AbstractDespite attempts since 2011 by the national government to regulate the size,placement, and content of billboards in Metropolitan Manila, it is apparent to anycommuter that out-of-home advertising continues to dominate – or blight – theurban skyline and major thoroughfares of the Philippines’ capital region.
J. E. A. Gomez Jr. (*)School of Urban and Regional Planning, University of the Philippines, Quezon City, Philippinese-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
Building on the author’s past investigation of locational and technical featuresof billboards, this research focuses on the communicated content, especially thelinguistic features of the visual hodgepodge that lines major streets. WhereasHotelling’s (Economic Journal 39(153):41–57, 1929) spatial competition theorysaw consumers as immobile and firms as selective of sites, present advertisingbehavior for billboards deals with the reality of mobile consumers, while firms arecompelled to control multiple well-traveled locations where persuasive speechand images can be broadcasted. Moreover, effort is made to match the perceivedstyle and cadence of the target audience, hearkening back to Giles’ 1971Communication Accommodation Theory, especially in use of the code-mixedTagalog-English, or “Taglish.” Taking these latter and other notions from linguis-tics, media, and urban studies, the author did a walk-by/drive-by qualitativeassessment of billboard concentrations and collected data on the profile ofcommuters, in order to derive plausible reasons for the persistence of patternsin the urban panorama of commercial speech. It is concluded that despite sporadicgovernment clampdowns and complaints of linguistic purists, the language ofbillboards continues to aggressively court the substantial 20-something cohorts ofcommuters and pushes for ideals of physical beauty and hedonic lifestyles thatexert an erosive influence on the traditional Filipino ethos.
KeywordsBillboard · Metro Manila · Taglish · Lifestyle · Advertising language
Halo-Halo: (noun) – literally, “mix-mix,” a popular Filipino dessert that consists of alayered concoction of shaved ice drizzled with evaporated milk, ice-cream, and avariety of sweetened beans, sliced fruits, gelatin, and flan. By extension, the wordhas come to describe any object or situation that is composed of a similar, colorfulmélange of ingredients. (Adapted and modified from The Little Epicurean 2017)
Introduction and Significance of the Study
After the intermittent impositions of government restrictions on physical dimensionsand location between 2011 and 2014, billboards are back with a vengeance inMetropolitan Manila, the National Capital Region of the Philippines. In fact, theynever left. Rather, after complying with downsizing regulations and heeding thepublic outcry against “too much skin,” advertising firms have upped the ante, as itwere, by introducing electronic billboards with garish mega-screens where once onlylarge-format printed canvas covered the cityscape with equally loud colors andcommercial messages. Since size and sexiness are no longer as contentious as theywere half a decade ago, societal and academic focus has slowly shifted to use ofother images and language that arrest, bombard, or distract the commuting publicevery day. Simultaneously, the advertising lobby continues to protest further regu-lation, as even indeed readable and conspicuous signs play an integral role in
2 J. E. A. Gomez Jr.
marketing, and there is a paucity of research support for community gains resultingfrom restrictive sign codes (Taylor 2005, pp. 304–305).
This research builds on this author’s past research on billboards as a unique urbanphenomenon in the Philippines and in so doing broadens understanding of thephenomenon to include a spatial-linguistic perspective. It specifically asks what isit about the target consumers’ profile that the present mix of language and images ofbillboards relate to successfully, thereby leading to the continuing persistenceof such colorful commercial speech in the metropolitan landscape. By studyingbillboards more critically, the study adds to the dearth of scholarly work on com-mercialized urbanization and the politico-economic geography of MetropolitanManila. The study emphasizes the communicative features of such out-of-home(OOH) advertising which, for better or worse, continues to impart a gaudy, hodge-podge quality to what has become a “Halo-Halo” landscape – and not just becauseof billboards but also because of lax zoning enforcement – and the organic growth ofsquatter shanties in the nooks and crannies between and behind better-off neighbor-hoods and commercial establishments patronized by the moneyed classes (Fig. 1).
