Month: September 2007

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Mostly Everything

“The New Order” Ad Congress this November

I’m a little disappointed that this year’s advertising congress isn’t getting a lot of buzz in comparison to the past ones that were held in Baguio and Cebu. I’m not quite sure which agency is sponsoring this year’s ad congress PR — the radio and television, as well as the online beat campaigns don’t seem to be very visible, if at all they are being run.

I have a theory why they aren’t very visible. Just check out their website address:

http://www.20thadcongress-theneworder.com/

Oh god. Who can possibly remember that insanely long URL? Ironic as it is, the “New Order” which will be held in Subic this coming November 21 to 24 2007 will touch on such things as new media, social media and emerging trends for advertising. As a guy who’s been in the blog industry for 2 1/2 years, I will be first to say that they should have chosen a friendlier URL.

From what I learned, the “New Order” pitch goes something like this: In the same way that soldiers were sent to Subic for training, so will advertisers and communicators be sent off for different kind of training. Wheee.

So, who’s going to ad congress? 🙂 It would be cool to see new media practitioners and blogtrepreneurs there! If you’re a corporation, it would be a splendid idea to sponsor some interested bloggers and get to know them better.

Tagay!

Categories
Mostly Everything

The “return of the comeback” of Paypal, Darcie is now happy

The life of Darcie, our b5 HQ manager, has been made much easier with the release of full PayPal support in the Philippines. Ever since 2005, b5media has been using Xoom to pay Philippine-based bloggers their monthly income. The service was actually very reliable until two years later – today, where increased earnings and the addition of more bloggers from the Philippines caused the Xoom account to “overload” once in a while. This brought a slight panic to some local bloggers for the most obvious of reasons.

The Xoom payment ceiling was especially tiresome for me as I served as a payment hub for three bloggers. PayPal’s grand return will sure make a lot of people at b5media happy.

Mike Abundo was most poetic about it:

Let that sink in for a second. Rural Filipinos can now sell their towns’ products directly to the world over eBay. Talented Filipina babes can become the next Happy Slip by posting their videos on Revver. The Philippines — indeed, individual Filipinos — can finally earn money in the global Long Tail of ecommerce.

Nope, it’s not April 1. Thank god. This is the real deal.

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Mostly Everything

Offer a novena for my talk today!

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Hey, Globe really rebrands everything so quickly. Their new Globe Visibility dongles come armed with the new corporate logos. I had to borrow one for a presentation I’m giving today: well I’ve been fretting all week over this – for the sole reason that the topic is rather obscure. I’ll be talking about “Gadgets and Software for PR practitioners” at today’s Public Relations Society Summit.

It’s actually a breath of fresh air, talking about something that doesn’t have anything to do with blogging. I used to give these talks with the boys at schools and exhibits, and its been months, heck, years, since I’ve been paired with them again – well not all of them, just Adel who’s talking about podcasting and then there’s Mike who’s doing DIY video editing. Annalyn Jusay is talking about blogging today.

Wish me luck. This is one of the more challenging presentations I’ve been assigned to give this year because I want to be more interesting than saying “hey this is a Treo 750, you use it to make phone calls.” Or “This is a laptop, it’s sorta like a PC, but you can put it on your lap.”

I cooked up something fairly interesting. I’ve been pulling out gadgets here and there. Makes me realize that apart from the stuff I already borrowed from tech distributors, I’ve been diagnosed with GAS.

GAS = Gear Acquisition Syndrome.

Wish me luck!

The Transportmers

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Now this is just too hilarious (and too amazing) to pass on to anyone who understands the Filipino public commute culture. More photos of the Auto-Toda and Decepti-Toda Transportmers from Kulot.

Thanks, Lauren for the tip.

Categories
Mostly Everything

A Toblerone Thank You via Free Music

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Yet another traditional industry – the chocolate industry, to be more specific – has jumped into the online viral marketing bandwagon. Toblerone has collaborated with a selection of local artists to release a torrent friendly album.

This effort is actually part of a campaign to establish Manila as a ‘Thank You’ Capital:

Continue reading “A Toblerone Thank You via Free Music”