Tag: iProspect

Sydney, Australia – Global commerce company Shopify in Australia aims to encourage businesses and consumers to view the brands that have reimagined retail in their own business operations through Shopify’s latest out-of-home (OOH) advertising, made in partnership with creative content agency Chello and media agency iPROSPECT.

Titled ‘Reimagine Retail’, the OOH campaign is best considered as a celebration of Australian brands that have disrupted retail with innovative products and cutting-edge e-commerce strategies – while doing it all on Shopify.

The campaign comes to life when users scan an inbuilt QR code functionality on all assets, giving users an opportunity to ‘meet’ Australian brands who have reimagined retail, and then shop their stores — from anywhere on any device.

“We wanted a campaign which celebrates and showcases local, independent businesses, who are the backbone of Australia’s entrepreneurial economy,” says Robin Marchant, head of marketing for APAC at Shopify.

Initially intended for a pre-lockdowned Australia, Shopify was keen to proceed as a show of support for its more than 100,000 merchants in Australia. Some of Shopify’s customers featured in the visual assets of the campaign include Go-To Skin Care, frank green, MAAP, and Who Gives a Crap.

“At Shopify, we power more than 100,000 Australian retail businesses to launch, run and grow by making it possible to sell to anyone, anywhere. Every day, we’re inspired by our merchants as they reimagine the possibilities of retail, and we can’t wait to see what the next generation of budding entrepreneurs will do with the exciting, evolving retail space,” Marchant added.

Speaking about the campaign, Tristan Velasco, creative director and co-founder at brand and content agency Chello, shared, “Working with Shopify made two things clear to us. One, that they’re merchant obsessed, and two, they help a long list of innovative, Australian brands redefine retail. It was a no-brainer that these brands would be the heart of our campaign.”

He added, “With so many businesses being hit hard by these latest lockdowns, it’s an exciting time to demonstrate the resilience and willpower of Australian brands on Shopify that have truly reimagined retail.”

Meanwhile, Sam Cousins, chief strategy officer at iPROSPECT, commented, “We recognize more and more in our business that every media touchpoint is a commerce opportunity. It’s great to have Shopify on board with us to help drive this forward through our partnership with Chello.”

Said campaign will run out of home, digital out of home, programmatic and digital as well.

India – Dentsu International’s digital-first end-to-end media agency iProspect in India has recently won the digital mandate for commercial banking company AU Small Finance Bank.

AU Small Finance Bank is an Indian scheduled commercial bank that offers banking services such as personal banking, online banking, internet banking, and business and corporate banking, as well as insurance, and loans, among others.

Through the partnership, iProspect will be responsible for handling the overall digital duties for AU Bank including performance and branding campaigns. The agency will also utilize its proprietary tools and solutions to help the brand achieve its digital marketing objectives through innovative digital campaigns.

Commenting on the new partnership, iProspect India’s CEO Rubeena Singh said that they are delighted that their in-depth domain experience of the BFSI sector won them the digital mandate. 

“We are excited to partner with AU Bank and work towards driving business growth and achieving their brand KPIs. We look forward to delivering our best services to the brand through the intersection of brand, tech, media, and communication,” added Singh.

Meanwhile, Uttam Tibrewal, the executive director of AU Small Finance Bank, shared that over the last few years there has undoubtedly been a fast-track shift towards digital adoption among customers. 

“As a tech-led Bank focused on offering customer-centric solutions, we are continuously working to optimize our customer engagement through digital media. The partnership with iProspect India is an important step in that direction which will strengthen our data-driven approach to digital marketing and media planning,” said Tibrewal.

In April this year, iProspect in the United States has also been selected as the global paid media partner of online employment platform LinkedIn. The partnership will see the agency managing the platform’s digital media strategy and buying across all of its business units.

United States – LinkedIn has recently appointed iProspect in the United States, the game-changing digital-first end-to-end media agency by dentsu international, to be its global paid media partner. 

The partnership will see iProspect leading LinkedIn’s digital media strategy and buying across all of its business units. The agency will operate as a media extension to the platform’s digital strategy and operation teams to help execute paid search, programmatic, video, and social, as well as mobile across B2B and B2C products.

Daniele Renda, the managing director and senior vice president of iProspect US, said that this is a transformative moment for LinkedIn, and the agency couldn’t be more excited and honored to be a part of this journey. 

“Our passion for the business and unparalleled depth and expertise with complex, global enterprise brands will help accelerate the brand forward as they continue to gain more international market share. We look forward to working with this fantastic team,” added Renda.

Global – Global media company dentsu international has officially launched anew iProspect, a game-changing digital-first end-to-end media agency.

As part of the improved iProspect, the agency will adopt the ‘Brands Accelerated’ tagline with a reimagined logo coinciding with a new brand identity and website, which was designed with “diversity, equity, and inclusion in mind,” according to the company. 