Review of Related Literature
Historical Notes on Commercial Speech and the Urban Landscape
Billboards and other similar types of “commercial” speech addressed to the publichave had a short history in industrialized countries, with public space in the USAexploited as a marketing medium since the 1890s, which transformed the urbanstreetscape rapidly (Baker 2007, p. 1188). Although initially unremarkable, laterhistorians’ accounts tend to emphasize tensions between reformers’ cultural idealsand mass culture, while later, highbrow journals became opposed to perceivedexcesses, and a clamor for aesthetic sensibility developed (Baker 2007, p. 1192).As late as the 1960s, there were no legal restrictions on the use of billboards in theUSA and some European countries, because sites were abundant in those days, butsince then a whole complex of regulation and property valuation has developedaround OOH advertising (Stoops and Wolverton 2006, pp. 333–334). In recentdecades, much of the critical popular discourse has revolved around the promotionof consumer goods and lifestyles that affect public welfare and morals, such asalcohol, which is explicitly or implicitly linked by ads to success, social acceptance,and power and whose consumption is depicted by young models (Moore et al. 2008,p. 510). Also, very common is the use of sex in advertising, at least since the 1960s,to increase consumer interest and sales, especially since research has shown thatsexual themes tend to cause positive arousal that leads to action or distraction awayfrom other thoughts and retention instead of the associated product/service image,whether or not it has anything sexual about it (Reichert 2002, pp. 241, 255, 258), anddespite the complaints of more conservative groups in society. In such cases, there
Taglish, Glutathione, and the Halo-Halo Discourse of Billboards in. . . 3
may be a corresponding counter-effort to regulate physical presence of such adver-tisements in the urban landscape or the outlets for their products (e.g., liquor stores,adult entertainment, etc.). Similar patterns of reaction may be observed in develop-ing countries where commercial advertising has been allowed to grow along similarlines.
Regardless of the appeal or repugnance of such commercial speech, scholarlycommentary has tried to understand advertising as a special form of communication,insofar as it is a speech act aiming to persuade consumers to buy or accept a certainproduct or service, such that a certain conversation is engendered between the ad’sproponent and the public participant (Liu 2012, p. 2619), a conversation in which acertain level of cooperation and politeness must be maintained in order for conver-sational implicatures (see Grice 1975 and Leech 2014) to take effect. More specificresearch has been done in recent years on OOH media, not only because billboardsare contentious and lucrative but also because they may under certain circumstanceshave symbolic and aesthetic value, such as in the way some people may regardbillboards in Times Square as media art due to their novel presentation styles(Jun et al. 2016, p. 16).
Fig. 1 Typical of the Metro Manila landscape on a smoggy day: traffic, cables, vacant billboardframes, and infrastructure that could use a good soap-scrubbing once in a while. (Photograph of aprinted mosaic, both by the author, March 2019)
4 J. E. A. Gomez Jr.
Concepts from Theories in Communication, Symbolism,and Language
A handful of concepts from communications and linguistic theories have provenuseful for understanding the billboard phenomenon in Metro Manila and are rootedin the observations in many countries where advertising has always been pervasiveand persuasive in nature as it attempts to supposedly model desirable patterns ofbehavior (Pollay 1986, pp. 18, 24). One major framework that forms the basis of thisstudy is Giles’ Communication Accommodation Theory (c. 1971) which describeshow conversational partners, whether close friends or loathed felons, adjust theirlanguage patterns to provide what they deem an appropriate response to convey acertain impression to the interlocutor (Blackwell Reference Online 2008; Giles et al.1991). Sometimes this process is deliberate; sometimes it is subconscious or auto-matic and employs a choice of expressions, accents, dialects, and other physicalalterations in communication, which by extension has also been used by mass mediaand advertising to try to “connect” to segments of the public they deem to havecertain profiles and response characteristics. Indeed, in media markets, becauseplatforms for commercial speech fight for consumer attentions and in particular forthe accompanying stream of advertising revenues, it becomes necessary to relate tothe potential customer effectively, bearing in mind that nowadays, the consumerssatisfy their content needs not on one platform alone, but on many, of whichbillboards make up only one point of contact, albeit a highly effective one (Ambruset al. 2014, p. 189).
On the whole, however, the role of communications in geographic discourse hasnot yet achieved the same prominence or level of discourse that other specializationsof geography enjoy. As Hillis (1998, pp. 558–559) reminded his readers in quotingAppleton (1962), “. . .communications geography remains a poor step-sister in the‘family’ of human geographies,” for which Hillis goes on to decry that there is muchpotential for scholarship, say, for instance, in reviewing cities not only as settings butas factors that exert agency or force in societal communications, not least of whichare achieved by information technologies of control, whose military origins haveonly recently been obscured by their entertainment and selling functions to generatecorporate profit.
Beyond the phenomenon of billboards or, more precisely, antecedent and collat-eral to OOH commercial speech, there are many other intended and unintendedconsequences of advertising, say in the way it expresses rational and emotionalexperiences and moods of consumers in analogy to the way art embodies universalfantasies, feelings, and thoughts (e.g., street art can be a countercultural response andconsumerist critique as well as an urban redevelopment project), all the while bothdeclaring their visual rhetoric of images and words to different audiences (Borghiniet al. 2010, p. 113). In other cases, the mere utilization and placement of street signsor wayfinding guides – sometimes, as in the case of Japan and the Philippines, whichincorporate advertisements – are responsive to spatial movements and frames thatperceive the world metrically (in coordinates) or deictically/topologically (in termsof distance from a cognitive center) in the mind of the commuter (Kataoka 2005,pp. 594–595, 613).
