Marketing Magazine SG - Jan / Feb 2016

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Enter the only agency awards in the region judged solely by client-marketers.

This year, entries are open to ALL agencies.

ENTRY DEADLINE

AOTY 1 MARCH 2016

MARKIES 7 MARCH 2016

For entries and more information, call Bernadine Reyla at +65 6423 0329/+65 97735523 or email bernadiner@marketing-interactive.com For sponsorship opportunities, call Johnathan Tiang at +65 6423 0329, ext: 202 or email johnathant@marketing-interactive.com

www.aotyawards.com/sg

ED’S LETTER ................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Rezwana Manjur, Deputy Editor rezwanam@marketing-interactive.com Noreen Ismail, Journalist noreeni@marketing-interactive.com Editorial – International Matt Eaton, Editor (Hong Kong) matte@marketing-interactive.com Production and Design Shahrom Kamarulzaman, Regional Art Director shahrom@lighthousemedia.com.sg Fauzie Rasid, Senior Designer fauzier@lighthousemedia.com.sg Advertising Sales Johnathan Tiang, Sales Manager johnathant@marketing-interactive.com Ee Kai Li, Account Manager kailie@marketing-interactive.com Erica Loh, Account Manager erical@marketing-interactive.com Grace Goh, Account Manager graceg@marketing-interactive.com Laura Lai, Account Manager laural@marketing-interactive.com Ong Yi Xuan, Advertising Sales Coordinator yixuano@marketing-interactive.com Advertising Sales - International Sara Wan, Senior Sales Manager (Hong Kong) saraw@marketing-interactive.com Events Yeo Wei Qi, Regional Head of Events Services weiqi@marketing-interactive.com Circulation Executive Deborah Quek, Circulations Executive deborahq@marketing-interactive.com

“It’s a trend we see every year,” says those who have been in the marketing industry for a long time, regarding budget cuts in Q1 and Q4.

Every year starts with tight budgets given the way events have unfolded in the economy in recent times; they loosen up somewhere in the middle and tighten again towards Q4 in preparation for the next year. All this thanks to the economic turbulence we have continued to see since 2007.

I know most of you seasoned professionals will be nodding reading this. Perhaps the only certainty about global economies is the current uncertainty.

No stranger to this trend, the marketing and advertising industry seems to have wrapped its head around the expected fluctuations. While on one hand clients are beginning to consider zero-based budgeting for marketing – think Unilever – agencies have started restructuring to get integration right, while continuing to achieve cost efficiencies – think Publicis.

A few things are clear. Budgets will continue to move towards digital marketing which will, in turn, continue to see more integration with traditional mediums.

Social and mobile will dominate marketing plans in organisations where they haven’t already and marketing will continue to become a broader company agenda than just that of a department.

Sales and marketing will inch closer at an unprecedented rate thanks to e-commerce and this will lead to many silos being torn down – between sales and marketing, IT and marketing, and so on.

One other theme seems to be certain.

Competition among traditional ad agencies will hit breaking point this year, given a series of interesting acquisitions we have seen thus far.

PwC acquiring independent Hong Kong agency Fluid and IBM snapping up Resource/ Ammirati – its first acquisition of a digital marketing creative agency all signal towards the new normal. It will be the agencies that will feel the need to innovate more than anyone else in the industry.

In this edition we ask marketers to pen down what they think will be the key themes for marketing this year. The answers ranged from content to mobile to integration to managing personal brands before anything else.

We had fun compiling this edition, hope you have fun reading it too!

Photography: Stefanus Elliot Lee – www.elliotly.com; Makeup & Hair: Michmakeover using Make Up For Ever & hair using Sebastian Professional – www.michmakeover.com

Editorial Rayana Pandey, Editor rayanap@marketing-interactive.com

GLOBAL ECONOMIC UNCERTAINTY: THE NEW NORMAL

Finance Evelyn Wong, Regional Finance Director evelynw@lighthousemedia.com.sg Management Søren Beaulieu, Publisher sorenb@marketing-interactive.com Tony Kelly, Editorial Director tk@marketing-interactive.com Justin Randles, Group Managing Director jr@marketing-interactive.com

Marketing is published 12 times per year by Lighthouse Independent Media Pte Ltd. Printed in Singapore on CTP process by Sun Rise Printing & Supplies Pte Ltd, 10 Admiralty Street, #06-20 North Link Building, Singapore 757695. Tel: (65) 6383 5290.

MICA (P) 180/03/2009. For subscriptions, contact circulations at +65 6423 0329 or email subscriptions@marketing-interactive.com. COPYRIGHT & REPRINTS: All material printed in Marketing is protected under the copyright act. All rights reserved.

No material may be reproduced in part or in whole without the prior written consent of the publisher and copyright holder. Permission may be requested through the Singapore office. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in Marketing are not necessarily the views of the publisher. Singapore: Lighthouse Independent Media Pte Ltd 100C Pasir Panjang Road, #05-01 See Hoy Chan Hub, Singapore 118519 198755 Tel: +65 6423 0329 Fax: +65 6423 0117 Hong Kong: Lighthouse Independent Media Ltd Unit A, 7/F, Wah Kit Commercial Building 302 Des Voeux Road Central, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong Tel: +852 2861 1882 Fax: +852 2861 1336 To subscribe to Marketing magazine, go to: www.marketing-interactive.com

Rayana Pandey Editor

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Check out all upcoming courses here: WWW.MARKETING-INTERACTIVE.COM/MASTERCLASS-SERIES/SG COMING UP Social Media 101 Date: 23-24 February 2016

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CONTENTS

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4 A MONTH IN NEWS A round up of a month of news from Singapore and the region.

16 CAN YOU REALLY PROTECT CREATIVITY? Uncredited creativity is nothing new in the arts industry, but Noreen Ismail says similar things also happen in the agency world.

22 KEEPING KIDS SAFE IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA Kids are all over social media these days and while that can’t be curbed, what should brands and social media owners do to not expose them to inappropriate ads? Rezwana Manjur asks.

24 PROFILE: ISABELLA TAN – CEREBOS’ VP AND GM What’s the language barrier between marketing and senior management? Rezwana Manjur talks to Isabella Tan, an ex marketer, who has risen up the ranks to take on a business leadership role.

28 THE FUTURIST: THE UPSIDE TO THE DOWNTURN Marketers from top-notch organisations share their views on the future of marketing and how to safeguard businesses against the harsh economic conditions that lie ahead.

What is the future of marketing amidst a global slowdown? Rayana Pandey looks at the upside of downturns.

34 HITTING THE ‘MARK’ IN MARKETING 35 THE FUTURE OF MARKETING – CONTENT, PERSONAL BRANDS AND ‘MARKETER ACTIVISTS’ 36 SORRY … THERE’S NO APP FOR THAT 37 A CALL TO RETURN TO BASICS 44 2016: MAY THE (DIGITAL) FORCE BE WITH YOU 48 STOP ME IF YOU’VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE 50 REVISITING ATTRIBUTION

SCAN TO SUBSCRIBE!

16 4 KEY TAKEAWAYS: >> A look into the future of marketing. >> How marketers can better understand senior management. >> Tips to going viral.

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NEWS

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WANT MORE BREAKING NEWS? SCAN THE CODE TO FIND OUT WHAT’S GOING ON IN THE INDUSTRY.

Boost for start-ups Singtel Innov8 launched Singtel Innov8 Connect, bringing startups and Singtel together to create innovative solutions for business challenges faced by the Singtel Group. Through this programme selected start-ups will receive up to SG$75,000 to test and validate their solutions with Singtel.

Successful solutions may lead to commercialisation with the Singtel Group, providing start-ups access to the group’s customer base.

New tool launched Mediacorp has launched Customer360, an audience targeting solution enabling advertisers to reach online audiences on Mediacorp’s digital network more effectively. With Customer360, advertisers have access to more than 100 curated audience segments such as travel, food, health, sports, automotive and finance. The solution taps on Mediacorp’s growing digital engagement across multiple devices. These segments are built from harnessing demographics, interest and behavioural insights across online and offline Mediacorp platforms.

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SPH gets apology The Real Singapore unreservedly apologised to SPH for its copyright infringement. SPH and Yang Kaiheng and Ai Takagi, the couple behind the website, reached an out of court settlement of the copyright infringement suit commenced by SPH in the High Court. The Singaporelisted media group alleged that content from its newspapers had been reproduced on the website without permission between January 2011 and April last year.

Singtel joins up with Netflix Riding on the Netflix wave, Singtel struck an exclusive tie-up with Netflix to give customers promotional offers to access top quality TV shows and movies on the streaming service. Singtel customers stand to get up to nine months worth of complimentary Netflix subscriptions if they recontract or sign up for Singtel’s mobile plan and/or Fibre Entertainment Bundle+.

PropertyGuru makes purchase Online property portal group PropertyGuru has purchased the real estate media businesses of Ensign Media, a publishing company headquartered in Singapore. The purchase includes Property Report, a regional luxury property and lifestyle magazine, and a website that publishes news and insights on such investment destinations.

The acquisition of the Ensign businesses is said to strengthen PropertyGuru’s integrated property media capabilities.

A festive microsite Lianhe Zaobao, the Chinese flagship newspaper of Singapore Press Holdings, launched Z-Shop, a Chinese New Year (CNY) microsite that provides useful information and services related to the festive celebrations.

The microsite is a collaboration between Zaobao Online and Qoo10, one of Asia’s leading online marketplaces.

Z-Shop features an online shop selling CNY products. Apart from shopping, the site is packed with content related to CNY celebrations.

Gardens by the Bay picks Havas Gardens by the Bay appointed Havas Media Singapore as its media agency. The agency was appointed to the business after a pitch process, which involved PHD and incumbent Briq. As the media agency of record, Havas Media Singapore will handle Gardens by the Bay’s traditional media planning and buying, as well as support the brand’s digital media strategy.

Late last year, Gardens by the Bay also appointed Ninemer Public Relations as its PR agency.

SPH’s media business struggles Singapore Press Holdings Limited (SPH) faced yet another quarter of struggles with its media business. While its net profit attributable to shareholders was SG$81.3 million, which is SG$12.0 million or 17.3% higher compared with the same period last year (1Q 2015), revenue for the media business has fallen SG$21.4 million or 8.7% against the first quarter of 2015.

OCBC appoints agency OCBC appointed digital consultancy Nurun as its social media of record, sources confirmed to Marketing. The appointment is effective 1 March for a contract period of two years. The agency will be tasked to handle OCBC’s social media portfolio which includes the bank’s consumer banking services and its annual mass cycling event, OCBC Cycle. Nurun is a digital consultancy under Publicis Worldwide.

New space, new logo Mediacorp unveiled a new logo in conjunction with the announcement of its migration from iconic Caldecott Broadcast Centre in Andrew Road to Mediacorp Campus located at One-North. The new logo is the first change in 15 years to represent an “evolving organisation”. Meanwhile, the Mediacorp Campus, a purposebuilt 12-storey facility, was officially opened by Singapore prime minister Lee Hsien Loong.

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NEWS

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Audi hires Publicis Singapore Audi Singapore picked Publicis Singapore to handle its social media business after a pitch. The two companies have agreed to a two-year contract with an option for a one-year extension. The account was last handled by Zeno Group. Publicis is also the current brand agency for Audi. It has tasked Publicis with strengthening its leading position, while also growing the brand’s presence in the market.

Smart living solutions Singtel developed and released its innovative solutions for smart living. Integrated solutions from Singtel’s consumer arm aim to help consumers live better by managing anything from their homes and vehicles to family health and safety. It is working with an ecosystem of partners, including Samsung and NCS, the IT services subsidiary of Singtel, which recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Singtel to collaborate on smart home solutions.

Long-term partnership DBS Bank and Manulife Financial Asia launched a 15-year regional distribution agreement covering Singapore, Hong Kong, China and Indonesia. As part of the new venture, the duo launched a new campaign starting with a two-page print ad in The Straits Times. As part of the agreement, effective 1 January 2016, Manulife is the key provider of bancassurance solutions to DBS customers in these four markets.

Calling all mid-career Sales Professionals

Join Mediacorp

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Cerebos calls media pitch Health food company Cerebos has called for a regional media pitch for the Southeast Asia markets, sources confirmed to Marketing. The incumbents for the Singapore and Malaysia markets are UM and Starcom Mediavest Group (SMG) respectively. UM was appointed in April 2015 and contracted for a period of two years while SMG’s win was announced in January 2015. The pitch covers the Southeast Asian markets.

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StarHub launches media review StarHub has launched a media review. StarHub also reached out to other media agencies for the review. It appointed marketing analytics agency Ebiquity to manage the review process.

The incumbent on the account is Mindshare Singapore. The agency has been its media agency of record since March 2009. StarHub said: “At this point, we can only confirm that we are reviewing our existing media agency relationship, and we have appointed Ebiquity to manage this process.”

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OCBC splits media account OCBC Bank appointed Maxus as its media agency of record for its consumer banking services, following a closed-door pitch in October 2015. The appointment is effective from 1 April 2016, an OCBC spokesperson confirmed.

The bank’s incumbent Carat will retain the bank’s subsidiary Bank of Singapore media account.

Carat had previously held the accounts of both OCBC and Bank of Singapore for eight years.

6HH D ƂW" Tell us why and send your resume to careers@mediacorp.com.sg (please include “MidcareerSales” in your email subject)

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NEWS

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Augmented reality Singtel TV activated its “Supersized Fun” campaign on Mediacorp OOH’s media digital mall screen at Junction 8. The execution of the campaign included augmented reality (AR) which featured cartoon characters from shows such as Dora the Explorer, Go, Diego, Go! and Frozen appearing on the digital mall screen whenever the public entered the AR booth set-up nearby. The Supersized Fun campaign aimed to allow for an immersive experience.

An intergalactic celebration Disney Southeast Asia and SMRT Commercial brought the epic Star Wars: The Force Awakens fever into the SMRT retail and transport networks last Christmas.

In addition, SMRT Commercial officially opened its latest concept store “Pop In” at Raffles Xchange on 15 December 2015. The popup concept sells popular Star Wars merchandise. Pop In aims to be a pit-stop for commuters and professionals to grab quick and healthy meals.

STB picks TBWA The Singapore Tourism Board (STB) appointed TBWA\Singapore as its global agency partner for integrated creative, digital and production services. The appointment is for two years, effective from 1 April 2016, with an option to extend the contract annually for a maximum of three years. Following the pitch called in August 2015, STB received a total of nine submissions. Roth Observatory International advised on the pitch.

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CapitaLand settles pitch CapitaLand appointed Havas Media Singapore as its media agency of record. As media agency of record for Singapore, Havas Media Singapore will handle CapitaLand’s traditional media planning and buying, as well as support the group’s digital media strategy.

The responsibilities span CapitaLand’s diversified portfolio of integrated developments, shopping malls, serviced residences, offices, homes and real estate investment trusts. The appointment was effective on 1 January 2016.

Going social Financial services company Exness appointed social and mobile agency KRDS Singapore to manage and strengthen the brand’s global social media presence on Facebook. With the appointment, Exness aims to broaden awareness about the brand on the social sphere and to drive user engagement on Facebook and to the website. The content will focus on providing users an overview of the brand and to educate and contribute to the trading environment.

Securing Grey Group Commercial auxiliary police Certis Cisco Security appointed Grey Group for creative and digital duties. The appointment covers the APAC market and comes following a pitch which was called late last year, Marketing understands. The company is tipped to unveil a rebrand set to launch in three markets in APAC which the company deems as its “priority markets”.

Cloudera appoints Ying Data management and analytics platform Cloudera appointed Ying Communications as its regional PR and marketing communications agency for ASEAN and Australia/New Zealand. Ying Communications will provide strategic counsel, thought leadership content creation and regional agency management from Singapore. It is also driving media outreach in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and Malaysia through its partner agency network. Cloudera launched in 2005 and is the market share leader in enterprise Hadoop.

AccorHotels makes purchase French hospitality group AccorHotels acquired Fairmont Raffles Hotels International Holdings, parent of three luxury brands, Fairmont, Swissôtel and the iconic Raffles Hotel.

The acquisition deal followed an agreement signed with the Qatar Investment Authority, Kingdom Holding Company, of Saudi Arabia and Oxford Properties, an Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System. The French group now owns a collection of hotel assets with 155 hotels and resorts, of which 40 are under development.

NTUC partners with Liverpool NTUC Income has partnered with Liverpool Football Club for OrangeAid, the corporate social responsibility (CSR) programme of the insurance co-operative.

Established in 2010, OrangeAid is NTUC Income’s flagship CSR vehicle to help disadvantaged children and youth. The twoyear partnership with NTUC Income involves tapping the club’s regional presence and brand to increase awareness of the programme’s objectives and initiatives as well as to help its fundraising.

Partnership inked Clear Channel has won the exclusive five-year contract to manage the bus-wrap advertising operations of Singapore’s third local bus operator, Tower Transit Singapore, starting from May 2016. The public bus contract was awarded to the Londonbased Tower Transit in May 2015. The contract will see it operate 26 bus services in the Western part of the island starting mid-2016.

Cinema boost for advertisers Mediacorp OOH Media secured advertising spaces in Clementi’s newest mall, 321 Clementi, as well as Jubilee Square in Ang Mo Kio. In addition, advertisers may now engage Mediacorp OOH Media for cinema advertising in WE Cinemas at 321 Clementi. The move sees 12 new advertising spots in 321 Clementi and 33 new advertising spaces in Jubilee Square made available to advertisers who want to reach out to the suburban community.

Boost for OCBC OCBC has partnered with SPHMBO in a move to dominate the multimedia space at HDB Hub. The bank took up the digital LED screen with its top mount branding and wall banner. A prominent OCBC logo was also placed to remind customers of the bank’s brand location on level two. This was accompanied by a wall banner stretching 22m by 3.4m promoting key messages about the OCBC 360 Account and its offerings.

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NEWS

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ZenRooms takes ride with Uber Hotel network ZenRooms has partnered with Uber in Indonesia to offer users a seamless travel and hotel experience. As part of this partnership, Uber riders can get IDR 100.000 off a ZenRooms booking by using the voucher code Uberzenrooms. Meanwhile, at each ZenRooms hotel, customers are given a Uber key card holder that entitles them to an IDR 100.000 discount on their first Uber booking.

Lighting up Hong Kong To unveil its new SUV model, the All New RX, Lexus Hong Kong dazzled passers-by with a set of moving light art shows that turned the city into a gigantic canvas after dark, done by creative partner The Gate Hong Kong. Held over two nights in December, the mobile light art project gave audiences a preview of the All New RX via visual formations.

Hoffman Agency’s new role The Hoffman Agency was appointed by Wearable IoT World, an accelerator company focused on the internet of things (IoT), wearables and other emerging technologies, as its global public relations and marketing communications consultancy. The agency is tasked to spearhead Wearable IoT World’s global branding, media and stakeholder engagement and thoughtleadership programmes to deliver effective brand awareness in the long run.

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Saving the rhino OgilvyOne Beijing joined WildAid in its fight against rhino horn consumption with a new campaign “Nail Biters” launched in China. Rhinos are one of the most critically endangered species in the world, and yet poaching of this dwindling population has been on the continual rise since 2008. “Nail Biters” aims to call out this truth and, in doing so, change the dialogue surrounding the practice.

Brookstone opens in China Brookstone, a US-based speciality retailer, opened its first overseas store in one of the largest shopping centres in Nanjing, China. Brookstone CEO Tom Via said Chinese customers were enthusiastically embracing the first Brookstone China store experience and first-day sales had far exceeded expectations.

The American retailer has also opened three stores within Funtalk Telecommunication’s locations in Beijing and Shanghai. Brookstone will adopt a sales model that features a hands-on interactive shopping experience.

Grey Group buys Korean firm Grey Group has acquired a majority stake in Vinyl-I Co, a creative digital agency based in Seoul, South Korea. Established in 2000, Vinyl-I Co evolved from a web and UX design agency to a full service digital advertising agency which incorporates new media technology to enhance the user experience, especially in the area of interactive design. Vinyl-I Co is managed by CEO Paul Cho and Gil Kim, chief operating officer.

Flamingo heads to Indonesia Flamingo has launched an office in Jakarta to build on its SEA expertise. Heading up the Jakarta office is Adri Reksodipoetro, who is an Indonesian native and outgoing managing director of Flamingo’s APAC hub in Singapore. Before this, he also worked in various insights agencies in Paris and Sydney.

Clients for the Indonesia office include Heineken, Disney, Google and Unilever.

Merging businesses WPP merged its Australian and New Zealand businesses with STW Communications Group in Australia and New Zealand. The merger saw WPP increase its shareholding from 23.6% to 61.5%.

The merged group will become the primary vehicle for WPP in Australia and New Zealand. WPP has been an investor in the company since 1988. The merger continues WPP’s strategy of investing in important geographic markets and to advance “horizontality”, a WPP statement said.

Shell announces job cuts Energy giant Royal Dutch Shell announced it would be making around 2,800 job cuts globally following its takeover of rival BG Group. These job cuts are about 3% of the total combined group’s workforce. Shell is looking to integrate BG’s business into its own. As part of this, Shell is proposing that office consolidation is undertaken where practical in certain locations around the world.

Media shift P&G has moved its media business in North America to Omnicom. The account was previously held by Publicis Groupe’s Starcom Mediavest (SMG) and was one of its top few clients. Reports on global media said the bulk of the account moved to Omnicom with Dentsu’s Carat taking on some parts of the media duties as well.

