Thailand – WPP creative company Superunion has partnered with Minor Food’s The Pizza Company, Thailand’s largest restaurant group, to develop a dynamic new identity for its Chick-A-Boom pop-up stores and home delivery offer. 

The new brand’s symbol, a non-binary mascot, ‘Chickira’, is created to celebrate the inclusiveness and diversity of contemporary Thai youth culture and to express the story of a brand where ‘everyone is welcome’.

Chick-A-Boom, known for its flavourful sauce and crispy fried chicken, has launched 15 pop-up stores across the country in an experimental ‘shop-in-shop’ format with The Pizza Company of Minor Food, sharing the space within the nationwide branches and complementing the pizza menu.

Superunion said the launch of the supercharged Chick-A-Boom brand and unconventional mascot, ‘Chickira’, was a deliberate move to disrupt the saturated fast food category dominated by Western brands. The design of Thailand’s first non-binary mascot, ‘Chickira’ aims to celebrate the diversity integral to contemporary youth culture as they shake their way into the hearts and minds of the Thai nation.

Superunion led the concept and name creation, brand identity, mascot and in-store experience design.

Kittichet Sathitnoppachai, AVP of Marketing at Minor Food, said, “We tasked Superunion with developing a brand and mascot that is big, bold and utterly unforgettable and it’s safe to say they delivered that in spades. The new brand identity along with ‘Chickira’ has worked perfectly in-store and equally translates seamlessly into the digital space as we look to expand our presence.”

Sathitnoppachai added, “Thailand has a vibrant and vocal LGBTQ community, and a reputation for its awareness of gender, inclusivity, and equality. Chickira was created to ‘ruffle feathers’ in the fast food category and change the game among traditional fast food mascots, most of which are predictable, male and tired.” 

Korrakot Kulkraisri, senior brand strategist at Superunion Thailand, commented, “The fast food landscape in Thailand has taken an enormous hit from the pandemic. Brands not only need to constantly present themselves online and provide seamless in-store experiences, they also have to actively reach out to customers in ways that are meaningful to their lives.”

Kulkraisri added, “Superunion’s core purpose when building brands is to find ideas that create positive and impactful change, and we are proud to bring this energetic brand and larger-than-life ‘Chickira’ to Thailand – a symbol of openness, inclusion, fun and love.”

Bangkok, Thailand – Bidmath, a global programmatic consultancy, has opened an academy for the special training of Display & Video 360 (DV360), Google’s unified platform for programmatic buying.

DV360 is an end-to-end campaign management tool, which aside from media planning and buying, enables advertisers to manage creative development and run measurement for campaigns across display, video, TV, and audio.

The training academy was put up with an aim to increase the adoption of programmatic industry knowledge in the country. According to Bidmath, despite the substantial growth of programmatic advertising in Thailand, there is a lack of deep technical knowledge.

A study by ad tech firm Rubicon Project reflects such observation, having found that 43% of advertisers in Asia are either extremely or somewhat hesitant to switch from the traditional way of media buying through an insertion order (IO) to the more automated mode of programmatic buying. The study also suggested that the single biggest challenge hindering further growth of programmatic advertising budgets is a lack of understanding and appropriate skills to effectively plan and execute programmatic ad campaigns.

Three courses will be initially offered, with each focusing on a specific topic within DV360: private marketplace buying, optimization best practices, and the fundamentals. Courses will be offered in Thai, Vietnamese, and English, and will be available both virtually and in-person.

Director of Bidmath Asia KK Sharma said that the lack of understanding and technical skills are slowing advertisers down when considering the adoption of programmatic guaranteed spends and the potential upside for local publishers such as Viu for example.

“By introducing courses in local languages, we hope to see increased adoption of programmatic advertising across Asia, but there is still a long way to go. Courses in Thai and Vietnamese were launched to accelerate growth and reach,” Sharma said.