The new agency will fuse existing capabilities, such as brand building, strategic planning, business intelligence, marketing activation, and performance optimization, as well as the capabilities of scaled services within dentsu international.

The teams for the new iProspect in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, in partnership with over 90 other markets, will be the first agency to offer performance-driven brand building at a global scale.

The company said the new iProspect will focus on how consumers behave in the digital world and apply strategies to real-world scenarios “through a highly connected and creative use of media.” 

The agency’s evolved capabilities will see the merged efforts of 8,000 specialists, operating across borders and in 93 markets worldwide.

Amanda Morrissey, global president of iProspect, commented that they are a new force in the industry, one that draws on decades of expertise carefully brought together to create an agile, scaled, digital-first organization built for the future and delivering today.

“With precision and pace, the new iProspect is able to learn, flex and scale its output to transform a brands’ performance and provide effective business growth; immediately and in the future,” added Morrissey.

Meanwhile, Prerna Mehrotra, CEO of dentsu Media APAC and managing director of Media Group, dentsu Singapore, said that iProspect combines the science behind performance marketing with the art of brand building, saying that growth today lies at the intersection of brand and performance, these two areas are no longer mutually exclusive in the digital era but instead, a necessity. 

“This unrivaled perspective, grounded in deep digital specialism and married with brand-building strategy, gives us the firepower to accelerate brand growth in the short and long term at scale. Having been part of this development, we know that the new iProspect proposition, one that is digital-first end-to-end that offers performance-driven brand building at a global scale, is one that will accelerate growth for our clients in the Asia Pacific region,” said Mehrotra.

Malaysia – 2020 was a challenging year. Across the board, people have had to adapt to new styles of working, adapt to new business strategies, and even changed industries. It would be easy to write off 2020 as a ‘bad year’, but I believe that’s the wrong way of looking at things. In fact, there is a case to be made for 2020 being one of the most important periods in the evolution of digital marketing, all over the globe. Let’s look at the facts.

1. As a direct impact of the lockdown in the pandemic, specifically called Movement Control Order (MCO) in Malaysia, there has been a surge of online activity that was unprecedented. Everyone staying at home with no recourse for outside entertainment meant that users were highly more inclined to spend time online. Think about what that means in terms of your online audience, and compare it with the online audience of, say 2019.

2. With MCO, suddenly there are more people on social platforms than ever before. When users used to consume digital media when they were at home pre-COVID, now entire nations can (and do) consume digital media throughout the whole day. And it doesn’t end at media consumption. Over the course of 2020, users have also taken more decisive action to leverage digital platforms to fulfill consumer needs.

3. Where there have previously been large pools of users that were either unfamiliar or untrusting of e-commerce and online shopping, those groups have largely been converted. Where there was once a common mistrust, there are now entire generations of new believers.

4. Think about it, now your parents or grandparents have become somewhat accustomed to the online shopping process (at the very least, they understand how to browse and then ask for their children’s help with the purchasing process).

5. To illustrate the above point, Facebook recently reported that Southeast Asia as a whole has undergone an approximate 5 YEARS worth of digital ‘education’ in just one year of 2020. This means that what would have originally taken 5 years of digital education to achieve this size of audience with media consumption and e-commerce familiarity has only taken a year because – that’s right – new users have taken the initiative to educate themselves on how the process works. This in turn means great news for all digital marketers.

6. As marketers, in order to sell, you need a market to sell to. For digital, understand that your audience is limited to users that are on the digital platform. To grow your potential audience, an education process must happen to educate users about their ability to conduct purchases online. There is an overwhelming increase in demand for online consumption, and the supply of services is struggling to keep up. The climate is still fresh.

7. So what does this mean for you? Don’t worry, a rising tide raises ALL ships.

8. If you are a small business owner, you can pivot extremely fast in order to scale. You have an expanded audience to collect data and learnings from, and with the right automation tools deployed strategically, you can grow your business at an accelerated rate than you would have been able to just this time last year. Use this knowledge as leverage that you have an exponentially bigger audience to sell now vs. just a year ago.

9. If you are a larger scale marketer for bigger brands, you should also rejoice, as the digital market is bigger than ever, with so much more to play for. There is a bigger slice of the pie to corner, assuming you are willing to experiment with new strategies and pivot as you go along. With the power of scale, your analytics tools will be more important than ever in leveraging the mass amounts of data available. This is the time to run mass A/B testing and test out different audience sets as there is more data than ever, and there is a key opportunity here to actually help shape the market in these early days.

10. Come 2021: NOW is the time to make big, bold moves on digital. This is the time for taking bigger risks, and collecting learnings while the new digital climate is still fresh. For those that refuse to adapt…the market will not wait for you.

This article was written by Fadli Azali of iProspect.

iProspect is a digital marketing agency part of the Dentsu Aegis Network in Malaysia. It delivers integrated marketing campaigns such as performance marketing, search engine optimization, website, and app development, content marketing, as well as social media, and CRM.