Lisa Tan, Carousell Media Group’s head of sales, bags an award at the Empowered Women Awards 2023 to be recognised as one of the ‘Empowered Women in Platforms’. The inaugural recognition exercise by MARKETECH APAC aims to laud outstanding women marketing leaders in the industry. 

Lisa’s addition to Carousell’s advertising arm in 2022 is a comeback for the leader as she served the company within an accounts role for three years from 2018 – 2021. Aside from Carousell, she brings with her experience in business development in companies such as ZomWork and EternityX. 

Helping advertisers to be at the right place & time 

Even though Lisa will only be just completing her first year with the Carousell Media Group team, she has already led several notable projects and campaigns that have contributed to the success of the company. One of these is the launch of the Carousell Shopping Ads in late 2022. 

Carousell Shopping Ads is the company’s solution that provides the most relevant ads to consumers via an optimised product feed triggered by the consumer’s search queries on Carousell’s marketplaces, giving an efficient and effective way for advertisers to boost traffic to their e-commerce stores. For this, Lisa developed a sales strategy to expand its reach to clients. 

Lisa is a forward-looking sales leader where she’s able to introduce innovative ideas in order to boost the advertising arm’s sales processes and efforts. Through her help, she’s able to put forth lead-generating strategies such as ‘comparison’ of other existing products in order to illustrate Carousell Media Group’s strengths in harnessing product searches.

Leading a regional sales team 

As head of sales of the advertising arm which has a regional presence, Lisa’s leadership remit, at the onset, is far and wide-reaching. 

One perfect example was when she helped untangle a challenge experienced by the Philippines team, which is hindering them to work smoothly with other sales teams. As a leader, she believes that success is achieved through a culture of innovation and collaboration.

Amidst being based in the company’s headquarters in Singapore, Lisa helped grow the value of transparency and accountability within the regional teams of Hong Kong and the Philippines to ensure the company’s state of business in these markets is on the path to sustainable success. 

An empowered woman willing to pay back 

For Lisa, being an empowered woman leader in the industry would be a lost cause if she’s not able to help build the same level of transformational confidence in other women. With this, mentorship is one of her non-negotaible aims as a leader. 

Her team comprises 70% female employees and as the head of her department, she doesn’t waste opportunities to nurture and take the charge in helping her female staff flourish in their expertise. 

Lisa’s mentorship and support have been especially important in the tech industry, where women are still underrepresented. Her efforts have helped to take steps forward in breaking down barriers and creating opportunities for women to excel and thrive in the industry. 

“Mentoring female leaders is deeply personal to me as I stand on the shoulders of all the mentors who have supported me. I want to help more women leaders to get a seat at the table so that they have a chance to let their amazing work speak for itself,” commented Lisa.

Aside from Lisa, check out who else snared a spot in the Empowered Women Awards 2023 Winners’ list.

The pandemic pushed the e-commerce and recommerce industries to greater heights due to the digital shift in consumers’ shopping behaviours. Thus, the rise of retail media became more evident in the marketing and advertising space — and has since evolved to meet the changing needs of consumers and brands alike.

In the new instalment of What’s NEXT 2023: Interview Series’, MARKETECH APAC sat with JJ Eastwood, managing director at Carousell Media Group, to delve deeper into the retail media space. In the conversation, Eastwood provided his insights on how retail media has evolved, what’s next in advertising, and Carousell Group’s role in it. 

Beginning the conversation, Eastwood shared that the company was made to make it easier for people to sell things faster and vice versa, for buyers to have a more seamless purchasing experience. To this, Carousell’s founders found the solution: bringing best-in-class features in e-commerce into the secondhand or recommerce space. 

After almost a decade, Carousell Media Group was established – the marketplace’s advertising arm – which was targeted at connecting brands and advertisers to tens of millions of active users across Carousell Group’s family of brands.

Watch the full interview with Carousell Media Group’s JJ Eastwood here.

Speaking about the role of retail media in the marketing and advertising industry, Eastwood said that the former’s number one goal is to help brands acquire new customers and increase sales. 

