Tag: Launch

Singapore — Adzymic, a dynamic creative platform, has announced the launch of its Smart Templates solution. The new tool enables advertisers to automate creative production and adaptation across multiple formats and sizes quickly and easily, without compromising on quality and brand consistency.

Smart Templates enables the process of developing customized templates according to the desired interactive functions and layouts required by corporate guidelines. A single master template is first built in HTML5 using third-party tools such as Google Web Designer, where various formats such as static or animated images and videos are supported. The master template is then propagated into multiple sizes with optimized banner layouts using automation, and these can subsequently be reused for different campaigns for the brand. Smart Templates essentially serve as a tool for executing multi-market campaigns or for brands with high campaign turnover.

Bybit, a fast-growing cryptocurrency exchange, is one such early adopter. Since 2021, Bybit has seen a fivefold increase in its user base across more than 160 countries. Today, the exchange serves more than 6 million registered users worldwide and offers them 24/7 support in 16 languages.

By leveraging Adzymic’s Smart Templates, Bybit was able to streamline and shorten production time by managing its marketing assets centrally, ensuring consistency in brand messaging while adhering to the varying creative specifications across media channels.

Additionally, Bybit also tapped on Adzymic’s dynamic creative optimization capabilities to incorporate live data such as cryptocurrency prices within banner ads, thus enabling Bybit with rapid go-to-market deployments essential to its business.

Travis Teo, co-founder and executive director of Adzymic, said, “Smart Templates is the next step in our mission to help brands automate their marketing operations. The emergence of various channels has resulted in the exponential growth of creative formats and sizes required for campaign executions.”

Teo adds, “Our new solution gives brands and agencies the power to transform their existing creative process, ensuring brand consistency while allowing creative variants to be generated for different types of channels – from display banners, videos and social posts to emails and websites.

The Smart Templates solution is now available to all agencies and advertisers in scalable packages, with self-serve options, creative supported packages, or managed services.

Singapore — Mental well-being and online wellness are subjects that the majority of internet users need to be mindful of and informed on. That’s why TikTok, the leading destination for short-form mobile video, has unveiled the second edition of Youth for Good, its flagship educational program that seeks to raise awareness of mental health and cyber wellness issues amongst Singaporean youths.

TikTok joined hands with the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth, Ministry of Education, National Youth Council, and the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) to maximize the reach of the program.

This year’s edition of Youth for Good will be launched in conjunction with IMDA’s Digital for Life Festival, where there will be several in-person workshops led by TikTok Youth for Good creators and non-profit partners on May 21, May 28 and May 29 each morning. They will drive open and empathetic conversations on achieving balanced mental well-being; how online platforms can be used to encourage help-seeking behaviour and provide help; as well as educate on alternative mental wellness boosting therapies.

The second edition will be officially announced on May 22 at a live, youth-led panel during IMDA’s Digital for Life Festival, moderated by TikTok wellness creator and other notable individuals supporting the program. As part of its efforts to empower youths to speak on issues close to their hearts, the panel will discuss how best to navigate the good and the bad in the online world as well as ways Singaporeans can pitch in to build a better and safer digital space for all.

Teresa Tan, head of public policy of TikTok SEA and Singapore, said, “At TikTok, we are committed to building a safe online space, where our users feel empowered to express themselves authentically, learn from others, and speak frankly about important issues facing youths today, such as digital wellbeing and mental health.”

Tan added, “With the support of our partners such as IMDA and our non-profit partners, we hope to continue the momentum from our success last year.”

Simultaneously, Dawn Low, cluster director for digital readiness and digital for Life Programme Office, shared, “We thank TikTok and all partners for joining us in building a digitally inclusive society by organising the workshops at the inaugural Digital for Life Festival, enabling our youths to learn how to use online platforms to amplify the importance of mental well-being specifically in the areas of digital wellness education.”

Until June 5, Singaporean youths aged between 19 and 34 years can apply via the TikTok to join Youth for Good and become wellness educational content creators on TikTok. Participating youths will undergo a specialised training program from June 20 to August 15, 2022.

Seoul, South Korea — SK Telecom (SKT) has announced the launch of its new AI service named ‘A.’ or ‘A dot’ as an open beta version for Android on One Store and Google Play, with SKT currently working on ‘A.’ for iOS and plans to release the service as soon as possible.

‘A.’ embodies SKT’s vision to become a leading AI Service Company that realizes greater value and convenience in customers’ daily lives through warm, human-centred technologies and services.’

