SOCIAL MARKETING AGENCY OF THE YEAR MINDSHARE SINGAPORE While 2014 was a challenging year for new business with few local clients, the agency managed to win five new clients and increase its revenue by 10%. It also says that its client retention rate is about 95%, with the majority of its top clients having been with the agency for between five to 10 years. Mindshare made several key hires in 2014, appointing two managing partners, one data technologist, a digital performance director and a creative content and activation project manager. It also kept staff attrition low at less than 25%. In 2015, the agency said it would be focused on helping clients answer the bigger questions, and become more adaptive in their approach to marketing while ensuring greater effectiveness to drive business results.
QED CONSULTING
VOCANIC As pioneers, initially in word-of-mouth, and then when social media appeared, in social media, – Vocanic has always been at the forefront of presenting its point of view regarding change, said the agency. Before 2014 this was done via its blog and speaking in public at events run by conference organisers. With the integration with GroupM it now has access to a roster of more than 300 clients and brands and has been running an intensive programme of workshops and internal conferences with both the agencies and their clients. Also, following several senior departures last year, Vocanic made several new hires to its team. Suffian Hakim joins regional creative director André Bose do Amaral, who was hired just last month for Vocanic’s content team. He has taken on the role of content lead. Hakim has been contributing to local titles such as August Man magazine, Time Out Singapore and CNN Travel over the years. He has also worked for agencies such as Ate Media and FYIGROUP. Maryam Mustan comes on board the Vocanic team with a background in content creation for various social media platforms across Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Mustan will be part of the content and community management team as a community manager.
In 2014, it launched “The Loop” – a physical room where clients could make collaborative and adaptive decisions across their paid, owned and earned marketing in real-time. The Loop enables clients not only to plan more adaptively and benefit from more collaborative adaptive decision-making powered by data, but it also enables the shift of media spend quickly to leverage opportunities uncovered by real-time data during campaigns. Aside from The Loop and Mindshare Discovery, it also created its OTF (original thinking framework) war games, a planning and innovation day similar to Facebook’s “Hack” where along with clients, it gives selected media owners the chance to collaborate to crack a client’s marketing challenge or brief. In a first for the industry in Singapore, Mindshare leveraged its scale and relationships with two of the most powerful players in the market (Google and MediaCorp) spending a day working through solutions with the client.
Before 2014, QED focused mainly on social media and digital marketing training. Capitalising on growth, with its roster of experienced marketers, in the second quarter of 2014 QED expanded its servicing offering to include digital management consulting and execution. This shift in focus resulted in explosive growth. In its first year of operations, QED signed several major clients, including Gardens by the Bay, Dolby Asia, CA Technologies, and the Ministry of Communications and Information. It closed the year with a full team of seven on board and welcomed a board of advisors who began their term in 2015. “QED and its principal consultants are regular contributors and commentators on issues relating to the industry and beyond,” said the agency. “We believe that digital and social media are deeply experiential, not just academic, which is why we plan and deliver hands-on training to marketers on topics like content marketing or crisis management in social media, serve on various boards and councils, are moderators for industry events and judges for industry awards. “We intend to continue our efforts as we work towards raising the standards and sophistication of the industry in Singapore and the region. Particularly, Ryan Lim will be pushing the agenda across on a national level as he begins his term on the board of directors at MDA.” One example of its work was to transform Gardens by the Bay’s marketing functions to become more digitally integrated and operationally proficient to handle digital and social media marketing and related initiatives. The more efficient digital marketing processes installed reduced time spent for planning and reporting while sustaining an improvement in engagement and reach performance.
Also key in Vocanic’s plans for 2015 is its technological capabilities. Chief technology officer Shreeniwas Iyer said: “We see growing opportunities in 2015 to deploy advanced technology through products and social campaigns to service the new needs of our clients. We are ramping up our tech delivery functions in response to this demand.”
Owned by: WPP Headed by: Nick Seckold, chief executive officer
Owned by: Independent Headed by: Ryan Lim, Natasha Zhao and Freda Kwok, partners
Owned by: WPP Headed by: Ian McKee, chief executive officer
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