Authenticity as the Most Powerful Campaign Strategy: Lessons from Duterte’s “As-Is, Where-Is” Approach

July 28, 2026

Series: Inside the Campaign Second of 10 Parts Key Takeaways Duterte told us directly: don’t package me differently from who I am We presented both sides of the candidate — unflinchingly — and let voters decide Research confirmed: authenticity was the #1 thing voters liked about him Manufactured relatability fails — voters have finely tuned authenticity detectors The lesson: authenticity is a strategic commitment, not a communications style There is a standard playbook in political communications. You take the candidate. You identify their strongest qualities. You amplify those. You sand down the rough edges. You package them into something the broadest possible audience can accept. We threw that playbook out from day one. Not because we were contrarian. Not because we were underfunded —

From Activist to Adman — How the Anti-Marcos Movement Made Me a Better Marketer

July 23, 2026

Key Takeaways: Some of the most valuable marketing training happens outside marketing –mine happened in the anti Marcos movement Every flyer and every rally had to land: that was audience segmentation before anyone called it that Distribution mattered as much as content — trusted networks were our channels The goal was never just to inform but to mobilize; that’s virality by another name Look behind history’s movements and you’ll find someone who understood audience, message and reach People are sometimes surprised when I tell them where I got my most valuable marketing lessons. It wasn’t a classroom. It wasn’t a boardroom. It was the Anti-Marcos movement — in the streets, in secret meetings, in the business of moving people when the stakes were life and

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

July 21, 2026

Series: Inside the Campaign First of 10 Parts 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. The 2016 presidential elections changed

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

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

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,

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

Infographic showing a 2x3 crisis response grid based on incident intensity (high or low) and market sentiment (negative, neutral, or positive): Mobilize, Monitor, Amplify, Watch, Observe, Engage.

Data Is the New Oil — But Discernment Is the Refinery

July 6, 2026

There’s a moment in every crisis room I’ve been in — and I’ve been in more than a few — when someone opens a laptop, pulls up a dashboard of real-time social media data, and says something like: “We’re trending.” And then everyone looks at each other, because trending could mean anything. It could mean you’ve gone viral for doing something right. It could mean a false rumor is currently racing ahead of the truth at the speed of a share button. It could mean a journalist with a large following just posted something that is factually incorrect, emotionally charged, and already spreading fast. Data tells you that something is happening. Discernment tells you what to do about it. This is the distinction I’ve spent

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,

Journal