Why the Bangko Sentral’s PR hire is not smart – but revealing

WHEN a central bank hires a public-relations firm, that is no longer a communications decision. It is a confession.

Central banks are supposed to be boring, aloof and slightly feared. Their credibility rests on discipline, not persuasion; on consistency, not salesmanship. They do not “sell stories.” They set rules, signal policy, and let markets draw their own conclusions. Once a central bank feels the need to polish its image through hired spin doctors, something fundamental has already cracked.

Which is why the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’ decision to hire a Hong Kong-based PR firm is not clever, modern, or forward-looking. It is revealing — and troubling.

Let us dispense with euphemisms. The BSP has hired Burson-Marsteller Ltd. under a one-year contract worth $547,000, roughly P32 million, taxes included. This was purportedly approved by the BSP’s bids committee and tasked to help “position the Philippines as a resilient economy,” manage foreign media, and engage international stakeholders.

In plain English: to sell a narrative abroad. Perhaps the BSP head Eli Remolona, because he gets P47 million a year, and the central bank’s top officials (including the Monetary Board members) are paid P20 to P30 million, they think P32 million to pay an American PR firm is cheap. Or they think that BSP’s money doesn’t come from taxpayers anyway, forgetting that the bank-regulation fees, as well as its reserves, indirectly are also people’s money. Or perhaps, Remolona has spent all of his working life in US and international institutions, he still thinks he is working in a First World country.

Why does a central bank need to sell anything?

Capital

Supporters immediately reach for the familiar excuses. Foreign investment is down. Net direct investment plunged nearly 40 percent year on year to just $0.6 billion in October 2025. Southeast Asia is competitive. Capital is fickle. The Philippines needs better messaging.

All true — and all beside the point.

Capital does not flee because messaging is poor. It flees because fundamentals are weak, policies are inconsistent, or institutions are no longer trusted. You do not reverse that with talking points.

What makes this decision especially absurd is that the BSP already has an Investor Relations Group — formerly the Investor Relations Office — explicitly mandated to court investors, organize roadshows, and explain reforms. This is not some neglected backwater. It is a stand-alone unit embedded within the BSP’s structure, now folded under the Strategic Communication Subsector, now headed by former newsreader Coco Alcuaz alongside the Corporate Affairs Office, reporting directly to a deputy governor, who makes P20 million a year. Can’t these highly paid officials with their highly paid staff undertake the BSP’s reputation management?

So, why outsource? Indeed, the BSP is the only government agency that has contracted a PR firm.

The answer cannot be capacity. The BSP is among the best-funded institutions in government. It pays top salaries, employs legions of economists, publishes regular inflation and stability reports, and already enjoys unparalleled access to both local and foreign media. If that machinery is insufficient, the problem is not communications. It is confidence.

And that is precisely what this PR hire signals: institutional insecurity. Or perhaps this administration is so rotten, it has infected even the moral compass of the BSP, supposedly the crème de la crème of Philippine bureaucracy.

Public relations

Public relations firms are not hired when institutions are confident. They are hired when institutions feel misunderstood, exposed, or defensive. They are hired when leaders believe the problem lies not in policy or performance, but in perception.

That is a dangerous belief for a central bank.

Burson-Marsteller is not being paid P32 million to educate. It is being paid to frame. To manage. To soften. To emphasize some truths and quietly step around others. That is what PR firms do. And that is exactly what central banks must not do.

Once narrative management enters the picture, transparency becomes selective. Criticism becomes a “communications challenge.” Policy failures become “external shocks.” Inflation becomes a “global phenomenon.” The language shifts — not because anyone is lying outright, but because the incentives have changed.

Worse, this move collapses the distinction between technocracy and politics. Public relations is inherently political. It is about audiences, optics, and timing. By importing PR logic into the BSP, the institution imports political behavior as well — whether it admits it or not.

The BSP apologists will insist this is merely “keeping up” with global practice. Other countries do it. Everyone is pitching. Standing still is falling behind.

This argument misunderstands how investors actually think. Investors do not allocate capital based on slogans or glossy narratives. They read balance sheets, study policy coherence, watch institutional behavior, and — above all — track credibility over time. A slick campaign cannot compensate for governance noise, policy zigzags, or unresolved scandals.

In fact, the opposite often happens. When investors learn that a central bank has hired a PR firm, the reaction is not reassurance but suspicion. Why the need? What problem is being pre-empted? What story is being polished?

There is also the small matter of accountability. The contract may have been approved by the BSP’s bids committee, satisfying formal procurement rules. But what, exactly, are taxpayers paying for? How does one measure success in “maintaining investor confidence”? What are the deliverables? What constitutes failure?

These questions matter because PR contracts are notoriously difficult to audit. You cannot count bridges built or vaccines delivered. You can only count impressions, sentiment, and “engagement” — all soft metrics that conveniently resist hard evaluation.

And let us not pretend the amount is trivial. P32 million is real money. It could fund additional research capacity, better supervisory tools, or deeper analytical work on food inflation — the issue that actually erodes public trust every day. Instead, it is being spent to make the Philippines sound attractive to people who already know how to read the data.

The deeper problem, however, is not the money. It is the signal.

Authority

Central banks earn authority by being restrained, even taciturn. They speak in dry language because dry language signals discipline. They avoid persuasion because persuasion implies insecurity. The moment a central bank worries about how it looks, rather than what it does, its independence begins to thin.

This PR hire suggests the BSP no longer trusts outcomes to speak for themselves. That is not a communications issue. That is an institutional one.

You cannot PR your way out of weak confidence. You cannot spin your way into credibility. And you certainly cannot market an “investment haven” while unresolved governance problems dominate headlines.

There is an old saying in central banking: Credibility is built in years and lost in moments. Hiring a PR firm will not restore credibility. But it may, quietly and unintentionally, signal that credibility is already being doubted — from within.

If the BSP truly wants to reassure investors, the solution is brutally simple and unfashionable: Tolerate criticism, let policy consistency — and explain in detail its questionable moves — not polished narratives do the work.

For instance, it hasn’t fully explained why it sold 25 tons of gold worth $1.6 billion in early 2024, making it the biggest seller of gold among all central banks in the world. That gold was worth $2.4 billion by the first quarter of 2025, giving the buyers $800 million (P47 billion) in profits. There have been persistent rumors that the buyers were certain individuals connected with the leadership of this administration. All we’ve been told officially, however, is that the move was “simply” part of its international reserve management decisions.

Is Burson Marsteller’s marching orders to quell these rumors?

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Why the Bangko Sentral’s PR hire is not smart – but revealing
Source: Breaking News PH