Philippines’ telco giant, Globe Telecom, has 65m customers and a sharp focus on building a broad-ranging creative ecosystem. Senior advisor Joe Caliro talks about the music, movies, style, fashion and production partnerships feedinginto the bigger picture.

A month ago, on 3 November, Globe Studios, a division of Philippines’ telco giant Globe Telecom, and Viu, the OTT/streaming service of Hong Kong telco giant PCCW, premiered a Korean music talent/reality show with an additional window on cable music channel Myx, owned and operated by traditional free-TV/pay-TV broadcaster ABS-CBN. The idea behind Hello K-Idol – a first-of-its kind coproduction – was “to bring K-pop closer to Filipinos”. Eleven days later, Globe dropped 10 songs by 10 Filipino artists simultaneously on Spotify in the Elements Music Camp 2018 playlist, with a streaming window for a behind-the-scenes making-of Elements show and a slate of related content on emerging markets’ platform iflix. And there’s more – movies, style, fashion, theatre, plus relationships with Disney, Turner, Netflix, Hooq and others... all part of a wide-ranging creative ecosystem Globe is building to nurture and support creative talent and engage its universe of 65-million (and growing) consumers.

Globe’s Manila-based senior advisor, Joe Caliro, says the telco’s content priori- ties are to “find stories or platforms that reach beyond the Philippines”.

“We start with a purpose to select projects that support the arts and Filipino creators, whether that’s in music, fashion, theatre or film. We then give mentoring, marketing and finance support to make the end product world- class. If done right it leads to great content,” he says.

Globe’s content strategy, Caliro adds, is all about partnerships. “The purpose-driven nature of our role is that it should be a win-win for both partners. We hope over time to work with every one of our content partners. The win-win is they all need localised content and we can provide this quality content and at the same time market it for them to our 65 million customers,” he says.

Caliro also spoke about some of Globe’s recent projects and described a vision in which the sum of the content parts is designed to equal way more than the whole...

Globe and Viu partnered for the first time on seven-episode Korean reality/talent show, Hello K-Idol. Are you happy with the response? ”It’s a great show... and we learned what not to do next time. [Globe Telecom president and chief executive, Ernest Cu] likes to say that as we go about doing this stuff, we’re learning. We don’t profess to know everything. And that’s why we partner. And little by little, we end up doing things where it’s more 80% us and 20% our partner. It’s starting to flip in films. In the beginning, it was 80/20. We were 20, because we were trying to get our feet wet, to learn the business.”

Does this first Viu co-production take you in a new direction or is this a continuation of your current partnership? “It’s a continuation. What we’re trying to do is hopefully partner with every one of our major partners. So Viu was a collaboration on trying to find a format that was Korean in nature but based in Philippines. That was something that we co-produced. We developed the script and the format with Viu.”

Will your productions ever be 100% Globe? “I don’t know that will ever be 100% because there is value in partnerships.”

You still see value in partnerships, even though these may not give you full ownership of the IP, which is important to you? “When you partner and you’re the minority partner you don’t own the IP. You own equity. And you will earn from that property. But you do not own the IP and hence anything you want to do or anything you want to spin off is very restrictive.”

How is Globe Studios structured? “The Studios is divided into two. There’s the branded part of Studios and then there’s the long-form division. Even within the branded space, we’re starting to work with partners that are outside of Globe. So we’re working with Volkswagen. We’re working with Revlon and with Lee jeans. Understanding how to talk to millennials in the digital space is what Globe has done really well.”

How much do you make in-house and how much do you involve the local indie production industry? “It depends on the type of project. When you look at, for instance, [music property] Elements, we will hire crews to come in and produce it, but ultimately, we’re producing it. We are directing it. We have a cast of in-house people who are script writers, who do the storyboards.”

How do you see Globe Studios’ role in the Asian content ecosystem?“We would love to see Globe Studios as the go-to partner for movies or short-form content that resonates not only with Asia but the rest of the world. I was once asked at a conference in the Philippines, ‘how do you get your movies on Netflix?’ My answer was this: ‘Very simple. Stop making Filipino movies for Filipinos and start making Filipino stories for the world. This is what Globe Studios is looking for when we take on a project and the quality of the final project must be at that standard.”

