Simone Tam, the Group & Creative CEO of Dentsu in Hong Kong, clinches an award to be one of MARKETECH APAC’s ‘Empowered Women in Agency’. The recognition initiative, Empowered Women Awards 2023, is an inaugural effort to honour empowered women leaders in the industry.
Simone is an advertising and marketing veteran, having started her journey in agencies way back in the 90’s. Her creative expertise is nothing short of commendable as she sharpened her agency prowess with some of the most respectable firms. Her early career saw her serving in FCB and then the DDB Group. She spent a number of years at mcgarrybowen before finally landing her current position at Dentsu Hong Kong.
Distilling 13 creative outfits into an integrated division of 6
From the period of 2012 to 2019, Dentsu, the renowned global advertising agency network, began an aggressive growth journey where it made more than 200 acquisitions, twice the trajectory in the market. Whilst the group was continuously acquiring new talents, it became a compilation of many different companies working in silos. For Hong Kong, this meant 13 individual agencies.
The said agencies all had different management teams with 13 P&Ls, all operating without any relationship to one another. Enter Simone in the picture. In 2021, her focused leadership as one of the CEOs of the 13 units quickly escalated when she was tapped to be the Group CEO of the entire Hong Kong division.
The year 2021 saw Simone driving the network’s transformation agenda and restructuring the organisation into six agencies; most importantly, she created a single leadership team and one P&L across the group of 6 agencies. In 2022, for the first time ever, Dentsu Hong Kong was ready to operate as one integrated agency group.
Operationalising a growth strategy – one that’s sustainable
There’s growth, then there’s sustainable growth. The former is less elusive given the right mindset of a team, but the latter – much more challenging to achieve with the incredible need for strategic foresight. With Simone’s impressive leadership direction and approach, she’s built a team structure for Dentsu Hong Kong that is thriving and sustainable.
She knows that in order for talents and clients to be well taken care of, value must be afforded from the inside. Just like with any great culture, the building blocks are effective practices — and this is exactly where she drew her influence from.
To breathe life into the ‘one dentsu’ vision, Simone leveraged town halls, sharing sessions, and workshops in order to create excitement for employees for the said company maxim. In addition, she scheduled bi-weekly one-on-one sessions with all 14 direct reports to share leadership wisdom and ensure alignment with management.
Ultimately, she fortified this unity in leadership and shaped a high-performing culture by introducing the ‘Care to do Better’ motto to the entire organization This eventually turned into practice that awarded teams and individuals who championed their ‘Care to do better’ attitude.
Empowering the industry as a true advertising ally
Simone’s passion and expertise for advertising transcends her drive to perform excellently in one entity, but to contribute to the betterment and evolution of the entire industry.
For the past six years, she sat on City University’s Advisory Committee for the Graduates Program to provide career guidance and design internship programs for undergraduates. As a guest lecturer at HKU Business School, she taught in its MBA class on creative effectiveness.
More notably, because of her belief in the power of the industry to create meaningful influence and change society, together with her creative partner, she led a 100% pro-bono project that produced a game helping autistic children build social & problem-solving skills.
With insights gathered from autism advocates, parents, therapists, and educators, the project ‘Critical Core’ enabled players to develop and adopt a magical character and work through a series of encounters with teammates whilst role-playing the adopted persona.
She commented, “I believe every industry, every leader needs to work on women empowerment until glass ceiling is no longer a term we use.”
Aside from Simone, check out who else made it to Empowered Women Awards 2023 Winners’ list.