Ryu Young-sang, CEO of SKT, said, “We created ‘A.’ as a means to provide customers with the benefits of warm, human-centred technologies in this era of AI. Going forward, we expect ‘A.’ to constantly grow and become a more valuable service with the active participation of customers.”

‘A.’ handles many different tasks on customers’ smartphones and recommends or plays music or video that matches their preferences making it a beneficial time-saving solution.

Built with advanced natural language processing and sentiment analysis technologies, ‘A.’ enables customers to create and enjoy communicating with an AI character that understands them well. The key AI technology applied to ‘A.’ naturally combines daily conversations based on the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 with the handling of specific tasks requested by customers. While having a free conversation with ‘A.’, customers can naturally shift to task-oriented dialogue.

Like other AI apps, ‘A.’ users can create and customize an AI character that reflects their personalities; communicate with the character through conversations or text messages, and ask for diverse information.

Through seamless interconnection with apps like FLO for music, Wavve for OTT, T Map for navigation, ‘A.’ allows customers to conveniently use a long list of services with their SK Telecom T ID. Customers can also send text messages, make phone calls, set alarms, manage schedules, and check daily information like weather, news and stock quotes.

In the second half of this year, SKT plans to add new features to ‘A.’ including ‘My TV’ and games. Other features like English learning, photo management, and concierge/expert will also be added going forward. SKT also plans to expand the features of ‘A.’ through partnerships with other companies.

Philippines — In recent years, there has been a pivotal shift in consumer buying patterns – consumers have started making more important buying decisions on their smartphones. According to a study by Google, mobile searches for ‘best place to buy XYZ’ have increased by 70%, and 59% of consumers mentioned that the convenience of shopping on their mobile device is important when deciding which brand or retailer to buy from.

With this trend, it is crucial for enterprises to keep up and capture a touchpoint with their customers at the right stage in the buying journey. Since smartphones have become an integral part of this journey, enterprises need to expand their available communication channels to include WhatsApp.

MoEngage’s insights-led engagement platform allows enterprises to learn what their customers are looking for on their mobile app or website, use AI to predict what next steps their customers are going to take, and help them automatically send contextually relevant recommendations, alerts, and reminders on multiple communication channels.

Through this collab, enterprises can have personalized communication with their tech-savvy, mobile-first customers on WhatsApp. WhatsApp is used the most by consumers in the age group of 26 to 35 and is present in almost 180 countries.

Another report shows that, while 54% of consumers prefer using WhatsApp to receive shipment status and delivery updates, 50% of consumers use WhatsApp for appointments and to get notifications of upcoming events and 23% of consumers want to receive promotional offers from their favourite brands via WhatsApp.

As more enterprises adopt WhatsApp, the WhatsApp team is improving how businesses can communicate with their customers. For example, earlier enterprises were limited to sending timely notifications, making it difficult to follow up with their customers outside of a 24-hour window. To enable seamless and timely interactions between enterprises and their customers, WhatsApp now supports more types of messages, for example, to let customers know when an item is back in stock. The team is also working on a periodically-updating service available for more types of conversations.

MoEngage is also studying behaviours and how they can integrate personalized messages to keep customers reminded and engaged on their shopping needs albeit with a very busy schedule as long as they consent to it.

Raviteja Dodda, CEO and co-founder of MoEngage, said, “By teaming up with Meta, we aim to bridge the gap between enterprises and their customers by allowing them to leverage insights about their customers, their journeys, and the long-term impact of WhatsApp campaigns on key business metrics like LTV, revenue, retention, and product stickiness.”

Hong Kong — Syfe, a digital investment platform headquartered in Singapore, has announced its launch in Hong Kong. This marks the company’s first market expansion since its founding in 2019. Syfe has gained tremendous success in Singapore and is a trusted brand in Singapore’s growing wealth tech industry.

Dhruv Arora, founder and CEO of Syfe, said, “Syfe combines proven to invest strategies, technology and continuous innovation to deliver financial solutions at a fraction of the cost when compared to traditional institutions.”

Arora added, “We are very excited to bring our successful offering with a strong track record in Singapore to Hong Kong as our first market for expansion. Syfe looks forward to partnering Hong Kongers in shaping better outcomes in life through better investing.”

Meanwhile, Yenson She, head of business development of Syfe, commented, “Culturally, people in Hong Kong have a high tendency to save. With a focus on long-term wealth building, Syfe is now bringing high-quality financial services made affordable and accessible for investors, helping Hong Kongers reach their important financial goals.”

Licensed in Hong Kong under Types 1 in Dealing in Securities, 4 in Advising on Securities, and 9 in Asset Management, and regulated by the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC), Syfe provides investors access to institutional-level investment strategies and advisory services previously only available for the top level of high-net-worth individuals.