How would you characterise Globe Studios’ relationship with producers or programmers? “The reason we’re different is because as Globe Studios, we want to produce high-quality stories that are not necessarily for mass appeal. We will finance and produce. Unlike the other studios, we promote the final product. It’s to our benefit to promote it to our 65 million customers. So we’re like a marketing arm for our own products”.

Are you building your own platform? “We decided not to go this route... We will partner with companies that already have platforms.”

Globe’s partnerships span a wide range of activities, all of which feed into each other... “I guess you have to put your money where your mouth is. We’ve introduced several different opportunities, including fashion. We have an initiative called StyleFest, where we mentor up- and-coming designers and we partner them with well-known Filipino designers. And we partner them with online businesses like Zalora and also with our own 0917 brand. We not only mentor them on the design but the business of fashion.”

Where does Globe Live fit? “Globe Live is the live events part of Globe... What we’re trying to do is create an ecosystem where you can create events that spawn content. And in some cases, the first type of content is branded content. It’s about getting other brands involved in that event and giving them a platform. And then the actual event spawns content, which can be a series, a movie, a documentary. That’s where Globe Studios steps in. We have several examples, including StyleFest. Our music project – Elements Music Camp – is another example of trying to give Filipinos a platform outside of the Philippines.”

You own the Elements IP... “We do, which means we can leverage new royalty streams from the music content, performance rights from the songs and the artist publishing rights of the song and the artist. Oh yeah, and we have content. We can now sweat the assets. We have merchandise rights to Elements. We can create Elements lines. So really, it’s trying to master what Disney has known forever.”

You describe Globe as an “un-label” in the music space.... “As a telco we get behind marketing. One would argue that we’re like a record label and we’re acting like an un-label. We produce music videos for each of the artists. We fund the whole thing. And we produced Anatomy of the Song, which people will be able to see on YouTube... We made a behind the scenes video and Live at the Iconic, which is a live performance in a studio of the song. In all, we have six shows of about 20 minutes each. Everything will air on iflix, so people around the world can watch, not just in the Philippines.”

It seems as though you spend a lot of time thinking about why artists from the Philippines have not made more of an impact on the global stage – and then trying to do something about it... “Why has a natural-born Filipino artist never broken internationally in the music industry? If you look at all the talent we have in the Philippines, you have to ask that question; why, when you go on cruise ships or you go in Hong Kong to a Hard Rock, it’s all Filipinos playing in the band. And so the hypothesis we had is that they’re just not given the right support to break internationally.”

And Globe can give them that support? “Yes. For instance, we partner with Spotify, which has reach worldwide for music. We have partnerships with YouTube, which has reach worldwide. So if you could create music (and content) that’s relevant to people, not just in the Philippines but worldwide, maybe you could break an artist.”

You believe you can contribute to the creation of an international star from the Philippines... “Perhaps part of the reason Filipino music hasn’t broke out of the Philippines is because the music producers have a Filipino ear... So we brought in five international producers to work with 10 artists. We got the best five Filipino local producers and we brought in five of the top international producers to create 10 songs, people who have produced artists like Bruno Mars, Justin Bieber, Nicky Minaj, Usher, Eminem. The songs were all recorded in English because English travels. The Elements Music Camp 2018 playlist dropped on Spotify on 14 November. It was the first time ever that 10 songs by 10 local artists had been released simultaneously. We wanted to give every song, every artist an equal chance at being discovered.”

You leveraged Globe’s involvement in the Elements Music Camp into a movie called Last Song Syndrome – or LSS. How did that happen? “In Elements, we have 10 artists. Among those is a band called Ben&Ben. Ben&Ben were [Elements Music] Campers and are the hottest band in the Philippine right now. We are producing a film that will release in the first quarter of 2019. Guess who’s the star of that film? Ben&Ben. It’s a love story about these two love-torn couples. What they have in common is that they love Ben&Ben. They follow Ben&Ben and they keep running into each other.”

What’s your biggest learning? “The only person that makes money is the person who owns the IP. Otherwise you’re just a production house. You can’t leverage the asset if you don’t own the IP. So a lot of the things that we’re doing now, we own the IP.”

What’s your best outcome? “I have so many... Ultimately I would love to have something by Globe Studios on every one of our partners’ platforms. I think that that’s a modest first step. If you ask Ernest [Cu, Globe Telecom president and chief executive], he wants to win an Academy Award. If you ask me I just want to make money. Not necessarily in that order.”

Published in Issue Seven of ContentAsia's in-print + online 2018 (December 2018)