Tag: APAC

Singapore – Virtue, the agency powered by VICE Media Group, has appointed Ann May Chua, former head of integrated production at WPP’s marketing production arm Hogarth Worldwide, to be the new head of production across the APAC region, driving creative excellence.

In her new role, Chua will be growing and accelerating Virtue APAC’s production capabilities, while tapping into the unique production expertise of Vice Media Group. A key member of the APAC leadership team, she will be working with the creative and account management teams to elevate creative output and production value.

Chua is a seasoned producer with experience in advertising, content, activation, audio, and post-production. Aside from her previous stint at Hogarth Worldwide, she has also worked at agencies including BBDO Singapore, Saatchi & Saatchi, and MassiveMusic Singapore.

Commenting on her appointment, Chua said, “Virtue builds brands from inside culture and has a reputation for producing more valued and visible cultural output for these brands. I’m looking forward to partnering with the team and building the creative production credentials for our clients.”

Meanwhile, Lesley John, Virtue APAC’s managing director, noted that they place a strong emphasis on production which brings to life the vision of their creatives while effectively connecting brands with audiences. 

“Ann May is highly experienced and will drive our production capabilities to new levels. I’m delighted to welcome her to Virtue APAC as we continue to deliver for our growing portfolio of global and regional clients,” said John.

In July 2022, Virtue has also promoted Fiona Knight, former business director at Virtue Japan, to the newly created role of head of account management for APAC. She will be driving commercial and operational excellence, including building the account management team, developing client partnerships and collaboration, and senior oversight on key accounts including Coca-Cola and Shiseido.

Hong Kong – Consumer bank DBS in Hong Kong has launched a new regional brand campaign called ‘Be a Different Kind of Bank’, which makes clear that the bank is more like a startup, as well as more techie and eco-warrior, and less like a traditional bank. 

The campaign signals DBS’ belief that a different kind of bank is needed in a post-pandemic world. It also highlights the bank’s commitment to intensifying efforts going forward to become even more like a forward-looking tech company offering financial services and less like a conventional bank. Moreover, it will continue to up the ante on addressing sustainability issues and devoting itself to being a purpose-driven bank.

Moreover, the campaign encapsulates several aspects of how DBS embodies being a different kind of bank, which include inculcating a startup culture, where a spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship will continue to flourish, and committing to continuous innovation, where the bank seeks to ensure that banking is simple, fast and effortless, increasingly personalised, and seamlessly woven into everyday life.

Another aspect is advancing the sustainability agenda, where the bank will be supporting social enterprises and prioritising action on climate change, powering philanthropic and relief efforts.

Karen Ngui, DBS’ group head of strategic marketing and communications and DBS Foundation’s board member, shared that with COVID-19 upending economies and societies, now more than ever, they must be able to anticipate and lead change so their customers and the community at large can ‘Live more, Live better, and Bank less’. 

“By behaving more like a startup, more like a techie, more like an eco-warrior, and less like a ‘traditional’ bank, we believe we can be a bank for the times – a different kind of bank for a post-Covid world,” said Ngui. 

Aside from Hong Kong, the regional brand campaign will also be rolled out in Singapore, Mainland China, India, Indonesia, and Taiwan over the next two months.

Manila, Philippines – Ox Street, the online integrated sneaker-focused marketplace, has launched a new offering called ‘Used’, which allows authenticated buying and selling of used and b-grade sneakers across APAC. 

For some, it may seem strange to buy used sneakers, but Ox Street data suggests that affinity for secondhand already exists in today’s market. Buyers are keen to acquire limited editions at a friendlier price point, which on average is 30% lower than ‘Brand New, Dead Stock’ (BNDS). 

Based on Ox Street’s research amongst its existing customer base, 45% of buyers of BNDS sneakers have already purchased used sneakers in the past but struggle with the fear of buying fakes. To tackle these challenges, Ox Street manages the end-to-end process for Used – from handling payment and shipping to authenticating all products sold through the platform.

Ox Street has soft-launched Used for sellers two weeks ago, enabling them to start listing their used sneakers. Today marks the launch for buyers, with over 1,000 used sneaker listings already available on the platform, eager for new homes.

To get started with buying and selling used and b-grade sneakers on Ox Street, the search results page on the app will show a small icon indicating if used products are available, and app users can browse all used listings for a particular product after selecting the size.

Gijs Verheijke, Ox Street’s CEO, shared that sneakers are meant to be worn, but sneakerheads tend to accumulate too many pairs to constantly wear all of them. 

