Digital Pilipinas Festival allows content creation to have a voice: CICP’s Jako De Leon

Content creation is a booming industry in the Philippines. In fact, it’s so popular that the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) has developed a course on content creation.

Creator and Influencer Council of the Philippines (CICP), an organization headed by Jako De Leon, aims to guide the creators and influencer industry by providing them with tools and training to optimize their platforms better. At the Digital Pilipinas Festival 2023, De Leon talked to CoinGeek Backstage reporter Claire Celdran about CICP and how they utilize emerging technologies in content creation.

CICP’s goal, according to its president and fellow content creator Jako De Leon, is to empower creators by educating them to become “a first-in-class kind of industry.”

De Leon, who’s father is a long-time actor and host in the Philippines, said he planned to avoid the entertainment industry by taking a pre-med course. However, creative minds don’t rest, and he followed what he love doing best and has been in the creative space for 15 years now.

“We started with YouTube…and then I started realizing there’s a lot more like me who just want to put content out there or would just want to create and create for a living,” he told CoinGeek Backstage. “I started talking to these people. Then, I started either managing or mentoring a lot of them. And now we have the CICP.”

Do content creators explore other avenues like blockchain and other technologies? De Leon mentioned that everyone, including content creators, has a role to play in Web3.

“If you ask about mass adoption, that’s where content creators have really, really figured it out, right? And [if] you look at Web3, you want mass adoption because there are emerging technologies. There are things to learn and how to market it,” he said. “I believe that there [are] benefits for both…we had a discussion about it in the panel…content creators are trying to have different ways of monetizing, different ways of protecting their own identities, their own content, and you can only do that with emerging technologies.”

In line with this, the CICP endorses the “Pamana” project, a movement that uses emerging technologies popular today to preserve, protect, and promote culture.

“The goal is to really preserve culture for the future generations and also for anyone. Content creators or creators in general, artists, artisans, all of these guys need to be protected. All of these guys need to be given some sort of ability to preserve what they’ve made, and sometimes, we forget about it. That’s what we were talking about right now,” De Leon explained.

Looking back at his experience at the Digital Pilipinas Festival 2023, De Leon sees that these conferences help small sectors like content creation have a voice.

“The fact that content creators are part of the digital economy conversation is already a step in the right direction because creative industries have contributed a lot to the digital economy. So, I think it is events like this that give us that voice. But not only that, [it] also gives us that recognition that we are important,” De Leon said.

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