Content creators and influencers are no longer just faces borrowed for a campaign. To many Filipino consumers, they have become primary sources of product information, purveyors of trends, and triggers for purchasing decisions. While this may sound like an exaggeration, their influence greatly contributes to the market leadership of brands in the country.
A 2024 study by Ripple8 and Unbox reveals that nearly 90 percent of Filipinos follow influencers, relying on them for product recommendations. That single fact explains why brands have shifted significant portions of their marketing budgets toward social media and creator partnerships.
While brands have grown smarter at determining which creators they recruit for campaigns, creators have become equally deliberate on their end — firmer with their voices and more intentional about who they partner with.
In the current Philippine social media landscape, two of the most distinctive voices are Macoy Dubs and Baus Rufo — known collectively as Dogshow Divas — whose humor, timing, and improv-native content have carved out a space that is entirely their own. But what sets them apart from the broader creator conversation is not just how they make content. It’s that they know, with unusual precision, how the industry that commissions it actually works. Both have spent years on the other side of the table — writing briefs, protecting brand voice, and deciding which creative voices to trust.
At BaiCon 2026, adobo Magazine sat down with the duo — on a bed, in a hotel room in Cebu, minutes before they were due to go on stage — to talk about what it means to be on the receiving end of the brief, how brands need to work smarter with creators, and why humor, for them, has never been an afterthought.
Baus spent eleven years in advertising. Macoy, eight. Between them, they have sat in enough client servicing rooms to know what a brand sounds like when it’s afraid, and enough production rooms to know what a creative sounds like when they’ve stopped caring. They wrote the briefs. They filed the DTI permits. They have been, in the most literal sense, the people on the other side of the table from where they sit now.
“I can’t help but really put my marketer hat on when we get a brief,” Baus says — speaking from the bed they insisted on using when the hotel room couch proved too small for the four of us. “But because we are essentially media publishers and channels now, we are actually more emboldened to push for what we want.”
That word — emboldened — is worth sitting with. It doesn’t mean reckless. It means they know exactly how far they can go because they’ve measured the rope from the other end. Their industry experience doesn’t hold their creativity back; it protects it. They know why certain mandatories exist, why approval layers pile up, why a brand gets nervous at the edge of something new — and because they know it, they can navigate it without losing the work in the process.
What they bring on top of that is harder to account for. Macoy’s view on it is straightforward: “The more absurd your choices, the more creative, the more entertaining, the more fun.” This may sound like a preference, but it’s a theory of how content works. An absurd choice, when fully committed to, forces everything around it to hold together with more discipline, not less. The improv training underneath their content isn’t personality — it’s craft, and it’s what separates execution that lands from execution that just fulfills a brief.
The industry still tends to treat humor as a finishing touch, something added near the end to make a campaign warmer or more shareable. Dogshow Divas work the other way around. The comedy carries the message, doing work that a more conventional execution would miss. And they know their specific register well enough to protect it.
“We offer a very specific tone of comedy,” Baus says. “If you feel we’re the match — go. We have declined briefs because we felt [that] tonally, we may not be the best fit.”
They decline briefs. In a creator economy where the pressure is always to say yes and find a way to make any brief work, they pass on work that doesn’t fit. Not because they can’t execute it, but because they know what they are, specifically, and enough to know what they aren’t.
The creator economy in the Philippines is not the same industry it was five years ago. Creators have stopped waiting for brands to hand them a direction. The better ones — the deliberate ones — arrive at the table with a point of view already formed, an audience already trusted, and a clear sense of what they will and won’t do with a brand’s money.
Baus and Macoy sit at the sharper end of that shift. Because they’ve been on the brand side, they understand what brands are actually protecting when they send a brief loaded with mandatories and approval layers. And because they understand it, they don’t fight it blindly — they work around it with more precision than most. It isn’t a creative compromise, but creative intelligence, if you ask me.
The ask for brands now is simpler than it sounds, and more demanding than most are ready for: stop treating creators as endorsers and start treating them as channels — ones with a distinct voice, a specific audience, and a creative logic that no amount of internal alignment can manufacture from the outside.
Baus and Macoy have spent years on both sides building exactly that. The brands that figure out how to meet current demands aren’t just keeping up. They’re the ones getting the work that actually lands.
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