Taglish, Glutathione, and the Halo-Halo Discourse of Billboards in. . . 5
English in Asia and Elsewhere, Code-Mixing/Switching,and the Languages in Advertising
One ineluctable aspect of mass media language in Asia (not just in countries like thePhilippines nor only in advertising contexts) is the use of English – English, that is,not always in its recognizable British or American tone and cadence, but in distinctly“Asianized” forms. As one writer puts it, the center of gravity of English as a secondlanguage or lingua franca is now manifestly Asian, largely because of thenon-Western populations that have acquired it with varying degrees of competenceand affinity (McArthur 2003, p. 22). In relation to such usage, language scholarsmake a distinction between outer circle and expanding circle English usage in Asia(the inner circle being occupied by native speakers). Outer circle communitiesinclude countries like India, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore, whereEnglish enjoys some sort of official status aside from indigenous speech and isused by a lively daily press, as well as a local literary community, while expandingcircle communities include countries like China, Japan, and Korea, where English isnot official, but is increasingly studied by growing sections of the populations forsocioeconomic purposes (Bolton 2008, pp. 3–4). One practical result of suchunderstanding, at least in the advertising industry’s experience, is that similarcultural affinities and a certain homogeneity of urban populations in cosmopolitancities have permitted advertisers to use the same executional technique to win marketshare and thereby also save on costs (Fam and Grohs 2007, p. 533).
The introduction and diffusion of the English for commerce and through mediaamong other language domains of Asia in turn enable the phenomenon of code-mixing, or code-switching, whereby native speech is enhanced (or debased,depending on how one sees it) and intentionally interlaced with a foreign idiom –often a peppering of Anglicisms, which then find their way into broadcast media.In Indonesia, for example, monolingual speakers of Bahasa may code-switch toserve particular needs as English has become for some a sign of popularity, attrac-tion, creativity, and internalization and is also consequently picked up by billboardadvertising (Da Silva 2014, p. 35). Other reasons for code-switching may include theneed to fill a lexical gap, to express identity, solidarity, informality, and so on, whichadvertisers can use to construct identity under certain situations (Muyuku 2017, p. 7)and which in some culture contexts are accepted and even perceived humorously, asin the case of “Spanglish” advertising, which creatively straddles the Hispanic andAnglophone worlds (Smith 2015, p. 168). On the other hand, other countries haveofficially opposed the unnecessary use of English in favor of local words, despite thepersistent inroads of the Anglo-Saxon tongue, as in the case of France, whoseToubon Law (1994) mandates the use of French in government publications, adver-tisements, and workplaces, among others, and because of which French neologismsrooted subtly in English had to be invented by foreign firms trying to penetrate theFrancophone market (Martin 2005, p. 77). There too is the Russian response, whichafter an initial fascination with Western advertising and products in the 1990s
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revealed a dislike by formerly Soviet consumers of certain commercials (e.g.,hygiene-related) and multiple or disjointed storylines and images on public TV,so that again, advertisers had to adjust both language and content to suit local tastes(Six 2005, pp. 1, 3, 10).
The Philippine Context: Language, Urban Planning, and OutdoorAdvertising
Focusing on Southeast Asia, in the Philippine context, OOH advertising is veryprofitable and has thrived; it may be inferred, not least because of the lack ofregulation and enforcement (Fig. 2). For instance, as De Los Reyes and Santos(2009,p. 40) point out, the National Building Code specifies a 10-m setback from thepublic right-of-way, which must be enforced for freestanding billboards, but this islargely ignored, as OOH signs have been planted right along the curbside, adding therisk of toppling over motorists to visual pollution. A more recent study by Gomez(2013a) went further by describing how the proliferation of billboards in Metropol-itan Manila is not so easily restricted because it is made up of long chains or webs ofpowerful and combative private interests, starting with the advertising agency and
Fig. 2 Precarious anchorage. While billboards have become sturdier since the devastation of 2006,they can be built at the edge of legal and structural limits, as this photograph suggests. (Photo by theauthor, May 2009)
Taglish, Glutathione, and the Halo-Halo Discourse of Billboards in. . . 7
product seller (i.e., the client) and down to the lessor-landowner whose lot accom-modates the OOH advertising structure. Hence, urban planners and elected officialsare careful about clamping down on such moneyed taxpaying investors, even if thenatural landscape has to be sacrificed in certain locations.
With regard to imagery, the content of billboards can range from the risqué femalemodels in bikinis, who represent fresh waves of sexualization despite politico-religious condemnation (Cornejo 2014, pp. 68–69), to the Roman Catholic MotherMary, who enjoys a strong religious following rooted in cultural iconography as anintercessor for the masses (De La Cruz 2009, pp. 458–460). As for language, thereare no qualms about the casual use of English, even if the vast majority of consumersemploy it only as an idiom of formality in office settings and in speaking toforeigners. In fact, the majority of respondents in many a survey speak theTagalog-based Filipino language (“Filipino” being a more politically correct label,because it is inclusive) at home or with friends, yet may lapse easily into code-switched jargon. Outside of the Tagalog region that surrounds the capital, citizens arecommonly trilingual: speaking the language indigenous to their province, thenFilipino, as well as English, the latter remaining popular and used frequently foradvertisements, newspaper text, and social media (Vizconde 2017, pp. 62, 73).
