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.”