HOW MUCH DOES THAT COST?

BRINGING THE FOREST TO COMMUTERS

April Group’s PaperOne implemented a six-week OOH creative campaign on the Downtown train to target professionals, managers, executives and technicians and the general public using the line.

April Group created a highimpact thematic concept train to give commuters more than a ride, but a

new immersive experience – a forest in the train. The campaign played a part in extending an invitation to the public to sign up and attend the Clean & Green SG50 Mass Tree Planting at Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park held on 24 October 2015.

The OOH campaign ran from 14 September to 24 October 2015 and cost about SG$55,000.

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NEWS

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Millward’s new solution Market research company Millward Brown launched digital behaviour analytics (DBA), an advanced analytics solution. DBA aims to give businesses near realtime access to actionable insights on brand health and marketing campaign performances, using data from search patterns and social media conversations.

The tool uses changes in online behaviours to give advertisers real-time feedback on the inmarket performance of specific campaigns.

PropertyGuru buys website Online property portal group PropertyGuru Group acquired RumahDijual.com, one of Indonesia’s property websites, for an undisclosed amount.

This came on the back of its latest acquisition of new project marketing solution, ePropertyTrack, in July, following an SG$175 million investment from a strategic consortium of three investors, including Emtek Group – Indonesia’s largest media group – in June.

Cathay Pacific flies high Cathay Pacific launched the second phase of its campaign called “Life Well Travelled” on the SPHMBO platforms at Chevron House and Marina Bay Link Mall.

Cathay Pacific aims to position its brand in a unique space, in terms of personalised service and enabling its customers to travel well as part of living well. This campaign is targeted to frequent business travellers and leisure travellers who will travel with their families and kids.

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Bentley appoints Accelerate Bentley appointed Accelerate Advertising as its regional marketing and PR agency in Asia Pacific, following a pitch. A four-year-old agency, Accelerate focuses on the automotive sector, creating marketing and comms campaigns for brands. The agency will support the client by creating integrated campaigns across channels as well as PR, media planning and management duties.

New acquisition Dentsu Aegis Network acquired JaymeSyfu Group in the Philippines. The JaymeSyfu Group will join forces with Dentsu Philippines to form Dentsu JaymeSyfu. Previously known as DM9 JaymeSyfu, the agency was founded in October 2005 by chief creative officer Merlee CruzJayme and chief client relations Alex Syfu. With GM Ronald Barreiro, the three of them have steered the agency business to phenomenal growth.

Growing its network Through an acquisition, Dentsu Aegis Network welcomed ASPAC Creative Communications in the Philippines to the network formalising the relationship in which the two entities have worked closely together since 2012. ASPAC is now part of Dentsu’s global agency network, but will continue to operate separately and retain its brand identity. ASPAC was founded in February 1975 as ASPAC Communicators by Max B. Ramos Jr.

AUDIT WATCH

A BIG TICKET BUY Regional luxury property and lifestyle magazine and website Property Report was recently purchased by online property portal group PropertyGuru.

PropertyGuru bought the publication from Ensign Media, a publishing company headquartered in Singapore.

The acquisition of the Ensign businesses will strengthen PropertyGuru’s integrated property media capabilities. PropertyGuru’s 14 million users and Property Report’s 70,000 online and offline readers, will have a combined access to PropertyGuru’s 600 monthly research and news articles published in three languages across four markets, and Property Report’s 100plus online features per month.

At present, Property Report’s online site attracts an average of 40,000 visitors every month. It has

Scoot appoints Performics Low-cost carrier Scoot appointed Performics, part of ZenithOptimedia, as its agency of record to manage its global media communications business both offline and online. Performics covers traditional forms of media buys (print, TV, radio and OOH ) on the offline front, and biddable media (digital displays, SEM and programmatic) on the online front.

Shake up for Publicis Publicis Groupe announced a shake-up of its operating model by “breaking down silos” in a move to offer clients a more streamlined service. The restructure aims to simplify the way clients access the range of solutions within the network from PR to healthcare, advertising and media, while at the same time accelerating growth within the Publicis network.

a combined 35,000 followers across all social media platforms. These numbers are currently not audited.

Founded by Terry Blackburn and Duncan Worthington in 2003 and headquartered in Singapore, Ensign began publishing Property Report in 2004. Focusing on high-end real estate in the region, and international investment opportunities for readers, Property Report is a bimonthly print magazine distributed across ASEAN and Hong Kong via newsstands, five-star hotels, airport lounges and direct mail. Existing staff of Ensign will be absorbed into PropertyGuru.

Disney’s new media partner Disney Studios Southeast Asia appointed Dentsu Media as its media agency of record for the company’s regional business, following a pitch. Dentsu Möbius leads the account. The agency is tasked to provide strategy and creative planning, regional coordination and alignment, media planning, buying and reporting for digital, ATL and on-ground execution.

New travel series Qatar Airways extended its commercial relationship with CNN International by embarking on an exclusive international sponsorship campaign of the network’s new monthly travel series, In 24 Hours. The campaign builds on the longstanding relationship between the two companies which dates back to Qatar Airways’ spot advertising first running on CNN International in 2003, and subsequent sponsorships such as CNN Weather and an aviation theme week.

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NEW WORK .................................................................................................................................................................................................................

1 Campaign Guinness Singapore Chinese New Year 2016 Brief Tapping on the Chinese New Year festive season, the campaign aims to reward customers for choosing Guinness beer as their gifts during house visits. The ad highlights the beer’s prominence during the Chinese New Year celebrations in helping families and friends share joy and prosperity. The campaign runs on radio as well as on-ground activations in Singapore until the end of February.

Client

Guinness Singapore

Creative

BBDO Singapore

Media

Starcom Media Group Singapore

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2 Campaign CNY Awkward Moments Brief By creating a series of light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek videos on the various awkward situations Singaporeans usually face during Chinese New Year, Philips hopes to establish an emotional rapport with its consumers by staying relevant to their everyday lives. At the same time, the timely campaign is aimed at showcasing the brand’s versatility across various situations through an entertaining and joyful manner. The campaign will run in Singapore with specifically tailored local context. The series of videos were launched on 25 January 2016 across various Philips social media platforms.

Client

Philips Electronics Singapore

Creative

Iris Singapore

Media

Carat Singapore

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NEW WORK ................................................................................................................................................................................................................

3 Campaign iJourney Brief The campaign aims to encourage Singaporeans to meet their retirement and other financial goals by saving and investing regularly as well as to raise their awareness and understanding of simple, low cost retail investment products. The integrated campaign runs island-wide until 25 February on print, broadcast, OOH, mobile, social, digital and online.

Client

Monetary Authority of Singapore

Creative

Addiction Advertising

Media

Addiction Advertising

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4 Campaign StarHub Chinese New Year 2016 TVC Brief StarHub launched a Chinese New Year TVC to celebrate the spirit of family togetherness. It portrays a young man greeting the wrong family on Chinese New Year, to the confusion of the homeowners. The ad aims to gently remind viewers to visit their relatives more often than the routine annual visits. The campaign runs through until mid-February. It is available online on StarHub’s digital assets, and is also running in cinemas and across all local and cable television channels.

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Client

StarHub

Creative

DDB Group Singapore

Media

Mindshare

SUBMISSIONS PLEASE SEND US YOUR BEST NEW WORK REGULARLY IN HIGH-RES JPEG OR PDF TO BE CONSIDERED FOR THESE PAGES. EMAIL RAYANAP@MARKETING-INTERACTIVE.COM

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2/2/2016 9:15:41 PM

OPINION: AD WATCH/WEB WATCH

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Fajar Kurnia Regional creative director Saatchi & Saatchi Singapore

AD WATCH HOT: Apple – start something new

NOT: Seoul Secret – Snowz

I love the simplicity of the “create something new” integrated campaign by Apple. It’s a beautifully executed product demo. So easy to adopt globally with opportunities to make it feel local. The campaign inspires even non-professionals to create art and Apple even provides free workshops at the stores. A lovely follow up to the “Shot on iPhone 6” campaign. In store, the oversize displays made the Apple stores look like art galleries. Let’s just say I considered buying an oversized tablet and an overpriced pencil two minutes after stepping into the space.

A lot of whitening product ads tap into the perceived insecurities among women in Asia, but this has taken it to the next level. If the ad was a CSR campaign to make women feel more comfortable in their own skin, I would have chosen this as my favourite with a solid five stars. But it’s the complete opposite. So far it has generated buzz for all the wrong reasons. Yes, I do believe there is such a thing as bad PR.

Benson Toh Creative director Tribal Worldwide Singapore

WEB WATCH HOT: uob.com.sg

NOT: mediacorp.sg

Banking. One of my least favourite things to do. So whenever I visit a “virtual branch” (online banking), I would like the experience to be as simple and hasslefree as possible.

Get in and get out kind of mentality.

The UOB site offers a simple navigation bar that is always visible (at the top) no matter where you venture. This makes navigating to where you last left off, a click away. No messy sidebar or complicated back buttons. Besides the four big buttons showcasing the latest promotions and the most immediate queries neatly stacked below it, there are four icons that hide the quick links to your other banking needs. Each category is compartmentalised into clearly marked drop-downs through a simple and clean grid, and although more can be done to make the site aesthetically more appealing, it does get the job done. Not bad for a late comer joining the rest of the banks which have gone ahead with the enhanced user experience.

A new logo, a new office, a new TV commercial with a spanking new website to match.

First look, the site is modern and young with fresh, vibrant colours plucked from the logo. However, navigating this site is quite daunting. Though there are lots of content to engage users, you can’t help, but get lost. The site is multi-layered and it doesn’t help that the side menu doesn’t bring you back to the previous visited page.

Clicking on “rewards” takes you out of the site on the same tab to meclub.sg and if you decide to go back to the main site after spending some time navigating through meclub.sg, you’re better off typing the web address all over again. The mobile site seems to be done in a totally different direction. It’s easier to navigate and the drop-down menu lets you know exactly where you are and somehow it feels like it was given a different brief from the web version. The revamp is as exciting as its TV drama.

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DIRECT MAIL CASE STUDY

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TAKING A SELFIE FROM SPACE An inside-look on how the beer brand spurred transnational participation for the world’s first selfie from space.

Capturing a rare moment: Heineken pushed the boundaries with its latest PR event.

As part of its integrated global Spectre campaign, Heineken created a top secret event very much in keeping with the uber high-tech spy world of Bond.

Once again, Heineken pushed the boundaries of modern technology and took the world’s first ever selfie from space, dubbed “Spyfie”.

To pull this off, Heineken partnered with Urthecast to take ultra HD imagery using its camera on the Deimos satellite, orbiting 600km above the Earth’s surface.

To recruit attendees from Singapore, Heineken targeted prominent media influencers with a disruptive media kit that dramatised the scale and scope of this once-in-a-life-time never-done-before Spyfie experience.

A spy-like polycarbonate hard case was hand-delivered to 180 influential media across

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the island by clandestine figures. Inside the case was a miniature space station drone – the perfect representation of the International Space Station where the super high definition Urthecast cameras were set up to take a selfie of hundreds of prize winners who stood in the middle of the Hoover Dam. The playful and interactive nature of the media kit resulted in our influencers sharing it on their social channels, spreading the word of this momentous Spyfie experience to a wider audience.

This innovative media kit ignited the Spyfie conversation across Singapore, engaging potential winners and generating a PR value of US$277,500 in the process. And ultimately two lucky winners were recruited to take part in this historic selfie from space.

THE MAIL Objective: To recruit attendees from Singapore to witness the world’s first-ever selfie from space.

Target audience Prominent media influencers such as journalists and key opinion leaders.

Results: The media kit ignited the Spyfie conversation, generating a PR value of US$277,500 in Singapore.

Jonathan Cockett Deputy creative director iris Singapore

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2/2/2016 9:14:25 PM

NEWS ANALYSIS

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ADDING NEW LIFE TO FUNAN One of the most iconic malls in Singapore Funan DigitaLife Mall is being redeveloped.

Rezwana Manjur explains the changes to come.

Revamp: Funan hopes to be an aspirational lifestyle destination that will enthral shoppers and retailers.

CapitaLand Mall Trust Management Limited (CMTML) will be redeveloping Funan DigitaLife Mall into an integrated development. This new development, it claims, will be an “experiential creative hub”.

According to the group, the space will now be used to engage the community to incubate new ideas and enable shoppers to “enjoy retail in a technology enabled environment”.

Going forward, CMTML hopes to use the space as a collaborative platform to connect retail, cultural, learning and business opportunities, and play a big part in the rejuvenation of the Civic District.

The mall is expected to close in the third quarter of this year, with redevelopment works commencing soon after and taking about three years. Leading up to the closure, the mall has lined up a suite of events and promotions.

Shoppers can enjoy Funan’s Chinese New Year promotions in January and February, an electronic and gaming expo in March and a mega sale in April. The mall is also planning to participate in the Great Singapore Sale and also run the iconic Funan Anime Matsuri in June.

Jacqueline Lee, head of investment and asset management for CapitaLand Mall Trust Management Limited, said in a statement to Marketing: “We are working closely with our tenants to facilitate a seamless transition which includes identifying spaces in other CapitaLand Malls for them to consider relocating to.”

These include Plaza Singapura, the destination mall for families and friends,

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centrally located on Orchard Road; and Bugis+, the entertainment and leisure extension of the bustling Bugis Junction mall that is directly connected to Bugis MRT station. Other possibilities include the cluster of CapitaLand malls – Westgate, JCube and IMM Building – in Jurong Gateway, Singapore’s up-and-coming largest regional centre.

She explained that with the closure, there would be a revamp of the space to serve future generations of local shoppers and tourists.

Wilson Tan, CEO of CMTML, said the new building on the Funan site would be an “aspirational lifestyle destination that will enthral shoppers and retailers”.

“CapitaLand Mall Trust is constantly looking for ways to ensure our malls remain relevant to shoppers and retailers, as well as to maximise the value of our assets for our unit holders’ benefit. Given its excellent location and the strong potential for an integrated development on this site, we believe the redevelopment of Funan DigitaLife Mall will create the greatest value for our unit holders,” Tan said.

However, concrete plans for the space are yet to be clearly defined. CMTML said in a statement it would “continue to refine the concept” for the new integrated development and share further details in due course.

What is, however, immensely clear, is the retail arena is in need of a revamp. It comes as no surprise that many brands have over the years been shutting their retail stores as rental rates keep rocketing and retail spaces turn into

ghost towns. This problem, is not isolated to Funan alone, but the retail industry as a whole.

One such retailer which has faced this issue first hand is one of the largest IT products and services providers in Singapore, Challenger Technologies. The CEO of the company, Loo Leong Thye, said: “When we first listed on SGX in 2004, our Funan store contributed to 60% of our total group revenue. As of Q3 2015, this number is only 20% of our total group revenue.”

However, because Funan’s redevelopment has been in the works for more than seven years, the retailer has had adequate time to plan for its store’s future. Today, the closure has propelled the group to make a greater push towards a digital retail ecosystem and advance software development initiatives for continued growth.

“The idea of a destination specialist shopping mall is not as relevant as being able to provide a wider range of products for customers to browse on-the-go,” Loo said.

The company can stock 10 times more products online than at its megastore in Funan, creating a mega mall effect for customers to browse and transact on their mobile devices.

Apart from restarting its retail e-commerce engine in 2014 with a mobile-first revamp coming in early 2016, the Challenger Group also announced its foray into a digital lifestyle ecosystem by establishing Challenge Ventures Pte Ltd (CVPL) in the third quarter of 2015.

CVPL invests in digital businesses and services.

But this is not to say Challenger will abandon ship on its retail strategy altogether.

“Our retail strategy has always been and will continue to see us expanding at suitable locations with reasonable rentals,” Loo said.

Moreover, in the past seven years, tourists and customers have also begun shopping at Challenger’s conveniently situated stores in the heartland malls because of the proximity convenience. What was needed for retailers today, said Loo, was to go in a direction where consumers already were.

“Our physical retail stores will evolve to become more experiential, with our brand partners having better concepts to showcase their products’ capabilities.

“They will complement our online store, which will serve customers at their own time – not dictated by a mall’s operating hours. With our mobile-first revamp coming in early 2016, more Challenger customers will switch to shopping with us online.”

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NEWS ANALYSIS

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MOBILE BANKING FRAUD: THINGS TO BE WARY ABOUT Specific malware, posing as harmless ads, is being used to target mobile banking users.

Noreen Ismail says consumers need to be careful of what they download onto their phones.

Not all app updates are created equal. Some are disguised malware waiting to steal private information to make illegal transactions online.

On 1 December, The Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) issued an advisory on a specific malware that has been targeting mobile banking customers on the Android platform.

ABS released a statement urging consumers to “be vigilant when using their smartphones for mobile banking”.

In addition, ABS director Ong-Ang Ai Boon said that since September, about 50 mobile users had fallen victim to the malware, reporting losses of up to several thousand dollars after clicking the ad on a link.

The malware poses itself as a software update for Android smartphones, or as a service for updating WhatsApp. For WhatsApp, the malware takes the form of a pop-up advertisement.

The “ad” urges consumers to tap it and download a new version of the programme or risk losing access to the service. After downloading the update, the application prompts the customer to input confidential information, such as credit card details, which is then used to commit fraud.

Victims have lost up to a few thousand dollars from fraudulent online purchases made by cyber criminals, Ong-Ang said. With m-commerce and mobile banking dominating the digital landscape, would incidents such as these push the mobile industry two steps back?

More than meets the ad Mobile players and banks in particular have been proactive when it comes to robust security measures, but such incidents only highlight how vulnerable consumers still are in the cyber space.

Pierre De Luca, managing director of Mediatropy, explained the problem arose out of the current mobile commerce and advertising ecosystem. Powered mainly by ad dollars spent on ad exchanges, this ecosystem is unregulated with a piecemeal approach to regulating it only surfacing now.

As such, advertisers enjoy a situation where cheap advertising inventory is available.

“However, with the advent of HTML5 formats, there comes trouble. Android systems

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Mobile banking woes: Be careful when updating apps.

are particularly vulnerable due to the flexible nature of the operating system, yet iOS users should not consider themselves untouchables.”

Hacks such as the WhatsApp malware are inevitable and will happen again.

Nonetheless, De Luca does not believe that such hacking incidents will impede the mobile and e-commerce industry – for now. However, the repetition of such events will in the long run affect the growth of mobile transactions.

“Only when that bottom-line is affected will the industry seriously look at solutions. For the moment, I believe that we will continue to enjoy cheap low quality inventory because the demand is there,” he said.

James Hawkins, CEO of Dentsu Möbius, also predicts the mobile industry will go on as business as usual.

“Nothing will halt the pace at which we adopt m-commerce and the rate at which mobile continues to define how, what and where we live our lives (with our mobile device).”

Since mobile devices have become users’ primary connection point, consumers are becoming more comfortable with transacting via this platform.

“Time is short and convenience is paramount, we are all time poor. If we have the opportunity to quickly, efficiently and safely transact we’ll take it,” Hawkins said.

Will consumers be more cautious now?

Perhaps for a while people will be a bit more cautious, but such malware issues have not prevented the e-commerce industry to enjoy steady growth for years, De Luca noted.

Likewise, Hawkins pointed out that to buffer malware scams, industries such as consumer banking, need to consider the security of their

customers as they increasingly use mobile devices for certain transactions.

“But this should not come as a surprise, there will always be scammers, theft and opportunists that are looking to exploit weakness in any system,” he said.

“The brands that can win the trust of their customers on the mobile platform will win. The stakes are getting increasingly higher and it is a race.”

Jeremy Bek, general manager of Isobar Singapore, noted that as malware is not isolated to m-commerce and exists across all platforms, consumers need to be savvy with cyber security as they increasingly engage in mobile activities.

“Malware is increasing looking more and more like official sites and communications, and users need to be extra vigilant in ensuring that the links, particularly if personal information is being requested, are from official sources.”

In general, he does not think that such isolated incidents will impact the confidence of users and deter them from continuing to perform mobile or m-commerce activities.

Meanwhile, ABS advised consumers to take the following precautions: • Secure your smartphone with a password.

• Install system updates to get the latest security features.

• Install applications from trusted sources such as “Google Play”.

• Only click on hyperlinks from messages and emails from a trusted source.

• Visit your bank’s website for more information.

Ong-Ang said: “ABS would like to remind mobile banking customers that smartphones are as susceptible to malware as desktop computers or laptops. Consumers are reminded to download applications only from trusted sources. As cyber criminals’ mode of operations and the malware are constantly evolving, visit your bank’s website for more information, latest updates and malware signs to watch out for.”

The major retail banks in Singapore have seen an increase of mobile banking customers from 1.5 million in 2013 to 2.4 million in 2015, according to ABS.

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2/2/2016 9:10:22 PM

NEWS ANALYSIS

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CAN YOU REALLY PROTECT CREATIVITY? Uncredited creativity is nothing new in the arts industry, but Noreen Ismail says similar things also happen in the agency world.

Artists’ woes: What can the advertising industry do better to protect creativity and not allow people to rip off other people’s work?

Hotel Indigo, a boutique hotel brand under InterContinental Hotels & Resorts (IHG), has lifted an artist’s work without permission. The hotel then reproduced and used the artwork as part of the hotel’s marketing messages to the dismay of the artwork’s creator Richard Lee Xin Li, an architect and illustrator.