To give an example, he said, “We want to show our consumers who come to Carousell this really nice blend between preloved items and brand new items and give them the choice. And we do that by showing the ads from our advertisers.” He also added that Carousell Media Group helps brands amplify their first-party data strategies.

But amidst all these, Eastwood said that there’s much more to look forward to from the company to trailblaze a continuous evolution in the retail media advertising space – which includes enhancing existing advertising products with machine learning capabilities.

Hear more about Carousell Media Group and retail media by watching the full interview HERE.

Singapore – As the pandemic thrust consumers to rely more on digital consumption, brands had to recalibrate their presence and leverage online channels to ensure they continued to reach their target consumers. This pandemic-induced reality is what gave way to the third wave of Digital Advertising — prompted by Retail Media. 

In the recently concluded conference ‘What’s NEXT 2023: Marketing in Asia Pacific’ by MARKETECH APAC, JJ Eastwood, managing director at Carousell Media Group, dug deeper into retail media and how it became the way to activate digital advertising’s now ‘third big wave’.

Watch the full presentation of Carousell Media Group’s JJ Eastwood here.

If we’re now in the third, where can we date back the earlier ripples? The study by Interactive Advertising Bureau Southeast Asia and India (IAB SEA+India) and Carousell Media Group revealed that the first wave, in fact, started with the search era in the 2000s and then followed by the social era in the 2010s when social media networks took part in digital advertising. Fast forward to 2020 — retail media networks finally took over. 

Retail media networks are classified into digital marketplaces, mass merchant retailers, and commerce intermediaries or delivery providers. To name a few, some known retail media networks are Amazon and Walmart in the US and in Asia, there are Carousell, Grab ads and panda ads.

In his presentation, Eastwood emphasised that five factors are driving the growth of retail media. This includes first-party data, which enables retail media networks to serve customers with relevant advertisements; closed-loop attribution, which helps in better understanding of ads; contextually relevant ads to the consumer; ability to reach relevant audiences at scale; and capability to run full-funnel campaigns. 

However, in particular, the growth of retail media was propelled by sponsored search ads which make up almost 80% of retail media networks’ revenue. 

Eastwood explained, “Those sponsored search ads are as relevant as organic search listings. This is what is at the core of every retail media network, what delivers results and meaningful insights for brands.”

The existence of retail media fills the needs of the brands since there has been a decline in television advertisements and the loss of third-party identifiers, whilst the stores are starting to shift into the digital world.

With this, Eastwood emphasised the retail media trends that emerged, particularly in Asia, where 99% of the brands and agencies plan to increase their retail media spending over the next 12 months. Moreover, according to Eastwood, 70% of advertisers are seeing an improvement in performance from retail media networks over other channels, whilst brands say that they will advertise on a retail media network despite not listing products in that marketplace.

Marketers face many challenges when advertising, such as measuring marketing outcomes, optimising cross-channel campaigns, and removing third-party identifiers, particularly cookies. Eastwood shared how retail media can solve these challenges. 

What’s next for retail media in Asia? Concluding his presentation, Eastwood said, “I think what is gonna happen for the next six to 12 months, particularly in Asia, are more data collaborations. Retailers and brands can come together and enrich each other’s data upon what they know about certain consumer profiles.”

He added, “Through the use of DSPs, Retail media is moving up the funnel into video and digital out-of-home formats. However, through the likes of shoppable videos, retail media will blur the lines between traditional branding campaigns and direct response.”

What’s NEXT 2023: Marketing in Asia Pacific is the inaugural 2-day hybrid industry conference of MARKETECH APAC which was launched last February 28 and March 1 as a culminating event under What’s NEXT 2023. 

More than 200 in-person participants and more than 100 virtual attendees participated in the conference to know more about what’s next in the different marketing disciplines including growth marketing, marketing and technology, retail media, public relations, travel marketing, influencer marketing, customer experience, and many more.

In the virtual conference held on the second day, Eastwood was joined by other marketing leaders from panda ads, Boost, CARSOME, and Hubilo, PrimeCredit Limited and Rentokil Initial amongst others, who also shared their insights about various marketing facets.

