People: What’s cooking in Joey Ong’s creative kitchen?

Wearer of many hats and all around cool dude Joey Ong is now, apart from being founder and managing director at Dojo, and kitchen manager at Seventeen O’Nine, is also a new dad. Facing double the adjustment due to the lockdown and, it appears, twice the fun, the passionate creative shares what he’s got cooking at the moment, in his kitchen and beyond. Words by JOEY ONG

We are definitely living in a very crazy time, specially in our industry. Advertising is already stressful and painful as it is — what more during a time of a pandemic? But now is definitely the time for us to be more positive and hopeful more than ever. My name is Joey Ong and I am the founder and Managing director/ ECD of Dojo.

I used to be a young punk in advertising when I started my career in J. Walter Thompson back in 2000. From there, I rose through ranks by moving to different agencies and gaining a few metals along the way. From JWT I moved to great shops like TBWA, PJB, Bates and DDB before joining the local agency Aspac to set up my own little boutique shop called Dojo. Eventually, we got acquired by Dentsu and now I manage and lead a creative team priding ourselves with creative storytelling online for brands like Kenny Rogers, Swiss Miss, El Real Pasta, Nissin Cup Noodle, Mang Juan, UFC Ready Recipe, Shangri-La Hotels and a few more. Notice that these are mostly food brands? This is because our team has specialized on creating content and solutions that are deeply centered in the kitchen. Dojo sure knows a lot about food. Everyone cooks, everyone knows how to food style and shoot, plus, everyone loves to eat.

In my early years in JWT,  I handled Knorr and Carl’s Jr., which has opened my eyes to the wonderful world of food advertising and made me wonder: How come there is no food agency when we have agencies that specialize in hair, telco, or beer? So in my 20-year journey, I was able to set up not just Dojo the creative shop, but also my own Test Kitchen Studio called Seventeen O’ Nine, where we do recipe tests, shoots, micro events and anything you can think of that requires a kitchen space. I also throw a lot of dinner parties and sell my food occasionally.

You would never think that life can be busier for a guy that is heading a small agency, running a kitchen, cooking on weekends and keeping up with his lifestyle sports. I do triathlons, run marathons, surf, and recently got myself into a plant-based diet and learning nutrition online. However, my biggest challenge, accomplishment and breakthrough happened right in the middle of the ECQ lockdown last April 9, 2020. I officially became a Dad to Joselito who was born during the craziest time of the lockdown. Hospitals have turned into war zones, frontliners were getting sick, people were coming in with COVID, and hospital clinics were closed. Imagine that, plus the emotional load of having to adjust work process and keeping my agency afloat. Boy, you need to really stay positive and focused in order to stay sane. So how did I do it?

I created a program or a system that allows my wife and I to work as a team. I think now more than ever, specially in this crazy time, teamwork in any aspect, whether at home or at work, is necessary. I would study those days when we would need to have a check up as my wife was at 8 months or 34 weeks already when the lockdown happened. With strict coordination with our doctors, we planned everything from the schedule all the way to what we are going to wear, to the steps to take when we get back to our house. The account executive/producer/strat planner in me was full on activated plus I was being creative in how we would do things. I would make face shields out of water bottles and shoot DIY videos to help friends keep up with home challenges during the lockdown.

I also doubled up on staying fit because, now more than ever, you can’t afford to get sick. Exercise is a science-backed way of fighting stress and although we are not allowed to go outside, I remained to stay active by climbing our condominium stairs from ground floor to the roof deck, riding my bike indoors, basically exercising as much as I can while locked up in our condominium. This allowed me to have a clearer frame of mind during the pandemic, allowing me to continue leading my team, creating stuff and keeping everyone positive. As a leader, you have this role during a war to always keep the flag up and this would have been hard if I felt defeated myself during the lockdown, I was feeling more positive than ever. When it started, I was going to become a dad, it was exciting. Right in the middle, I actually became a dad. That was super scary. Now, I am a dad and loving it.