Location Theory, Political and Economic Geographies of the City,and the Language of Images
One interesting observation about billboards is that they tend to flip conventionaleconomic geography on its head by conflating commercial location with extendedreach. That is, if one recalls Hotelling’s (1929) spatial competition model as appliedto a linear city, firms would tend to locate in sites where relatively immobileconsumers could minimize purchase and transport costs, as the latter choose fromcompeting but similar products of those firms, such that nearer firms enjoy theadvantage of “gravity” or proximity to potential customers (Thisse 2009, p. 2).Transport costs have been shown to adversely affect advertising sunk costs forfirms with already large shares, although they improve prospects for firms with asmaller market size (Tan 2014, p. 5). In contemporary times and urban areas,however, consumers are vastly more mobile, and optimum location for firms neednot be at the closest point, as long as there are other ways to encourage consumerpatronage, hence the role of advertising, among other urban incentivizers like cheappublic transit, in order to obviate effect of distance and to communicate persuasiveideas to citizen.
The city however is not an economic playing field alone but is also a landscapeof power and its material expression. There are many materialities at play in the workof human and urban geographers who look at phenomena such as communicationand commercial speech, and as others have pointed out, the problem is often not thatthey have engaged in the immaterial but, in contrast, that the complexity of the lesstangible has not been engaged with sufficiently insofar as it shapes physical sur-roundings, not just with discrete objects but also with relationships and movements
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(Latham and McCormack 2004, pp. 703–704, 715). The character of cities isprecisely a product of this plurality and contestations that give it shape and form,sometimes at the most superficial level, through such things as graffiti, advertising,or plain public signages.
A certain politics grows in and around such conditions, especially concerningparticipatory governance and citizenship, which are conditioned by builtenvironments (McCann 2002, p. 77), and yet at the same time, politicians andnonpoliticians alike are every day making numerous efforts to alter the landscapeto suit their needs or aspirations for a better neighborhood. For example, as Fransico(2010, pp. 233–234) has shown in the case of Metro Manila, the wealthy are willingto pay for environmental quality improvements – specifically versus the visualclutter of billboards, insofar as these are technically luxury goods that only better-off households are willing to spend for, although the content of such billboards canbe very proletarian in appeal and in their casual mixing of languages.
Physical Scope, Limitations, and Methodology
The author employed a qualitative and visual approach to observing and analyzingthe location and language content of billboards along the major thoroughfares ofMetropolitan Manila: Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, Quezon Avenue, and SouthLuzon Expressway. Specifically, photographs were taken of the OOH advertisingstructures, and notes regarding their messages were made during ambulatory inspec-tions, as well as drive-by (windshield survey) inspections. This study is an outgrowthof similar research started in 2009 and has also drawn from key informant interviewsin 2015–2016, while the most recent on-site inspections that inform this article tookplace between May and June of 2018. Part of the fieldwork involved a policy surveyand collection of legal data to compare against field observations. Geographically,the research was limited to Metro Manila, although many of its findings can safely begeneralized to other Philippine cities. As a procedural requirement to respect copy-right laws, this manuscript only used indirect representations of public advertise-ments, such as through photographs of landscapes, or of printouts and artistic andsymbolic portrayals, as well as photographs of empty/blank billboards.
Fieldwork Findings and Analysis
The recorded patterns of observation can be divided into three categories: thesalience of code-mixing in billboards, the use of imagery to communicatenon-textually the ideals of beauty, and the overall visual impact of agglomerationsof OOH advertising on the urban landscape. These will each be described and thendiscussed vis-à-vis the legal environment that controls such commercial speech andbuilt structures in the Philippines.
Taglish, Glutathione, and the Halo-Halo Discourse of Billboards in. . . 9
Taglish Taglines
Although linguistic purists and an older generation of Filipino traditionalists maycringe, the language of many billboards in Metro Manila is blatantly Taglish, thatcode-mixed variety of Filipino speech used for convenience or style by the young(and sometimes the uneducated or the grammatically heedless). The proportions mayvary in favor of either the Tagalog or English component, as long as the entireutterance is semantically coherent. Thus, for instance, one might observe theserepresentative signs (Table 1).
The system of code-switching is not rigid, as it seems that English words are usedfor varied applications, but most obviously to describe objects for which there is noexact original Tagalog or “Filipinized” equivalent (e.g., sandwich, microwave,contact lens) or for which no neologism has been coined yet. English may also beused for terms whose Filipino equivalents may seem a mouthful or would cost toomuch to spell out in advertising copy, like kaibigan (friend) or sinturongpangkaligtasan (seatbelt). It may be remarked that in the case of outdoor advertising,English words may, in addition, connote positive attributes (healthy) or respond tothe Filipino penchant for double entendre or innuendo (“young pork,” juxtaposedbeside a vivacious female model).
