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JC Medina
Spread that virus

Help spread the word about your business with a healthy dose of viral marketing
Straight out of college, Eduardo Mapa joined the ranks of the country’s workforce as an insurance agent. As he learned the ropes and built relationships with his clients and coworkers, he soon found his calling in the advertising industry, where he started a career as a media salesman for various publications.

He developed a reputation as one of the industry’s most aggressive media salesmen, and an advertising agency, Ogilvy and Mather took notice of his talent and hired him for account management work in the early 1990s.

Mapa eventually got cross-posted to Singapore through another advertising agency, Euro RSCG. While in the Lion City, he handled accounts like Asia Pacific Brewery, where he won accolades for his “Dr.InkBeer” campaign. During this time, another type of industry was emerging -- the dotcoms -- and Mapa eventually handled advertising for the likes of jobpilot.com and asiaone.com. This is where his attraction with digital marketing started.

In 2003, with over 18 years of successful ad campaigns under his belt, Mapa was reassigned back to the Philippines to further pursue his digital marketing career. He worked on several projects with a leading local newspaper. One of those projects, “Inquest,” won the “Grand Boomerang Award,” a recognition given to successful campaigns using both the Internet and mobile communications.

“I think I’m one of the few above-the-line advertising practitioners who dived into digital space,” says Mapa of his current position as chief operating officer and managing director of Media Contacts, the digital marketing arm of Havas Media in the Philippines. In an industry where companies still take the traditional media route, digital marketing is touted as the next big thing and Mapa’s experience and skill sets are much sought after.

Media Contacts is a product of years of collaboration between Mapa and the country’s No. 1 search portal, Yehey.com. Mapa’s big opportunity came when Havas Media—the sixth largest communications group worldwide with roots in Europe—decided to establish an office in the booming Philippine market. With his existing relationship with Yehey and a proven track record of handling several marketing campaigns in digital space, Mapa was Havas Media’s obvious choice for leading its Philippine operations.

The partnership was solidified through a joint venture between Havas Media and Yehey, with the latter currently providing full technical infrastructure support to Media Contacts. In this arrangement, a lean-and-mean team of over 20 digital specialists report to Mapa.

As a digital media agency, Media Contacts is responsible for delivering full-blown campaigns in the online space. This involves the design and planning of marketing strategies from the ground up, the development of websites related to the execution of those strategies, the production of online content like viral videos, and the planning and buying of digital media in such high-traffic online sites as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Media Contacts conducts its operations within what Mapa describes as a “digital hub,” which means that the Philippine unit is part of a network of digital marketing professionals working in Havas offices in Southeast Asia. In effect, Media Contacts has over 900 professionals and a presence in over 26 countries, giving the company’s local clientele access to this wealth of world-class skills and talent.

With this level of expertise, Media Contacts has helped clients like the Department of Tourism (DOT) carry out their campaigns on the battleground where it matters the most—online. For instance, the company’s current project with DOT, piloted in North America, will soon be rolled out to ten other markets worldwide.

One of the key projects Mapa had taken part in was the 2008 Philippine visit of popular video blogger Christine “Happy Slip” Gambito, a Filipina based in the United States. Through the online video medium, Gambito was able to tour the country and invite Filipinos the world over to experience the Philippines again. She was well-received by the local community, with droves of fans flocking to see her in person.

Digital marketing is still a new field in the Philippines, but with the creativity and natural affinity of Filipinos to the new medium, Mapa is confident that sourcing local talent will not be a problem. Still, he says, Filipinos have a lot to learn from their regional counterparts.

“Among Filipino digital artists, there’s this tendency to focus on the ‘art execution’ and the ‘flair’ side of the creative bandwidth,” he says. “They seemingly don’t recognize that in digital space, it is actually content and depth that are the key drivers in the engagement story.” He thus encourages his own team of digital artists to work hard to stay competitive in digital marketing and trains them to become industry “mavericks” who think out of the box.

Mapa believes that the RP digital marketing industry has good prospects, noting that traditional advertising agencies have begun to establish their own digital arms by getting talent from outside of the usual sources. On the part of Media Contacts, though, Mapa says he prefers to do the basic—drawing customers to his clients brands. “While some agencies pursue search-engine marketing as a strategic tool in helping clients build their business, we’d rather bring our clients into the business of customer-intent acquisition instead,” he explains.

“We are bullish on the growth of the digital communications in the Philippines,” he says, “and we foresee digital media to soon be a regular part of the Philippine marketing communications budget in the next couple of years.”