by Oliver Bayani
MANILA – If you travel, or in most cases, get stuck along EDSA when going to and from work, you have probably not have just seen the work of Jacqueline “Jackie” Ongking – but may have also breathed it.
Google will tell you that she is no painter, sculptor or graphic artist. In fact, you may have a hard time finding details about her online, with the exception of her Twitter feed of curious news and a couple of press releases. When she sat down with adobo to share her design process, Ongking was dressed in khaki pants, a plain cut blouse and flats, Pacific Paint’s VP of Marketing doesn’t even look like the stereotypical client associated with edgy campaigns.
What stood out, however, was Jackie’s outstanding business ethics and humility that have influenced not just how the company make campaigns but kept the business afloat and strong for the last 62 years.
Jackie gave us a short history lesson on how everything began. She belongs to a second generation of Filipino-Chinese family that founded Pacific Paints in 1953, which began as a repackager of paint and lacquer thinners under the brand name Columbus.
Boysen, which is now synonymous with the company, is actually a brand of premium paint from California brought by Jackie’s parents to the Philippines in the 1960s. The original brand died in its home market but remained strong locally under her family’s watch.
She shared that Pacific Paints was the first in the country to remove mercury – a toxic heavy metal from paints but they never made a big deal of it. They didn’t want to milk the situation of its news value even if it remains vastly relevant now as it was over five decades ago,” Removing mercury was a very expensive process but they just bit the bullet because it was good for the environment. They were actually the very first but have always been strictly low profile. We don’t go about bragging, ‘Hey this is what we do’.”
She’s proud to say that the brand focused more on making good on their word to customers instead of threading good words together just to impress, “They came with very little, they worked very hard and I think what sustained them at the time was their credibility. Everything was done with a handshake, and that isn’t a metaphor back then.”
She continues, “If we have dealers who have problems paying on time, you can be a little more generous in your terms to help them revive their business, right? The company can only stand up if our partners can stand up as well.”
Her modesty with words is even curiously reflected in the brevity of her briefs, says Kara Fillamor, TBWA/Santiago Mangada Puno’s account director for Pacific Paints, which she recalls was challenging but surprisingly effective.
“I remember the day when we got a brief where she only wrote, ’Make it funny.’ A brief normally is longer than that because agencies need some details to get some direction but keeping it short forced us to work harder and not be limited by the brief.”
For Jackie, it’s all good when each facet of the business forms a virtuous cycle, eloquently summarized by JW Marriott – “Take care of your people, your people will take care of your customers and your business will take care of itself.”
She also continued to take care of the environment for good measure with projects like Project EDSA, Jackie’s most ambitious to date, with eight large scale artworks that weren’t just made to beautify but also to purify the air along the 24-kilometer polluted artery of the city using Boysen KNOxOUT, currently the world’s first air cleaning paint.
That won the brand and TBWA/SMP a silver trophy at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity back in 2013, and, more importantly to her, planting the equivalent of 8,000 mature trees that can get rid of toxic nitrogen oxide from the air.
“I wanted to promote (the) paint but also do CSR at the same time. But if I just painted a wall white, how would you know if it’s really air-cleaning paint? Project EDSA merged art and science and it was the perfect marriage,” she says. Apart from tapping known artists to create the eye-catching art seen on the go, the painters employed to execute the job were artists who used to paint theatrical billboards.
Jackie also shares that Pacific Paints even paid close attention to how sustainable their paint manufacturing process is. Their Cavite-based plant, once the largest and most modern paint factory in Southeast Asia, is remarkably ISO 9001-, ISO 14001- and OHSAS 18001-certified.
“It’s virtually cleaner than certain food factories. I was amazed myself since we just make paint,” she says.
The idea for Project EDSA, like most that come across this marketer’s mind, is as spontaneous as it gets but has roots from countless pieces of art, books, places she visited and – being a foodie at heart – even the meals she cooked and ate along the way, “You go to museums, see art, people, and do dozens of other things. Creativity has an appetite and you are required to feed it quality food,” she says.
But what truly strings Jackie’s influences together stronger than aesthetics, beauty, or anything else is their family’s culture of modesty and fairness to everyone, “I think they more of lived by example,” she said when asked on what her parents advised her to do when they handed over the business to her siblings. “They weren’t very communicative. My father was not a very verbose person. He spoke very little. But you can see how they lived their life. Very honorable, very honest with a lot of integrity. You’ll be ashamed if you ever spoiled their name.”
So far, Jackie and her brother, Johnson Ongking, VP of Pacific Paints, are making mom and dad proud. By developing world-class paints, enriching relationships with distributors and making their paints more affordable, Pacific Paints now commands a whopping 70% of the local paint market.
“We also have the philosophy to give the best value for money. Worldwide, we probably have the lowest price. One competitor asked if were selling paint at a loss? We keep it reasonable, keep profit margins not that high, so that everyone could get a hold of good quality paint.”
Yet for all of what she has done for the company, Jackie remains refreshingly grounded: “We have become the category. That’s the hard work of everybody. I’m just advertising. I’m just one small part in a big company. I mean you cannot do this without the production, without the marketing, everybody – the chemists, even the fillers who fill the paint.”
True, she’s just one small part in a big company but she does her bit in a big way. While she lives in a high-rise condominium she harnesses the natural flow of air instead of turning on the air conditioning; she can afford imported furniture and fixtures but is loyal to the natural wood furniture of a local artist. What she splurges on is art: paintings and sculptures but also by local artists. She lives a colorful but unvarnished life. Like her Dad, she’s not verbose but she walks her talk and for sure, she makes her parents proud.
This article was first published in the May-June 2015 issue of adobo magazine.
