Online experimentation was already widespread at ABS-CBN when Donald Lim joined just over a year ago, in June 2013, to become the Philippine media major’s first chief digital officer.

That made the task of the incoming CDO both easier and harder.

While hands-on experience fostered familiarity with the internet’s challenges as well as its potential, internal executives and business heads – having made headway by themselves – were reluctant to relinquish control.

Some of that experience had deep roots. A specialist subsidiary, ABS-CBN Interactive (ABSi), first emerged at the end of the last century, in February 1999, after ABS-CBN spun off an interactive media unit that had taken shape within its IT department.

ABSi operated as an effective digital agency for well over a decade, catering to the needs of the group’s various business lines, from TV to music to cinema to publishing.

When Lim arrived, the group as a whole had nurtured hundreds of sites and Facebook pages dedicated to numerous programs and stars, while ABSi itself was competing more and more with external suppliers. 

online overhaul

The time had come for a digital spring clean. Lim dissolved ABSi and started consolidating the group’s various digital assets, while putting a unified strategy in place.

“We are still in that process today – we are still moving people,” Lim tells Media Business Asia, talking on the sidelines of the Chief Digital Officer Global Forum in Singapore. 

“That’s tough," he adds. "For any big organization, it’s a paradigm shift in itself.”

This focus has already reaped some sizable rewards, including 7 million plus followers on Facebook as well as more than a million on YouTube.

Good progress, but the audience for ABS-CBN’s news site still trails that of the country’s leading broadsheet, the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

“If you want to be the number one in media, you have to be the number one in digital,” Lim says. “It’s not even an argument.”

At the same time, these are uncontroversial targets designed to build momentum for bigger ambitions ahead, geared towards visible metrics that leave little room for disagreement.

While important, these tend to treat the internet as an add-on to the core business, primarily used for marketing and promotion rather than as an engine of change.

The next step will be more challenging but where the real wins lie: inculcating new business models and ways of working throughout the organization, among producers and directors, editorial and sales. 

“While we are the drivers, we don’t know everything,” Lim says. “They come up with the big ideas. We recognize that.”

Future Foundations

The internet represents a small sliver of ABS-CBN’s revenues today. Digital ad sales tend be bundled with other media for example, rather than go head-to-head for budgets with online rivals.

At the same time, the group is expanding on other fronts too, rolling out a new mobile service while preparing to open its first theme park early next year, part of a larger push to become less reliant on ad revenue.

“When it comes to digital, we are very deliberate,” Lim says. “We have to place our bets on what we think will work. There is room for innovation but what we promised the board is that we will be aggressive enough, but not spend and spend, or buy and buy.”

Nonetheless, the company wants to lay claim to an emerging digital economy, while preparing to compete with both incumbents as well as powerful emerging rivals in the future.

New approaches are designed with tomorrow in mind. App development focuses on smartphones for instance, even though most Filipinos use feature phones today, on the basis that the impending arrival of cheap devices from China will transform the market.

If all goes to plan, the chief digital officer designation should become redundant in about five years, succeeded perhaps by a new role anchored to information or strategy.

Lim feels ABS-CBN is ready, encouraged by the launch of an in-house rival to core broadcast viewing, live streaming and catch-up service iWanTV, in 2010.

“It was that mindset that I felt they were ready for digital,” he says. “I don’t even know if video-on-demand will be the main product offering. But all of us are learning right now.”