MANILA, PHILIPPINES– President and Managing Partner of Hit Productions Vic Icasas has over two decades of experience in the field of music and audio production for advertising.
Originally started out with Hit Productions as a composer and music producer, Icasas has led Hit Productions to being the most awarded sound studio in the Philippine ad industry, winning an unprecedented seventeen times as the 4A’s Audio Production House of the Year.
During the lockdown, Icasas has led the sound production for several campaigns for Globe myBusiness, Oppo, McDonalds Philippines, Jollibee Philippines, and Emperador Brandy. In this interview with adobo magazine, Icasas talks about sustaining the company, the changing behavior of brands, and the future of audio production
adobo magazine: What is the current state of audio commercial production in the Philippines with the restrictions due to the lockdown and COVID-19? How is the business and operations?
Vic Icasas: We’ve had to pivot to an almost 99 percent remote setup for our operations, with only our finance team now reporting to the office three days a week, as well as one or two studios occasionally powered up to accommodate the projects that cannot be done WFH.
It’s somewhat wry and ironic, but back in mid March when the lockdown happened, we managed to move out and get up and running almost immediately. This is because we just dusted off the same playbooks that we had last used in 2017 when the audio houses at Mile Long got caught in the crossfire between the government and the Rufinos / Prietos, and we were asked to vacate our facilities with little to no notice. I had no idea we would need to go through those playbooks again, but well, here we are.
The biggest difference between 2017 and 2020 is that our current situation is uncomfortably open-ended. For now, the operational toll on Hit Productions has been mainly on the parts of the company that rely on the physical studio facility, i.e. reception, messengers and janitorial, kitchen staff, etc. We’ve had to structure early retirement packages for as many of these people as we could, because we do not realistically see a return to their roles in the next few months and it made no sense to put them on unpaid leave. Saying goodbye to these folks, some of whom have been with us for over 25 years, was one of the hardest decisions I’ve had to make at Hit Productions.
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What is the current behavior of brands and ad agencies toward spending on advertising particularly in production of TVCs and video content?
From my vantage point I see an interesting cross-section of the economy picture. Some brands that used to spend a lot on advertising pre-pandemic are continuing to spend as if nothing has changed, while advertising spend from other particularly hard-hit sectors such as travel, airline and non-essential goods and services have dropped to almost nothing. Platformwise, it seems that most of the ads being produced with us during lockdown are bound for digital and social, while a disturbing and unusually low (practically zero) number of radio commercials are being produced with us. I’m not sure if this is tied into the demise of ABS-CBN, which was not only the country’s largest TV network but also its widest radio network as well.
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What steps are you taking to sustain your business and make it more effective and efficient?
We’ve mapped out a pandemic-specific WFH production process for every department, and while it seems to be working out for us, we are continually toying with various tools and methods to improve these even more. Hit has been relying on Slack for our office comms since 2013 and doing remote recordings with Source Connect and Zoom for at least the past three or four years, so those were at least a couple less things for us to figure out on the fly.
On the non-production side of things, we’ve also taken on the services of a professional HR consultancy to guide us through not just the intricacies of dealing with labor and employment practices at this unusual time, but to help us craft never before needed and suddenly vital internal policies for the WFH use and care of Hit’s equipment, data privacy while using Hit computers at home etc.
What specific changes in the production process did you have to put in place due to restrictions? Do you see this as the new way of working until the end of the year?
Due to the unpredictability of the situation, with public transport being either unavailable or unsafe, the biggest change we’ve had to make to our process is to record all voice talents remotely. The voice talents with initiative have managed to set up decent sounding rigs in their homes that, while not acoustically ideal, are definitely at par with the new standards required of pandemic production. And when a session is running smoothly nowadays, once the producer, engineer, and talent all working well together, it can be just as effective over Zoom as if they were separated by glass vocal booth windows.
We’ve noticed increased efficiency and less “fat” in the process, and we do welcome it and hope this efficiency is something that will stay for good even when we move back to the studio. I do want to point out that we feel fortunate that the audio production business model can be readily adapted to the constraints of WFH, unlike over on the video production side where filming and shoots under lockdown are much more difficult to accomplish.
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Looking into 2021, what are the prospects and future for TV commercial and movie production of which audio production is integral.
Audio production is integral but it is also a dependency. June and July were much needed revenue generating months for us, tied to the ability of video production houses to successfully film and shoot new commercials. However, in the first two weeks of August where the video production houses took a break from shooting, our business declined accordingly, regardless of how well set up the Hit operations may have been to accommodate work. Ultimately, both for the near term and into 2021, the ability of our friends from the video production sector to adjust to the constantly changing conditions may dictate how the audio production side of things will fare. I cannot begin to imagine the problems they face, and they have our whole hearted support.
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