Lee stumbled on his uncredited artwork via The Shutterwhale, a lifestyle blog that claims to

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independently review “hotels, loyalty points and travel”.

According to Lee, he was contacted by Master Contract Services, but the matter hasn’t been resolved.

While IHG is the operator of the hotel, the key parties are the developer Eco-id and the contractor Master Contract Services. Lee said: “IHG is quite likely an innocent party in this

incident.” The images bearing Lee’s artwork have since been removed from IHG’s site.

Furthermore, IHG’s vice-president of operations in Southeast Asia, Leanne Harwood, told The Straits Times: “We understand that in the artist’s impression of the mock-up room for the hotel, imagery by local artist Richard Lee was unknowingly used. The owner has reached out to him with apologies and further

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NEWS ANALYSIS

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discussions will be held to ascertain (the) next steps.”

While such instances of uncredited creativity is rampant in the space of creative arts, the issue also extends to the ad world where clients don’t seem to mind recycled creativity or idea theft. According to formul8 managing director, Fiona Bartholomeusz, such instances of reproduced or uncredited art is

are rigged, that is, the client knows who they want to work with and just need to fulfil some numbers for transparency. It also means that they do pick up ideas from other agencies they know they won’t be hiring. Intellectual property sadly doesn’t hold sway with regards to a great idea.”

Are there any creative rights at all?

To better “protect” one’s creativity,

It boils down to working with the people you know and trust.”

Meanwhile, Shaun Sho, creative director of Neighbor, said there could have been a miscommunication issue between Hotel Indigo and Lee where the hotel did not inform the illustrator that his work was used in the mockup stage.

However, since the image was used for the hotel’s publicity and marketing messages, it was likely an infringement issue more so than an incidental occurrence.

“Unfortunately there will always be another sucker waiting to pick up the business. All this means is that we are killing the industry by promoting and encouraging bad behaviour.”

becoming increasingly prevalent. She said that while the reproductions may not reflect blatant copying, some do take creative liberties in changing one or two aspects of an original artwork just enough to “create” a new concept.

“Better yet, you get clients who tell you that their idea (which you proposed to them) was coincidentally something they thought of before they met your agency!

“In practice, we all know that some pitches

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notwithstanding the legal rights that should be automatically conferred to it, Bartholomeusz advised creatives to “vet who you court and what you pitch for”.

She also called for the need to dispense “polite reminders” about IP rights to clients and prospective clients alike.

“Frankly, there is very little agencies can do and we don’t really have legal protection or a governing body that protects our rights.

“For Neighbor, when we present ads and use images created by another photographer for a presentation, we would inform the clients to let them know of the copyrights of the items included at the presentation stage.”

Still, Sho agreed that some clients are prone to recycling designs created for work commissioned for previous years.

He said that to reuse such work, clients should extend the professional courtesy of letting the agency know in advance, as the latter has the right to charge them extra for any additional year of using their original or adapted designs.

Sho highlighted that while many clients are aware of the IP rights associated with artworks, not all would be open to negotiating fairly for original artworks.

“This case may cause a minor glitch for IHG. In my view, it was probably a miscommunication in which the parties can take a more proactive approach to settle it with the illustrator that helps to settle the matter in an amicable manner.”

On the other hand, Bartholomeusz said while it was an embarrassing situation for a global brand, the guilty party would most likely be reproved with a minor slap on the wrist.

“They’ll probably settle by paying the artist a small amount and in a few weeks it will all be forgotten. Remember the incident about a government agency that ripped off a small agency’s creatives and reused it with minor design tweaks the next year and didn’t pay the agency?”

“Unfortunately there will always be another sucker waiting to pick up the business. All this means is that we are killing the industry by promoting and encouraging bad behaviour. In many ways, we only have ourselves to blame.”

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2/2/2016 9:09:43 PM

NEWS ANALYSIS

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SELLING BEAUTY – NOT A BLACK OR WHITE ISSUE Rezwana Manjur reports on the tricky terrain of marketing beauty products.

Beauty in the eye of the beholder: Companies selling beauty products need to remember that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes.

“Just being white wins,” said this Thai ad which has drawn the ire of the public in Thailand and made headlines globally.

An ad by Seoul Secret promoting fair skin through a pill called Snowz shows a model sharing her fear of losing her “whiteness” of skin. The ad shows her skin growing darker until she turns into coal-like blackness.

The company has since apologised for the ad and said: “What we intended to convey was that self-improvement in terms of personality, appearance, skills, and professionalism is crucial. However, we would like to express a heartfelt apology and thank you all for the comments.”

The company has also removed the video clip, related advertisements, and other planned materials to “show responsibility in this incident”.

Take a look at the ad here: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=Gt5OKzofUI8 This is not the first time the Thai market has seen such a backlash over similar ads. In 2013, global brand Dunkin’ Donuts faced huge criticism for featuring a woman in “black-face” make-up to promote a charcoal-flavoured range of donut.

Even in Singapore, a nation which prides itself on being somewhat progressive and cosmopolitan, saw its fair share of drama in the skincare area last year when women’s rights

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group AWARE Singapore slammed Nivea for its latest ad. The spot depicted a modern-day woman caught in awkward social situations due to her dark underarms.

“Apparently having the ‘wrong’ colour of armpit makes you unfit to interact with other human beings. This is supposedly humour – but is promoting shame and insecurity about our bodies a laughing matter?” AWARE has said on its Facebook page.

Skin colour is an issue that has plagued the region for decades with brands such as Fair & Lovely coming under intense fire over the years for embedding the value that being fair skinned is beautiful in the minds of men and women.

In a conversation with Marketing, Robert Gaxiola, executive creative director of manghamgaxiola mcgarrybowen, who works on brands such as Nivea in Europe, said today it was no longer about sidestepping the problem, but rather the advertising industry needed to put an end to the entire issue of fair skinned being the only way to judge beauty.

“Using it in advertising is so inflammatory, and yet we still see it pop up year after year,” he said. Rather than avoid the sensitive areas, the advertising industry needs to “be sensitive to the mistakes of the past and work a little harder to evolve” from the issue “For me as a creative director, it’s about

finding a way forward with the benefit and not showing a comparison of any kind,” he said.

“I do not know the background behind this ad, but it makes you wonder why anybody would ask their agency to do this or sign off on it. There are so many other ways to make your product or benefit glow.”

Ali Shabaz, chief creative director at Grey Singapore, said that between selling a product benefit and offending people was a very thin line.

Everything from a social context to sometimes even a cultural context must be weighed during communication.

Whitening products are in a difficult space.

But many brands have talked about the unique selling point of the product without a comparison to people who are fair or dark skinned.

Communication that talks down to people is not welcome in any category. Least of all in beauty.

Primus Nair, executive director of BBDO Singapore, who previously worked on accounts such as Olay, added that when creating campaigns for products such as these, it’s easy to overly dramatise the perceived negatives.

“In doing this we are often missing out on the emotional positives the product has to offer.

It is important to remember that beauty does come in all shapes and sizes. And while we still need to be culturally relevant, we should keep that top of mind,” he said.

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NEWS ANALYSIS

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INDUSTRY EXPERTS WEIGH IN ON PUBLICIS’ RUMOURED STAKE IN CHEIL Publicis is said to be considering a tender offer for about a 30% stake in Seoul-based Cheil Worldwide, which would make it the single largest shareholder in the agency.

Noreen Ismail reports.

French conglomerate Publicis Groupe is eyeing off a controlling stake in Samsung Group’s advertising agency Cheil Worldwide, Bloomberg reported. The Korean ad firm has a market value of US$1.9 billion.

Publicis is said to be considering a tender offer for about a 30% stake in the Seoul-based Cheil Worldwide, which would make it the single largest shareholder in the agency, the article said. Samsung Electronics and engineering affiliate Samsung C&T Corp own about 25% of Cheil Worldwide, according to data compiled

by Bloomberg.

The French company aims to structure the potential transaction to ensure Cheil Worldwide continues handling Samsung Group’s advertising.

Publicis owns ad agencies, including Leo Burnett and Saatchi & Saatchi. Its previous merger talks with Omnicom Group fell through in May 2014. Meanwhile, in November 2014, Cheil signed a deal to acquire a significant piece of Iris Worldwide, with a view to increasing its stake to 100% over the next five years.

Marketing reached out to Publicis for comment. A spokesperson for Cheil Worldwide told Marketing the company does not comment on market speculation.

If successful, the acquisition will enable Publicis a strong foothold in Korea, further securing its relationship with Samsung in the long run. As for Cheil, such a deal would provide a global network for the Seoul-based agency, known for handling Samsung’s advertising account.

TrinityP3’s managing director Darren Woolley told Marketing Publicis’ offer was not unexpected: “In many ways it is no different to Interpublic Group buying Lintas in 2000. Many agencies that are established with either direct or indirect connections to a particular advertiser will invariably be bought by a holding company, either because it is good business to secure the clients of that agency in the short to medium term or because the agency is struggling with growth and the owners are looking for an option out.”

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Making its move: Publicis Groupe will gain a stronger foothold in Korea if it gains a controlling stake in Cheil Worldwide.

Woolley pointed out the business move could be due to the recent initiative by the South Korean government opening up its advertising market place to more international players.

“South Korea has a number of agency and client arrangements and relationships similar to Cheil and it could be that we see these head in a similar direction with sales to one of the global holding groups.”

Meanwhile, Richard Bleasdale, managing partner for Asia Pacific at Roth Observatory International, views it as a smart, but brave move by the French company, especially

after a tough trading year in 2015 which also saw Publicis unveil a global restructuring of its organisation.

“The move is smart in that Publicis must solidify its global Samsung brand relationship – this move offers that potential and in fact the opportunity for considerable further growth with Samsung. Brave in that, Cheil has a fairly diverse ownership structure currently and is culturally very different to Publicis, so optimising the investment will not be easy.

“In Publicis’s case though, fortune probably favours the brave.”

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4/2/2016 2:28:48 PM

NEWS ANALYSIS

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WANT TO GO VIRAL? THROW SOME CATS INTO YOUR MARKETING MIX No, it’s not Hello Kitty, but we seem to be going kitty crazy nonetheless.

Rezwana Manjur writes.

Cat power: STB is the latest company to jump on the bandwagon of using cats in a video.

Let’s all accept it now. Cat videos have magical powers. And Singapore Tourism Board’s latest campaign video proves this to be true.

The video, which is narrated by an eccentric little kitty called Didi, talks about his fellow kitty peers living all across Singapore, effectively highlighting the various monumental spots across this Lion City. Since its upload onto STB’s Facebook page on 13 January, the campaign has already hit 162,000 views on

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Facebook and more than 3,600 likes. It had more than 5,200 shares at the time of writing.

Cat videos are not new to the world of advertising and media.

In a conversation with Marketing, Don Anderson, regional managing director of social media firm We Are Social, shared some statistics that showed that in 2014, there were more than two million cat videos posted on YouTube accounting for 26 billion views.

Moreover, a study in 2015 by an Indiana

University Bloomington professor suggested that viewing cat videos, people tended to feel more energetic and more positive. So clearly, STB has hit the nail on the head with its felinefriendly video.

“You have to credit the Singapore Tourism Board for trying something a little less obviously travel-focused, instead going the route of exploring local landmarks through the perspective of several ‘celebrity’ neighbourhood cats. It’s quite grass roots and entertaining, but nicely produced all the same,” Anderson said.

He added the video had the right formula to strike a positive chord with all cat lovers in the city, who will no doubt feel inclined to share it with friends.

“Given cats are a universal social theme, it should hopefully also find an audience outside of Singapore,” he said.

James Hawkins, president of Dentsu Möbius, said: “As much as it pains me to admit it, but I actually really enjoyed the video! The simple story being told with the backdrop of the Singapore tourist spots worked well.”

Moreover the story was relatable and “people are sharing this content with their friends, family or work colleagues who are sure to identify one of the traits of the cats to an individual”. This obviously sends this through the roof and into “viral” territory.

However, he was quick to add that he had “no idea as to why cats are the darlings of the internet”.

While it’s often easy to work on a campaign and hope for the best, there are methods to the madness.

The “recipe for going viral” is that a great connection to the audience is needed. Be that a product truth or brand truth that engages.

“Over complicating any story to be told has you at a disadvantage, and therefore, a focus on having a clear and compelling reason to be telling your story is key. A clever way to carry your story, or a fresh take on something really works,” Hawkins said.

Giving the example of a recent SIA campaign handled by his agency, #NoDetailTooSmall,

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which had more than 30 million shares globally, Hawkins said the trick which he followed on that video was to craft a beautiful and easily identifiable tie-in to the brand.

“We knew it was a great idea, it hadn’t been done before and it was immediately relatable for the craft (the time, the effort, the dedication). It was also beautifully simple in its production,” Hawkins said.

Don’t get stuck on going viral While it is easy to get stuck on the term viral, Anderson said that it was common practice at his agency to advise brands to avoid getting fixated on the term “viral”.

“A single online video, even if successful, does not make for a successful brandconsumer relationship. It’s not a conversation – it’s a one-off attempt to get noticed,” he said.

Given the increased congestion of online video content “viral” success is considerably less likely to occur today than, say, five years ago. What brands need to do is generate a mix of always-on content that plays more to the interests of their target audience, while avoiding being too product-centric.

Any conversation that a brand is seeking to have in social should really be about the consumer, not about themselves. Sadly, far too many brands are still focusing on themselves.

Anderson explained the phenomenon was akin to walking into a party and talking only about yourself – if you’re only talking about your interests, your audience will go in the other direction. It’s about relevancy to them, not you.

Why does some content work and some doesn’t?

Ultimately, all great content is about experimenting and persisting and how to appeal to and collaborate with online social communities.

Great content creators don’t take their audiences for granted – they see them more as partners and they listen to them. Their content is often topical, unique and offers the ability to participate through commenting. It elicits engagement. This is something that some brand marketers probably need to get more comfortable with.

Having an established audience base for rapid distribution is also critical, and ensuring that the content is supported with a budget for amplification either through sponsored posts, SEM or other means in enhancing potential reach.

“The surprise element doesn’t hurt.

Marketers need to think about how to consistently cut through the clutter and drop a few surprises in there to get people talking,”

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“As much as it pains me to admit it, but I actually really enjoyed the video! The simple story being told with the backdrop of the Singapore tourist spots worked well.”

James Hawkins — president of Dentsu Möbius

Anderson said. He added that IKEA has been one brand that has been very effective at this in Singapore as it has actually created a sense of “what are they going to do next?” with its social efforts of the past year and a half.

“The brand is playing off common themes, but in fun, quirky and entertaining ways that most of us can identify with,” he said.

But any marketers thinking of trying to replicate the success of the Volvo Trucks’ “Epic

Split” video need to recognise that effort was a year in the making if not more, was supported with a very healthy influencer outreach and amplification budget, and a number of high production value videos leading up to JeanClaude Van Damme’s turn.

In other words, to have a successful content that resonates, you need to have a well-defined content strategy and a plan in hand way before the execution.

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KEEPING KIDS SAFE IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA Kids are all over social media these days and while that can’t be curbed, what should brands and social media owners do to not expose them to inappropriate ads? Rezwana Manjur asks.

Last month, Reuters wrote a blistering article which said that children as young as 13 were being “inundated with daily ads” from the alcohol industry on social media platforms.

According to the article this was despite age-gate technologies social media sites boast.

While the platforms that were explored were Twitter and Instagram, the article was harder on the Facebook-owned photo sharing platform for allowing all underage profiles to be able to follow alcohol brand accounts.

In a conversation with Marketing, an Instagram spokesperson clarified that it had implemented age-gating measures in April 2015 and this was a tool the platform had been working on prior to the research.

“We’re committed to making sure that our platform is safe for young people,” the spokesperson said.

Currently the platform requires people to be at least 13 years old to use Instagram. For sponsored or paid advertisements, Instagram uses its parent company Facebook’s ad serving technologies to ensure that ads will be shown to people who have identified they are over the legal drinking age in their country.

For organic content, when someone tries to access an alcohol brand’s account, Instagram will first use Facebook information to verify the associated age of the Facebook user. If they do not have a Facebook account, the platform automatically shows a dialogue box asking them to confirm their age status.

While there are steps put in place, there are no groundbreaking security measures to protect children from advertising.

Digital proliferation today is at an all-time high and social platforms are morphing at breakneck speeds. Along with that, it is safe to say young teens and adults born in the digital era are far savvier than the basic age-gate technologies put in place by many platforms.

Jamie Lewin, head of strategy at m/six, explained this could be because nascent digital platforms are more concerned with building up their audiences, and hence, try their best to simplify the sign-up processes.

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Taking responsibility: Are social media owners doing enough to protect kids?

Initially, these platforms are most concerned with building up an audience and safety is not their priority.

It’s this later stage which calls for brand safety, the rigour of audience segmentation, and the ability to exclude or target content to specific segments.

As such, they remove as many friction points to getting started as possible, and often forego even asking date of birth. The responsibility later falls on the shoulders of brands and the agencies, which represent and advise them, to hold themselves to the highest standards of safety.

Helen Lee, managing director of ZenithOptimedia Singapore, was of the view that this is, in fact, where agencies needed to step in – to protect the clients’ interests and ensure their ads do not show up in a less than ideal environment.

“While this might sometimes mean additional charges for the usage of brand protection/viewability technologies, most often clients find these a worthwhile investment,” she said.

If you want to jump onto the bandwagon …

Before a brand commits to a communication platform, it needs to understand the relative

strengths of that platform. And increasingly in the digital space that means safety and targetability over scale, explains Lewin.

“In this operating environment, we see a huge tension between brands wanting to stay relevant to younger people and therefore embracing the relative risk of a nascent platform’s approach versus the safer choices of tried and tested platforms.”

While the likes of Yahoo, Facebook and MSN have strong first-party data coupled with the ability to accurately agAe-target, they might not always be the sexiest of platforms with the most engaged audiences. This is an ongoing challenge for clients, but one which can be managed through research and technology.

“While parameters like the audience’s country of residence, device or the network they are accessing the internet can be easily tracked, personal parameters like gender and age are a bit trickier since only social networks capture these data points,” said Prantik Mazumdar, managing partner at Happy Marketer.

For non-social media publishers who do not capture users’ personal data, clients may need to take it one step further and work with the publishers to make estimates about the audience through proxies such as surveys and focus groups.

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The ultimate Customer Experience conference returns 18–19 May With digital, big data and social more central to the marketing function, strategies that stay focused on growing loyalty and engagement are more crucial than ever before. At the heart of this challenge is the customer and our desire to enable deeper relationships with them beyond the transactional. This forms the focus of this year’s programme: ‘Engage & Collaborate.’

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WHAT’S THE LANGUAGE BARRIER BETWEEN MARKETING AND TOP MANAGEMENT? REZWANA MANJUR TALKS TO ISABELLA TAN AN EX MARKETER, WHO HAS RISEN UP THE RANKS TO TAKE ON A BUSINESS LEADERSHIP ROLE AT CEREBOS.

f you grew up in Singapore, chances are you are familiar with Cerebos’ evergreen packaged Brand’s Essence of Chicken bottles. While many of us might have grown up with the concoction being a big part of our dietary supplements, not many of us know the story behind the brand.

In the early 19th century, King George IV’s poor health inspired his royal chef H.W. Brand to create an essence of chicken beverage to boost his physical condition to aid his ailments. After retiring from the royal kitchen in 1835, chef Brand brewed up Brand’s Essence of Chicken for commercial sale in the UK. With the trade routes under the British colony picking up, in the 1920s the chicken essence hit the shores of Asia.

British men and women based in Asia were seen consuming this product in their homes. Since most of the British household caretakers were locals, the product gained popularity in the region for being a health booster.

I sat down with Isabella Tan, vice-president and general manager of Cerebos Pacific, a Suntory Group company, as she narrated the Brand’s story to me. Tan, who looks after Singapore, Brunei and the Philippines for the brand, shared more insights about it.

Tan came from a marketing background. Since joining Cerebos, she has held appointments in both regional and local business units.

Twenty years ago, when Tan first joined Cerebos, she took on the role of marketing manager.

She quickly rose through the ranks and by 2002 she took the role as head of regional marketing services for Brand’s. By 2004, she was promoted to vice-president of regional marketing and was responsible for

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shaping the strategic marketing plan and the CRM strategy for Brand’s business across Asia – particularly in key markets such as Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and China.

Despite being in a management role for nearly five years, marketing clearly is in Tan’s blood. So now that she has a team of marketers under her, what does she struggle with when working with them I ask.

Communication, it seems, is a struggle. Between marketing and management, there is a clear language barrier.

“Marketing likes to dream, which you, of course, need. But you need to come back to earth. Many marketers get so hung up on nice ideas and their story boards that they forget to talk about the value they bring to the business,” she says.

CEOs, CFOs and country managers need hard numbers, not just a beautiful creative concept or idea.

Just like how marketers often study and understand their audiences before a big campaign, the same should be done for management. Simply put, marketers need to think of their management as their audience.

“Do you know what your country managers or CEOs are measured on? What makes them tick? If you are more conscious about how they are measured, you will be more conscious on how you are being measured,” Tan says.

At the end of the day, much like for any campaign, relatability matters.

The same rule goes for your management.

“In marketing you need to keep your feet firmly planted on the ground, while your head is up in the clouds dreaming up lofty, big ideas. Mastering that balance will point us towards valuable ideas as opposed to wild ones.”