For the advertiser as well as the commuting consumer, the main functionalityof such ads is probably their brevity, as the succinct mixing of English and Filipinowords tends to be short and impactful, and can imitate the latest slang, or simply
Table 1 Taglish advertising on billboards. (Source: author 2018. (See also pictures of billboardsthroughout this chapter))
Code-switched tagline/slogan Translation into English Proponent
“Ang friend ngpensionado.”
The friend of the pensioner Ad for Stanford Finance, whichlends to retired senior citizens versustheir social security savings ascollateral
“King Sisig: Tadtad ngSarap”
King Sisig (minced pork earsdish): chopped-up by flavor/peppered with flavor
Ad for King Sisig restaurant
“Basta Tocino, ChooseOnly 100% YoungPork”
When it comes to sweetmeat,choose only 100% youngpork
Ad for CDO Funtastyk Young PorkTocino
“Masarap Na, HealthyPa! O, Gardenia na!”
Not just delicious, healthytoo! Hey, (get) Gardenia(already)!
Ad for Gardenia breads, in this case,whole wheat bread
“Baka Dapat BagongKotse na? Take our60 second loan test.”
Maybe you should get a newcar already? Take our60-second loan test
Ad for Bank of the PhilippineIslands, in this case, the Auto Loansservice
10 J. E. A. Gomez Jr.
achieve recall by their brazen display of linguistic infidelity. Probably, the ad-makersand the clients who pay them know how to construct proper sentences, but optinstead to pair Taglish with the images of young media icons (e.g., Maine Mendozafor CDO Funtastyk Young Pork).
Words That Mean Beauty: Glutathione, Metathione, and Other SkinWhiteners
Although not as rampant as the glutathione ads that proliferated in the last decade,billboards in Metro Manila are also conspicuous for advertising skin whiteners orsimilar beauty treatments, as promoted by models whose ghostly skin speaksvolubly about a persistent Filipino paragon of beauty – or at least the paragonbeing touted in the last decade by pharmaceutical companies and manufacturersof hygienic products. For example, there are organic topical products such as kojicacid soap extracted from mushrooms, and papaya soap, as well as synthesized pillscontaining metathione and hydroquinone, which reduce or interfere with melaninproduction in the skin. There are also forms of ingestible collagen and skin bleachesbeing advertised that invariably contain the legally mandated proviso: “No approvedtherapeutic claims” or (translated from Filipino) “This is not a medicinal drug andshould not be used to treat the symptoms of a disease” (Fig. 3).
Fig. 3 In this composed landscape photograph, the author is painting from memory a billboard inthe distant urban skyline. Incidentally, the words on the artwork approximately translate as“whitener” and “smoothener,” in symbolic reference to popular advertisements for beauty products.(Photograph by the author, March 2019)
Taglish, Glutathione, and the Halo-Halo Discourse of Billboards in. . . 11
Because a majority of the archipelago’s natives are naturally tan or brown-skinned, fair complexions stand out and have become associated with ideals ofcomeliness. Again, such advertising is not without its critics, as nationalists wouldsay that such posturing is a leftover from the colonial past when imperialists, firstunder Spain (333 years +/�) and then the USA (46 years +/�), diffused intoemerging Philippine society their own standards of Caucasian beauty, not leastthrough intermarrying with and influencing the indigenous elite. However, directobservation of current OOH advertising partly debunks such accusations of neoco-lonial mentality, because the products are now being pushed by a newer breed offoreign capitalists, South Koreans, who have been migrating to the Philippines sincethe 1990s and have introduced a standard of external beauty characterized byhairless, blank-faced models with radiantly white skin. Many Chinese mainlanders,Taiwanese, and far fewer Japanese have also been arriving to invest and inadver-tently inject their own tastes for food, beauty, and the artifacts of the good life intothe urban spaces of large cities, especially through commercial manifestations likeshopping malls. Ironically, there is a strong language aspect here, as revealed in otherresearch by this author; the South Koreans have come to learn English, as thePhilippines offers the next best and most proximate alternative to middle-classSouth Korean parents who cannot yet afford to send their children to schools inthe USA, Canada, or Australia (Gomez 2013b). Many end up staying, as their youngchildren learn English, Filipino, and Taglish rapidly, and take root easily in what hasgenerally been a Filipino culture hospitable to foreign sojourners.
