Sybil Ng, account director for Asia at Quantcast, is one of the winners of ‘Empowered Women in Tech’. The recognition initiative, Empowered Women Awards 2023, is MARKETECH APAC’s inaugural effort in recognising outstanding female leaders in the industry.
Ng has been with Quantcast for over four years, starting off in the role of senior account manager in 2018. She was then promoted to her current role in October 2020. Prior to her joining Quantcast, she served various roles within companies such as Blis, PHD, and Omnicom Media Group.
Creating business wins for greater good and team growth
For Sybil, being a leader often means stepping out of your comfort zone and rising to change business challenges. This was exemplified when she led IOPEX project within Quantcast, and helped out in building the entire workflow migration process, built job descriptions for support candidates and worked closely with HR to interview, and recruited the best-suited candidates to support this initiative.
Moreover, she has worked closely with senior APAC leadership and sought to identify challenges that the account management team faced on a daily basis that prevented them from working more strategically and spending more time with clients.
As a core part of her team’s remit, Sybil has led them to retain revenue which has to date accounted for at least 65% of the region’s revenue. This number has grown steadily to the 80% range during her tenure with Quantcast.
Lastly, she has helped to drive the recovery of revenue from travel and hospitality clients through proactive outreach initiatives and excellent client management. With this, she has achieved a 92% year-on-year account retention within the portfolio she manages.
Building and solidifying team culture during a time of uncertainty
With 2023 entering into a year of recession, the media industry in general faced instability internally and externally. Seeing this trend, Sybil immediately took steps to make sure her team of aspiring future leaders were well-equipped to navigate the challenges ahead while keeping them motivated and optimistic about the direction of the company and industry.
Some of these strategic steps included savant leadership and maintaining an open-door policy to team members, empowering team members to build their own brand profile, and playing coach and cheerleader to team members.
She is also readily available in sharing and collaborating with team members from other Quantcast offices globally to find solutions to challenges – a great example is helping teams troubleshoot with their offshoring initiatives given the proven success they had in Asia.
In terms of fostering cross-region sharing to help team members, she is eager in sharing and amplify team wins across APAC and beyond to help facilitate client- and vertical-level learning sharing. For her, the amplification of APAC wins has led to global teams in EMEA and NA being able to open up conversations with the same clients in their respective markets, unlocking new business wins for Quantcast.
Tying in her passion for learning and guidance through high involvement
For Sybil, she aspires to become a mentor and guide in the media industry, understanding that this field has a growing knowledge gap and that there’s no educational curriculum that teaches individuals everything they need to know about the industry.
To start with, she is an active contributor and committee member of various industry boards such as the IAB SEA + India, Programmatic Pioneers, and IAB Hong Kong. Moreover, she is also a mentor for aspiring undergraduates looking to start a career in the media industry at her alma mater – Singapore Management University -as well as a peer mentor within Quantcast APAC, paired with aspiring future leaders within the organisation.
Sybil notes that she has also taken proactive steps to get to know the goals and aspirations of each individual and work closely with other supporting functions such as marketing and HR to help elevate and push team members in areas they’ve identified they would like to grow and develop in.
“Women should support women’ – I heartily disagree with this. It should be ‘people support people’ because this is when you can be your most authentic self; not determined by gender norms society tells you to adhere to,” she said.
For her, she aims at helping empower her team and equip them with the skill sets to become more prominent in the workplace through confidence-building exercises such as presentation/leadership skills training workshops.
Aside from Sybil, check out who else made it to Empowered Women Awards 2023 Winners’ list.