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“ARTICULATION IS SOMETHING I HAVEN’T FOUND THAT MANY MARKETERS ARE CAPABLE OF. SAY YOU ARE GREAT AT ANALYTICS, BUT CANNOT ARTICULATE THE PROBLEMS OR ANSWERS YOU HAVE FOUND, IT IS HARD FOR OTHERS IN THE TEAM TO HELP YOU.” This ability to articulate the right points is also an aspect Tan looks out for when she hires. For Tan, two key points are a must when making a hire for the marketing team: curiosity and articulation.

Without harping on the point of curiosity too long, she says a healthy dose is always needed to seek out new ideas, while challenging the norm is also a must.

But articulation is an area many struggle with in the field – be it fresh grads or senior marketers.

“Articulation is something I haven’t found that many marketers are capable of. Say you are great at analytics, but cannot articulate the problems or answers you have found, it is hard for others in the team to help you,” she says.

CHANGING CONSUMER HABITS Nonetheless, today the problems plaguing marketers are many. More and more consumers are moving at lightning speed with their habits constantly and rapidly evolving. Expectations are sky high for brands to meet those needs.

Large corporations are still somewhat sluggish in adapting to this change because of the ritualistic procedures put in place and that’s where nimble start-ups often eat into their business. The threat start-ups pose now is more real than ever.

“Marketers should be afraid that consumers are moving faster than the companies and start-ups are so quick to innovate and meet their needs. The time start-ups take to get their first prototype out, a large corporation is still going through paperwork and through the loops of the corporate structure,” she says.

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Marketers need to work on integrating themselves better in a company be it in product innovation, engineering or the supply chain.

“Consumers are moving faster than companies and marketing has to go beyond just coming up with communication pieces, activities and promotions,” she says.

This is very much unlike when she first started in the marketing field, she reminisces. Tan’s first role in marketing was in a Swiss timepiece company.

Back then, it was a small company and she alone was responsible for marketing. Tan was quickly exposed to the whole breadth of marketing.

“I had to ensure designs were coming up pretty quick and keeping up with trends – be it colour themes, patterns or bejewelled, I was always spotting trends,” she says.

Without an in-house designer team, Tan was often left thinking of ways to respond to those upcoming trends. And that’s where she learnt the need for speed.

“Back in the day, you had to be faster than competitors. Today, you need to be faster than consumers because they are way ahead of even your competitors,” she said. But ultimately, at the end of the day, Tan is a strong advocate of putting the customer at the heart of every function in the company and especially so for marketing.

As a personal philosophy, be it in the role of marketing or management, she believes a company needs to place the customer at the summit of every unit. And that is why customer intimacy has always been a strategic focus for the brand.

“If you don’t know what your customers want, but have the best product in the world, it will just stay as is – a great product. You will not have a compelling proposition to resonate with your audience.”

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4/2/2016 11:50:42 AM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

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“THE MISTAKE MARKETERS MAKE IS TO TRY TO CONTINUE TO DO MORE WITH LESS RESOURCES AND OFTEN END UP SPREADING A REDUCED RESOURCE AND INVESTMENT OVER TOO MANY AREAS AND END UP ACHIEVING VERY LITTLE.’’ Darren Woolley Managing director TrinityP3

2016 has begun on the same note as 2015 for an economy that perhaps matters the most to the world right now – China.

China’s GDP growth figures are just in and they stand at 6.9. While not bad on their own, it is the slowest the giant economy has ever grown in the past two and a half decades.

Although the economic volatility caught most by surprise at the end of 2014, where the last quarter saw a significant dip in spending, it caught more momentum in 2015 when trillions of dollars were wiped off the value of global stock markets, and the Asian stock markets saw the biggest drops since March 2011 – a sharp reaction to a slowing Chinese economy.

And with the latest GDP growth figures, the slowdown has been reinforced. As the market continues Yuan’s devaluation, grappling with plunging foreign reserves and sluggish growth in manufacturing, its ripples will be felt far and wide, especially in Southeast Asia given the close trade ties.

A ZenithOptimedia report said China, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam, which have been categorised as “fast-track” Asia economies, recorded the highest growth rate among all the regions, at 9%, in the global market between 2015 to 2016.

However, China accounts for 74% of ad spend in “fast-track” Asia, “so its slowdown naturally has a large effect on the region as a whole”.

How will this affect marketing budgets and plans for 2016 for brands within China and outside?

For 2016, the marketing budgets have shrunk, but this was already planned into the client budgets as they continued to cut back on budgeting and adjust to a new normal in 2015, according to Amrita Randhawa, CEO of Mindshare China.

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“Planning budgets for 2015 seemed to already have either 0% growth or decline factored in as marketers, too, did not want to have to face the risk of chopping and changing mid year,” she said.

Within China itself, there is an interesting polarity. Large, well-established clients are no longer looking at bullish high double-digit growth unless it is the e-commerce parts of their business. Overall, the industry is eyeing low single digit growth as a target.

“On the other hand, mid-size clients in categories that are niche or growing still have a healthy double digit growth target and are on the path to the achievement of those,” she said.

For global marketers looking at China, it will not come as any surprise the natural reaction (and one we have certainly observed) to the current China market is to pull back investment.

“They are not seeing the growth numbers that ‘widen the eyes’ and as such react accordingly. Instead of ‘optimistic’ investment behaviour, we are seeing a much more cautious approach,” said Robert Sue, deputy general manager of Starcom Shanghai and the head of the luxury and global network client practice for Starcom.

Among industries, high-end luxury will be relatively stable as there are so many intangibles in luxury purchase, said Sue, adding that ultimately consumers will trade-down a level across most categories such as shampoo, clothing, food, cosmetics and so on.

“Chinese consumers are known as some of the most price conscious, going to lengths to secure even small savings/discounts,” he said.

Is it all gloom and doom?

It is a given that in such a situation, there will be much more scrutiny on media investment and the focus will be on making every yuan work harder.

However, according to Sue, the behaviour mirrors that of brands that are seeing negative growth.

“This is strange as brands are still growing here in China and the economy is still growing.”

There is still so much untapped potential, but it’s human nature. When things are not as good as they used to be, even when the new position is still relatively good, reactions are more doom and gloom.

While the wait and watch approach is pervasive, there are also brands who continue to invest in China as the market represents an unprecedented opportunity over the long-term for many different kinds of businesses. Moreover, strategically, it’s not in the best interest of brands to disinvest or slow down aggressively and abruptly.

Echoing this sentiment, KP Unnikrishnan, marketing director for Asia Pacific and Japan at Palo Alto Networks, said in spite of two major stock market crashes recently, China continues to dominate in the technology space both as a consumer and manufacturer.

“B2B companies that consider China a priority market are in it for the long haul and are not likely to make a major switch in their marketing strategies unless they are directly affected,” he said.

There are still a few things going in China’s favour. Capital availability, competitiveness, the regulatory environment, stability, the local market and business climate, as well as international trade, continue to make China a strong business case.

“Specifically for Palo Alto Networks, thanks to the demand and need that we’re seeing from organisations in China to build a strong cyber security infrastructure, it’s in our interest to continue to ramp up our sales and marketing efforts in the market,” Unnikrishnan said, adding that for Palo Alto Networks, it will be going forward and executing its 2016 marketing campaigns as planned.

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He advises that despite the current environment, brands should continue to market in China and uncertainty and challenges should be looked at from a different perspective. A few tips to remember, he said, are as follows: 1. Marketing and selling in China is different compared to other markets in the region and globally.

2. Personalised and customised marketing will be key and will go a long way.

3. Timing is important.

4. Social selling the China way is always preferred.

The impact on media In an evolving market such as China, the media will continue to fragment with digital and mobile leading the way. But within that, the market will see a much greater growth in performancebased media such as e-commerce, search, programmatic and social versus display and online video.

“This is the simple result of brands being more focused on converting further down the funnel,” Randhawa said.

The other space to see continued growth in is content. According to her, already some TV channels’ revenue from content is starting to be at par, if not exceed, traditional ad revenues and the focus now is to bring new programmes which allow brands distinctive integration.

“This will continue given the raft of brands that have seen success with this approach in China in 2014-2015,” she said.

Proliferating social media platforms are another area marketers will be focused on.

“WeChat is one of the key platforms that global marketers should consider investing in, something that we are also planning to do at Palo

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Alto Networks,” Unnikrishnan said. “However it shouldn’t stop there. Even with the boom in digital in China, we expect that marketers will have to continue to develop 1:1 relationships with customers in order to establish a rapport, build confidence and demonstrate commitment.”

Another perspective The knee-jerk reaction most natural to a downturn is cutting spending, but is it the only way to look at the situation?

A downturn will put increased pressure on budgets and performance with marketers being asked to do more (or at least the same) with less.

It can actually be a catalyst for impartially reviewing how you are managing and measuring your marketing. Marketers can more actively demonstrate their value to the organisation, and move to a much more future-focused marketing approach.

Changes in the marketplace also create opportunities to find advantages over the category competitors. While the market may be shrinking, the opportunity is to capture market share so that when the cycle swings back, and it always does, the brand and business is in prime position for growth.

In fact, a big mistake businesses make is to significantly cut their marketing investment.

“The evidence is the brand that maintains their investment are the ones that bounce back the fastest and the most on the upswing,” said TrinityP3’s managing director Darren Woolley.

“The mistake marketers make is to try to continue to do more with less resources and often end up spreading a reduced resource and investment over too many areas and end up achieving very little.

Better to look at reducing the activities to those core areas that will build share and preference and support sales volumes in the short-term.”

Don’t do the same things with less money According to Woolley, if the marketing investment is reduced, it should be reduced in line with cuts in all areas of the business. It is then important to start to review all marketing activities and to eliminate all activities that do not directly support the strategy to deliver growth in market share and brand preference.

“If marketing is required to support sales, then this budget should be allocated as part of the sales budget. What marketers should not try to do is try to do everything they were doing before with less budget. The market circumstances have changed, therefore the strategy needs to be reviewed and the implementation of the marketing plan must be reviewed in view of the market changes.”

Short, mid and long-term views Some common mistakes brands can make in a downturn are a short-term focus, a badly planned budget and an overly cautious/conservative approach to marketing and channels.

The secret is to commit to mid and long-term goals with just as much (if not more) energy and focus – and then set and review short-term goals regularly to help deliver on these, said Richard Bleasdale, managing partner for Asia Pacific at Roth Observatory International.

“While short-term, the likelihood in Asia is for some level of economic downturn, Asia’s mid and long-term fundamentals remain very strong. Businesses, which focus on the shortterm, will never maximise their potential or take best advantage of the environment in which they exist.”

Amid such a global climate, what are the implications of technology and digital on marketing? What are the basics not to be forgotten as marketing moves towards being hyper personal? Marketers share their views in the following pages.

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WHAT DOES 2016 HOLD FOR CONTENT MARKETING IN ASIA? It was definitely an exciting year for content marketing in Asia in 2015. We saw 2015 as the year we spent a lot of time speaking with brands and talking about the why of content marketing.

Any “new” idea takes time to germinate, and going through the period of explaining the why has been critical to help marketing professionals position content marketing within the context of their own business.

As such, we believe 2016 will be all about the “how-to” of content marketing, so it really is an industry on the cusp of exploding in Asia.

However, all of the ACMA board members come at content marketing from slightly different perspectives, so we decided to ask them and our special guest, Edward Bray of LinkedIn, what their predictions were for 2016.

Here’s what they said:

Content marketing will go mainstream with a vast expansion in the number of clients with dedicated content budgets and a serious examination by business leaders of the potential for content to help them achieve their goals.

Editorial calendars will become a standard fixture in every marketing or comms-related department to strategise content creation and a timely and effective distribution.

Video will continue to grow as a way for brands to communicate with their audiences based on in-feed distribution methods and Google’s increasing need for YouTube to generate more revenue growth. There will be more and more very short videos (15 seconds, six seconds) in the attraction phase of the buying cycle – Vine may finally come of age. For every long-form film, clients will demand lots of episodic short-form content to be distributed on social networks to attract interest.

Simon Kearney, CEO and editor-inchief, Click2View

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Brands that really get content marketing will understand two very vital things in 2016 and this understanding will help them rise above the competition.

First – content marketing is not something the marketing team just does. Sure the marketing team will own the content assets and run the campaigns to drive customers to these sites, but for content marketing to succeed within a business, the entire organisation must adopt it.

Content marketing is both tactical and strategic, but it also requires a complete cultural change within business, where you move from talking about me to creating and curating valuable information that improves customers’ lives. It is the essence of being a truly customer obsessed organisation.

Second – content marketing cannot succeed without C-suite buy-in.

This is even more critical in Asia where hierarchy continues to have a massive impact on the culture of how business is done.

The most senior people in an organisation must not only understand what content marketing is, they must also embrace it and lead from the top. The challenge is that many leaders today are used to carefully controlled PR walls, and they need to let these walls down and start having open and honest conversations with their customers and broader communities.

They also need to trust their employees, the reason customers do business with you. This is enormously challenging for leaders in Asia, but it is a change that must happen to be successful.

The businesses that don’t get these two points will become frustrated and believe that content marketing is just more hype.

It is not hype. Building trusted and valued relationships with customers is what content marketing is all about. It’s a change in mindset and embracing it fully will see enormous benefits for businesses. But you must be patient too. It’s not an overnight success story.

Andrea Edwards, head of content marketing and training, Novus Asia

With traditional marketing agencies struggling to hit the rights notes in content marketing, Southeast Asia will see major international brands appointing 100 content marketing agencies of record before the end of 2016.

Major brands are expressing frustration with the approach, ideation and fee structures needed to deliver major “always-on” campaigns being offered by their traditional partners. The requirement to produce scalable ideas that translate across hero, hub and hygiene creative briefs through video, audio, text and graphics is putting established players under pressure. It’s unlikely they will be able to restructure internal resources or build new operational structures fast enough to meet consumer demand.

Experienced, dedicated, existing content marketing companies that have, to this point, played peripheral roles, will scale to fill the gap and will be welcomed at the top table. Senior marketers are no longer looking for award-winning onehit wonders, but are looking for campaigns that deliver consumer experiences across multiple platforms and track the customer journey from awareness generation, through preference to transactions and loyalty at an affordable price point.

Nick Fawbert, managing director for Asia, Brand New Media

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As content marketing starts to gain more traction, we’ll be seeing more companies in Asia create “internal newsrooms” to produce the necessary volume of quality content to keep their online channels fresh and relevant. Overworked marketing managers, meanwhile, will increasingly be turning to staff to act as de facto “reporters” – brushing up their writing skills and coming up with story ideas to feed the content pipeline. At the same time, organisations will be putting the basic plumbing in place to execute their content marketing strategies, creating brand language and tone of voice guides, story guidelines, formulas for blog posts and the like.

Melissa de Villiers, senior writer and editor, Editor Group

“Content marketing will no longer be the sole responsibility of the marketing team. The rise of social selling means that content creation needs to be a collaborative effort between marketing and sales. Organisations that embrace this concept will extend the reach of their content through sales channels and are more likely to achieve sales and marketing alignment.”

A couple of years in the future, chances are you’ll be watching this article, not reading it. And, as it continues its relentless rise, it’s clear that online video is the future of content marketing – indeed, Cisco predicts that by 2017, video will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic.

In turn, this will necessitate massively improved data compression. Get that bit right and video won’t just be the future of content marketing, it’ll be the future of content marketing for every business.

Edward Bray, head of marketing, APAC, marketing solutions, LinkedIn

Henry Adams, founding partner, Contented

Content marketing will become the primary driver and engine for engagement with brand audiences – but only if brands can find areas to play where they can authentically engage and add value to their communities.

Lauren Hendry Parsons, account director, AKA Asia

Traditional marketers beware: your comfort zone is about to be severely disrupted. We’ll see increased pressure on traditional marketing across all forms, particularly online, spurred on by the adoption of ad blockers and consumers’ general frustration with interruptive messaging.

While platforms, publishers and media buyers and sellers will do whatever they can to deter this – to the likely expense of the user experience and their own reputations – the more sophisticated brands will focus on driving real conversations and awareness with audiences.

That will translate to 25% to 35% of marketing budgets being allocated to some form of content marketing investment in 2016, be it thought leadership content and short-form videos on Instagram with a conversion metric attached, to in-sourcing more content practitioners and asset management tools.

It’s going to be a year of deciding which side you’re on if you’re a brand marketer, and if it isn’t the consumer’s side you’ll be called out.

Don Anderson, regional managing director, We Are Social

Clickbait will continue to die a slow, painful death. Not slow enough for our taste!

Timi Siytangco, director, brands and agencies, Outbrain Southeast Asia Conclusion As a collective, the board members of ACMA come at content marketing from slightly different perspectives, but the unifying message is that content marketing is about creating conversations of value with customers and other critical audiences.

Last year was definitely one of massive learnings for businesses in Asia and we’re looking forward to working with innovative businesses in 2016 who are ready to skyrocket into the new world of content marketing.

This article was contributed by the ACMA board.

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4/2/2016 12:57:50 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

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HITTING THE ‘MARK’ IN MARKETING “Everybody has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.” Mike Tyson’s view on boxing aptly underscored the importance of technique and fundamentals. A good parallel for marketing: its future lies not in its next strategy, but in applying the nuances of the craft 24 x 7.

After a career spanning several diverse industries, I define marketing as “creating want”. For decades, marketing has been “overengineered” and driven by media. It is now returning to its core, but with more information and tools than ever before. The future of marketing will be driven by customers: be where the customer is, use the same tools as them and co-create with them.

There are several sensible lists on trends for marketing in 2016. The usual words abound – content, collaborate, social, mobile, engage, integrated, omni-channel. I agree with them.

However, for me, the future of marketing goes beyond these techniques. It is going to be about “hitting the mark” in marketing.

Mindset shift: We typically think of the customer journey as a path to purchase.

However, consuming is no longer isolated. It is an “always on” string of moments converging on the customer’s “path to purpose”.

The design of the experience is paramount, not of the creative. Customers are mobile: always on the go, willing to change their opinions and always connected. Marketing, therefore, has to be omnipresent. It is all about multi – multi-channel, multi-media and even multi-faceted. For example, as concerns around junk food mounted, McDonald’s went beyond adding healthier items or disclosing nutrient information. Its online platform “our food, your questions” took on real questions – 20,000 of them in the first six months alone.

One of the most popular videos on it openly showed how food is “dressed up” for menu pictures to make it look appetising. While there can be questions around the openness, it does reflect a shift in approach, and bringing the customer into the journey.

Anthropological: Marketing is shifting from being flashy and ad-spend driven to humanpowered. We live in the age of “me”. Blending in and conforming have been replaced by overt expression: people literally die trying to take unique “selfies”. Marketing can no longer be everything to everyone. A clear focus on the human personas to target is a must. And then accompany these by clear brand personas.

Cutting through the clutter will mean being innovative and bold. For instance, a few months

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ago, Campbell Soup weaved in pop-culture by evoking Darth Vader in its commercial. It also depicted a same-sex couple and their bouquets were accompanied by a few predictable

“MARKETING HAS COMMENCED THE JOURNEY FROM A COST CENTRE TO DRIVING REVENUE TO ULTIMATELY BEING RESIDENTFUTURISTS’’ Prashant Agarwal, director of innovation, AIA, and managing partner at EDGE LAB

homophobe brickbats – “you make me sick!”

Several supporters jumped into the fray on social media to suggest excellent Campbell soup to nurse the sickness and warm a cold heart. Edgy. Risky. Memorable. Ultimately rewarded.

Real: Brands are now curated with customers – honesty and transparency is key. The world is hyper-connected and people arm themselves with information with a single click. Tangible criteria is table stakes. Marketers must craft compelling narratives to create memorable experiences that drive purchase. Media needs to be earned versus bought.

Microsoft and American Express are two examples of great models in storytelling. At first blush the link between their story and product isn’t obvious. Yet as people identify with the reality they convey, the marketing message sticks. Recently, AIA, a life insurance giant and my employer, used innovative voice restoration technology to tell a powerful story of a “real life miracle”. Using voice samples donated by more than 10,000 people, sound engineers created a restored voice for Eunju Kim, a mother of three, with a speech impediment. Eunju’s story, where she sings happy birthday to her daughter, had nine million hits on YouTube and Facebook in a couple months. It doesn’t attempt to sell insurance. But the celebration of life’s miracles are a fit for a category aiming to take care of those you love.

Knowledgeable: For the longest time, marketing got away with being about creativity and “art versus science”. No longer. Science now drives the art, and marketing must deliver measurable business impact. Data will empower, but also confound: data-mining can offer highly targeted content, but can also create a concern of a lack of privacy.

Facts will rule, and marketers will confidently present fact-based and deep insight around customer motivations and requirements to the organisation. KPIs will be welcomed. The focus on customer intimacy will create a natural convergence for marketing with innovation, and across functions such as sales and technology.

There is no better time than now to be a marketer, and shape its new agenda and importance for the corporation. Marketing has commenced the journey from a cost centre to driving revenue to ultimately being “residentfuturists”. Asymmetry used to be a source of advantage. Marketers have the power to channel their diversity of thought, skills and approach to change this dynamic.

