The one they overlooked
DURING my three decades as an advertising agency professional, I came to know some of the brightest young men in the industry who were entrusted with drawing up project study plans for a variety of business ventures. Many ended up in flying colors for their clients and a few hit some snags and hitches.
Those plans were conceptualized outside of their then incumbent job as advertising agency executive.
From an outside perspective, such an assignment appeared unethical, but the admen and the commissioning client mutually agreed to keep the arrangement confidential.
Mostly, the clients came in the person of new college graduates but with solid financial resources, while others were established and ongoing business concerns seeking to expand their product lines.
But what made the special arrangement unusual was the complete trust that clients reposed in the admen who, on account of their rigid orientation in multi-interest businesses, were so adept in marketing, corporate communication, just as they were at home in trading and distribution, as well as in tracking down consumer preferences and identifying public behavior.
They have hindsight and working expertise in business and industry interests, ranging from automobile distribution and barbecue stalls merchandising, to private zoo attraction and selling zero-sugar content in tropical fruits and candies.
Of great interest to many lately is the admen’s adroitness in political management.
Those social science realities were confidently in the grip of the hands of the “men in the gray flannel suit” that they were paid handsomely.
But unexpected realities do happen and it is inevitable that hitches occur in any well-researched project study no matter how focused are the designers.
One of such almost-foolproof plan was made by an account executive of a medium-size ad agency for a threevessel deep-sea fishing venture sometime in the early 1980s.
Everything was sewed up – the size of the vessels, their engines, sonar equipment for detection schools of fish in various domestic seas, where to unload the catch, recruitment and training of the crew, names of each of the vessels, and, of course, the logo and seal of the of the owner.
Not the least was the buoyed up expectation of the owner.
The catch was promising and rewarding in the first three months. But something sparked that showed signs of unrest among the crew. The owner was not giving the fishers their fair compensation and just commission.
In the fourth month, the crew “mutinied” and abandoned their vessels. The owner learned from Coast Guard patrols that his three vessels had been abandoned and found drifting in the high seas off Palawan.
It looked clear that the project study did not consider much the prospects of the crew staging a mutiny in demand for fair compensation.
Today I find some parallelism to that fizzled out deep-sea fishing project in economic plans of the Duterte administration. The planners deodorized the TRAIN Law by harping mostly on the benefits to the country and to its citizenry. All on paper!
It now becomes clear that in their plans for the TRAIN, the managers did not give utmost consideration to the spiraling prices of oil and the corresponding weakening of the peso against the US dollar, the currency we use to buy the black gold.
They failed to consider the possibility, and it is always there, of an uncontrolled increases of fuel products, or refused to come up with the expected adverse effects of the derailing TRAIN now bedeviling us.
*** U.S.T. STUDENTS’ SEND-OFF RITES. The Arch of the Centuries is the welcoming portal for newly admitted freshmen students of the University of Santo Tomas. But last May 24, it was the scene of a more poignant occasion when 8,000 graduating students passed through it to signify the ceremonial completion of their student life in the Pontifical University.
UST Rector Very Rev. Fr. Herminio V. Dagohoy, OP, led the Eucharistic concelebration with the Dominican fathers at 6 p.m. The students were each given a Thomasian Mission Cross, a reminder to stay true to Thomasian ideals.
Part of the program was the annual Ceremony of the Light that represents UST’s mission of spreading the illuminating light of education and evangelization to others. The graduating students symbolically leave the University in the traditional recessional parade where they exit through the Arch. Rev. Fr. Jesus M. Miranda Jr., OP, secretary general, had also welcomed the same students into the Arch during the traditional Thomasian Walk some four or five years ago.