article in AdEdge Magazine November 2005

The Young Upstart in the Horizon: Are More Filipinos Watching TV or Hooked Online?

With being wired synonymous to being hip, has the television lost its claim as the center of a Filipino home? As reading has long been relegated to the minority and the radio as part of the ambient city buzz, advertisers may find it profitable to migrate to the Internet to peddle to the masses. The World Wide Web is a deceptively attractive place to get your tagline across, a veritable uncharted land with its natives all on their stomachs with their ears to the ground. The lifestyle and its products that you’d like to sell will figure as a proverbial train thundering throughout this technological frontier. Think: limitless advertising space with equally limitless audio-visual capacity still waiting to be regulated right in your market’s home.

Sounds straight out of the pages of the most common cyberpunk fantasies, but cyberpunk has always been classified within the shelves of science fiction. Though the Internet may present numerous soapboxes, platforms and stages to disseminate information, it begs to be asked if there are empty Mac or IBM boxes outside every Filipino home.

According to the most recent ACNeilsen Media Index, approximately 90% of Filipino households still get their media fix through the television. The television has a greater reach than education; long-distance education through satellite feeds or tapes has become a profitable enterprise. Cable television has given more channels and more choices to the Filpino audience. On the other side of the scale, below 10% of Filipinos are logged on to the Internet. The scene of the family gathered around a television still triumphs over the quaint adverts of families connecting through webcams and headsets.

The Internet provides one thing that the television may find difficult with which to compete. Personalization of information and just how quickly one receives it is unbeatable in the face of having to surf through numerous television channels looking for the information one may need. The search engine, Google has made itself a player in the advertising market since the technology it uses to map the Internet has the capability to pick out key words from web pages and provide ads that may be relevant to the user. Many futuristic films have predicted that people will be connected to the web indefinitely and that this connection will make it possible to personalize billboards or posters as one passes by. Though it may give advertisers better information about its market and a more focused manner of selling, the implications on privacy may be too disconcerting.

Even with all that space and potential, the Internet will lag behind, padding silently through the media battlefield. The technology required for a home user are numerous—a computer screen, the machine itself, a keyboard and then the paraphernalia required to connect through a phone line or through a still growing and unreliable system for DSL or Cable internet. The television may come in various shapes, but the least you’ll need is a power source. It might seem technophobic to say that television is better simply because the equipment needed to broadcast are already in place while the viability of the new systems of digital technology are still being set into motion. Yes, it may ring true that digital technology is inevitable, but that doesn’t change the fact that with a simple press of a button, you’re watching television while the computer requires you to wait for things to load.

The migration of the Filipino worker has made it easier for dollars and other currencies to enter the economy. It has also created a greater need to communicate with the greater part of the world and a possible market into which to jump. The Internet provides a steady portal for families to connect and the advent of Filipino channels brings the rest of the country to these lonely souls working in foreign lands. It is also interesting to note that these overseas workers are a steady market for electronics. Though selling at jaw-dropping low prices with the advent of IBM-clones and other cheaper alternatives, computers still lose to the television as the proverbial pasalubong from the dedicated relative striving in the First World. The karaoke or even the latest pair of basketball shoes still beats the PC as the awaited padala, so sewing adverts into the lining of shoes like fortune cookies may seem more profitable than the pop-up windows advertising the same pair.

The creation of easy-to-use web publishing platforms has nurtured the boom of web logs or blogs, and this has created a growing community of voices. Though it provides a quicker way to update news and a more democratic manner of providing information from hard-to-reach places such as war zones, this phenomenon has only affected the news sector. The television wins since it capitalizes on entertainment without worrying too much about content, and perhaps the Filipino has enough news when he finds out that life will get harder tomorrow because of rising gasoline prices or another political scandal that a means of escape is more important. It doesn’t help that education is a luxury and even becomes a painful irony when presented with the fact that the Philippines’ greatest export is labor and mostly for manual and rudimentary jobs.

Even among Internet users, the television is an invaluable part of their lives. It is common knowledge that the television is a daily companion while among the Internet users, the biggest chunk of the user pie, 27% log on only twice or thrice a week. It seems that the World Wide Web is an electronic New Zealand where there are more mindless drones than actual people, without the benefit of wool or milk. But with the growing accessibility to the technology with the flourishing industry of Internet cafes and the prevalence of computers connected to the Internet at the workplace, it is wiser to consider that the Internet is a fledgeling media player. It pays to remember that the television, moving pictures in your own home was met with the same reticence at its introduction.

Yet with the progress of technology moving at such a frantic pace, the Internet may soon lose its last place status on the media hierarchy and perhaps it may climb to equal or even replace the television. But it seems more likely with current trends of media technology that the world is leaning towards a combination of both mediums, melding the accessibility of the television with the interactivity of the personal computer and the World Wide Web. Yet it is difficult to unravel the obstacles that keep the Filipinos glued to the television screen. Though there are more avenues and profitable reasons to learn how to use a computer, education at its most basic and even reliable and permanent sources electricity is still inaccessible in many rural areas. Manila and other urban cities of the Philippines may become hubs of information with the help of the Internet, but the numerous island forming the archipelago still depend on the television, the radio and the newspaper. Perhaps until these rural areas are given the tools to flourish into self-sufficient communities, a wired 7,107 islands may be closer to science fiction than front-page news.

In the war for the attention of the masses, the Internet may seem like a young upstart gleaming in the metallic colors of the future and speaking in the quick and dynamic slang of the youth but it is still dwarfed by the many headed Television industry that may not be as shiny but still has much of the population under its hypnotic spell.