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4/2/2016 4:32:32 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

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THE FUTURE OF MARKETING – CONTENT, PERSONAL BRANDS AND ‘MARKETER ACTIVISTS’ Are you concerned that your marketing doesn’t accelerate sales? Do you worry that your marketing team struggles to make a tangible impact on your business? As you go into 2016 and beyond, you must transform your marketing into a high-octane conversation engine. The future of marketing isn’t about brand awareness. It must power conversations that generate demand.

So how do you create a high-octane conversation engine?

Here are the three gears that power a highoctane conversation engine:

“IT’S NO LONGER ENOUGH TO INFLUENCE CHANGE IN BEHAVIOUR. YOU MUST INSPIRE COLLECTIVE ACTION AND CHALLENGE THE STATUS QUO.” Maneesh Sah, head of marketing, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa, Aon Hewitt

1. Content Brand recognition is no longer enough. Your communities expect your brands to create meaning. So what type of content must you create? According to the book, The Challenger Sale, successful companies challenge their clients with commercial insights that help them to make money or save money. Don’t overwhelm your clients with the features and benefits of your solution.

You must have an investigative mindset to understand your clients’ business drivers. You must create insights that address their pain points and give them a competitive edge. You must challenge your clients to think about their businesses in radically different ways.

Marketing organisations must transform to media organisations. You must create content assets rich with insights. These are white papers, opinion pieces, blog posts, infographics, press releases. People now spend more than 2.5 hours per day on mobile devices. So you must create content that is “glance-able”. An infographic can be consumed quickly. People like to engage with it and share it with their connections.

TED Talk videos have transformed how people educate themselves. You must create more informational videos. Clients love to hear from their peers. Recruit existing clients to participate in your case studies. These content assets need to be amplified via various tools such as events, email, blog, newsletters, LinkedIn and Twitter. Don’t underestimate PR. Use it to add a solid layer of credibility to your message. Consulting firms such as McKinsey and Aon create insights and amplify them to engage with their clients.

2. Personal brands Why must you create a personal brand? A key component of a personal brand is expertise that is highly visible. Research shows that visible experts consistently win more business for their firms. Most clients go online to research suppliers before they make a purchase decision.

Marketers must help their companies develop visible experts for a competitive advantage. You must inspire your subject matter experts to build their personal brands.

How do you create a personal brand?

Expertise coupled with visibility results in

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a strong personal brand. You must amplify content using your company’s blogs and other digital tools. Get speaking slots in external events. Post photos of these events on LinkedIn. Do your subject matter experts take a stand and are known for it? In this connected world, information is freely available. Coach them to have a point of view. If you just provide data, you won’t differentiate yourself. Help them grasp and remember concepts quickly. Codify your insights and communicate in short sound bites as if journalists are quoting you.

Some examples of visible experts are in Aon Hewitt’s blog Insights@Work. (http:// insightsatwork.aonhewitt.com/).

3. Marketer activists It’s no longer enough to influence change in behaviour. You must inspire collective action and challenge the status quo. It’s not enough to just create content. You must spark conversations. You must think like marketers, but act like journalists and publishers.

How do you inspire change?

According to his book on activists titled Market Rebels, professor Hayagreeva Rao says: “The challenge for market rebels becomes how to forge a collective identity and mobilise support by articulating a ‘hot cause’ that arouse emotion and creates a community of members, and relying on ‘cool mobilisation’ that signals the identity of community members and sustains their commitment.” Marketers must create a “hot cause” around which their audiences can rally and engender new beliefs. Marketers must also develop “cool mobilisation” techniques to gain their buy-in and trigger change in behaviour.

In the personal computing movement, the hot cause was the tyranny of the central computer.

The cool sources of mobilisation were hobbyist clubs. The hot cause for marketers now is to turbocharge sales. For this to happen, you must transform the way your organisation shares content with the outside world. The cool sources of mobilisation are content advocacy tools such as GaggleAMP and Dynamic Signal.

The future of marketing is content, personal brands and marketer activists. You must drive these three gears in 2016 and beyond to transform your marketing into a high octane conversation engine.

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4/2/2016 1:01:29 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

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SORRY … THERE’S NO APP FOR THAT On its 30th anniversary, the world celebrated Back to the Future day. Cable news channels debated whether the producers got their version of 2015 right. So if you want to know what the future of marketing may be like, I’d suggest looking at the past for some timeless truths.

Crystal balls? We don’t need crystal balls!

The principles of marketing management have not fundamentally changed since Philip Kotler and Peter Drucker first translated best practice into academia in the 1960s.

But what has changed is the sheer variety of tools we now have at our disposal. However, the best tool is only as good as its user. And the vendor who’s making the fancy PowerPoint presentation convincing you their wonder tool or predictive channel is the bee’s knees is probably the least objective person to turn to for unbiased advice.

There’s no more shock in future shock So what’s the future going to be like? Let’s get the obvious out of the way.

• Next Gen Tech will overtake Now Gen Tech.

And there will always be new bandwagons to jump on.

• Media will continue to fragment. Channels will always get costlier and reach less.

• Big data will overpromise and under deliver.

• Agency planners will needlessly overcomplicate advertising.

• Pundits will prematurely predict the death of ad agencies, newspapers, TV and radio.

• Today’s Millennials will be replaced by tomorrow’s post-Millennials.

• Focus groups will continue to reinforce the familiar and seldom uncover the undiscovered.

• Everyone will continue to confuse each other with more jargon and acronyms which we hear, use and repeat without real understanding. Just like Max Planck’s chauffeur, the ability to quote what one hears doesn’t make one a quantum physicist.

Success isn’t forever. Failure isn’t fatal.

What will not change in this future is the marketing world will be divided as always into winners and losers.

For every iPhone launch, there’s an Apple watch bomb. For every PayPal success, there’s a failed Bitcoin. For every online viral Volvo “Epic Split”, there’s a brand popping up on an undesirable website thanks to programmatic buys. Regardless of which industry you are

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in, I humbly submit the one factor which characterises marketing winners is quite simply: courage. As Drucker pointed out – behind every business success was someone who made a courageous decision.

Warning label Let’s be clear, courage is a double-edged sword.

It’s both a career killer and a turbocharger in corporate land. Courage cannot be learnt in business schools.

There’s no “on/off” switch in one’s DNA code nor an app for it. As such, courage is the one quality that’s sadly missing among many marketing professionals. At its core, marketing management is the art of making strategic decisions to achieve positive outcomes.

Therefore, it takes courage to navigate ambiguity, reject conformity, filter falsehoods, buck convention, trade control for collaboration, take ownership for mistakes and realise that silver bullet solutions do not exist.

Twelve things business schools never teach 1. It takes courage to terminate ineffective legacy strategies and practices.

2. Conversely, it also takes courage to support a tried and proven strategy when consultants call change for “change’s sake”.

3. It takes courage to “double down” on initiatives that can only bear fruit after more than one financial quarter or FY. (Patience is not a common trait among CFOs.) 4. It takes courage to take a leap with the untestable when research says stick to the tried and tested.

5. It takes courage to point out that just because some things can be measured, it doesn’t mean it’s always worth measuring.

6. It takes courage to realise that big data identifies patterns, but not always insights.

(The customer isn’t an IP address, she’s your wife.)

7. It takes courage to know that just because ideas can be content it does not necessarily mean that all content has ideas.

8. It takes courage to reject buzz du jour activities such as content creation, UX and branded entertainment if it doesn’t solve business problems.

9. It takes courage to explain their real value given that “views” and “likes” cannot be booked in the one-company ledger.

10. It takes courage to admit that brand conversations and storytelling are peripheral activities, not a primary business objective.

“THE CUSTOMER ISN’T AN IP ADDRESS, SHE’S YOUR WIFE.” Mark Fong, senior vice-president and head of branding and strategic marketing, City Developments Limited

11. It takes courage to call BS on the latest “black box” digital solution if you can’t explain how it works in plain English.

12. It takes courage to hire small independent ad agencies with special talents over big networks agencies with hierarchies and overheads. After all, didn’t the best SIA campaigns come from a small local shop with no global network to speak of?

No guts no glory.

As a former creative director, ad agency head and now a client, I always believed marketing is, at its core, an intuitive alchemy of imagination and best practices.

In a future where the environment becomes more complex and the pressure to deliver mounts, the more we need marketing professionals with the courage to make bold and considered decisions that will move the business needle.

And that’s something that was just as relevant in 1985 (when Back To The Future was released) as it would be in any future.

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5/2/2016 12:00:16 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

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A CALL TO RETURN TO BASICS When McFly travelled to the future in the 1989 movie Back to the Future II, amazing technology greeted him in 2015 – flying cars, Nike self-tying sneakers and hoverboards.

Predicting the future is a nasty business, as we all know, and we will most likely overestimate what the future holds versus predicting what will evolve or develop over a much shorter time span.

The marketing eco-system pulsates with fresh buzzwords every other season, each trying to outrank the other to become the next “it” word – such as mobile, big data, programmatic, just to name a few.

With many media conglomerates adding new terms to the ever-growing list to describe or sell the same thing, it’s sometimes demanding to just catch up. To all digital media publishers/ owners, it’s at times bolder to call a spade a spade. The future of marketing, as it stands, calls for a return to basics; to scrape past the excessive volume of data and information and to return to what marketers do best – be consumer-focused.

In the exciting realm of marketing, bells and whistles may have changed over the years, but deep down the consumer has not really evolved much and the very core concept of

“INTEGRATION MAY SOUND EASY, BUT MANY MISTAKE MULTIMEDIA OR MULTIPLATFORM AS INTEGRATION.” Jennifer Loke, senior manager, marketing – Southeast Asia, Hong Kong Tourism Board

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marketing is rooted in human needs and not in technology. Yes, granted that technology has created new opportunities and shifted attention and behaviours, but it merely serves the same human need in a different form. Simplifying things would help break down much mystique behind the development of the industry.

If we constantly return to our marketing core, which is meeting human needs, there will be much bravado in marketing and we no longer have to hide behind big words, big data, and at the same time, we will be able to make good sense of the landscape and colossal charts and data in a relatively straightforward manner.

So, what does returning to the core mean?

It’s about telling a good story to your audience to imprint on them a favourable impression that will meet a need of the consumer. With all the clutter amid the evolution, often resulting in overwhelming data and information and an ever-growing list of new media vehicles, we have to take a step out of it all and look in and sift out what really matters.

Marketing, to me, is akin to orchestrating a performance to reach your intended audience.

It is the magical ability to weave different connecting points together and tell a story to fascinate your intended audience.

Through such orchestration, one key element is critical – integration across the silos of marketing disciplines, including public relations.

Integration may sound easy, but many mistake multi-media or multi-platform as integration.

Integration also does not mean the same message be amplified across all touch-points.

As consumers are exposed to multiple touch-points and they get information from a plethora of sources, the consumer journey or path-to-purchase then becomes a network of connection points versus the old linear model.

Hence, good integration means that when a consumer sees one connection point and later on sees another, the consumer could be exposed to different aspects of the brand and yet the two could make a complete brand/ product story.

Another consumer might be exposed to four to six connection points across social, digital, print, events, editorial articles, influencer interviews, and form yet another complete story.

The essence of good integration lies in having a central idea built on insights so that communication messages and content can travel across connection points and form different aspects of the central idea. Such “liquid” content allows for the customisation of messaging to each connection point so that it makes sense within the vehicle framework, yet laddering up to the central idea of the brand.

Resisting the thought of repeating one single key visual across all connection points takes much bravery and definitely requires more effort in planning the matrix of messages across the consumer’s network of consumer path-to-purchase. But doing so will certainly reap higher returns for the campaign and brand in the long run.

Specifically, integrating marketing communication messages and content with PR will up the ante for a brand as PR helps build up another pillar of brand storytelling in an authentic way via earned and shared media.

Traditionally a distinct separation of disciplines, more conscious efforts thus have to be put in place when planning the matrix of messages across various disciplines and including PR will yield greater rewards for the brand.

Returning to the core of marketing will become increasingly critical as the “new” developments in the industry will become the new normal. And further newer developments will take off sooner than you can say “wow”, hence, we need to fall back on what the human need is and fulfil it.

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5/2/2016 11:55:00 AM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

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SEVEN NEW DEVELOPMENTS FOR DIGITAL IN 2016 We think there are seven developments that will be predominant forces in 2016 for digital marketing, although many of these will require more time than just a year to gain mainstream adoption.

“MEASUREMENT COMPANIES WILL FINALLY CATCH UP TO MEASURING CONSUMER ACTION ON SOCIAL MEDIA, ATTRACTING MARKETERS TO CHANNELS BEYOND BEYO FACEBOOK AND TWITTER.” A

1. Developing and acting on one view of consumers – across their devices, media and channels – will become a broad initiative. Marketers are finally beginning to recognise the importance of reaching and recognising actual consumers within a privacy framework, where consumers have control of their information. The move towards a single consumer view will shake up the part of the industry that remains focused on connecting devices and cookies.

Raju Raj ju M Malhotra, alh h SVP of products, Conversant

2. An increasing number of marketers will want to activate their offline CRM data online. In doing so, they will recognise the limitations of existing solutions, including DMPs, toward achieving that goal. This realisation will force agencies and ad-tech companies to find ways to prevent data loss as marketers’ data moves from one system to the next.

3. CMOs working with ad-tech companies will make incremental measurement a “must-have” as they start weighing the incremental effect on an ad versus brand equity in driving conversions.

The new requirement will create anxiety, fear and uncertainty for those companies using clicks as a convenient way of measurement.

4. Measurement companies will finally catch up to measuring consumer action on social media, attracting marketers to channels beyond Facebook and Twitter.

It’s hard to predict what social channels will emerge as the next big thing, but new forms of measurement suggest new opportunities for marketers and publishers.

5. The focus on viewability will evolve into a discussion of ad quality, a measurement that includes fraud, brand safety and viewability. The debate on viewability is actually going to draw to a close, and the conversation is going to start shifting to what really matters: ad quality. We talk

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about viewability as if it exists separately from ad fraud and brand safety. They are important on their own, but it’s the sum of the parts – ad quality – that leads to greater results. Focusing on viewability in the absence of ad quality will lead you to unintended outcomes.

6. Marketers will want to apply the learnings from their ad campaigns to other types of marketing campaigns.

This will require ad-tech companies to work with them like marketing-solution partners, as opposed to single-point solutions.

7.

Ad blocking is going to evolve into a solution that works for consumers,

publishers and marketers. A viable ad blocking solution has to address the needs of all three parties. Today, if consumers’ ad experiences don’t meet their expectations, they always have an option to use ad blocking tools. However, these tools typically block all ads without any criteria for their relevance to the consumer. That’s not a sustainable model, because advertising subsidises most of the content and services available on the internet. Marketers might not be affected in the short term as they typically pay for the delivered ads. But over time, marketers that are truly consumercentric will have an advantage. They will still be able to reach their consumers through channels that are available to them.

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4/2/2016 2:43:06 PM

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27/5/2015 12:08:37 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

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REDISCOVERING THE JOY OF SHARING Sharing – one of life’s greatest, yet simplest pleasures – has never been easier. But it’s also never been less personal.

Social media networks dominate our lives – to such an extent that it’s now not inappropriate (in some circles) to live-tweet medical procedures to a near infinite audience or announce the death of a loved one on Facebook.

Businesses are also able to share content with consumers more easily than ever.

Subscription-based digital entertainment

platforms such as Apple Music (which launched globally in 2015), and Netflix (which expanded to cover 130 markets globally in the first few weeks of 2016) have cemented the paradigm shift from physically thumbing through record or CD racks to the commoditisation of entertainment content for a fixed monthly fee.

But the emotional intimacy generated through the sharing of personally curated content has been heavily diluted by technology.

Mixtapes, once a key mating ritual of lovestruck teenagers (and popularly immortalised in

“EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE SUGGESTS THAT FAR FROM MAKING US WISER, OUR INCREASINGLY HOMOGENISED ENVIRONMENTS DRIVE HUMANKIND TOWARDS THE ‘LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR’; SO I BELIEVE 2016 WILL SEE A REACTION TO THIS, WITH CONSUMERS AND BRANDS CELEBRATING THE VALUE IN THE ESOTERIC, THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE INTIMATE.’’ Greg Clayton, managing director, Kadence International

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Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity), simply don’t have the same emotional oomph when the same mix is uploaded into the public domain and corporatised by a SoundCloud logo.

Thoughtfully clipping an article from a magazine or newspaper and placing it on a colleague’s desk is a behaviour rendered impossible if sharing a digital link; further exacerbated when paywalls make the content impossible to access. And if you’re going to send a link, why just send it to one colleague when you can send it to the whole office? Surely someone will be interested?!

Interpersonal connections are undoubtedly suffering in the digital age. Broadcasting used to be the preserve of a select few organisations.

Now everyone’s at it.

Has the power gone to our heads? Are our brittle egos so hungry for continual praise and reassurance that we have to bellow our message to as many people as possible, simply to garner a few “likes”?

Kadence’s extensive media research over the past few years has uncovered conflicting insights – the obvious gratification of cheap, quality content; and yet a melancholic disquiet that existing digital sharing tools have been tailored to merely broadcast information – a state of affairs that has further exacerbated people’s proclivity for pronouncement.

So, while consumers are making convenient (and often inherently poor) sharing decisions, they are limited by a lack of effective infrastructure to support and enhance more intimate and personal sharing of digital content.

It is, of course, fair to recognise that some of the most exciting new brands (Uber, Airbnb) have harnessed peer-to-peer connections to construct the “sharing economy” at a global level – but these interactions still involve very limited interpersonal contact.

On the other hand, the likes of Nutella, Coke and Marmite (with their opportunity to print the name of a loved one on their product using their own iconic logos) recognise that enabling emotive human connections is just as powerful as expansive brand campaigns.

Empirical evidence suggests that far from making us wiser, our increasingly homogenised environments drive humankind towards the “lowest common denominator”; so I believe 2016 will see a reaction to this, with consumers and brands celebrating the value in the esoteric, the individual and the intimate, and accordingly, reappraising our sharing behaviours to bring human connection to the fore once again.

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4/2/2016 1:11:10 PM

Internet Relay Chats (IRCs) predecessors of modern day social media networks The first recognizable were first used in 1988 social media site, Six Degrees, was created in 1997

31.25

million messages per minute

Youtube introduced the concept of shareable videos to the world in 2005

“What Gutenberg did for writing, online video can now do for face-to-face communication� ~ Chris Anderson, TED

Facebook launched in 2004 as a private social network. By 2015, it had 1.44 billion users worldwide generating a phenomenal amount of activity...

2.77

million videos per minute

In 2010, Instagram brought the polaroid aesthetic of yesteryear into the hyper-connected social media age, allowing people around the world to share and comment on photos

30,000,000,000 photos shared since 2010

48,611

photos posted per minute

28,833

likes per second

Research has found that people experiencing high social media connectivity have an inversely proportionate amount of interpersonal human contact and relations

4 in 10 feel they have less daily interaction with people

1 in 6 only experience social interaction once a week or less

Insight Worth Sharing. www.kadence.com/share US

UK

India

Singapore

Indonesia

Vietnam

China

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

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IN SEARCH OF THE VIRAL UNICORN As societies become more affluent, the lyrics of a popular track by one of my favourite bands Muse captures the times perfectly: “Time is running out.” In a recent study by local media agency We Are Social released in November 2015, digital connectivity in Southeast Asia has leapt over the past few months, with much of this growth attributable to more widespread access to internet-enabled mobile devices.

Though this presents opportunities, it also indicates the amount of information providers and brands battle for to gain attention in the digital space. Video is cementing its position in the digital landscape as an effective means of content marketing which is gradually surpassing that of traditional media.

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, 61% of respondents could recall a general idea about an online video compared with 46% of respondents who said the same about TV ads on broadcast and cable.

“WHAT BRANDS SHOULD CAPITALISE ON IS THAT CONSUMERS DO NOT WANT TO BE MARKETED TO, BUT ENTERTAINED.” Aldrina Thirunagaran, digital marketing, global consumer financial services, OCBC Bank

Is video really the answer?

But not all content engages and video may not necessarily be the answer all the time.

The solution may be deeply rooted in the consumer’s wants, needs, understanding what constitutes the bulk of their time and how to capture their attention. In effect, what brands should capitalise on is that consumers do not want to be marketed to, but entertained.

I Want My MTV! The rise and early beginnings of MTV fascinate me. Music videos were traditionally two to three minutes long, but more importantly, what the early MTV model infers is the need for compelling storytelling combined with arresting visuals.

In a way, the MTV ethos has gone full circle with the advent of Instagram. With the capability of videos being introduced in mid-2013, video ads jumped from 9.54% in September to 22.52% in December 2015. Naturally, Brand Networks saw an increase in Instagram spend for the consumer packaged goods (CPG), fashion and retail verticals three times more in Q4 2015 as well.

Given the emphasis on stunning videos, Brand Networks also expects the fashion and retail sector to continue their dominance in the Instagram market in 2016. It also predicts a rise in video-centric advertising from health and fitness as well as travel-focused brands.

We see brands looking towards more experimental forms of visuals, be it cinemagraphs, GIFs or motion graphics.

Brands are also turning to animation, memes and, for Disney, Coke, Dove and Domino’s, even

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emojis were used to buck the visual trend so as to capture those all-important eyeballs. The Queensland Police Service recently capitalised on the “This is Bill” phenomenon and provided its own cheeky take and twist.

Brands are starting to get clued into what interests their targeted audience and the way they communicate. Likewise, what interests the audience is potentially low-hanging fruit which will ultimately reap its rewards as a hook to engaging current and potential customers.

