan (NatDem–NDF–CPP) in red and Akbayan in rose.

Two Lefts, One Label

July 9, 2026

Where the Makabayan bloc and the Akbayan bloc sit in the Philippines’ war of misdirection A follow-up to “Strategic Misdirection in Political Messaging” The first piece argued that a great deal of Philippine political messaging works not by lying outright but by pointing the audience at the wrong object — collapsing distinctions the speaker would rather you not see. Nowhere is that mechanism cleaner than in how the country talks about “the left.” The word does an enormous amount of quiet work. It flattens two rival traditions, born of a bitter split, into a single red silhouette. And that flattening is not an accident of shorthand; it is a political asset that different players spend and defend. So it is worth doing the un-collapsing. Where,

Chess pieces illustrating strategic misdirection—pink and yellow pawns facing a dark king lit in red.

The Enemy of My Enemy Is a Strategy, Not a Truce

July 8, 2026

In every war room I’ve sat in, the hardest order to give a fired-up team isn’t “attack.” It’s “stand down.” Ask true believers to hold their fire while the other side is stumbling, and you get the same look every time — the one that asks whether you’ve lost your nerve. I hadn’t. And neither, I’d argue, have the Pinks and the Yellows. To the casual observer, the sight of the Pink and Yellow factions quietly holding up a shield for the Marcos administration looks like total ideological surrender. How, they ask, can the people who built their identity on opposing a Marcos restoration suddenly line up behind him? Someone coins “Uni-Pink,” a tidy betrayal narrative is born, and everyone nods along. If you’ve worked

Dark storm clouds hanging low over a wide, open ocean, with faint silhouettes of ships on the distant horizon

Rene Was One of Ours: What Ateneo de Manila Forgot About Cura Personalis

July 4, 2026

I keep coming back to one small, unbearable fact. Before Rene Clert Baterbonia was a name on a national headline, before he was a “Blue Eagles recruit” and then, God help us, a body pulled from the surf in Dipaculao, he was a boy from Talacogon, Agusan del Sur, who wore the same blue we wear here in Davao. He was an Ateneo de Davao product. He led our region to a Palarong Pambansa gold and took home the MVP. He was, in the truest and most literal sense, one of ours. So no, I can’t write about this the way a columnist writes about a distant tragedy in Manila. This one landed at home. And that’s exactly why I need to write it honestly,

Abstract illustration of a glowing signal cutting through scattered noise, representing a clear narrative breaking through misinformation during a crisis.

When the Casino Is on Fire and Twitter Thinks It’s ISIS: A Crisis Manager’s Playbook

July 1, 2026

It was past midnight on June 2, 2017, when a lone gunman walked into Resorts World Manila, set fire to casino tables and slot machines, stole chips, and then took his own life. Thirty-eight people died — almost entirely from the stampede and smoke inhalation in the chaos that followed. Within hours, a journalist who billed herself as a terrorism expert reported that an ISIS faction had claimed responsibility for the attack. Her report went viral. It wasn’t ISIS. It was a debt-ridden former civil servant named Jessie Javier Carlos who had run out of options and made the most catastrophic of choices. But by the time the facts caught up with the story, the narrative had already taken on a life of its own

The Ban Is Coming. Are We Ready to Lose 90 Million Hours of Attention?

June 28, 2026

Here’s what should be keeping every marketer, PR lead, and digital strategist in this country up at night: the Philippines is not watching the UK’s under-16 social media ban from a safe distance. We are about to pass our own version of it. Digital Secretary Henry Aguda has said the government wants an online safety law enacted by the end of 2026, with a minimum age of 16 — even as industry players like TikTok lobby for a lower threshold. The specifics matter, because this isn’t one bill, it’s five. The Senate Committee on Public Information and Mass Media has already held hearings on a stack of competing proposals: Erwin Tulfo’s SB 595, which would bar children 12 and under outright and require verified parental

Infographic comparing bullying prevention approaches: one-off campaigns that show little effect versus whole-school programs shown to reduce bullying, with the statistic that Philippine students report bullying at roughly double the OECD average.

What Actually Stops Bullying: A Guide for Schools Beyond “Be Kind” Posters

June 25, 2026

In 2022, the OECD’s PISA survey asked 15-year-olds how often they get bullied. The global average came back at roughly one in five experiencing it multiple times a month. In the Philippines, that number was 43 percent of girls and 53 percent of boys — more than double the international rate. Researchers studying the data concluded the Philippines had effectively become the “bullying capital of the world.” That statistic sat in policy briefs and committee hearings for a couple of years. Then, on June 22, 2026, it stopped being an abstraction. Two students at San Jose National High School in Tacloban City opened fire on their classmates and told police they had been bullied. Four students died. Nine were wounded. The motive police cited was

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