Year-End 2022 Archives - MARKETECH APAC

The year 2022 saw numerous acquisitions and partnerships amongst companies and agencies across the Asia-Pacific. These acquisitions birthed lots of significant initiatives that geared up their respective industries for 2023.

Amongst these acquisitions, one snagged MARKETECH APAC’s Acquisition of the Year nod: ADK’s acquisition of Rage Communications. The Japan-headquartered company officially announced the acquisition in March 2022, which also came with the latter’s rebranding as ADK Rage.

To share more about the move, we talked to ADK’s Global Operations CEO Yasuyuki Katagi. In the interview, he shared some of the efforts done by ADK after the acquisition and how Rage has elevated the agency, amongst others.

How the acquisition helped ADK boost its solutions and capabilities

According to Katagi, ADK Connect, the digital-first creative and performance agency under ADK Global, has achieved a dramatic increase in its solutions and service capabilities following the acquisition. Moreover, the agency has also boosted its expertise in CX, digital technologies, and CRM through its exchange of talents and knowledge with ADK Rage.

He added, “For our clients, ADK Connect is their go-to for all marketing- and communications-related services, delivering outsized results with local expertise and Japanese marketing DNA. I am happy to say ADK Connect is strongly-positioned in the region’s market today.”

Katagi likewise shared notable initiatives done after the acquisition, such as having an elevated partnership with its network offices in Thailand, Taiwan, and Japan to deliver fully integrated solutions to their clients in CRM and eCommerce. He also added that this integrated strategy increased ADK’s pitch volume and new customer engagements by 25% across Asia in the last year.

On the agency’s growth in other markets

Apart from levelling up ADK’s capabilities, the acquisition was pegged as its milestone entry to the Indian and Australian markets. Truthfully so, ADK Rage’s cutting-edge digital technologies have helped ADK Connect widen the playing field for its business teams.

“Particularly in Australia and India, ADK Connect has blossomed into a full-service marketing solutions provider. I am grateful some key clients have recognised this; as a result, for these clients, we are transitioning our current work to a full-service solution in the coming months,” said Katagi.

Moreover, Katagi shared that the agency has appointed Clíona Manahan as its new general manager in Australia. He also shared ADK is establishing an Asia solutions business that will provide services in countries like China and Japan.

What’s next for ADK?

After all these achievements ADK has reached because of the acquisition, Katagi ensures that there’s more to look forward to from the company. One of them is the establishment of a global solutions centre in India that will leverage ADK’s technology, R&D, and high-quality production skills to provide scalable solutions for its clients.

Katagi added that a digital solutions cluster in Chennai is also in the works. He added, “Furthermore, we are devoted to being on the cutting edge of future technologies and trends, and we see considerable opportunity in areas such as artificial intelligence, CRO, and CX.”

ADK is also looking to develop their leadership teams with the appointment of Rie Otsuka as its chief growth officer and Neville Medhora as its chief transformation officer.

“Overall, we are optimistic that the combination of ADK Connect and ADK Rage will continue to drive growth and success in the ensuing years. We are eager to explore the numerous opportunities that await us,” Katagi concluded.

This recognition is based on the results of Google Analytics on the most-read stories of 2022 with editorial validation on the significance of a leader’s contribution, campaign results, and overall impact.

What good is our social sphere if consumer brands simply remained stagnant in their brand experiences? This is somewhat the proposition that Wayne Deakin, creative lead at British ad agency Wolff Olins, gave in his piece, Don’t believe the hype–rethink brand experience – penned and published here at MARKETECH APAC last September 2022.

There is quite an unsettling but interesting air from the way the ad man painted a picture of branding – indicating as if something is at stake other than just top-of-mind positioning, consumer perception, and loyalty. Nonetheless, Deakin must have struck a chord in audiences, earning it the topmost readership in 2022 amongst all written insights by industry leaders on the platform. This makes the feature our Thought Leadership of the Year.

The think piece that began with a sundry of worldly sorts

Reading into the first few paragraphs of Don’t believe the hype–rethink brand experience, you wouldn’t know that the think piece is indeed about branding. The global principal for design at Wolff Olins begins his commentary by explaining how the world is changing, touching on a sundry of entities such as the architecture of cities, data and AI, and gender identity.

Speaking to MARKETECH APAC, Deakin said that our experience with a brand is “made up [of] multiple interactions and [micro-interactions].”

He further goes, “Brand isn’t a top-down or traditional channel approach but instead thinking of brand as a living breathing ecosystem of parts and how it stretches across all parts of business and operations.”

What Deakin seems to assert is that branding has ceased to revolve solely around marketing tactics, whereas “Marketing is just one piece in how you surface as an identity today.”

He says, “We now need to view [brand-building] in a more open and transparent approach…[the] reality is that [today,] all the actions a brand does need to be viewed as [brand-building] opportunities, as consumers and employees are judging your brand on many fronts.”

Befriending friction and considering principles of atomic design for your branding

Blocks of intelligent insights later, you’d find that Deakin’s main show has yet to come into the feature – and that would be his out-of-the-box and unorthodox three-pointer on how to deliver a brand experience that respects consumers’ unpredictable human nature.

And it goes as follows: One, whereas ‘friction’ is at all costs avoided, he advises making your ‘friend’; two, in the same breath as breaking traditional approaches, he believes speed is not always king; and three, he encourages brands to consider the mechanism of atomic design and adopt the value of composability.

If he were to pick only one and identify the most important amongst the three, he said it would be what he paralleled with science – being composable.

“It seems we are in a recession, so the concept of being composable is something that brands should prioritise for sure,” he said. “Making sure you are armed with a modern design system that is adaptable to different channels and media is something that’s critical in a [recession] when different channels and platforms will be hit in different ways.”

On a less technical note, but still in the name of being ‘flexible’, Deakin also reiterates that it’s about “being a friend, not just a utility.”

“Psychological segmentation has an important role to play in understanding how we can be more human and coherent – showing up in many ways at the right time in the right way.”

On aiming to be a category leader, he said, “That ability to arm your agency and partners with a composable brand that can work in many ways to attract different audiences is essential.”

What brands must focus on this 2023

Deakin’s insight was penned in September 2022, and as of writing, had been a good quarter ago. In today’s fast-paced tech-inclined environment, that could metaphorically be described as light years ago if we’re talking about keeping up with consumers’ ever-changing nuances.

If he would have written the piece today, Deakin said he would not change a thing.

“I wouldn’t change anything I wrote. I would say that [there are] even more reasons to lean into brand experience as we move into 2023.”

“As economic times get tougher, businesses tend to cut costs of course but brand experience is a very useful approach to become more agile and to convey the values, [meaning,] and purpose of your brand quickly, [easily,] and – most importantly – responsively to customers’ evolving concerns and needs in changing times.”

He said that 2023 is all about one thing, and that is building trust. Deakin joins the many leaders today that are advocating to focus more on consumer retention over acquisition.

His two cents on the matter, “It’s not about throwing everything into searching for endless new customers but [instead] [about] making existing customers spend more time, money, and interactions with your brand.”

He looks to BigTech members Apple and Amazon, and opened up about how the said players don’t waste efforts into bringing in new evangelists, but instead, finding more ways to keep those within their business ecosystem inside it.

“If you [were to] do one thing well in [2023,] it should be prioritising the thing that galvanises trust with your primary customers – the customers whose loyalty you can’t afford to lose, especially in uncertain times.”

Deakin concluded, “Spend more energy on building that deeper connection.”

This recognition is based on Google Analytics results on the most-read stories of 2022, along with editorial validation on the significance of a leader’s contribution, campaign results, and overall impact.