Keeping it real The need for authenticity is important and this is seen in popular culture. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings recently shared in a letter to shareholders two things: how his business hit 75 million subscribers, and his very hot content, a 10-part documentary series entitled, Making a Murderer which took America by storm.

This is indicative of the era that we live in and the search for, as well as the importance of truth, as seen in documentary style storytelling.

Brands need not necessarily feature crime as a storyline, but what this trend indicates is the growing need for authenticity and the perception of it.

Authentic content is likely to keep audiences engaged, regardless of the medium. The popularity of a podcast shows us that. However, Adweek quoted Kevin Sullivan, an executive producer of a podcast on NPR, that “people feel connected to what’s happening to people in the stories, and they end up caring about an issue they didn’t even realise was important.”

The ability to make consumers care is important because as we all know, caring is sharing which is gold for your brand.

Caring is sharing Tapping on the emotions of consumers is not new as we have seen in popular Thai ads.

Paradoxically, advertisers from the land of smiles have been able to make us care about the plight of the downtrodden and underdogs of the world so as to drive awareness of local Thai insurance and security brands.

However, sometimes, brands underestimate the power of animals which Singapore Tourism Board leveraged in a recent video.

The video, which featured Singapore and its neighbourhoods as viewed through the eyes of cats, gleaned more than 5200 shares.

Don Anderson, from We Are Social, commented that more than two million cat videos posted on YouTube accounted for 26 billion views. But this does not mean that animals are a quick fix to the viral dilemma.

However, Anderson maintains that any conversation that brands are seeking to have in a social space should be about the consumer and their interests. “Sadly, too many brands are still focusing on themselves.”

Parting thoughts What these success stories point to is the digital world is still pretty much an enigma. Using data and case studies, we can try to make sense of it, but great viral content involves taking a calculated risk to stand out from the crowd – be it in the visual treatment, content, the use of humour, or worse still, the introduction of inexplicable, random elements.

More importantly, the unicorn may not be the video itself, but the understanding of what is topical to the audience themselves. Once we have solved that mystery and translated that into an engaging piece of content which could be used to strike up those social conversations, a pot of viral gold might just be waiting for us at the end of the rainbow.

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4/2/2016 2:24:09 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

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2016: MAY THE (DIGITAL) FORCE BE WITH YOU Marketing has truly come of age, and if you’ve been in this field for long, you will know what I’m talking about. There is a fundamental shift in the way organisations look at marketing today and the impact it can create in their business. From being a support function or a cost centre, marketing has moved to the organisational strategy level, taking a seat with the sales leadership, and in many cases, even the board room. This means expectations are growing; marketing must rise up and take its capabilities to the next level.

But before I go into the capabilities that marketers in Asia Pacific need to future-proof themselves, let’s take a step back to understand the environment that is responsible for that change. Even as consumers in Asia Pacific are spending more and more time online and on social media, they have not totally abandoned their old habits. Organisations need marketing managers to reach consumers through both digital and traditional media, track consumer activities online and at physical stores, and produce campaigns that engage consumers in ways they have not experienced before such as personalised content addressing their specific needs. And all these have to be achieved on a tighter budget and a shorter timeline, and with a commitment to improve return on investment (ROI).

The need to go digital is as pronounced in the B2B space as it is in the consumer.

Information about products and user-generated reviews and recommendations are easily available online, which means B2B purchase decisions at the initial stages are often made without the involvement of a salesperson.

Quite predictably, attention has now shifted to the impact that online channels, including websites, apps, social media and forums, have on lead generation, brand-building and the sustenance of long-term client relationships.

With that, lead generation and relationshipbuilding have moved from being the exclusive forte of the sales organisation to that of a shared responsibility between sales and marketing.

Watch out for these three trends in B2B marketing in 2016, as B2B marketers in Asia Pacific will come to grips with digital 1. Content marketing: A well-defined content marketing programme with an editorial agenda and call to action. Content teams will be tasked with not only creating insights-driven branded content to be

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shared with clients and prospects, but also managing user-generated content that is mostly beyond their control.

User-generated content, whether it is a product review or recommendation on social media or a blog, creates a strong impression about your brand online, and there must be a strategy to include it in the company’s broader content plan. We are moving closer to that day when content generation takes the form of co-creation between the in-house marketing team and the extended family of brand ambassadors or consumers.

2. Mobile and video: Mobile and video are the two big media consumption trends that marketers cannot ignore. Over the past five years, mobile has steadily gained ground across Asia Pacific as the primary media consumption platform for consumers.

An interesting data point for marketers is that by 2020, there will be 1.6 billion new smartphone connections. These smartphone users will use their phones to connect to the internet, shop online, engage through mobile apps and visit social media.

We’re also experiencing a spike in online and mobile video viewership. This growth in mobile, coupled with the boom in video viewership, is forcing B2B marketers to integrate mobile and online video into their media mix for 2016.

3. Marketing automation: Marketing automation and martech tools will be the marketer’s new best friends. They provide us a better profile of the customer, thereby helping to target the right prospects with the right medium. These tools are helping to improve the efficiency of lead generation programmes, remove discrepancies, get sales and marketing functions to work closer together and, at the same time, bring more accountability in marketing.

The growing emphasis on martech as well as social and digital will also open up conversations around both brand and cyber security.

In 2016, together with investments in technology, we can expect marketers to take a more active role in improving security awareness within their teams and implementing security action plans. A closer partnership between the CMO and CTO/CIO/CSO will be the way forward for these organisations, with an aim to prevent cyber security breaches.

“THE GROWING EMPHASIS ON MARTECH AS WELL AS SOCIAL AND DIGITAL WILL OPEN UP MANY CONVERSATIONS AROUND BOTH BRAND AND CYBER SECURITY.” KP Unnikrishnan, senior director (marketing),Asia Pacific and Japan, Palo Alto Networks

The digital boom in Asia Pacific and the resultant changes in B2B purchase behaviours have presented a stiff challenge for marketers in this space. Marketers need to step up their game and take a re-look at their existing strategies. I believe that 2016 will be a turning point for B2B marketers, especially those who want to embrace digital more fully. And, as they say in Star Wars, “May the force be with you” to make it happen.

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4/2/2016 2:15:08 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

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THE SECRET TO INTEGRATED MARKETING IS UNIQUE TO EVERY BRAND Integrated marketing as a concept and strategy is not something new. We may have been hearing about it for less than a decade, but it has been around much longer than that.

But it is only in recent times that technology has opened up so many new channels for marketers to reach out to consumers – forcing them to at least leverage, if not master, an integrated approach to marketing brands.

If we simply go by the definition of integrated marketing, you are likely to find multiple versions loosely defining what integrated marketing is, but time and again it has been shown the one-size-fits-all approach does not yield success in this area. For marketers, this brings up the challenge of clearly defining integrated marketing and how they can have a unified approach in applying it to sell their brand.

Contrary to the general perception, there is no one single consistent definition of integrated marketing. In fact, different marketers like to approach and focus on the concept differently.

Mostly, it is defined as leveraging multiple channels to send out a consistent message to customers. A brand communication approach where a brand’s core message is seamlessly presented across various mediums with similar tonality. But as markets, customer behaviour and technology evolve, the understanding and application of integrated marketing has also changed.

There are some fundamental changes taking place on how integrated marketing strategies are being conceived. Often at times, marketers see integrated marketing to be about maintaining consistency of content and messaging across channels, whereas it should be all about customers first. Customers should be put at the centre of all strategies followed by execution across mediums.

Second, marketers should also give emphasis to how seamlessly customers move between different channels they are being targeted with. Each touch-point, including email, messages, websites, physical collaterals, and so on, should allow them to move from one channel to the other without interruption, so as not to lose their valuable attention. A well thought-out integrated marketing plan will ensure this is well taken care of and does not suffer from intermittent breaks.

This brings up another related aspect of

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“INTEGRATED MARKETING ISN’T LIMITED TO DEFINITIONS AND SACROSANCT METHODOLOGIES CCESS. THAT GUARANTEE SUCCESS. NDING IT LIES IN UNDERSTANDING WHO IT IS INTENDED FOR, N GETTING CLARITY ON WHAT THE BRAND’S BUSINESS IS ABOUT, AND HOW IT LINKS TO THE INTENDED AUDIENCE.” Amit Tiwari, director, marketing, Philips India a

integrated marketing which should be key to marketers who wish to create value over the long haul. An integrated strategy should not be just about one event or campaign, but should envision beyond. It is not an isolated event where interactions are happening for a limited period, but it should constantly flow back and forth beyond one campaign. When customers are engaged in a sustained manner, transcending multiple campaigns, it can lead to greater profitability towards the end and a longer brand recall. Performance indices and benchmarks from a single campaign are key to any marketer, but they should not lose sight of the long-term goals of marketing activities.

Another job of every marketer is to cut down the functional silos that exist in any company which hampers successful assimilation of collective expertise in integrated marketing activities. If a strategy is designed with customers at the centre, it is a no-brainer that not only the marketing function, but sales and servicing professionals also have some form of insights into their customer base. All of their insights could be valuable to any marketer.

How they react and interact with customers

also impacts a customer’s relationship with a brand. In today’s world, content is seen as king and it is rightly called so, at least for now. Good content can drastically boost an integrated marketing programme and make it successful.

A marketer should push for great content to become the base for communicating the core message of the brand, and make it part of the planning from the very first day.

This brings us to the conclusion that integrated marketing isn’t limited to definitions and sacrosanct methodologies that guarantee success. But, it lies in understanding who it is intended for, getting clarity on what the brand’s business is about, and how it links to the intended audience.

It is about selecting the right mix of marketing strategies with appropriate channels, activities, media buying, tactics and methods. In the end, the integrated marketing goal isn’t limited to just one campaign and a one-time performance measurement, but a sustained value creation for the brand that it can leverage through multiple campaigns. And, this is only possible when integrated marketing becomes customer-driven marketing more than anything else.

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4/2/2016 4:39:14 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

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THE FUTURE IS IN THE PAST! As a practitioner in the advertising and media industry for over 35 years, I’ve witnessed the definition of “creativity” fluctuate across the breadth and depth of its intended role and purpose in helping brands communicate better with their intended consumers! A major blame for the inconsistent values placed upon the art of creativity has been the evolution of media and the proliferation of its forms and platforms.

The simplified analog world which my career kicked off with had only newspapers, television, radio, cinemas and posters as mainstay vehicles to amplify what advertisers wanted to shout to the world out there. A far cry from the digital arena of the now, where the multiplicity of media manifestations have reached exponential proportions across paid, owned, earned, shared and converged platforms.

The art of creativity has adorned its fair share of preferred personas across distinct periods in time – the “product era” of the 1950s, the “image/impression era” of the 1960s, the “positioning era” of the 1970s, and so on. Much like art movements such as impressionism, symbolism, cubism, realism, and graffiti, advertising has also evolved through phases where dominant preferences prevail – strong headlines and short body copy, photocentric expressions, story-telling advertorials, minimalistic layouts (use of white space), endorsement-oriented campaigns, testimonialaligned proclamations and more.

No matter where the journey has taken us, my firm belief for creativity to exude the full promise of a bright future is for its craft to be fundamentally embellished by “the past”.

Contemporary modernism has clouded many in the industry into being overly concerned by the avalanche of cutting-edge options driven by technology, disruption, terrestrial reach, non-traditional ad platforms and social media inferences. To be distinctly clear about how creativity should be best applied as we take on 2016 and beyond, I recommend a bold step backwards for a reorientation on the fundamental premise of “creativity”.

Having commenced my career in an Ogilvylinked advertising agency (Meridian), I cannot help but laud what David Ogilvy, who Time e magazine in 1962 called “the most sought-after wizard in today’s advertising industry”, taught me through his applied principles. Allow me to quote the father of advertising and I’ll let you be the judge of its relevance for this day and age.

“If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.” Ogilvy reminds us not to write ads that merely reek k of cleverness, but not connecting with the consumer. He firmly believed that we should

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all be treating our audience as a close friend – someone who is sitting in front of us. “When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing to each of them a letter on behalf of your client.”

He was research-oriented and subscribed to fully understand how targeted prospects think and spoke before even attempting to

“THERE IS NOTHING MORE IMPORTANT THAN SEEING THROUGH THE EYES AND WALKING IN THE SHOES OF THE CUSTOMER.” Geoff Tan, head and senior vicepresident, Singapore Press Holdings

put an idea down on paper. David also said: “Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.”

I learnt from him to never look upon myself as the person my ad is trying to appeal to.

There is nothing more important than seeing through the eyes and walking in the shoes of the customer. “The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything.

She wants all the information you can give her.”

David stressed the importance of writing great headlines when he said: “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

I can’t help but quote the well-documented example of the Rolls-Royce advertisement which he wrote in 1958 after three weeks of reading and studying all the technical characteristics of the car. “At 60 miles per hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock”.

All said – when we get these fundamentals right, then adapting the art of creativity across to new platforms, devices, formats, expressions, be these analog, digital or everything else in between, will be a breeze. As we kick off this new year, while most soothsayers are heading forth with predictions on wearable tech, personalisation, first-screen mobile, virtual reality, the proliferation of robots, the rise of influencer marketing and more, I am heading back a few steps to empower a quantum leap ahead.

Steve Williams, CEO of Maxus Americas, puts it succinctly when he said: “Creativity is the marriage of imagination and execution, thinking and doing. Creativity in the context of today’s world is underpinned by the fact that almost anything is possible given technology and platform advancements. Technology is changing behaviour, but ideas and how we tell the stories are everything – this is how we influence behaviour. As long as we remember that it’s about the idea and the story, not simply the devices or technology, we will create great and enduring ideas. Is there a process to creativity? Yes, process and workflow play their part. Let’s not forget too, that we ‘unlearn’ creativity as we get older – so it is eminently possible to re-learn.”

For 2016 and beyond, let us constantly re-learn from the gem-filled storehouse of the past!

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4/2/2016 1:15:44 PM

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EVERY PAGE OF THE NEWSPAPER IS A DELECTABLE READ. Here’s an appetising insight readers find advertisements just as palatable as the stories the newspaper carries. While news nourish their minds with the most quintessential of ingredients, advertisements spice up their overall appreciation of brands and trends!

So the next time you’re looking for the perfect media recipe, look no further than a newspaper – it’s tried, it’s tested, a truly delectable dish indeed!

Bon appétit.

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MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

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STOP ME IF YOU’VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE I hate making predictions. The yearly budget and planning process is as close to crystal ball gazing as I really like to get. Other than the fact there are plenty of futurists around who get paid for this sort of thing, I worry that someone will actually pay some attention to what I’ve said and point out how far off I was.

However, Marketing magazine can be persuasive about these things! So, in the hope the article will be followed by some sort of Men in Black forced amnesia technology – allow me to offer up some thoughts.

Selfish one first – digital transformation.

Taking on the new role here at StarHub puts it directly on the radar for me. However, I see an increasing amount of agencies – not just social/digital, but traditional ones – positioning themselves as having experience of digital transformation.

Given the far-reaching organisation-wide implications around DT, and the fact it’s still a nascent area for a majority of companies, then I’m somewhat surprised that many agencies can claim to have genuine depth of experience.

Having said that, it does make sense for agencies to develop their offering in this area.

If a key benefit of DT is to support the company goal of differentiating themselves through excellence in customer experience then there is an obvious connection to the brand.

And if it’s an agency involved with the client’s brand expect to see digital transformation referenced more in its credentials or better still an outline of its approach and how it can help brands implement it across the org.

Next up, and this is more evolution than revolution, is the increase on social commerce and social selling. Last year saw most brands move away from simply trying to build up their social communities and report back on vanity metrics. With the C-suite no longer obsessed with driving up higher likes on the company Facebook page then the inevitable and somewhat overdue question of, “so where is the ROI on our social media?”, is now being asked more in the boardroom.

Brands will be looking far more into how they can use LinkedIn, for example, to support their sales teams in lead generation and business development, so expect to see a lot of your colleagues’ profiles looking more “complete”.

How do you drive to your dot.com will become one of the first questions you’ll have to

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“HOW DO YOU DRIVE TO YOUR DOT.COM WILL BECOME ONE OF THE FIRST QUESTIONS YOU’LL HAVE TO ANSWER IN CONSIDERING YOUR USE OF THE HE VARIOUS SNS.” Rod Strother, VP, digital transformation, StarHub

answer in considering your use of the various SNS (social networking service). Which could mean that you leverage certain platforms such as Instagram more than you did previously. At Lenovo I was always asked why I got asked more questions around the numbers I was presenting on global calls than any of the other function leaders and I think it came down to two reasons.

One, we had more metrics in social than most of the other teams and, two, nobody believed any of them. So I personally welcomed the opportunity to expand on how we viewed the value of social and to associate more of what it delivers to lead generation and sales.

The third horse I’m backing is an increase in brands as content producers. Nothing new for brands to develop content, but I think we’ll see more in-house editors with their own editorial teams, more video producers, curators,

moderators and creative leads. It will become far more organised and systematic than simply throwing something to the PR team to write a press release.

It will be focused around real-time marketing powered by social listening and customer insights. Some of the big brands are already there – Coke with Content 2020 and adidas’ approach at the last World Cup – but I don’t see it just being exclusive to global brands.

My sense is it won’t be driven by the opinion that agencies are no longer being relevant, but rather clients wanting to get the message out faster and have it come from the “heart” of the company.

And there you have it, my three picks for where marketing is going – feel free to look back on it in 12 months to see if it was all nonsense.

Cue Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in wraparound shades and black suits.

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4/2/2016 1:27:00 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

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CAN WE FUTURE-PROOF OURSELVES? While people are talking about the future of marketing – deep down in our mind, we also realise that some of the future is actually already happening. Some companies catch this faster than others. Some are still in the denial phase, others are pioneering the space. No matter what, the future always depends on what we do and create now.

Undeniably, technology seems to move faster than the adoption and adaption rate among people and even slower among the industry. Simple thing such as: how many months or years after you create your personal

personally? If they do, what is the content of those conversations? Based on my observation and experience, I would say the future of marketing lies in the power of the below four elements.

1. Power of prediction The ability of marketers in predicting what consumers want/need even before they realise they want or need it. OK, so this is a prediction game? Yes it is, and scary enough – prediction in this era is no longer a game – it can be your weapon. Prediction has become fact-based

“LIFE IMPROVES WITH DATA – AND IT GETS EVEN BETTER WHEN THIS DATA IS SERVED BACK TO US TO SOLVE OUR PROBLEMS.’’

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2. Power of content We are familiar with branded content. But hey, as consumers – don’t we now enjoy the usergenerated content more? The power of usergenerated content seems to be surpassing branded content as brands begin to lose control of their own marketing to their customers.

My 10 year old son knows all the details about the Samsung S6 phone – not because Samsung talked to him, but because he searched and watched (user-generated) product reviews on S6. Bearing in mind that everyone of us can be the media channel itself.

If there are seven billion people in the world – that means there are at least three billion potential media channels. Point of discovery can happen anywhere (we know that Facebook claims this too – well, it makes sense!)

3. Power of human approach Technology is like alchemy – but it only works if there is an alchemist. The alchemist is a human itself. How do we inject a personal touch to our consumer. Imagine, yourself – do you prefer to be served by a machine? No matter how good the voice is?

In my experience, I have seen numerous incidents where a complaint has been blown out of proportion on social media, but one personal call from the call centre has resolved it without any further drama. So, with all this advancement, do not underestimate the human approach. Technology should identify the opportunity and predict the trend, but it is still the personalised human approach that makes a whole lot of difference.

Adeline-Ausy Setiawan, managing director, Unilever Enterprises Indonesia

Facebook account that your company adopts Facebook as a communication channel?

While we are all heavy and dependent users of Google, is your company already securing keywords in the search engine?

Now that we are already in the era of mobile, social media and search marketing and brands claim to have seen their effectiveness – the question is what are the real returns on the investment and what happens to the data collected through these executions?

Advertisers pay for clicks, so does it mean they have the access to speak to customers

The hairdresser and therapist send me personal texts to remind me about the next appointment and product I need to apply. Life improves with data – and it gets even better when this data is served back to us to solve our problems.

with all the historical evidence – the digital footprint we leave behind when we put our mobile on silent before we go to bed. This is so powerful that almost in any news of technology that we read consists of headlines of big data, personalisation and so on.

But why can’t it move faster? My hairdresser and my facial therapist from a small local clinic are still doing it way better than the giant department or grocery store I shop twice a month at. The latter owns my basket shopping data, but is unsure what to do with it. Data itself is not useful if we are only sitting on it.

4. Internet of things While we are discussing what marketing in the future should be, it is more crucial to design a product that we will market to be future-fit.

As you have seen with CES early this year, you can only be more assured the future product is happening already.

The products and services that we thought would happen are in fact available and people are already enjoying them. The internet of things will only lure consumers with the promise of a better, stronger and more convenient life.

So are you future-ready? Is your organisation future-proof?

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4/2/2016 1:28:08 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

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REVISITING ATTRIBUTION A quaint houseboat floating on a sparkling Dal Lake beams from the magazine page and catches your eye. You’re conscious of the accompanied text, but it’s the powerful image that’s grabbed your attention.

You’re reminded of the effect the image had on you as you stumble across it yet again, at another time, as a website banner. However there’s a far greater impact as you take a little more notice of the caption which reads: “Up to 35% off houseboats in Srinagar.”