Carousell Media Group, the speaker for the keynote presentation, is a proud bronze sponsor of What’s NEXT 2023: Marketing in Asia Pacific. Carousell Media Group is the advertising arm of Carousell Group, which helps brands across Southeast Asia and Hong Kong acquire new customers and increase sales. With tens of millions of active shoppers and hundreds of millions of product searches on its marketplaces every month, brands can connect with consumers through full-funnel campaigns, drive conversions and gain valuable marketing insights.

Singapore — Entravision MediaDonuts, a digital marketing performance and branding solutions platform in Asia-Pacific, has signed a partnership agreement with Carousell Media Group for Carousell in the Philippines and Cho Tot in Vietnam, as their official reseller.

Via the collaboration, brands can advertise on premium real estate in Carousell’s e-commerce space while leveraging its advanced contextual and audience targeting capabilities. Carousell Media Group has a database of 58 million registered users across Greater Southeast Asia through their different platforms namely Carousell, Mudah.my, Cho Tot, OneKyat, Ox Street, and Refash. Additionally, millennials comprise 70% of this targeted group of highly engaged consumers with buying intent.

Moreover, advertisers can leverage Connect, Carousell Media Group’s off-platform solution, to engage consumers across the open internet through millions of other publishers across mobile and web app inventories. Powered by The Trade Desk technology, an independent DSP, this feature allows brands to target and retarget users throughout their buying journey.

JJ Eastwood, MD of Carousell Media Group, said, “As we scale our media offering in the Philippines, we are excited to partner with Entravision MediaDonuts to connect advertisers with passionate communities and sustainability-conscious shoppers.”

Meanwhile, Pieter-Jan de Kroon, CEO of Entravision MediaDonuts, noted, “The Philippine internet economy has reached US$17b, and is expected to grow to US$40b by 2025. Entravision MediaDonuts is in the Philippines to provide on-ground support to all marketers expecting the best-in-class solutions for their digital media campaigns.”

On the partnership with Carousell Media Group, de Kroon shared, “We are very excited to represent Carousell in the Philippines, which will help advertisers achieve superior performance at scale. The digital media landscape is evolving fast in the Philippines and we’re seeing a very interesting opportunity, especially in the e-commerce space.”

Singapore – Carousell Media Group (CMG) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau Southeast Asia and India (IAB SEA+India) have released a new report showing a digital disruption spurred on by the migration of users from offline to online with the new stay-at-home paradigm.

The IAB SEA+India surveyed more than 61,500 respondents who use CMG recommerce platforms in Singapore (carousell.sg), Hong Kong (carousell.com.hk), Vietnam (chotot.com), Malaysia (mudah.my) and the Philippines (carousell.ph).

This year’s regional research establishes the audience profile in each market, explores income, investing and spending habits, how respondents spend time online, streaming services to which they subscribe, their food and grocery shopping habits including use of meal delivery platforms, future purchasing plans, what influences their spending, and how and why they are shopping sustainably.

Regional CEO of IAB SEA+India, Miranda Dimopoulos, says there has been a seismic shift to online led by the Southeast Asia and Hong Kong regions, and on a scale never before seen.

“We’re seeing everything from mundane daily tasks to health and self development being enabled from your mobile device. We also see that CMG’s hyper-engaged audiences are prioritising sustainable shopping to protect the planet,” said Dimopoulos.

JJ Eastwood, managing director, Carousell Media Group, said, “It is also gratifying to see that our Carousell Group marketplaces are now synonymous with sustainability and social ethics, and we have seen a quantum increase in usage of our recommerce marketing platforms over the past two years.”

Eastwood further mentioned that this year’s survey builds upon research from last year, in partnership again with the IAB SEA+India, into Millennials and Sustainable Purchasing. “This year we drilled deeper into respondents’ financial habits which reveals that the largest spending category, both current and future, is local and international travel,” added Eastwood.

Commenting on the regional findings, Eastwood said, “We see a significant swing towards shopping sustainably to mitigate climate change and protect the environment, rather than purely to save money.” According to Eastwood, consumers are prepared to pay more for sustainably sourced or produced food and products.