The Tropical Psychedelic: Billboard Advertising as an Expressionof Power-in-Urban Space
Finally, the fieldwork confirmed the persistent overall effect of billboard concentra-tions in strategic parts of the metropolis. The densest agglomeration is still in theGuadalupe district of Makati city, approximately midway through Epifanio de losSantos Avenue, the main thoroughfare of Metro Manila. For obvious reasons, sitetopography makes this the most coveted and therefore also the most colorful andcluttered site: the sloping banks on both sides of the Pasig River form a naturalgallery upon which to erect billboards (Fig. 4).
Elsewhere, at major vehicular terminal points like the Epifanio de los SantosAvenue Rotunda to the south and the length of the C-5 semi-circumferential road,billboards also proliferate. Their language content is brief and persuasive and reliesheavily on images of elated 20-somethings; of comfort food like Shakey’s Pizza,Kentucky Fried Chicken, and San Miguel Beer; and of status symbols like cars andsummer vacations at the beach. As one Taglish advertisement put it: “Sarapka-summer” [a delicious summer companion] paired with a picture of sabahalo-halo espesyal [special shaved ice dessert with a plantain], to highlight thetropical hedonism that can be enjoyed, especially during the hot months of Apriland May.
12 J. E. A. Gomez Jr.
And yet from the vantage point of the planner or geographer, the colorfulhodgepodge of OOH advertising clusters also speaks in a more subtle language:the billboards occupy prime real estate sites and they represent both corporate andpolitical wherewithal, insofar as the local mayors approve the placement of bigbusinesses’ billboards. There are deals to be made here, both legal and not-so-legal,and public welfare is not always the foremost concern nor is environmental andaesthetic quality. Still, as the author has the benefit of a decade-long critical view,civic concern is not entirely stifled nor ignored: there are fewer oversized billboardbehemoths nowadays exceeding 600 m2 (~6500 sq. ft), as the government hasslowly heeded clamor for safer streets and less obstruction of natural views ascompared to billboard blight in the early 2000s. There is more standardization anddownsizing, and yet as an industry insider has revealed, the largest ad agenciescontinue to defy government, as they have the economic means to litigate andcounter-litigate endlessly (a predilection for litigiousness, some would say, adoptedfrom the USA, along with English) to wear out the bureaucracy (Interview withveteran advertising industry executive A. Kimpo on July 15, 2015). Or, as mentionedearlier, private advertisers have upped the ante, as it were, by constructingmassive electronic billboards – also called Curtain LED displays in the localindustry – not unlike those of Times Square, New York Fame, that can project
Fig. 4 Through this slanted landscape shot, the reader may appreciate that in the entire MetroManila landscape, the sloping riverbanks of the Pasig in the Guadalupe area still provide the besttopographic elevations and geographic centrality for OOH advertising. Real estate prices here reachinto the hundreds of thousands of pesos (tens of thousands of US dollars) per square meter.Photography by the author, March 2019
Taglish, Glutathione, and the Halo-Halo Discourse of Billboards in. . . 13
several high-definition colored advertisements every 9–10 s overlooking prime loca-tions, in the process easily grossing PhP10,000 ($200 US) per spot, which makesPhP60,000 ($1200) per minute. The messages and images may be tamer nowadays,but the mere presence of the medium is more ubiquitous, more aggressive, andphysically more enduring after lessons learned when past typhoons knocked downbillboards and government raised the standards for structural design. And, as animportant afterthought, while the amounts just mentioned may seem small by USstandards, it should be realized that PhP10,000 is equivalent to the monthly wage of ablue-collar worker in the metropolis, which on the electronic billboard literally flashesby every few seconds to generate profits for both the advertiser and the corporateclient, making the implied income disparities seem quite severe.
The Legal Angle: The Regulation of OOH Advertising Structuresand Commercial Speech
In order to appreciate the potentials and limitations on overt commercial speech andthe unwritten, but no less powerful communicative power of physical structures, oneneeds to understand the gradual, if initially reactive, emergence of regulations thataffect billboards and related media in the Philippines. First, in spite of billboardshaving become a public concern in the last decade, there are still no national lawsspecific to the control of billboard design, placement, or content. For physicalintegrity, government building officials resort to the National Building Code(established by Presidential Decree 1096 of 1977) and the other related national-level document, the National Structural Code. The latest version available online isfrom 2015 and is revised regularly by the Association of Structural Engineers of thePhilippines. However, the real policy restrictions started with Administrative Orders160 and 160A of 2006 from the Office of the President, which directed the Depart-ment of Public Works and Highways to dismantle hazardous billboards and providedimmediate legal grounds to do so, right after typhoon Milenyo (international name:Xangsane) toppled dozens in 2006, causing a few fatalities (Gomez 2013a, p. 207).Later, the metropolitan government also stepped in, specifically the Metro ManilaDevelopment Authority (MMDA), which also bore the brunt of public outrageagainst billboards. The result was a series of orders in 2011 (Memorandum Circulars10, 11, and 12), agreed to by all the mayors of the 17 local government units thatmake up Metro Manila and the Department of Public Works and Highways, whichgoverns legal right-of-way on major thoroughfares even while the MMDA has anoverlapping mandate for ensuring public safety and urban planning in the samemetropolis. Among the most important features of these memorandum circulars aresetback requirements and billboard dimension maxima (Table 2).
