As usual, there is a dearth of data: the area sales directors aren’t talking.

What is happening? What is competition doing? Why aren’t efforts working?

Is the ad effective? Are your sales people doing their jobs?

What’s the latest craze in Davao? Why are Bacolod consumers not as responsive to discount offers? Why are sales for car alarms weak in Cebu?

It isn’t “Manila and “Balance Country”.

Imperial Manila is not a market reality, only a convenient one for marketers. The term “Balance country” lumps the rest of the country into one amorphous territory. And it’s a perspective that’s unhealthy to your bottom line.

Marketing uses a multinational template.

The major schools of marketing – Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive – taught our people a Western brand of marketing.

Global ad agencies stay in ivory towers, automatically think in terms of television spots, writing advertising for a people they have not met face-to-face and barely understand.

Madison Avenue advertising.

The self-conscious industry produces advertisements that win awards but do not ring cash registers. Generated by a class of people who have a very faulty notion of what the market needs and cares for.

It’s an archipelago of disparate countries. Almost.

The provinces are not poorer or less developed counterparts of Manila. The development is not linear: provincial folks do not see Manila as an ideal that other cities will become.

This insight has repercussions on business.

The Cebuanos’ pride in being Cebuano, for example, and their rejection of Imperial Manila as a model is strong as ever.

Talk to them in Tagalog and expect intolerance.  Global ad agencies assume that the language is understood everywhere, either due to ignorance or simply deterred by the attendant work. And when they do take the trouble to produce local ads, they simply translate into the local language and record in Manila, using announcers whose diction is far from genuine and laughable when aired in the provinces.

National? What national?

Normally, marketers rely on systems of delivery of product and message that diminish in quality and control as these extend farther from the city.

The parallel is that of a newspaper: the Manila-based marketer rolls out campaigns from headquarters, but there are no truly national broadcasting networks or national distributors in the country as there are no real national newspapers.

The Myopia of Manila.

You’re running a brilliantly designed television commercial in areas where powerful brands can exist without television exposure. You’re placing award-winning ads in “national” dailies that don’t reach Cebu before 10am.

Hours after they pick up the local daily.

Your expensively produced ad is airing on national television well within primetime as defined in Manila. But folks in Laoag are asleep at 9pm.

It’s easy to plan and buy media on a “national” basis. Global ad agencies do because there’s so much more work thinking and going local.

Nobody beats the local in knowing the locality.

Estima Content has forged linkages throughout the archipelago. This allows us depth of knowledge when managing events and when media planning using local media.

Mom’s Radio: a breakthrough in radio.

Estima Content

invented Mom’s Radio, a network of FM radio stations dedicated to the concerns of mothers in the provinces.

During its five years of existence, it was acclaimed by the Catholic Mass Media Awards several times.

This is not radio, it’s a conversation.

Mom’s Radio was premium programming.

It was more expensive to produce than the normal jock spinning music throughout the day. Wisdom was generously imparted by a pair of mothers to the listener: wisdom on every topic of interest – family healthcare, beauty, graceful ageing.

In the environment of content, advertising messages are heard, not as part of a background tapestry of music and blurbs, but considered consciously, deliberately, creating consent for the product. And the listener is engaged and invited to participate by calling or texting opinions and queries.

Bridging the provincial gap. 

Provincial power is a strength of Estima because the company believes in the potential of the countryside. Mom’s Radio was but one in a series of projects that hopes to reduce the expense of marketing to the provinces.

Estima Content knows that the provinces are not just different from Manila, they are distinct from each other, too. Provided attention and effort, they are lucrative markets that can reduce client’s dependence on Metro Manila sales.