The company also offers direct indexing global portfolios for retail investors, exclusively for Hong Kong. The portfolios are classified as Core portfolios, built for one’s essential financial goals, and Themes portfolios, which act as satellite portfolios to complement the Core.

The fast-growing fintech saw a significant four-fold increase in its assets in the first half of 2021. Syfe’s platform and its features are protected with bank-grade security, coupled with two-factor authentication through phone or email for all users. Monies and assets in investors’ portfolios are held in a custodian account through an SFC licensed broker, and any uninvested cash is held in a client account at HSBC Hong Kong, regulated by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority.

Commenting on this, Yenson said, “Starting today, Hong Kongers can participate in investing opportunities available in global markets and leverage Syfe’s curated portfolios to grow their wealth. Having a simple, smart yet powerful digital wealth platform enabling investing at your fingertips will be a true game changer for Hong Kongers.”

Auckland, New Zealand — POP MART, the global culture and entertainment company best known for art toys and collectable toys, has announced the opening of its first New Zealand store in Auckland this April.

Located at Queen Street, the commercial centre of Auckland’s CBD, the two-story site features a range of POP MART toys from their numerous series and of varying rarities.

Justin Moon, VP of POP MART, and president of POP MART International, said, “We are excited to come to New Zealand and open our new store in Auckland, a world-renowned and beautiful city.”

Moon adds, “With our well-designed store, we can connect with local art toy fans and consumers, bringing them a joyful and engaging shopping experience, and sharing the culture of art toys.”

The New Zealand store is the first official POP MART store in Oceania. The company launched two Roboshops, or toy vending machines, and a pop-up store in Australia last year, which proved a hit with local art toy fans. A store also popped up this year in London that marked the brand’s first physical store in Europe. The Beijing-based art toy brand has already expanded into 23 countries and regions across the world.

Shenzhen, China — WeBank, a Chinese digital bank, has launched its new brand ‘WeBank Blockchain’ with an ethos of ‘New Opportunity, New Mission, New Journey’ at a launch conference.

At the launch event, WeBank proposed a new mission of building trusted Environmental and Social Governance (ESG) infrastructure to promote equity and sustainable development for its blockchain technology. Through this, WeBank will construct a trusted foundation for stakeholders engaged in strategies involving government, the business community and the general public.

NanqingLi, president of WeBank, said, “In the past seven years, WeBank Blockchain has accomplished two interim missions and met its goals to realize a technology that is secure, controllable and open-sourced achieving industrial digitalization.”

Li added, “Today, fintech is transforming from merely improving efficiency to promoting equity and sustainable development. WeBank will leverage its advantages in strategic positioning, agile trial-and-error experimentation, dedication to innovation and exploring cutting-edge technologies to promote equity and sustainability with WeBank Blockchain.”

WeBank started to navigate blockchain in 2015. One year later, it co-launched Financial Services Blockchain Consortium (FISCO BCCOS), the first blockchain consortium in China’s finance industry. Since then, driving the blockchain and fintech sector forward has been a core mission for the digital bank.

In 2017, WeBank realized its own secure and controllable blockchain technology and led the open-source development of FISCO BCOS, the financial-grade open-source consortium chain platform. After releasing the source code, WeBank has been actively promoting the application of blockchain for industrial digitalization, further boosting the development of the real economy in China.

Today, the open-source consortium chain ecosystem initiated by WeBank Blockchain along with other parties has attracted thousands of institutions and individual members. It has successfully supported the deployment of several hundred blockchain applications in various industries such as finance, legal and justice, healthcare, and more with more than 200 benchmarking applications for industrial digitalization.

Commenting on the launch of WeBank Blockchain, Henry Ma, executive VP and chief information officer of WeBank, said, “After nearly seven years of rapid development, WeBank Blockchain has completed building the foundation in terms of notion, technology and ecosystem and is ready to embark on a new journey.”

Meanwhile, Hata Fan, deputy general manager of technology development for the distributed business of WeBank and head of WeBank Blockchain, said that WeBank Blockchain plans to accomplish its new mission by driving ESG applications and talent cultivation based on the solid foundation of an open-sourced technology and ecosystem which are summarized as “2 foundations + 2 drives”.

To better promote ESG development, WeBank Blockchain will focus on key technologies used for privacy computing, trusted governance, distributed digital identity and more. It will develop the framework for ESG applications and build an open-source ecosystem promoting quick and efficient implementation of ESG programs. Through an open-source ecosystem, WeBank Blockchain will work with more partners to drive ESG applications and cultivate talent with both blockchain and ESG capabilities, which is expected to cover more than 100,000 training opportunities.