Fatherhood is probably the most life changing event to ever happen to any guy. More than winning a Cannes, more than becoming an ECD, or starting your own agency. This event has really put me in a different perspective. Am I more inspired? Yes definitely. Am I more challenged? 3000 percent more. Am I more scared? Super, especially now in our current world state. I feel that combining the feeling of becoming a parent with the fear of a pandemic will really impact the way a person is. Right now, although busy with little sleep, I’ve gone from slacker dude to super organized neat freak. Procrastination is very easy when you are working from home because you are always just next to your bed or working on your sofa, but we need to make this work from home set up happen and function perfectly because we are not going back to how it was before anytime soon. Honestly, it’s perfect timing, and what better time to work from home than now when I have a new born. I did not have to go back to the office after one week of paternity leave but like any perk, there is always a catch. We are busier now more than ever, our meetings go from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. non stop, we have to clean the house in between, wash the dishes, cook our meals and for me, even change the nappies sometimes. I’ve become an expert at swaddling.

Setting up for the new normal at Dojo is a continuous learning process. We are small so we work like a family, and being tight knit works to our advantage. Although we are physically apart, we are always in constant communication via Viber, now Teams and Zoom like everyone else. Dojo lunches together used to be our favorite in the office so we still occasionally do our lunch together but online where we just chat about what’s going on with the world. Anong ulam nyo? is a regular question we have in our group plus now that everyone in the team seems to be leveling up their culinary skills, we are looking forward to our first physical come back to the office.

We have scheduled our Lockdown Pot Luck lunch where each member of Dojo will have to come in with their best dish that they learned to cook during the lockdown. We continued to create content for our clients by moving our studios at home. So far we’ve done more than 20 recipes and 15 videos and photo shoots in the comfort of our own homes. This is the beauty of having a team that knows and understands food because everyone is a content creator. Some members have started getting into Tik Tok and gained more than 50K followers during the lockdown. Some Dojo members have started a food business on the side selling vietnamese dishes in their neighborhood. Most continue to enjoy the usual bonding we have when we worked in our physical office but now online. The new normal is here and we’ve learned to embrace it pretty well as a team. Briefs continue to come in, J.O.’s are endless but are managing it well. Recently, I’ve incorporated something into our schedule where we treat it like a cooking process. Accounts will have to add a cooking time for each meeting to manage online calls. Thirty minutes cooking time per meeting so we can really plot our days. Time management is key to making this work and constant communication not just within our team but also with our partner clients. We have Zoom inumans with them and sometimes just random catch ups to see how everyone is doing.  #ThisishowweDojo

As for me, a busy new Dad in a new world, working in an industry that’s just catching up with the changing times, I’m keeping myself busy and learning new things everyday. When I discovered that my wife was pregnant last year, I started an online community for dads called DadBudPH. Ten months later we have grown to more than 4000 members and are still growing. There are hardly any dad-led resource groups online, so this is a pretty fresh concept which is keeping me busy as well. Managing an online community is a commitment but the real stories and the people I meet in this dad community make it really worth it. Even fatherhood is changing as more and more dads are getting involved. It’s such an amazing thing to see and experience, which honestly, I tell my non-dad friends, is something only a fellow dad would really completely understand. “Joey Ong from Dude to Dad” is a funny and unbelievable concept to some of those who know me well, but I think I’m applying a lot of the things I’ve learned in work and life to being great at it. This is the one job that has zero room for failure. There is no “take two.” And it’s definitely the best job in the world.

Life will never be back to how it was before this pandemic. When I look back on those crazy industry parties by UGL, Kidlat in Boracay, office get-togethers during random week nights in Gweilos, all the way to our Malate days in J. Walter Thompson, it makes me sentimental, but at the same time glad that I was able to experience the complete adulting shebang in this industry that we all love. I went from being this drunk dude in parties to trying really hard to be mature in meetings with clients all the way to leading and starting my own agency concept, finding love along the way and starting my own family.

The next 20 years will be different but it doesn’t mean it has to be all that bad. I look at Joselito and I tell myself that this little boy will be growing up and having his own journey from being a baby to a dude in a more digitally connected world where physical distancing is the new norm. I will tell him my tales of being found drunk on the beach after a night of partying, on getting into fist fights, being a troublemaker and partying during at the turn of the millennium like it’s the end of the world. He will probably just think that’s so baduy, or imagine it in a Lomo-style, square format picture that is out of date in his vertical screen world.