Insider Spotlight
The joint venture, PT Summit, will initially be deployed across brands including PEP.ph, SPOT.ph, Esquire Philippines, Cosmopolitan Philippines and SPIN.ph before opening its services to other media organizations.
Summit Media, founded more than 30 years ago by Lisa Gokongwei-Cheng, is one of the Philippines’ leading digital lifestyle publishing groups.
Beyond digital publishing
The partnership marks the next phase in the evolution of Summit Media, which shut down its remaining print magazines nearly a decade ago while maintaining its book publishing business.
Backing that vision alongside Gokongwei-Cheng is Summit Media president and CEO Howard Go, who believes publishers deserve better technology built specifically for journalism.
For example, he said publishers have spent too long adapting to platforms built for social media rather than journalism.
“If you look at the different social media platforms, it forces people to make content in a certain way that can create clickbait articles and even fake news. People will look at the headline and put comments before reading it,” Go said during the launch of PT Summit on Wednesday.
“The data we get from social media is not designed for media. It’s designed for the creator economy, for clickbait,” he said.
Better tools needed
Go said the same problem extends to the publishing tools many news organizations rely on, arguing they have become too rigid for modern storytelling.
“If you look at WordPress, it’s very simple, very light, but it can’t do the great things you want. The data’s limited,” Go said.
He said editors increasingly want to move beyond one-size-fits-all content management systems.
“Many were talking about, ‘Can we build something where the CMS allows me to personalize almost every story in a different way?’” Go said.
“The CMS can be much more flexible and agile over time. It allows us to create the right content depending on the brand that’s doing it and the story we’re creating,” he said.
Why PlayTime Entertainment?
Following a corporate restructuring that separated its gaming operations, PlayTime Entertainment has repositioned itself to focus on the broader entertainment business.
Still a relative newcomer to media, it has expanded through partnerships with Miss Universe Philippines and ABS-CBN’s iWant before entering publishing technology via PT Summit, which is led by CEO Crisanto Roy Alcid.
Gokongwei-Cheng said PlayTime Entertainment is the majority partner in PT Summit and will oversee its operations.
She said technology solutions proven in other industries could be adapted to the media business model.
“And in many ways, it’s similar. You’re attracting an audience, you’re retaining an audience, you want to keep the audience on your platform, and then you monetize your audience,” Gokongwei-Cheng said.
“This is why I think this partnership is a great partnership… we are the first customer, and we’re super excited about what can be achieved,” she said.
Advertising without driving readers away
Go said the same philosophy extends to advertising, where he believes digital publishers should improve the user experience instead of sacrificing it.
“Ads can be intrusive. They can actually make you choose to leave the site,” Go said.
He said PT Summit aims to create advertising products that work for marketers while keeping readers engaged, making monetization part of the experience rather than an interruption.
AI assists journalists, not replaces them
Go drew a clear distinction between using artificial intelligence to improve workflows and using it to produce journalism.
“AI can be used… to help us look for errors in code, go through data faster, but we won’t be using it for content,” Go said.
“Our editors continue to write objectively from their perspective,” he said. “What we want to do is give them the tools to be able to do things better, more efficiently.”
Miguel R. Camus has been a reporter covering various domestic business topics since 2009.
