advertising + marketing malaysia
AGENCY OF THE YEAR 2016
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EDITOR’S NOTE
Editorial Rayana Pandey, Editor rayanap@marketing-interactive.com Rezwana Manjur, Deputy Editor rezwanam@marketing-interactive.com Vivienne Tay, Journalist viviennet@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 - Malaysia Joven Barceñas, Director, Business Development & Strategy (Malaysia & Indonesia) jovenb@marketing-interactive.com Bernadine Reyla, Project Manager bernadiner@marketing-interactive.com Ong Yi Xuan, Advertising Sales Coordinator yixuano@marketing-interactive.com
Advertising Sales - International Johnathan Tiang, Sales Manager (Singapore) johnathant@marketing-interactive.com Sara Wan, Senior Sales Manager (Hong Kong) saraw@marketing-interactive.com
Event Production Hairol Salim, Regional Lead - Events and Training hairol@marketing-interactive.com
Event Services Yeo Wei Qi, Regional Head of Events Services weiqi@marketing-interactive.com
Finance Evelyn Wong, Regional Finance Director evelynw@lighthousemedia.com.sg
Management Søren Beaulieu, Publisher sorenb@marketing-interactive.com
There has never been a more exciting time than now to be in marketing, but can the same be said for agencies? While there are arguments for both sides, certain challenges agencies face cannot be negated. Agencies are finding it harder and harder to retain talent – the best of which are getting lured by emerging ad-tech players and/or giant publishers. Thinning margins industry wide have wreaked havoc – so much so that reinventing is no longer a matter of choice, but a necessity. In a new study by Forbes Insights and sponsored by Oracle Marketing Cloud, 60% of brand and agency executives say their roles and responsibilities have changed significantly over the past two years. As a result, both groups are re-engineering their internal organisations and forging new ways of working with their respective agency or brand counterparts. At the same time, the research found that technology is ingrained in marketing operations and, perhaps most significantly of all, agency and brand stakeholders are challenging themselves to analyse and apply consumer data in more sophisticated ways. Some are even hiring data scientists and others outside of the traditional marketing discipline to help in these efforts. But that’s just the start. “As the changing nature of marketing impacts product development, sales and company culture, closer collaboration
between brands and agencies is becoming more important than ever. The result: forward-thinking agencies are ready to serve a higher purpose than just being ‘idea factories’ for individual campaigns, in the words of one executive in Asia,” the report said. The need for agencies to innovate in offerings as well their structure, has never been stronger than now. And we have begun to see some of those changes starting to take place. Our Agency of the Year awards is all about celebrating those efforts you have made to make your business future-proof. Advertising + Marketing magazine‘s Agency of the Year is recognised as Malaysia’s premier awards show for agencies, and touted as the only one judged solely by client marketers. Our awards have always had two components – assessing the business of agencies in the Agency of the Year segment and assessing the work or specific campaigns in The MARKies. Both components saw new categories added to reflect the evolving nature of our industry. The competition this year was fierce, and the quality of submissions par excellence. The agencies that won displayed robust business results for themselves as well as their clients. Read onto find who the champions of Malaysia’s ad industry are.
Justin Randles, Group Managing Director jr@marketing-interactive.com Tony Kelly, Managing Director tk@marketing-interactive.com
Advertising + Marketing Malaysia is published 6 times per year by Lighthouse Independent Media Pte Ltd PP 16093/12/2011 (026708). Printed in Malaysia on CTP process by Percetakan Skyline Sdn Bhd No. 35 & 37 Jalan 12/32B, TSI Business Industrial Park, Batu 61/2 Off Jalan Kepong, 52100 Kuala Lumpur Tel: 03-6257 4846. For subscriptions, contact circulations at +65 6423 0329 or email subscriptions@marketing-interactive. com. COPYRIGHT & REPRINTS: All material printed in Advertising + Marketing Malaysia 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 offi ce. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in Advertising + Marketing Malaysia 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 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 A+M Malaysia magazine, go to: www.marketing-interactive.com ...........................................................................................................................