“Through Used, we are saving millions of pairs of great sneakers from a slow death at the bottom shelf of someone’s closet. In doing so, we’re also really excited to see the range of limited edition and vintage sneakers making their way back onto the marketplace,” said Verheijke.

Meanwhile, Quek Siu Rui, co-founder and CEO at Carousell Group, said that during the past 10 years, Carousell has facilitated tens of millions of secondhand transactions and inspired people all over the world to start selling and buying secondhand items. 

“Looming environmental changes and over-consumption have made our mission more relevant than ever. The latest Used feature on Ox Street will definitely supercharge the recommerce trend in the region as a market leader in sneakers, and encourage more people to consider secondhand as their first choice,” added Rui.

Singapore – Media spend varies by region, with brands in APAC reinvesting a higher percentage than other regions, while brands in North America reinvest slightly less, but enjoy a much stronger payback, according to a report by global audience measurement, data, and analytics company Nielsen.

The report also found that media spend often needs to be higher to break through and drive returns. Nielsen shared that its ‘50-50-50 Gap’ states that while 50% of media plans are underinvested by a median of 50%, ROI can be improved by 50% with the ideal budget.

Moreover, beyond budgeting, the report showed key insights and recommendations to deliver higher ROI across multiple marketing areas, including full-funnel marketing, whereas adding upper-funnel marketing to existing lower- and mid-funnel marketing can grow overall ROI by 13-70%.

Another key recommendation is ad sales growth strategy, where comparing channel ROIs can help set pricing strategies. And lastly, audience measurement, where advertisers should prioritise measurement solutions that cover all platforms and devices, with near-real-time insights. 

Imran Hirani, Nielsen’s vice president of media and advertiser analytics, said, “Brands can’t afford to waste valuable ads on the wrong audiences. By investing wisely and having a balanced strategy of both upper-funnel and lower-funnel initiatives, brands can reach the right audiences and maximise their ROI.”

Singapore – Advertising network TBWA\Asia has welcomed back Perry Essig, most recently the executive creative director at dentsu international, to step into the newly created role of chief creative experience officer.

In his new role, Essig will be working closely with the collective’s creative leadership across Asia and Ben Williams, TBWA\Worldwide’s chief creative experience officer, who was appointed to the role in October 2021. He will be joining a team tasked with further deepening the collective’s creative vision to push the boundaries of brand experience, by leveraging the power of creativity. Essig will also be focused on strategically pushing the creative integrity of the agency’s products and guiding clients in exploring new approaches, which add ongoing value and impact.

The appointment marks a return for Essig to the TBWA\ Collective, moving to Singapore from New York, where he worked at dentsu international. Prior to this role, Essig was the global creative lead for Standard Chartered and Singapore Airlines at TBWA\Singapore. He has also helmed global accounts at TBWA\Chiat\Day New York, TBWA\Juniper Park\Toronto, and Publicis.

Commenting on his appointment, Essig said, “With the lines blurring between digital and real-life, brands have evolved in how and where they’re showing up, immersing themselves further into our lives through the experiences they are creating. That’s what makes this role so exciting. I look forward to working with TBWA’s creative force across the region and globe to create needle-moving experiences for our clients.”

Meanwhile, Sean Donovan, president of TBWA\Asia, shared that as brand experience becomes the keystone of marketing strategy, it’s imperative, as creative partners that they provide a cohesive lens with which to affect disruptive growth.

“With Perry joining the team, we will be accelerating our Collective mission to deliver impactful work in an increasingly fragmented landscape,” said Donovan.

In May this year, TBWA\Worldwide appointed Kazoo Sato, former executive creative director at TBWA\Hakuhodo, to be its new chief creative sustainability officer at TBWA\Hakuhodo and TBWA\Asia. He will be the key creator of solutions to sustainable problems through the creation of innovative and unconventional design thinking, creative campaigns, products, experiences, and communications.

Vietnam – Transparent programmatic and data-driven agency, Bidmath, has appointed Rakesh Singh, former head of digital, destination marketing and marcom at Hoiana, to be its new country manager for Vietnam and commercial head for APAC.

In his new role, Singh, who will be based in Ho Chi Minh City, will be responsible for leading the new business and solutions in Vietnam, as well as commercial partnerships across the APAC region. 