Other provisions of the stipulations in the aforementioned policies include pro-hibition of billboard placement in the scenic waterfront and reclamation area, as wellas provisions for authority to implement the policy and penalties therefor. In currentreality however, several billboards and LED signs are apparently oversized and inflagrant violation of such pronouncements, but the government has been slow to
14 J. E. A. Gomez Jr.
clamp down, while corporate giants of the private sector are willing to put up a fight.Apart from the MMDA and Department of Public Works and Highways, the localgovernment units also share responsibility for policing the urban landscape. While mostlocal government units are reactive and complacently follow the MMDA’s lead, wealth-ier territories like Makati, which is home to the main central business district, havecrafted their own OOH advertising regulations and have modified existing zoningordinances accordingly to such a degree that the MMDA has decided to use this as abenchmark (Frialde 2014, p. 1), at least until such time that other local government unitscraft their own regulations or a new national law supersedes extant subordinate policies.
As for content, there really is no overall government regulator either. In thePhilippines, advertisements are coursed through the Ad Standards Council, a formalpeer review body consisting of veteran industry practitioners, who ensure that grossviolations are filtered out, such as foul language, indecent imagery and nudity or near-nudity, and illegal incitements (e.g., lobbies for formula milk vs. breast milk). How-ever, the Ad Standards Council can only do so much, and occasionally its judgmentcalls are off, so that the public still does find the released advertisements unacceptable.In such cases, people often turn to either the local government units’ local officials ormass media to get their disgust communicated back to the Ad Standards Council,which then alerts the advertisers and corporate clients (Interview with M. Estrada,Operations Manager, Ad Standards Council, May 26, 2015). It seems then thatsometimes touchy ethical issues plague the OOH advertising dynamic, despite, onthe other hand, the sometimes-altruistic corporate social responsibility projects toutedby the Ad Standards Council or major advertising firms; for indeed, such corporatesocial responsibility has been known to make up for or mask shabby ethical behaviorand assuage corporate consciences (Drumwright and Murphy 2009, p. 90).
Synthesizing Discussion
Commuter Demographics and Their Linguistic Implications
One comes now to the crux of the matter: why then does such seemingly haphazarduse of commercial speech, bold images, and capitalist power symbolism persist andseem to be successful in the Philippine urban setting? One major contributing factor
Table 2 Extract of stipulations from standing billboard regulations in the Philippines. Source:Metropolitan Manila Development Authority, Memorandum Circulars 10 and 11, 2011
Setback requirements (meters) Other requirements
Road rightof-way width Front Side Rear Area dimension maximum: 80 m2
Height limitations: 9 m above crown ofstreet levelContact details of advertiser: >0.5 mfrom groundDistance from other signs: >100 m
30.00 and above 8 5 5
25.00 to 29.00 6 3 3
20.00 to 24.00 5 3 3
10.00 to 19.00 5 2 2
Below 10.00 5 2 2
Taglish, Glutathione, and the Halo-Halo Discourse of Billboards in. . . 15
is the demographic profile of the resident population itself: most Filipinos (>50%)are under 29 years of age (Population Pyramid 2017); that is, they are young,unsettled, and open to trying new experiences and products, with a growing numberdoing better economically despite the high poverty rate of at least 21.6% in 2015(Philippine Statistics Authority 2015). An urbanized citizenry with such characteristicsis probably quite responsive to the gaudy displays of food, sex, sleek new cars, wonderdrugs, and tropical vacations that, for better or worse, attract young people all over theworld to spend their hard-earned cash (Fig. 5). The advertising industry is simply andeffectively trying to speak in their language and accommodates what is perceived bybusiness owners to be the target sectors’ more hedonistic vulnerabilities.
More to the point, if one considers PHAR Philippines’ (the exclusive advertisingand marketing arm of LRT-1) recent survey of commuters for the Light Rail Transit1, one would see that the gender split is almost equal, 59% are 18–29 years old, 97%own a mobile phone, and the average journey time is 42 min (entering to exiting thestations), which is long, considering that the main CBDs (central business districts)of Makati and Ortigas are just over 6 km apart and the rest of the metropolitan
Fig. 5 A rare sight in thebackground: empty, blank-faced billboards along a busyhighway, waiting to be filledwith advertising copy,foregrounded by a profusionof bougainvillea – with asingle stray flower hangingstrategically, as if to cover upthe commercializedimmodesty of a nearby motel.(Photography by the author,March 2019)