Game, set and match, you’ve decided your next holiday destination.

You explore further by clicking on the banner, and spend a good deal of time supplementing your research with Google.

Overall you’re pleased to have selected a holiday destination that strongly appeals to you and suits your budget.

This is where the fun begins for the marketer and data analyst!

“Attribution” is a fairly dreaded buzzword among marketing professionals. You have all your company’s marketing channels integrated, synchronised and designed to suit, and the competition of which works best and for what purpose, is microscopically evaluated.

What’s producing the most site visits?

Which channels results in revenue, ROI and how does it serve the KPIs? In the context of the houseboat in Srinagar, what was responsible for the conversion? The offline ad, contextual banner or the paid search text ad?

Marketing in a digital world has effectively added to the complexities and fragmentations of reaching a consumer. Add to that mix user-generated content, independent brand messaging, the increasing importance of word of mouth, and you have an interesting and incisive analytics challenge.

Traditionally, most companies have used the last click approach, which is fairly straightforward, to understand, report on, analyse and act upon. Many brands still use it and while it has its obvious merits, the proliferation of channels in itself poses problems aplenty. Discounting offline as a means of measurement by online tools is still a topic of debate.

Learnings from what role each channel plays in the purchase funnel, and their likely impact post-purchase in terms of loyalty and reinforcement is a first step. Determining the most appropriate channel mix and incorporating the flexibility to refine this mix as required is the next. It’s not just a question of having the right tools and systems, but also the ability of

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“NOTHING WINS OUT MORE THAN DELIVERING AN OUTSTANDING PRODUCT OR SERVICE AT THE BEST PRICES TO SUIT YOUR TARGET MARKET.” Divya Ramaswamy, vice-president of digital marketing, Wego

changing mindsets, acknowledging that not all channels deliver the same way or serve the same purpose.

There are a few inherent problems with trying to model attribution.

• Incremental value added by new customers compared to the value derived from building a loyal customer base.

• The perennial offline versus online, and how to piece them together.

• Flexible factors such as seasonality, product packaging and pricing to name a few.

Controlling all of them is an uphill battle, but at the same time, it doesn’t negate the necessity, or usefulness of attribution.

Attribution and modelling is an imperative part of most businesses today, particularly in the world of e-commerce. With the growth in app-related e-commerce activity, it’s vital to understand customer behavioural patterns from a variety of sources and devices, rather than generalise based on similar company experiences. Each is unique.

Testing multiple attribution methods simultaneously (last click, position-based, linear) is a good place to start to gain a better understanding of the impact of different touchpoints.

Once you’ve established a solid understanding, it’s a good time to then explore methods to customise the attribution model to suit your business. Cross device attribution through different means such as log-ins, fingerprinting, or good old extrapolation based on historic data, would tie in splendidly here.

Packaging it all together – attribution, devices, measurement, data – and then assigning suitable weight to a variety of channels and devices helps the marketer to better understand the value of each stage of the purchase path. Instead of just a bird’s-eye view of the entire customer base, it will facilitate a more accurate segmentation and identification of users. In addition, you’ll have the potential to unlock lifetime user values and understand their unique journey, which in turn, results in more effective marketing, resulting in a more longterm and sustainable relationship.

Ultimately, nothing wins out more than delivering an outstanding product or service at the best prices to suit your target market.

Attribution and modelling will help seal the deal by enabling more effective communication via the appropriate channels.

Measurements and resulting adjustments to messaging will deliver a strong business performance, happy and satisfied customers and, even more importantly, brand loyalty.

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MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

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TACKLING TALENT ISSUES WITH ANALYTICS A perfect storm is brewing in the workplace.

There are now four generations in the workforce, each bringing differences in attitudes, expectations and values. At the same time, Baby Boomers are reaching retirement age, leaving organisations at risk of losing years of institutional knowledge and expertise.

These demographic shifts, along with new job roles that have emerged in today’s economy, have intensified the competition for talent as companies worry about finding and keeping the skill sets they need.

While finding the right talent is critical, keeping that talent can be even harder.

Employee retention and turnover is the number one workplace challenge facing HR leaders today. The differences among demographics make it impossible to have any single one retention strategy, as what keeps people in their jobs can vary by generation. For example, Millennials – now the largest generation in the workforce – may care more about opportunities for working in different locations and are more likely to move from job to job than Baby Boomers, many of whom expect to remain at a company for decades or even a lifetime.

That’s why more organisations are looking to predictive and prescriptive analytics to help them answer and solve these tough workforce challenges. These capabilities, designed for use

by HR and business managers, can be built into core human resource systems and predict who might be at risk of leaving, and then prescribe what actions to take.

This new form of HR analytics can be based on a variety of internal and external data.

For example, one company analysed years of its own aggregated historical data and discovered that the employees most likely to stay were those who had experience in multiple parts of the organisation, challenging its assumption that willingness to stay was more likely tied to how many years employees had been with the company. That insight prompted the company to revitalise a dormant rotational programme, which lowered attrition.

The importance of engagement Losing great talent can have many repercussions. It can cost thousands of dollars and significant time to replace and train a new hire, and negatively impact productivity, customer satisfaction and workplace morale.

Many employers assume more money is the only way to stop an employee from

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seeking new opportunities, but that’s often not enough. Employees often leave due to a lack of engagement. People that are satisfied and connected to their employers are less likely to entertain headhunters and search outside for other opportunities. Now, more than ever before, employee engagement is paramount to attracting and retaining talent – and remaining competitive in the global market. Research shows a direct link between employee engagement and corporate performance.

A 2013 Gallup study revealed that employee engagement is an important predictor of company performance, even in a tough economy, with highly engaged companies outperforming the competition by 22% in profitability, 21% in productivity and 10% on customer ratings. Additional Gallup research showed that companies with engaged workforces have higher earnings per share (EPS), experiencing as much as 147% higher EPS compared with their competition.

A major part of engaging employees is understanding what motivates each individual and working with them on clear and direct career paths aligned with their goals and interests.

Yearly evaluations are not enough in today’s workplace. Employers need to continuously re-recruit employees with feedback and new opportunities to keep them engaged and invested in the business.

This is where predictive and prescriptive analytics can make a difference. It’s important to keep using everyday communications and the more subjective information – conversations with employees about career goals, evaluations from team members, and even our own instincts as managers – but the current war for talent tells us that’s no longer enough. With richer data and better analysis, managers can make much better informed decisions on the next steps to take and proactively engage with employees before they leave for more attractive opportunities.

Data science and machine learning The science and technology behind these new capabilities in the enterprise often go under the names of data science and machine learning. These approaches have their roots in consumer web companies, which offer up books and movies based on what you’ve read or watched before. Now these approaches are being applied to finding those employees at a high risk for leaving, and provide personalised recommendations for how to re-engage them

“EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT IS PARAMOUNT TO ATTRACTING AND RETAINING TALENT.” Tim Young, vice-president, Workday, Asia Pacific and Japan

before they get discouraged or look somewhere else. These insights are based on analysing a number of different factors about an employee, such as commute time, new life changes, time since a promotion, or stock vesting, to better understand how and when employees’ needs and interests may change.

Employers are not the only ones who stand to gain from this new evolution in analytics. Data science is also empowering employees with individualised insights and recommendations to help them create the ideal career path.

Analytics can show them “what other people like me” have done in the organisation, different career path options, and what skills or experience are needed.

While some may fear that data science makes relationships less personal, it can actually create greater transparency and a more personalised connection among HR, managers and employees. As the war for talent continues to intensify, the power of prediction will be a competitive advantage to engaging and retaining employees, and for helping individual employees map out a rewarding career.

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MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

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PROMOTE THE MOST IMPORTANT BRAND OF ALL: YOUR OWN For my parents’ generation, career advice was relatively straightforward: get a high-paying job with a large stable company and you’re pretty much set up for life. Even today, this is still considered conventional wisdom, especially in Asia where large conglomerates dominate several industries. I once had one of those “stable” jobs, a marketing management position with a multinational company called Nokia, at the height of its dominance as the world’s largest mobile handset manufacturer. We all know what’s happened to Nokia since then.

The truth is, there is no such thing as a stable job anymore. Last year the Society for Human Resource Management reported the average employee tenure for technology companies is three years, or less than two years in advanced markets such as the UK. The same report quoted the average employee tenure at tech giant Google was only 1.1 years. Whatever we once believed as the covenant between employee-employer is now a thing of the past.

There is every likelihood that a marketer, either by choice or by circumstance, will be moving from one employer to another every few years. Yet the average marketer still neglects to look after the most important brand of all: his own personal brand.

Author Reid Hoffman goes one step further, arguing that one should manage their career as if it were a start-up (The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career, available on Amazon). A simpler way to start is to ask yourself: What can we learn about how the world’s biggest brands are managed and how can they be applied to your career as a marketer?

Great brands are unique What is your personal brand’s unique selling proposition? Identify what it is in your field that you specialise in. It’s not enough on your CV or LinkedIn profile to say that you manage ad agencies and are responsible for CRM. Instead specify how you specialise in transforming traditional marketing organisations into digital marketing organisations. Talk about how you have a track record for gleaning new marketing strategies from analysing available data. Share how you have taken many US brands and made them relevant across multiple Asian cultures.

Recount your past successes and, in all likelihood, recurring themes will emerge. Stick with those themes and elaborate on them through blog

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posts, drawing on examples from your career or from your observations in the industry. Volunteer to speak on these topics at conferences or media interviews. A powerful brand’s uniqueness echoes across all forms of media. Your personal brand should be no different.

“IDENTIFY YOUR CAREER’S STRENGTHS AND START PUTTING TOGETHER A STRATEGY FOR HOW TO GROW YOUR OWN PERSONAL BRAND” Miguel Bernas, Asia Pacific media and marketing expert

Great brands are authentic The world’s most powerful brands are true to themselves, credible, consistent and never claim to be more than they are. A major Singapore company was recently caught paying bloggers to praise its services and malign competitors.

Whenever a brand stoops to such inauthentic behaviour, being found out is inevitable.

In a competitive job market, many fall to

the temptation to overstate one’s qualifications or claim understanding of topics on which one actually has limited experience. This is unnecessary. Your own career offers a wealth of lessons and experiences to draw from. Authors are constantly advised: “Write what you know.”

The same consideration must be taken in defining your own personal brand.

Great brands stand for something Power brands have values and are not afraid to express them, even if it means alienating existing customers. Much has been written about Starbucks’ stance on diversity and marriage equality, which caused some conservative Americans to call for a boycott of the brand.

CEO Howard Schultz admitted publicly: “Not every decision is an economic decision.”

The move may have been unpopular in some sectors, but it also forged stronger bonds with a core set of loyal brand advocates.

Brand loyalty is built when a customer decides that a brand shares similar values.

Similarly, as a brand, you should never shy away from having an opinion on something you feel strongly about. Too many marketing blogs and social media posts are full of politically correct, often-repeated, safe content. They are also dull and indistinguishable. If you want your personal brand to stand out, take a stand on issues and passionately defend them.

Great brands form alliances Apple Pay x MasterCard, Spotify x Uber, adidas x Yohji Yamamoto, LEGO x Star Wars … great brands aren’t afraid to collaborate with other brands. Such associations can bridge a brand towards a different audience, others can nudge the brand away from its roots towards new areas.

In building your own personal brand, make sure to form relationships with others with similar domain expertise. If there is someone whose career you admire, reach out and meet over coffee. If you are in similar fields there should be no shortage of things to talk about. There’s no limit to what opportunities may result. This is where social networks such as LinkedIn can also be a powerful tool.

Now, more than ever, your career needs to stand for much more than simply which company you currently work for. Identify your career’s strengths and start putting together a strategy for how to grow your own personal brand.

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MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

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SALES AND MEDIA TOUCH-POINTS TO CONVERGE IN NEW WAYS IN 2016 Successful marketing is all about delivering the right content to the right person in the right context. As we enter 2016, Millward Brown weighs in on the emerging trends ranging from the complexities of consumer journey marketing and the rapidly evolving media mix to content marketing strategies, and challenges in programmatic buying, where there is a content versus context battle underway.

The study focuses on the growing importance for brands to manage context and content in the year ahead. Marketers, who adopt a planning approach that recognises media channels as a way of distributing content as opposed to a device or a technology, will have the most success in 2016.

While the evolution of new platforms and technologies presents brands with many opportunities, the adoption of these brings a responsibility for advertisers, agencies and media owners to ensure brand-building will thrive. It has also addressed declining receptivity to advertising, and there is a risk for brands whose digital content is not wellexecuted, but the marketing wins we will see will be those who get it right.

But what’s the one key prediction for 2016?

The opportunity for marketers to develop clearer consumer journey maps, from awareness to purchase, in order to better integrate sales and media touch-points.

According to Millward Brown’s “Digital and Media Predictions” for the year ahead, this opportunity will become possible as digital platforms blur to an unprecedented degree the lines between these two previously separate disciplines, allowing marketers to optimise the consumer journey more than ever before.

Three key trends will drive this opportunity: the consumer journey becoming device and channel agnostic as people buy at the moment and in the way that best suits them; the transformation of e-commerce sites from pure sales channels into media touch-points; and the transformation of ad creatives that link directly to purchase opportunities on digital channels.

Marketers who develop detailed consumer journey maps will be able to follow consumers along this new path to purchase, allowing them to identify the most powerful touch-points from both sales and marketing along the way. This will give brand owners the power to deliver the seamless brand experience that consumers desire and drive brand, market share and sales outcomes, simultaneously, and in harmony.

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“SALES AND MEDIA TOUCHPOINTS HAVE TRADITIONALLY BEEN SEPARATE, BUT CHANGES TO THE DIGITAL LANDSCAPE AND CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR NOW ALLOW MARKETERS TO UNIFY THEM FOR THE FIRST TIME.” Duncan Southgate, global brand director for digital, at Millward Brown

“Sales and media touch-points have traditionally been separate, but changes to the digital landscape and consumer behaviour now allow marketers to unify them for the first time,” said Duncan Southgate, global brand director for digital at Millward Brown.

“In 2016 we expect advertisers to map marketing contexts to an integrated consumer journey so that sales and brand-building content complement rather than compete with each other.”

Other key findings Millward Brown anticipates additional important changes in the world’s media landscape and describes in the 2016 predictions how marketers can “get media right”. These include: • Brands will invest more heavily in online and particularly mobile video advertising in 2016, yet many will waste millions by neglecting to adapt content across formats. Smart marketers will involve digital considerations much earlier in the creative process and pre-test more assiduously.

•

Connected TV (or Smart TV) will take over the television viewing experience, bringing profound changes to the way people consume content. Experimentation with workable addressable TV advertising models will begin, although live TV advertising will remain dominant for now.

• To overcome low digital advertising receptivity, more brands will become content creators. As marketing moves from disruption to attraction, inspiring content marketing will move up the corporate agenda.

“The recent rise of ad blocking software means that consumer receptivity will be a big issue in 2016. Brands that fail to target consumers appropriately, adapt content across formats or rely solely on paid advertising content are unlikely to build engagement and drive sales,” Southgate said.

“The ability to connect in digital platforms at a time when consumers are willing to do so, and with great content in a format that is not intrusive, will separate the successful marketers from those that simply annoy.”

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MANAGING CORPORATE AFFAIRS

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NOREEN ISMAIL INVESTIGATES THE EVOLUTION OF CORPORATE AFFAIRS AS INDUSTRY PROFESSIONALS WEIGH IN ON WHAT THE PRACTICE MAY LOOK LIKE IN THE FUTURE.

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Corporate affairs, as a practice, currently stands smack-dab in the middle of a technological and paradigm shift. While the way it has been defined and practised has taken shape to evolve and adapt to new technologies, corporate affairs departments work differently across various sectors to reach a similar end goal: communicating a message effectively to the right audience.

In today’s open-source and always-on world, communications is a skill that has taken centre stage. The practice of corporate affairs holds the main responsibility for everything related to internal and external communications, government relations, PR and public policy; now corporate affairs includes an added challenge of relaying those messages in various channels to accommodate the business’ inevitable leap into digital.

The evolution of corporate affairs Christopher Samuel, director of corporate engagement for Monsanto, Asia Pacific, explains the three significant changes taking place in the realm of corporate affairs: 1. The traditional model of stakeholder engagement is dead.

Historically, commercial and corporate affairs leadership put their organisations (self) at the centre of the ecosystem, and mapped and engaged stakeholders with themselves at the centre. The reality is the citizen/customer/consumer is at centre of a large ecosystem consisting of several organisations and stakeholders.

Commercial and corporate affairs leadership need to humbly acknowledge their organisation’s position within this larger ecosystem and engage in relation to it.

2. Realigned thinking based on five core areas.

Corporate affairs leaders need to think and act critically on five core areas: Purpose (of the organisation on the planet), policy, products/services, partnerships, people leadership and development. According to Samuel, the most successful corporate affairs professionals seem to be the ones able to think and act critically on these five core areas.

3. Organisational rejig The execs leading talent and human resources should be tasked to ensure each member of their teams are the right culture fit for the organisation. Hires should be highly engaged and demonstrate agility and high performance in a rapidly evolving

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cultural, commercial and communications context.

Are all corporate affairs roles created equal?

As the role of corporate affairs changes, so too the expectation of it. The tasks of a corporate affairs team differ depending on the organisational needs of the company, as well as the extent of its interaction with the government.

At agrochemical company Monsanto, it is organised into corporate engagement (CE) and government affairs (GA) teams.

Its team in Asia Pacific leads the combined responsibilities while focusing on “engaging and energising a diverse set of stakeholders on the needs, challenges and broad range of solutions farmers need to nourish our growing planet sustainably”.

The Asia Pacific team facilitates a diverse cross-functional role focused on engaging employees, external stakeholders and society on the “needs, challenges and broad range of solutions farmers need to nourish our growing planet sustainably; and opportunities in the areas of policy, regulation, sustainability, communications and community partnership”.

collaboration with functions such as legal and finance (for government affairs), marketing and sales (for brand, customer and digital PR), supply chain (for market expansion and sustainability initiatives), human resource (for internal communication) as well as directly with the CEO to build external reputation and a strong employer brand.

Meanwhile, for public transport operator SMRT Corporation, its corporate affairs team sits as part of the corporate marketing and communications department. This department is the larger group under which there are five teams including corporate affairs. The other four teams include new media, internal communications, media and marketing communications and community engagement and CSR. At SMRT Corporation, the corporate affairs team comprises a leader along with three members; the team works closely with two members from the finance department who help with investor relations and communications.

While corporate marketing and communications mainly deal with corporate communications, the company has a separate set-up that deals exclusively with

“There is rarely an aspect of business that CA does not impact – from building brands to corporate reputation to enabling entry/expansion into markets to preventing business disruption.”

Shweta Shukla – director of communications and government affairs – Asia Pacific, Kimberly-Clark

As for consumer packaged goods company Kimberly-Clark, its corporate affairs team in its APAC headquarters in Singapore is a two-member team, including Shweta Shukla, director of communications and government affairs – Asia Pacific.

However, in smaller markets where the company does not have a dedicated corporate affairs team member, any corporate affairs-related matter will be assisted from the headquarters through a “partnership approach”.

“We also ensure we have the right PR agencies such as Edelman, Ogilvy PR, MSL and local partners supporting our teams across key markets,” Shukla says.

The corporate affairs team works closely with other departments within the company.

“There is rarely an aspect of business that CA does not impact – from building brands to corporate reputation to enabling entry/ expansion into markets to preventing business disruption,” she says.

Hence, her team works in close

the government. Colin Lim, vice-president for strategic relations, leads the entity that is tasked with government relations. Principally, SMRT’s corporate affairs team handles investor relations and communications: the team has always been tasked with putting together the company’s annual report.

However, with SGX’s new requirement for companies to produce sustainability reports by 2018, the corporate affairs team will now also manage this report, and prepare the company to take on the larger responsibility of producing integrated reports in the near future, said Patrick Nathan, vice-president for corporate information and communications at SMRT Corporation.

Government relations Monsanto works with the government via its industry association (CropLife Asia), and industry chambers (for example, US-ASEAN Business Council) to ensure farmers across Asia Pacific have access to cutting-edge technology solutions to meet their country’s

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A helping hand: Kimberly-Clark often partners with governments to help out with their CSR programmes.

“As the world seeks more transparency from organisations on their role and performance on the planet, best-in-class corporate affairs will bring even more insights and ideas in the areas of purpose, policy, products, partnerships while radically evolving people engagement and development.”

Christopher Samuel, director - corporate engagement, Monsanto, Asia Pacific

food and nutrition security and sustainability goals.

For example, CropLife Asia and several food and agriculture stakeholders have dialogue,

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exchanged learnings and experiences from across Asia Pacific and other agriculturefocused nations worldwide on agriculture investment policy and technology regulation.

According to Samuel, this was set up as a platform for nations in Asia Pacific to evolve into “globally comparable farmer-focused sciencebased agriculture regulatory systems”.

Meanwhile, Kimberly Clark has partnered with governments in several ways to help build its business and brands.

It has launched corporate social responsibility programmes to help a nation’s agenda. For example, in keeping with Korea’s reforestation and environment priorities, Kimberly Clark has been leading a threedecade programme called “Keep Korea Green” in which employees and consumers have together planted 50 million trees.