Aside from his previous role at Hoiana, Singh has also served as the managing director at Havas Media in Vietnam. In his career span of more than 18 years, he has always been associated with the large media and communications companies in the industry, having worked with agencies like Group M (Mindshare and Mediacom), Omnicom Publicis, and Havas Media Group across Asia and Africa markets, with more than 10 years in senior leadership roles. 

On his thoughts regarding the largest opportunity for brands in Vietnam, Singh commented that the share of programmatic advertising in several emerging markets in APAC is much lower than that of mature markets where more than 80% of the digital spend is bought programmatically, and the primary reason for this is the lack of exposure of brands to the several benefits of programmatic advertising and this is largely due to inefficiency and lack of capabilities prevailing within the industry primarily driven by traditional media agencies who are struggling to move from the traditional media buying approach to the new audience buying approach driven by data and technology.

He said, “With the advancement of technology such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), programmatic is now playing a significant role in the digital marketing ecosystem and with our huge expertise in this area, Bidmath is well placed to spearhead the growth in the region.”

Moreover, Singh also shared the key game-changers that he believes to be the future of online, which includes AI in marketing, the Metaverse, livestream commerce, AR, voice search optimisation, programmatic advertising, chatbots, and marketing automation, as well as micro-influencers, and shoppable content. Meanwhile, lack of resources, skills, and knowledge are amongst the key barriers for brands to achieve personalisation goals.

Singh noted, “I consider myself an emerging market specialist having had the opportunity to work across several emerging markets like India, Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, South Africa, and Vietnam. With the rapidly accelerating technological advances in digital marketing, the recognised value of data and increasing data literacy amongst brands and marketers, I’m looking forward to many more interesting experiences in the near future.”

Sydney, Australia – Global media intelligence and data analytics company, Meltwater, has announced several product enhancements and the addition of several new premium clients, including IKEA Australia.

Aside from IKEA, Austrade, Australia’s trade, investment, and education promotion agency, is the latest client to appoint Meltwater to replace multiple existing vendor partners. The company will be deploying Meltwater’s integrated solutions both in its Australian operations and all its global offices. It’s the most recent of Meltwater’s Australian-based multinational clients who have opted to standardise their use of Meltwater globally.

Meanwhile, as part of its ongoing commitment to invest in research and development, Meltwater has recently launched its enhanced TV & Radio (Broadcast Content) offering which includes diarised speech to text for transcripts and identification of supers/banners for TV coverage. It has also announced the introduction of facial recognition technology to further improve its platform offering. Meltwater has also confirmed that it has secured long-term deals with The Australian and Australian Financial Review to support its media monitoring capabilities. These deals coincide with a global partnership with Twitter for industry-leading access to its social data intelligence pipeline.

In addition, Meltwater has expanded its local workforce with 47 new people joining the company in Australia in the last year and three new strategic senior appointments set to lead key functions across APAC, which includes Upali Dasgupta stepping into the newly created role of marketing director based in Singapore.

David Hickey, Meltwater’s regional director, believes that the breadth of their offering combined with their exceptionally strong locally based team means that they can provide unparalleled support for the often-complex requirements of their customers both here and across the region. 

Over the past year, Meltwater has also completed the acquisition and onboarding of four insights companies with a focus on emerging areas including social media engagement and influencer marketing. These include social media intelligence company Linkfluence, influencer marketing company Klear, community-based research company Owler, and AI start-up Deepreason.ai. Meltwater also recently partnered with Hubspot on World Certification Week in a bid to support the learning and development of its local talent by joining the Great Upskilling initiative. 

Hickey said, “We have always placed a lot of importance on learning and development, it’s in our DNA and our partnership with Hubspot was in perfect alignment with our values. At Meltwater, we regularly invest in upskilling through training budgets and are further investing in our employees by hosting a yearly two-day Australian Leadership Development Summit in Sydney for the entire national team.”

Sydney, Australia – Programmatic digital advertising company PubMatic has partnered with audience intelligence platform AlikeAudience to enable advertisers in Indonesia to access quality audience data on the supply side.

Aside from Indonesia, the partnership is also for key markets Australia and Japan. It aims to expand the reach of Connect, PubMatic’s differentiated audience solution that leverages addressable signals from across the internet to help data owners drive monetisation and help media buyers drive performance. Connect allows media buyers to leverage a portfolio approach to addressability.

AlikeAudience offers bespoke demographic, interest, and transactional data and has more than 7,000 audience segments in the US, Australia, Japan, and SEA, across a wide range of industries, including FMCG, automotive, and financial. The company has substantial operations in APAC and the U.S. and assembles its audience data from exclusively consumer-consented CRM data, billions of unique mobile signals, and transaction data from multinational credit card companies.