16 J. E. A. Gomez Jr.
periphery is not more than 15 km away (Abadilla 2016; Treacy 2016). Suchcommuters either crowd into the three elevated light rail lines, or the much olderground-level train to get to work daily, or use the ubiquitous public utility jeepney,while they wait to reach their destinations. Under such conditions, the shoulder-to-shoulder daily commute in transit is a sociological phenomenon that engenders itsown communication dynamics: the young citizens are essentially captive in theirseats and, if traveling without conversation partners, can only look out the vehiclewindows for relief, where they are greeted by billboards and enticing imagery. Thelanguage of the streets they ply is trenchant and demanding: raggedly dressedbarkers shout out in order to load waiting vehicles, and some collect the fare asthe passengers step into waiting vehicles, while traffic enforcers yell at errantmotorists and jaywalkers, and insouciant groups of teenagers jabber and hoot orlisten to loud music, much to the annoyance of older commuters. The use of Filipinolanguage here is functional and rapid-fire, intermixed with English as needed, andcertainly without the rhythms of polite speech, considering ironically that mostFilipinos have had at least basic elementary schooling and the country had at leasta 96% functional literacy rate as of 2015 (Cristobal 2015; Philippine StatisticsAuthority 2011). That is to say, the urban environment does not yet widely manifestthe same courteous verbal exchanges that one might expect to experience, forinstance, in the public spaces of London or Geneva.
The Usefulness of Taglish Despite Institutional Conservatism
A second visible reality that has explanatory power is the nature of communicationitself among the youth: it is fast-paced and creative and does not always pay lipservice to the niceties of grammar and the exhortations of mother-tongue national-ism; so that if Taglish will do and seems the more popular choice, then so it shallremain and multiply on the tongues of teen media idols and cliques. In time, asyounger cohorts age, they may acquire a more well-rounded language facility andsome nationalistic sentiments or simply adopt as part of the “normal” idiom theexpressions that they had grown accustomed to in youth, in the process turning slanginto mainstream expressions. While neologisms like selfon (cellular phone), fotobam(photobomb), and lobat (low battery, referring to the state of your mobile phone) areaccepted, it is reckless orthography and abusage that are decried by the likes ofthe National Commission on the Filipino Language (Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino),a productive but somewhat obscure and underfunded institution charged with devel-oping and safeguarding Filipino and other Philippine languages. Nonetheless, aslinguists may point out, language is malleable, and what may be unpalatable to oldergenerations may in time become the common parlance.
Taglish, Glutathione, and the Halo-Halo Discourse of Billboards in. . . 17
The Linguistic Landscape and Mass Media
Lastly, one may also view the present lack of strict regulations not as a whollydeplorable state-of-affairs, but as one that actually encourages graphic and linguisticexperimentation, if only at the behest of profit-making. As the author has alreadyseen in the medium term, regulations have and will catch up with the state of the art,curtailing abuses of speech and causing a reordering of urban space, in effectbringing Metro Manila closer to the straitlaced cosmetics of Singapore or Tokyo atsome unspecified future date.
One other important unifying concept that the findings resonate with is the notionof the “linguistic landscape,” which refers to the visibility and salience of languageson public and commercial signs in a given territory or region (Monje 2017, p. 15).Indeed, as originally conceived by Landry and Bourhis in 1997, the experience of thelinguistic landscape by members of a language group – in this case Filipinos – hascontributed to social and psychological aspects of bilingual development. Filipino,English, and the code-switched Taglish interpenetrate the landscape of billboardsand street signs and are located precisely by firms to reach mobile consumers whosespeech, behavior, and physicality are mirrored in an act of accommodation-cum-persuasion. The resulting assemblage of billboards, buildings, signs, and streets isnot, by this account, a random or disorderly end state but rather a deliberate if weaklygoverned playing field of competing communicators and their media. On thisplatform, advertising has become a site of multiple language contact, where Englishmay be privileged (Piller 2003, p. 170), but also subverted and amalgamated to suitthe local culture’s needs and passing fancies.
Conclusion and Recommendations
The results of this research have described the billboard phenomenon in MetroManila as a site of diverse communication modes, manifested by the record-worthytextual accommodation through conflation of English and Filipino. Aside from itslikely appeal to a young audience, the persistent use of arresting imagery and hard-to-reach standards of beauty, nevertheless, comply with minimum standards ofdecency and design specification. Moreover, the use of terse, catchy, code-mixedlanguage suggests that the linguistic landscape is neither aloof nor imposed, but, likeso many other physical features of the city, is a negotiated space whose physicalbenefits and disbenefits are often in flux.
Because of limitations in time and resources, the author could not push theresearch farther in depth in several promising directions, namely, correlationsbetween language uses and image or location choices, the patterns of non-textualsymbolism in densely clustered sites, or the continuing, multilayered narrative ofMetro Manila’s “billboardization” per se. It is therefore recommended that readersinterested in these or related topics embark on their own similar research, whichwill address the need for material on the intersection of media, urbanization, andlanguage, especially in Southeast Asia.
18 J. E. A. Gomez Jr.
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