The company also recently expanded its global sanitation programme, “Toilets Change Lives”, in India to support and leverage the government’s “Clean India Campaign”. KimberlyClark is partnering with non-governmental organisations to build and repair school toilets as well as with social entrepreneurs to create sustainable sanitation solutions.

In Singapore, given the government’s impetus on digital innovation, Kimberly-Clark is collaborating with the Economic Development Board by sharing and showcasing its own global digital capabilities.

This is to explore the potential of local startups to take the company’s digital capabilities to the next level.

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In addition, the company’s “Touch of White Angels Programme”, in partnership with the China Women’s Development Foundation, trains nurses and health workers across hospitals in urban and rural China on infant and child care.

Kimberly-Clark also works with governments to establish standards for the country’s practices. For example, the Vietnam Institute of Standards approached KimberlyClark to help set standards for manufacturing quality diapers and sanitary napkins, driven by the market leadership and consumer trust Huggies and Kotex have earned in the market.

Future of corporate affairs So where is corporate affairs headed? As the world seeks more transparency from organisations on their role and performance on the planet, Monsanto’s Samuel foresees the opportunity for best-in-class corporate affairs to bring even more insights and ideas in the areas of purpose, policy, products, partnerships, while radically evolving people engagement and development.

Some challenges to navigate are in the areas of insights, strategy, ideas, creativity, ROI, evolutionary environments, volatility, ambiguity and people’s passions, given these are areas in which corporate affairs operate.

Moving forward, the practice’s uniqueness is its ability to attract talent historically groomed in other functions to get comfortable straddling various functional areas.

SMRT’s Nathan explains that corporate affairs within the organisation will still be dealing with corporate branding, however, the advent of social media has necessitated a new media team within corporate marketing and communications department.

“While we used to have a separate social media team, it has merged to be under the responsibility of the head of corporate marketing and communications group to make sure the branding and image positioning of the company is consistent across all media assets and platforms, and that the brand is carefully managed at all times.”

One of the challenges of corporate marketing and communications for a national operator such as SMRT is speed of its communication.

“The speed to adapt to new communications channels is crucial, the proliferation of platforms such as blogs and forums translates to the need to positively profile our organisation proactively instead of reactively.

“The team has to have its finger on the pulse constantly, making media monitoring even more critical than ever before," Nathan said.

Meanwhile, looking ahead, Shukla predicts three broad themes emerging for corporate

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A step in the right direction: Monsanto works with governments to ensure farmers have access to cutting-edge technology.

affairs in the next five years: a blurring of lines cross-functionally, leading sustainability efforts and having measurable impact.

With restructuring becoming a norm in organisations, CA will need to be more adaptive and work seamlessly cross-functionally, while continuing to maintain and sharpening its functional edge. Second, as sustainability becomes both a government and business

imperative, corporate affairs can take the lead in helping their organisations “talk” the walk among stakeholders and leverage it for business advantage. Last, corporate affairs can harness its full potential by leading projects that directly impact the top and bottom lines such as through brand PR or leveraging government policies that have maximum business impact for the company.

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CORPORATE AFFAIRS: WHAT IS ITS FUTURE? Both public affairs and public policy will continue to be critical functions within the communications set-up of companies.

Dealing with greater public scrutiny is a sign of the times so obviously firms need to find the right balance between being discreet in the pursuit of their business objectives, with regard to dealing with government and influencing policy, and being transparent with their public in general on the other hand, so these initiatives are perceived in a positive way. Companies that do find this balance will be the ones that will succeed business wise and enjoy the benefits of a good reputation.

Tarun Deo – managing director, SEA and Singapore, Golin Singapore

With several macro trends (such as the dispersion of trust, and democratisation of information) underpinning shifts in the global business environment, there is an increased need for corporate affairs practitioners to integrate and partner closely with the business (CEOs and senior leadership) to help steer and navigate government and regulatory changes, the changing media and social landscape, as well as a more vocal and activist public. Corporate affairs will need to deftly orchestrate and juggle a three-prong remit of “evolve-promote-protect”, acting as the change agent to ensure the organisation adapts and leads market expectations, forms the right alliances and partnerships, connects with key stakeholders and audiences, while upholding the organisation’s corporate conscience.

Evelyn Yeo – director, corporate and government affairs, Edelman Singapore

In my opinion, corporate affairs should be about influencing and shaping political, regulatory environments and overall stakeholder relations. From that perspective, 2016 will be a very interesting year. Trade will be heavily influenced by the start of the AEC, the new Trans-Pacific Partnership and the opening of markets such as Myanmar. At the same time many industries are seeing change in the way governments deal with them – for example, telcos and communications (and the merger of IDA and MDA in Singapore); how Fintech is forcing regulations to adapt; old industry lobbying groups fighting against incumbents (for example, hotel chains versus Airbnb; taxi firms versus Uber or GrabTaxi). Many of these “battles” are still wide open and it will depend on how fast companies can respond to and influence these changes that are upon us.

Lars Voedisch – principal consultant, managing director, PRecious Communications

“Uberization” of the economy and the speed of consumer adoption have changed the way business is conducted in today’s society, impacting security and transparency. Government agencies need to be aware of these and keep up with the digital transformation. They need to adopt a bottom-up approach, listen to the various sectors’ views and take these views and opinions into account when developing their policies. The top-down approach will not work in today’s fast-changing and connected world. Corporate affairs in the next five years will involve a more consultative approach. Engaging stakeholders to garner buy-ins and acceptance will be key.

Yu Poh Leng – senior vice-president, GM, Ruder Finn Asia

Corporate affairs will continue to become even more important over the next five years as consumers, customers and other stakeholders continue to demand increased transparency and accountability from companies and organisations. This means organisations need to get on the front foot to communicate who they are and what they stand for, particularly as they look to grow or evolve across all channels and in a way that’s engaging for all audiences. The way people are consuming information is also continuing to change. Attention spans are shortening, the desire to read information is decreasing and people are always “on”. Companies and organisations need to manage this. Communication needs to be shorter, more concise and visually standout if you want people to pay attention and engage with your content. And this all needs to happen in a way that still tells a good story.

Lily Carlyon – senior director, Baldwin Boyle Group

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EVENTS

MARKETING DURING ECONOMIC DOWNTURNS Economic turbulence across markets continues to grow. China’s slowing growth and Europe’s ongoing struggles are putting markets globally at peril. Businesses, therefore, are naturally playing it safe, marketing budgets are being revaluated and prudent ways to measure the effectiveness of every dollar are being put in place.

It’s time to ask marketing the tough questions for the road ahead. In economic uncertainty how can marketing properly justify its place in the bottom line? And how can you safeguard your company from the risks of an unpredictable market place?

To answer these questions, Marketing magazine, together with the BBC, organised a half-day event.

In a conversation with Karishma Vaswani, the Asia business correspondent for BBC News, Susie Wong, CMO for IBM ASEAN, spoke about the realities of marketing in today’s turbulent times.

“The pressure on marketing to be effective is real, more so in Asia. It’s a no-holds barred conversation we have at IBM, where we track every dollar we have spent on marketing and the value it has added,” she said adding that data is at the heart of it all.

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be the biggest priority. In the olden times, the spray and pray strategy worked for many brands, but that strategy is grossly dated in today’s times.

“We talked about awareness, above-theline campaigns and so on, and with that one big marketing push we would hope the brand awareness goes up, but that doesn’t work anymore,” she said.

“Now it is all about being targeted – creating brand awareness isn’t the real deal. Creating awareness among the right audience is what is imperative.”

At IBM, Wong said every marketing dollar was tracked.

“Marketing ROI is a serious discussion for us. What levels of interest/lead marketing activities have generated – through events or otherwise – is something we track very closely.”

This is one big change that has happened from the past owing to the economic uncertainties and the realities of global markets.

Another massive change brands are dealing with is technology. Technology is a major disrupter and new-age tech-based companies are proving to be a threat for established players. Citing the examples of Uber and Airbnb, Wong said brands who were able to deal with the “unknown unknowns” were the ones who would thrive.

And the key to becoming future-ready is to keep the customer experience at the heart of it all. Customer-centricity is the key in making sure customers remain loyal to brands.

“Marketing in the last five years has changed so much, it is exciting and scary at the same time,” Wong said, adding that what makes it exciting is that analytics and data can tell brands so much more about a customer now.

Brands now have the ability to track exactly how far their customers have interacted with them – when a customer has logged in, checked out the website, left the website at what point, or how much time they spent. All this data is a gold mine for marketers.

Also, as a result of the boom in digital and social media consumption, unstructured data has also proliferated. “If brands are able to combine this with the company’s existing CRMs, they have the power to look at the entire customer journey – that will be a key differentiator going forward,” Wong said.

However, all of these goals can be achieved if brands have the right talent in their marketing departments. Citing a Harvard Business

Review, Wong said the study identified that there were three categories of employees in the marketing team which shape the bench for growth – thinkers, feelers and doers.

“Thinkers are skilled at analytics, customer segmentation and scenario analysis. Feelers connect to customers and communicate internally. Doers execute marketing initiatives, which is essential in today’s 24/7, always-on economy,” the study said.

In an organisation, depending on the need, a brand has to configure a mix of these three.

“That’s how you come up with agile teams.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to talent,” Wong said.

Content at the heart of new-age marketing These transformations taking place in marketing also means the era of one-off massive campaigns are over and the need is for brands to be always-on, or at least engage audiences consistently. It has underlined the

DATE: Wednesday, 2 December 2015

VENUE: PARKROYAL on Pickering Singapore

MADE POSSIBLE BY:

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EVENTS

need for compelling content marketing more than ever before. How are marketers organising themselves to generate, disseminate and amplify content? The second half of the event focused on this topic.

Sock Hwee Tan, director of marketing and communications for Asia Pacific at UPS, said in the past marketing teams were focused on channels or products, but that structure doesn’t make sense anymore because lines have blurred.

“Instead of looking at channels and products we are looking at what content will resonate with our audience and who in the organisation is best placed to create it,” she said.

Content marketing has forced brands to look inwards – find great stories from within and share with the target audience – but what does it take to realign the teams to meet the current need?

Helene Blanchette, digital marketing leader, regional digital marketing and business support for Fuji Xerox Asia Pacific, said anyone working in a large corporation would agree that silos

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were the hardest things to break – whether it was product silos or departments.

Fuji Xerox has embarked on its content journey with much seriousness. Although, “not quite there yet”, she said it has a sound strategy in place.

It has created the role of a content manager who sits in the new digital marketing team. The prerogative of the team is to oversee all digital efforts and fully align digital with other marketing strategies.

“We want to make sure digital and the physical world are not looked at as two separate things. We are conscious of the fact that we don’t want to build a digital island,” she said.

Fuji Xerox also created a hybrid team internally, with people from different backgrounds and departments slowly moving into the digital team. This is to ensure the team fully understands all aspects of the business and creates content that is robust.

Given the enhanced role content is plying in marketing, client structures were evolving, said Alistair McEwan, SVP of commercial development for Asia and ANZ, at BBC.

The BBC has recently come up with BBC Storyworks which brings editorial insights to corporate storytelling helping brands create content tailored for their audience.

“While media agencies are well entrenched in the process of content creation and production, publishers are beginning to have direct conversations with clients as well,” he said, adding that one of the foremost factors for the success of content marketing is having a clear objective of what the piece of content should do for the brand.

There are three key factors which determine the success of content marketing for brands – access, assets and approval.

“These determine how well their content strategy will work,” he said.

Content marketing is way too critical for it to be outsourced, speakers on the panel discussion said. While agencies and vendors could come to add value and help amplify content, the process should be led from within the client organisation.

“If we ask agencies to create content externally, they will do it, but it will be superficial – especially in the B2B space where client relationships are fairly deep,” Blanchette said.

Content marketing, ideally, should play the role of a unifier within the company – be it leveraging employees for content or global counterparts to source for relevant content and adapt it to local markets.

“There are new dynamics at play when it comes to content and brands are in the process of figuring what is best for them. There is a need to pull in employees as they are a brand’s true asset and this involves the breaking down of silos,” Tan said.

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CAREERS

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CAREER PATH

JOB SHUFFLE

Gale Choong Head of marketing Unilever Singapore

First job?

Business development executive in a packaging manufacturing company.

First job in advertising/ marketing?

Brand executive with Unilever Singapore.

Best job?

My marketing stint at Unilever of course. I was with Unilever from 2005 to 2010. I moved to L’Oréal after that for four and a half years. Then F&N for one year. Now I’m back at Unilever as its head of marketing for the SG office. It’s a full circle, home coming.

Havas Worldwide appointed Todd Martin as regional digital director for APAC. He is tasked to lead and drive the growth of digital across Asia Pacific. He also leads Havas Drive, a digital acceleration, technology and innovation unit based at Havas Worldwide Bangkok. He reports to Juan Rocamora, chairman of Havas Worldwide Asia Pacific, and will work alongside Sunny Hermano, business development and integration director for Southeast Asia, and Levent Guenes, the CEO of Southeast Asia.

Perks of your current job?

Doing something that I love and I am passionate about. The ability to be creative, but at the same time business-focused (balance of both right and left brain).

Worst job?

Honestly, I don’t believe that there’s ever a “worst” job.

Every job has given me valuable experiences and learnings. They have in one way or another brought me to where I am today.

Marketing professionals you admire?

Not a conventional marketer, but I admire the late Lee Kuan Yew for the ability to “market” Singapore as the country it currently is.

Best career advice you’ve been given?

A career is a marathon, it’s not a sprint.

Why a career in marketing?

It’s a career which enables me to be both a poet and a peasant, ability for me to use both the left and the right brain.

If you weren’t in marketing, what would you be?

My secret ambition is to be a stage performer.

How do you wind down?

Spending time with my family.

In line with Cheil’s expansion plans, Cheil Singapore hired Fredrik Englund to take on the role of regional creative director. He will play a pivotal role in bringing Cheil Singapore’s creative and digital offerings to the next level for clients, which include Samsung, Singtel and CapitaLand. He reports to Nalla Chan, managing director of Cheil Singapore and to Ken Cho, CEO and president of Cheil’s SEA regional HQ. Edipresse Media Singapore’s managing director Gilbert Cheah stepped down from his role after more than a decade at the helm. His departure marked the end of an 11-year tenure that saw Edipresse Media Singapore’s luxury lifestyle media brand, Singapore Tatler, enjoy unprecedented success by winning Luxury Magazine of the Year for seven consecutive years from 2008 to 2014, and Luxury Website of the Year for two years in 2014 and 2015.

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Peter Diermayr, APAC managing partner of Mindshare, is leaving the agency in March. He will be replaced in his current role

by Sarah Hargreaves, who will be leading the IBM account, and

by Kanika Manglik, who will be leading the Boehringer Ingelheim account. Both will report to APAC chief client officer Karl Cluck. Diermayr has held various management roles in WPP companies such as Wunderman/ Y&R and BLUE. Ali Shabaz, chief creative officer of Grey Group Singapore, has been promoted to chief creative officer of Grey Group Southeast Asia. He will oversee offices in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. His career spans more than 20 years across three markets, India, Middle East and Singapore. He has worked on various big brands that have included Visa, HSBC, Sunsilk, KFC, FedEx, ICI Paints, Qatar Airways, Pizza Hut, SilkAir and GlaxoSmithKline.

Mindshare appointed Karl Cluck to the role of chief client officer for Asia Pacific.

He took over from Roy Sudipto, who left the agency to become CEO of developing markets for WPP’s Tenth Avenue.

Cluck retains leadership over Mindshare’s Japan, Korea and Taiwan cluster, where he continues working with local MDs to drive Mindshare’s business in these critical North Asia markets.

Additionally, he will oversee all regional and major local clients for Mindshare across Asia.

Experiential marketing firm George P. Johnson named Wee Teck Chan as managing director for Singapore. George P. Johnson is the flagship brand of Project: WorldWide, the global agency network that also holds entities such as ARGONAUT, JUXT, Shoptology and Spinifex.

Chan was most recently vicepresident and general manager of client services for George P. Johnson, Greater China, operating out of its Beijing office.

International media group Eleven Sports Network hired Joyee Biswas as managing director for its Asia operations.

He brings with him extensive business leadership experience in broadcast, digital and print media across Asian markets, including India and Singapore.

He most recently held the position of director of sports content and programming at Singtel, where he was responsible for multiple linear and non-linear channels and platforms.

Visa appointed Lynne Biggar as EVP and chief marketing and communications officer. She also serves as a member of the company’s executive committee and operating committee. Biggar joined Visa from Time Inc. where she was EVP of consumer marketing and revenue. Before that, she was at American Express in a variety of general management and marketing positions.

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16 June

Four Seasons Hotel Singapore

Your all-in-one platform for discussing the most pressing data and analytics issues Find out more at www.marketing-interactive.com/analytics/sg/

Contacts: Registration and agenda requests Carlo Reston +65 6423 0329, carlor@marketing-interactive.com Sponsorship and advertising Johnathan Tiang Call +65 6423 0329, johnathant@marketing-interactive.com

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3/2/2016 11:31:50 AM

LAST WORD

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RAYANA AND REZWANA: SAME, SAME, BUT DIFFERENT. REALLY DIFFERENT Dear friends of marketing, we’ve had it. And when I say this, I really mean, we’ve had it.

All of 2015, I, deputy editor of Marketing magazine, Rezwana, have been confused with editor, Rayana – through emails, phone calls and wait-for-it even face-to-face.

Granted, we look similar, you know, same height, weight, skin colour (#browntown) and at times we also wear similar outfits (just to make things worse). We even have the same phonetics to our name (RA-YANA/REZ-WA-NA), well, almost.

Ray’s side of the story is no different either. But hey, we’re two different people. By now you must be thinking, no way! After all, not many of you have seen us in the same room at the same time, so here’s proof.

But hang on, this isn’t a rant to our PR friends who email me, addressing it to Ray and vice-versa. It is also for our colleagues! *Facepalm*.

This, therefore, is just a gentle (photographic) reminder. We are the who’s who of Marketing magazine. No, literally – who IS who???

Here’s your guide: I write so much on idea theft, fake products, cheap copies and doppelgängers in our industry that this issue hits really close to home.

I first joined Marketing magazine in February 2012, fresh out of NTU (go NTU!).

I was hired by Rayana Pandey, the editor of the magazine. Now, Ray over the years, has taught me the ins and outs of journalism and the advertising and marketing scene in Singapore.

It is only natural that much of my professional mannerisms have been moulded by her.

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This has often led to many in the industry thinking we are interchangeable, one and the same.

Now for a fresh rookie journo, being confused as the editor isn’t a bad thing at all. I mean, who doesn’t want to be the editor of a regional magazine, right? (Disclaimer: If the confusion was made on the monthly pay day, this would be a completely different letter.)

But recently, when I took on the role of deputy editor, the problem escalated to a whole new level. I was getting invites, phone calls, media gifts (love them), sales pitches (hate them), story ideas and so much more – but only half the time.

Because at all the other times, it was pitched to Ray, while being sent to REZWANAM@marketing-interactive.com.

So for 2016, we hope this identity crisis, God help us both, will stop!

May we please (pretty, pretty please) request for the right emails, the right invites and, of course, the right media gifts.

But identity crisis or not, 2015 was still a fantastic year working with all our lovely industry friends. Stories were aplenty and ideas were overflowing. We launched several new successful columns and events and got much more personal with fellow readers.

As 2016 rolls along, we look forward to touching base with you and keeping this momentum going. Cheers to a bloody good year and a million hugs and kisses to all of you.

Over to you, Rez (no wait, I mean Ray).

Love, Rez. Thanks Ray, no wait, I mean Rez. *Facepalm*.

There is nothing more to add to except that, occasionally, passing off a call pretending to be Rez, is so damn helpful.

Me: “Sorry, Ray is not in the office at the moment, may I take a message?” Hey, not my fault if after stating clearly, it’s me Rayana here, the person goes: “Oh, hey Rezwana!”

And if you thought this was the end, check this out. That’s our events producer, Preeti Varadarajan together with us (take a guess who’s who again). Preeti’s first day at work, when she barely knew anyone except me who had hired her, meets a guest at one of our events who tells her a follow-up is needed with his client, post their meeting last week. This conversation was face-to-face and that meeting was with me. Go figure!

Oh, and just to make things worse, here’s another one of us three.

But anyway, all this aside, it was a fantastic year for us, guys. And we hope 2016 is a bigger and a better year for all of us.

Love, Ray/Rez/Preeti (you choose).

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4/2/2016 4:30:22 PM

19-20 APRil marriott tang plaza hotel

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TAKING THE CONTENT CONVERSATION FORWARD Content marketing isn’t new, but continues to grow in importance. For most organisations it is no longer a question of ‘why’ content marketing; it’s about when, what and, most importantly, how?

At this year’s Content 360, we’re covering the ‘how’ of content in great depth.

Be a part of Content 360, Asia’s 360 forum for content marketing to take an immersive look into best practices from across the region. Stay connected, learn from experts, share your ideas and join in the content conversation.

Pre-Early bird rate (Till 21 February) Client-side: SGD1,090 Solutions Providers: SGD1,690 www.marketing-interactive.com/content360/sg 19-20 April 2016 Singapore Marriott Tang Hotel 9.00 am to 5.00pm (Registration starts at 8)

For more information, contact: Czarina Solomon project manager +65 6423 0329 ext: 227 +65 8112 6351 czarinas@marketing-interactive.com

23 March 2016 Shangri-La Hotel Singapore

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