Two ad agencies are not one and the same company. Bubuwit gathered that Agency A was identified as committing phone frauds. Agency B quickly said it was not the company involved since it has never been involved in long-distance phone services, nor was it connected with any company in the telephone business, more specifically the international phone services company. Agency B, Bubuwit was further informed, has been conceptualizing for the past several years ad campaigns for major corporations, and this so-called international phone-services company was not one of them. If you call Agency B and ask for telephone service, you will have dialed the wrong number.

New agency?

Lines are burning, according to Bubuwit. What is this about the top head of an ad agency who found out that not everything was well at his office, hence his resignation (or was it retirement)? The latest buzz is that this chief is forming his own agency.

Less ads?

Disenchantment with the dominant role advertising once held in building a brand is spreading throughout the business world. Many top executives now believe that advertising has become much less effective due to splintering of the marketplace into ever smaller niches. Not to be outdone by the fascination of their clients with each new methodology for fixing what ails the business, agency management has come up with its own panacea—marketing solutions. Ad agencies could no longer position themselves simply as fonts of creativity. Agency managers swallowed their disdain for sales promotion and direct marketing and repositioned the famous-name creative agencies as the place to go for integrated marketing services, supplied by various subsidiaries under the agency corporate umbrella.

“Advertising, the way we know it, is dead. And a lot of Filipino agencies have died. They were all swapped up by the multinationals,” JS Roberto Caballero, president and chief creative officer of C&A Advertising & Marketing Solutions, stressed in an interview. Some of his hot contemporaries have been retired or retrenched. “We’re moving along, with no one to fire us.”

Small but still in the ball game. He founded C&A in 1993, the first and only Filipino to win the coveted Clio Award two years in a row for Philippine Airlines’ “Shining Through.” A dominant figure in the ad industry, Bobby, as he is known to his advertising colleagues and friends, has chalked up enough credentials to earn him another title—that as a living chronicler of the Philippines advertising history.

Having just reconnected with a friend a year ago, Bubuwit established a business relationship with the association she heads. Bubuwit met her second in command, who, when not working for the association, also ran his own marketing company. Just recently, she hired Bubuwit to conduct a media-training program for one of his clients, a doctor. As it turns out, Bubuwit told the doctor during their session that his last name was uncommon and that Bubuwit also knew a very nice woman in the marketing industry, where Bubuwit started his/her career. Bubuwit asked him if he knew her. “Yes,” he said, “she’s my mother!” Life is very funny, Bubuwit said, you never know where one connection may lead you to another.