Where We Are Going
Thinking out of the box
In one of our brainstorming sessions a while back, we were thinking of ways to further push the envelope in growing our advocacy for financial literacy. We had been educating our younger readers how to manage finances, to help them embrace responsible adulthood.
We had produced several columns in our paper, created an online series; and yet it didn’t seem enough for us.
We wanted something more engaging and relatable to our target audience. All of a sudden I blurted out, “Why don’t we make a teleserye?” And we all laughed. That was how “Single/Single,” a boy-meets-girl teleserye, was born.
It was essentially a love story that promoted financial literacy and ran for two seasons, became a movie, won many awards and yielded the biggest brand collaborations for The STAR.
That is one of the many stories of success that we have embarked upon, and almost always triggered by an out-of-the-box idea. Practically speaking, it is uncharacteristic for a newspaper to even do such a thing. But we are always triggered by the question, “Why not?”
Left-field decisions and strategies made The STAR a success and saw it prevail over other newspapers in the country. In fact, we have been No. 1 in advertising revenues every single month for the past 15 years, which is a milestone in itself.
Newspapers, in general, have largely been guided by set ways and ideals: strict deadlines, principled editorial policies and carefully crafted words — meaning that, once it goes out in print, you can never retract what has been published.
But The STAR was destined to be different the moment it started 35 years ago. It’s not common to pick yellow as a color for a newspaper, at least one that wishes to be taken seriously, nor to position the paper with news and lifestyle content as though it were a glossy magazine.
It was our left-field decisions and strategies that made The STAR a success and saw it prevail over other newspapers in the country. In fact, we have been No. 1 in advertising revenues every single month for the past 15 years, which is a milestone in itself. Today, The STAR remains the strongest and most stable paper, after having gone through changes and challenges faced by the entire media landscape.
Our formula to thrive well stems from three factors: a passion for innovation, an agile feedback system within our organization, and placing a premium on relationships. Place it in a family-style office setting and you have a happy, motivated group of people to work with.
The Philippine STAR now occupies half the market share of multimedia revenues of the newspaper market in the country. Our digital platforms, social media pages, multimedia capabilities, even our printed newspaper, remain as strong and as relevant as ever.
This timeless recipe that has guided us for 35 years has helped us to adapt well with the onset of digitalization and social media, which has become the primary medium of the last decade. In spite of all these challenges, The STAR successfully transformed itself into the multimedia powerhouse that it is today.
Our transformation began as early as 2008, born out of a global financial crisis that put innovation at a premium. We have always been ahead of the curve. That year, we created “Engage” which was years ahead, even before native content became popular.
Even before companies started considering their journey into digital transformation, The STAR set its sights on shifting from a static medium to liquid content that follows its reader in whatever format and platform they see fit.
This emboldened us to create content that is more visual, dynamic and real-time. The STAR was among the first to make itself available on digital newsstands and create its own mobile app. We were also among the early adaptors of the QR codes and Augmented Reality features that presented a robust offering to our advertisers.
By spinning off the content of its Lifestyle section into TV shows and engaging its columnists as TV hosts and content producers, we have sealed a winning formula by promoting STAR as a multimedia empire, creating Philstar TV, featuring Modern Living TV, Wheels, Let’s Eat and Trippies, which ran on ANC, CNN and One News channels.
The STAR also broke ground by becoming the first newspaper to produce a successful miniseries with Cinema One and movies with Star Cinema’s Single/Single franchise.
Our exposure to television emboldened us to form a content-creation house in 2014, way ahead of other publishers drawing up their own. By then, when the media landscape had shifted to digital, especially social media, The STAR had a headstart by creating successful digital campaigns for advertisers via its Facebook and YouTube pages, whether it’s video campaigns — what we call “Viewtorials” — or a collaborative digital-first advocacy campaign.
We have sharpened our ability to create content and explode its engagement through our multimedia platforms so that, in the last five years, we have expanded our expertise to creating several niche websites such as Latest Chika, Geeky, Wheels.ph and PropertyReport.ph, and venturing into events with the groundbreaking Women Influence Forum in 2019.
We even created Philstar Outdoor, which served as an added exposure of our content while sitting in traffic through digital billboards. We have grown our social media pages, which currently engage a following that is already 13-million strong.
When The STAR bought Business World in 2015, we immediately implemented our multimedia strategies into the paper, which had been bleeding for more than a decade. In just one year, Business World was taken out of the red by strengthening its hold on the business community and emphasizing the strength of its content, creating a series of business fora fronted by the Bworld Economic Forum.
Even after the pandemic struck, Business World was the only publication to quickly pivot to digital-first content including its fora on a virtual format.
It was during the challenge of the pandemic that our multimedia readiness, which we have honed for almost a decade, helped us to thrive well, even when most newspapers were badly hit. At the height of the quarantine restrictions, we launched our flagship digital platform, Philstarlife.com, a website set to occupy the lifestyle space in the digital universe.
Since its launch in October 2020, Philstarlife is now among the fastest-growing news and lifestyle websites online and is fast becoming a preferred platform by brands for collaboration and exposure. Upon its launch, Philstarlife became the first media brand globally to collaborate with clothing giant Uniqlo with its In Between UT shirt.
Despite all the challenges that have hounded print and the gloomy forecasts, The STAR still prevails to this day. We now occupy half the market share of multimedia revenues of the newspaper market in the country. Our digital platforms, social media pages, multimedia capabilities, even our printed newspaper, remain as strong and as relevant as ever.
What drove us to where we are now is our firm belief that a newspaper has a role to serve no matter how the landscape has changed and will continue to change. As passionate as we were 35 years ago, that spirit lives on with our founders who have inspired us, our present leaders who make us brave and emboldened, and our next generation of “Star Troopers” who give us hope and optimism.
The stars have designed us to be big dreamers, and we still dream big. Because, as it always was, and as it is now, we will continue to ask the question: “Why not?”