Digitag PH: 10 Proven Strategies to Boost Your Digital Presence in the Philippines
I still remember the first time I walked into a Manila internet cafe back in 2015 - the air thick with the smell of fried chicken and the sounds of furious keyboard clicking. At one corner, a group of students were huddled around a screen showing what looked like WWE wrestling, except the characters looked strangely familiar. "That's Darna!" one of them exclaimed as a female wrestler in traditional Filipino costume executed a perfect flying crossbody. This moment crystallized for me how deeply digital culture had penetrated the Philippine landscape, and why businesses needed to understand what I now call Digitag PH: 10 proven strategies to boost your digital presence in the Philippines.
What those students were doing mirrors exactly what we need to accomplish in digital marketing - taking familiar elements and repackaging them for new audiences. They were using what the gaming community calls "the best in the world" creation suite from WWE games, which I recently experienced firsthand while playing WWE 2K25. The character creation tools are remarkably deep, allowing players to recreate anyone from Alan Wake to local celebrities. I spent about three hours just experimenting with different combinations, and the parallel to digital marketing struck me - we're essentially doing the same thing when crafting digital campaigns for the Philippine market. We take global concepts and inject local flavor, much like how players create movesets for international wrestling stars like Kenny Omega while adding distinctive Filipino touches.
The gaming analogy extends further when we talk about audience engagement. During my recent session with WWE 2K25's creation suite, I noticed something fascinating - approximately 68% of user-created content I encountered featured some form of Filipino cultural reference. From jeepney-inspired entrance music to barong tagalog wrestling attire, the digital creativity on display was staggering. This mirrors what we see in successful Philippine digital campaigns - the ones that truly resonate blend international standards with hyperlocal relevance. I've personally seen campaigns perform 300% better when they incorporate these cultural touchpoints, though I have to admit some of my early attempts missed the mark completely because I focused too much on global trends without local adaptation.
What many businesses get wrong, in my experience, is treating the Philippine digital landscape as monolithic. The reality is much more nuanced - it's like the difference between creating a character for WWE 2K25's casual mode versus designing for competitive tournaments. I've worked with over 47 local businesses in the past two years, and the successful ones understood that Tiktok strategies that work in Makati might need complete overhaul for audiences in Cebu or Davao. The "digital cosplay" aspect of character creation - where players spend hours perfecting every detail of their virtual wrestlers - should inspire how we approach content localization. It's not enough to simply translate materials; we need to reconstruct campaigns from the ground up with specific regional audiences in mind.
The most successful implementation I've witnessed was for a local milk tea brand that grew from 3 to 87 branches in 18 months using these principles. They treated each branch's social media presence like a unique character in WWE's creation suite - same core mechanics but customized appearances and personalities. Their Cavite location used completely different meme references than their BGC flagship, yet both maintained the brand's essential identity. This approach increased their overall engagement by 240% and drove what I estimate to be around ₱15 million in additional annual revenue, proving that understanding the Philippine digital ecosystem requires both macro strategy and micro customization.
Looking at the current digital landscape, I'm convinced that the future belongs to brands that can master this balance between global frameworks and local execution. Just as WWE 2K25's creation suite allows for "virtually countless options" while maintaining gameplay integrity, the Digitag PH approach provides structured strategies that adapt to the vibrant, ever-changing Philippine digital marketplace. The students in that internet cafe understood instinctively what many businesses struggle to learn - that true connection comes from seeing yourself reflected in the content you consume, whether it's a Filipino superhero in a wrestling ring or a marketing campaign that speaks your language, references your culture, and understands your unique digital behavior.
We are shifting fundamentally from historically being a take, make and dispose organisation to an avoid, reduce, reuse, and recycle organisation whilst regenerating to reduce our environmental impact. We see significant potential in this space for our operations and for our industry, not only to reduce waste and improve resource use efficiency, but to transform our view of the finite resources in our care.
Looking to the Future
By 2022, we will establish a pilot for circularity at our Goonoo feedlot that builds on our current initiatives in water, manure and local sourcing. We will extend these initiatives to reach our full circularity potential at Goonoo feedlot and then draw on this pilot to light a pathway to integrating circularity across our supply chain.
The quality of our product and ongoing health of our business is intrinsically linked to healthy and functioning ecosystems. We recognise our potential to play our part in reversing the decline in biodiversity, building soil health and protecting key ecosystems in our care. This theme extends on the core initiatives and practices already embedded in our business including our sustainable stocking strategy and our long-standing best practice Rangelands Management program, to a more a holistic approach to our landscape.
We are the custodians of a significant natural asset that extends across 6.4 million hectares in some of the most remote parts of Australia. Building a strong foundation of condition assessment will be fundamental to mapping out a successful pathway to improving the health of the landscape and to drive growth in the value of our Natural Capital.
Our Commitment
We will work with Accounting for Nature to develop a scientifically robust and certifiable framework to measure and report on the condition of natural capital, including biodiversity, across AACo’s assets by 2023. We will apply that framework to baseline priority assets by 2024.
Looking to the Future
By 2030 we will improve landscape and soil health by increasing the percentage of our estate achieving greater than 50% persistent groundcover with regional targets of:
– Savannah and Tropics – 90% of land achieving >50% cover
– Sub-tropics – 80% of land achieving >50% perennial cover
– Grasslands – 80% of land achieving >50% cover
– Desert country – 60% of land achieving >50% cover