Moreover, AlikeAudience has been operating in the APAC market for the past five years, working primarily with demand-side platforms (DSPs) across the region, and this partnership makes the company’s high-value audience data available on the supply side for the first time.

Brandon Lee, PubMatic’s director of data and audience for APAC, commented, “We believe that working directly with PubMatic gives media buyers greater control over data, along with higher match rates and better campaign performance. Our proximity to publishers and consumers means fewer hops around the ecosystem, making SSPs uniquely positioned to help brands reach audiences at the right place and time.”

Meanwhile, Bosco Lam, AlikeAudience’s founder and CEO, believes that advertisers will benefit from access to PubMatic’s quality mobile app media inventory, coupled with unique audiences created through packaged deals from the supply side.

“Advertisers are seeking to ensure their digital advertising campaigns are privacy-compliant and do not utilise personally identifiable information, and that has been our competitive advantage. We believe brands can reach the right audiences with all of the right data privacy practices in place,” said Lam.

In June 2022, PubMatic has announced that all of its global data centres are now powered by fully renewable energy. The company achieved this significant milestone as it embarks on a comprehensive, multi-pronged sustainability plan by the end of 2022.

Sydney, Australia – Enero Group, a boutique network of marketing and communications businesses headquartered in Australia, has today announced its acquisition of GetIT, the marketing agency in APAC that specialises in B2B technology. The acquisition is aimed at accelerating the growth of the group’s leading global technology communications consultancy Hotwire.

The group said the inclusion of GetIT in the group will help extend Hotwire’s client services towards digital marketing, brand strategy, reputation management, and public relations through its offices in Singapore, India, Malaysia, and Japan.

In April last year, Enero, via Hotwire, also made an acquisition through the buy-out of McDonald Butler Associates (MBA), a UK-based B2B sales agency. 

GetIT, as part of the Hotwire Group, will be advancing the consultancy’s network of global businesses with a combined team of more than 500 employees and 14 offices around the world. 

Speaking to MARKETECH APAC, Anol Bhattacharya, GetIT’s CEO, shared that the two primary motivations for the company to go forth with the acquisition are immediate access to the global platform and the opportunity to expand its service range. 

He also said they “liked the Hotwire/Enero leadership team.” 

“By joining Hotwire, GetIT will continue to drive momentum, particularly in the rapidly advancing markets of South East Asia, Japan, and India. Adding reputation management, brand strategy, and public relations to our sophisticated performance marketing capabilities will deepen our partnership with premier technology companies to help them achieve their business goals, particularly in navigating complex reputation issues, building business-impacting stakeholder relationships, and delivering revenue growth on a larger global scale,” commented Bhattacharya.

Alongside GetIT, the group has also announced its major acquisition of ROI DNA, a leading B2B digital marketing agency, which is seen to further extend and transform Hotwire’s capabilities in North America.

Brent Scrimshaw, CEO of Enero Group, said, “Adding sophisticated performance marketing capabilities in North America and APAC will create a global network of performance marketing expertise. This will unlock further opportunities for Hotwire to deepen [its] partnerships with some of the world’s leading technology companies.”

“Combining world-class communication skills to expedite reputation, relationships and revenue, these acquisitions will continue to accelerate Enero’s growth trajectory and positioning as a creative technology company,” Scrimshaw added.

Meanwhile, Heather Kernahan, Global CEO of Hotwire, commented, “The addition of ROI DNA and GetIT to our portfolio allows us to accelerate our reputation, relationship, and revenue services globally while adding performance marketing to provide a unique marketplace offering, which we believe, is the key to success in the current tech landscape. 

Kernahan adds that the acquisitions mean more than just for the benefit of clients. 

“Enero and Hotwire already attract and retain some of the best talent globally and aim to be the best working experience for all our teams – we are excited to bring this level of commitment to the whole employee to the ROI DNA and GetIT teams,” she said. 

The acquisition of GetIT will launch Hotwire’s owned office network across Asia, including Singapore, India, Malaysia, and Japan with a client portfolio that includes high-profile tech brands such as AWS, Oracle, Fortinet, Fujitsu, Cisco, Google Cloud and Trend Micro. 

Effective immediately, GetIT will operate as a Hotwire Company, and Bhattacharya and the extended leadership team will be continuing in their current roles. The same goes for ROI DNA which will immediately start operating as a Hotwire Company.