The challenger agency

Miguel Ramos, president of ASPAC Advertising, is known as the team captain and resident radical at the entrepreneurial company that he leads and envisions to be the "challenger agency".

"In any industry, there is only one champion. All the rest are challengers. But our mindset is to try even harder than the rest, to challenge ourselves, so our clients can see the true value of the agency," he said.

Since March 2000, ASPAC has been a member agency of the Bates Worldwide network, one of the 10 largest advertising and marketing communications networks in the world.

Its membership in Bates Worldwide has meant wider access to information, trends and technologies. The learning and helping goes both ways with ASPAC being familiar with the needs of the local market and Bates offering a fresh network to tap.

By choice, ASPAC has a client list that is manageably short. "We believe that a great agency can outwit competition without needing to outspend them, that constantly challenging conventional thinking ensures the best work is created by our agency for our clients," said Ramos.

Major clients

Among ASPAC’s clients are the Metrobank Group, Wrigley Phils. and Nokia.

It won the Metrobank account more than seven years ago, after submitting the lowest bid. It also helped that ASPAC, which already held the Metrobank Foundation account, knew what message the bank shareholders led by chairman George S.K. Ty wanted to convey–strength and stability.

"Despite many revisions on our side as the advertising material is routed to senior management, ASPAC has made all its deadlines," said a bank officer. "We’re happy with the quality of their work and, of course, with their reasonable price."

With Wrigley, ASPAC successfully positioned the fairly new, mentholated gum called "Cool Air" as an affordable (even hip) brand not only for the masses but for the middle and upper class segments as well.

As for Nokia, a recent brain-storming session between client and agency recognized a pressing need for a campaign on proper mobile phone use. One of the country’s two biggest cell phone companies agreed to lead such a campaign called Nokia Phonethics.

Trying harder

The ASPAC team is younger than those in most ad agencies. Ramos, now 33 and president for the last five years, considers this an advantage.

"We aim to be a different kind of agency," Ramos said. "If you expect cut and dried advertising, look some place else. But if you’re looking for advertising that hits you and your consumers in the gut, disrupts your current notions, and moves consumers to action, let’s talk about it."

The firm prides itself with having "a very flat structure and very quick processes". There are no thick layers of management that normally plague bigger organizations. "We have to be swift in responding to our clients’ needs."

Calling his staff "pragmatic idealists," Ramos said his team is not afraid of making calculated risks.

"We believe that in a world where consumers perceive less and less differences among products, advertising–good, breakthrough advertising–is often the most powerful business tool available to a marketer – but only if it is deliberately used as a high leverage asset. Mediocrity and playing by the existing rules will not create leverage. Exception and differentiating ideas are the only currencies of brands that will survive and will thrive in the new century," he said.

Passion

Ramos learned about advertising as a craft and as a passion from his father, the late Max Ramos, Jr. The older Ramos was a highly respected advertising man who started his career as a copywriter and eventually became general manager of the largest agency during the 1970s before setting out and successfully co-founding his own ad agency that is now ASPAC.

"We challenge conventional thinking in all its forms. We are agents of change. Our purpose for being is to make our clients’ brands successful in their markets and, eventually, icons of Filipino life. We are driven by our clients’ evolving needs and the rapid pace of change in the markets they compete in," he said.