Singapore — Full-service communications agency Redhill has officially launched Redhill Studio, a specialist division offering services for the designing of creative assets and web development. At the same time, the agency has also welcomed Aditya Menon as the division’s business director. He will spearhead the division and enhance Redhill’s broad range of services.

Menon holds an extensive understanding of the marketing and advertising industry having almost a decade of experience. He has extensive expertise in delivering meaningful integrated marketing campaigns having led multiple creative network agencies in India and Singapore namely JWT, Grey and BBDO. In his previous roles, Menon managed high-value clients like Google, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson as well as Singapore-based enterprises like RedMart.

Menon commented on his appointment, saying “Redhill Studio signifies our response to the evolution of communications agencies around the world in raising their competitiveness via full-fledged services. The Redhill Studio team is packed with a diverse pool of expert talent that ranges from graphic designers and video producers to IT specialists – we are ready to act as a one-stop creative and technology production hub to help Redhill solidify and expand our capabilities and offerings.”

Meanwhile, Ann-Marie Eu, COO of Redhill, said that they’re very excited to launch Redhill Studio and bring Menon on board. Eu added that visual and online content are crucial components in integrated communications campaigns.

“More organisations today seek to streamline their vendor engagements with agencies that possess diverse proficiencies that can reliably support the delivery of end-to-end, 360-degree services. We are confident of meeting this need of our clients, backed by a talented team who will be led by Menon, an industry veteran. Redhill Studio will help scale our offerings across markets as we work towards providing a holistic, well-rounded suite of services that cater to any of our client’s communications needs,” Eu said.

Redhill Studio offers services via three key verticals namely brand and design, video development and website creation. Under the first service, the division offers a wide array of services related to branding collaterals like print and packaging work required for client campaigns, as well as production of digital materials, including the pre-and post-production of digital content present in advertising and social media campaigns.

For video development, the studio produces video content that can be used as internal assets or those intended for external activities, alongside producing animations. Lastly, website creation involves streamlining the website development process, as the studio also specialises in coding and customising complex website applications while also simplifying product and user flows to optimise the user experience.

Redhill Studio will lead the agency’s provision of creative services for Singapore government communications campaigns – following Redhill’s appointment to the Singapore Ministry of Communications and Information’s Whole of Government panel of vendors.

Dhaka, Bangladesh — Telecommunications company Banglalink in Bangladesh has unveiled AppLink, a digital services marketplace aimed at connecting Banglalink customers with local developers. Along with providing the customers with convenient purchase facilities, it will open up earning opportunities for the developers.

Local developers can register and get all the necessary tools and Application Programming Interfaces such as SMS, USSD, and billing connectivity on AppLink’s platform to publish and monetize their digital services of different categories such as health, education, sports, among others. Banglalink customers will be able to purchase their desired services using Banglalink’s mobile airtime balance at the Applink website (applink.com.bd/).

Zunaid Ahmed Palak MP, honourable state minister of the ICT Division, said, “Banglalink is known for taking exemplary digital initiatives for the country’s youth. This time, it has developed a digital platform that can encourage young developers to develop apps for our local market. This is an example of how large corporate organizations can contribute to the growth of our IT sector by empowering young professionals.”

Upanga Dutta, chief commercial officer of Banglalink, said that the company has launched AppLink with a two-fold objective; firstly, this new digital ecosystem is to empower local developers with a platform to showcase their talents with the opportunity to earn.

“Secondly, it enables our customers to easily purchase their desired services and apps with complete ease. We are happy to expand our digital service portfolio further through this initiative, and hope to enable young developers across the country through this platform,” Dutta said.

India – Former Webchutney c-suite leaders – ex-CEO and ex-CCO Gautam Reghunath & PG Aditiya – has launched the new creative agency Talented. 

Reghunath & Aditiya were both homegrown leaders at dentsu webchutney, and together they’ve spent a combined 20 years at the agency. In their official launch release, the duo promises to build a creative agency that returns the advertising industry’s focus back to its talent. 

The duo said that they have radical ideas they believe can fundamentally alter the agency business – including employee ownership and stronger skin in the game relationships with clients. 

“We want to build a workplace where what every member of the leadership & its youngest colleagues think and say about the company, are the exact same. Where our actions and policies back up our words and press releases,” the duo said.

The duo emphasised, “When a client chooses us, we want them to know that we’re committed to putting the sharpest, most motivated talent in front of them. How we operate internally is going to play a huge role in making that happen. And at the end of all of this, we just want to do great advertising.”