A MEMBER OF
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Rayana Pandey Editor
a dvert i s i ng + ma r ke t i ng AGENCY OF THE YEAR SPECIAL ANNUAL EDITION 2016
Photography: Elliot Lee, Nikon Ambassador (Singapore) – www.elliotly.com; Makeup & Hair: Michmakeover using Make Up For Ever & hair using Sebastian Professional – www.michmakeover.com
AND THE AWARD GOES TO …
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METHODOLOGY
HOW THE WINNERS WON How the finalists were determined Since its inception, the winners of Agency of the Year have always won based on one constant: the agency preferences of client marketers. Just like last year, this year’s awards once again gives agencies the opportunity to enter and nominate themselves to be in the running for the title. Any agency could enter in any of the 13 AOTY categories they felt were relevant to their business. This allows for greater participation from more agencies based in Malaysia. Staying true to the awards’ methodology, their cases were then rigorously scrutinised by a jury of 19 senior client-side marketers before the final rankings were determined. The judges were chosen based on their seniority and vast collective knowledge and experience in the marketing and communications fields. Each entry was judged by a number of members from the panel, each with strong expertise in that particular marketing discipline. To ensure no conflict of interest, judges did not score agencies they had direct working relationships with, either currently or during the evaluation period. Criteria The entrants’ performances during the specified time-period of 1 January 2015 to 31 December 2015 were evaluated based on criteria that covered everything from business performance to greater contributions to the industry at large. Agencies were required to structure their cases based on the following four key business areas, with an equal degree of value tied to each: performance (25% of total score), product (25%), people (25%) and perspective (25%).
the highest percentages, and the highest ranking independent agency (Local Hero) in each category were thus determined.
JUDGING CRITERIA
25%
25%
25%
HOW LEO BURNETT GROUP MALAYSIA CRUISED TO VICTORY While any agency winning gold in their category is eligible to win Overall Agency of the Year by having the highest overall score, Leo Burnett Group Malaysia earned its title convincingly by triumphing in multiple categories, and scoring a record 29 points from 10 trophies.
POINTS SYSTEM GOLD
4
SILVER
2
BRONZE
1
LB’S TOTAL
29
A CLOSER LOOK AT THE CHAMP’S PERFORMANCE
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25%
Performance Product People Perspective
How the winners were decided Entries were evaluated by a judging panel made up of senior client marketers across major industries in Malaysia, including telecommunications, F&B, hospitality, travel, insurance, retail and banking and finance. All the judges’ scores were tallied and each agency’s score was expressed as a total percentage within each category to produce the winners’ table. The three agencies with
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The agency with the most wins across all categories was duly granted the title of Overall Agency of the Year.
CATEGORY
RANKING
Brand Consultancy of the Year
Gold
Event Marketing Agency of the Year
Gold
Public Relations Agency of the Year
Gold
Content Marketing Agency of the Year
Gold
Creative Agency of the Year
Gold
Digital Agency of the Year
Silver
Mobile Marketing Agency of the Year
Silver
Direct Marketing Agency of the Year
Silver
Social Marketing Agency of the Year
Silver
Search Marketing Agency of the Year
Bronze
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SPONSOR AND PARTNER
SPONSOR
MARKies sponsor for Best Idea – Female Audience
NBCUNIVERSAL NBCUniversal International
13th Street, Studio Universal, E!
Networks, the international
Entertainment Television, The
channels division of NBCUniversal,
Style Network, DIVA, Telemundo
is one of the world’s premier
and Golf Channel. NBCUniversal
entertainment portfolios, delivering
International Networks is a division
quality content and compelling
of NBCUniversal, one of the world’s
brands to over 176 territories in the
leading media and entertainment
world. The brands in the portfolio
companies.
include Universal Channel, Syfy,
PARTNER
Tiger Beer
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Born and brewed in the heart
in the early 1990s, with over
of Asia, Tiger Beer’s uniquely
50 international awards and
refreshing and full-bodied flavour
accolades to date. Some of the
is enjoyed in more than 70
notable awards include a gold
countries. The brand received
medal in the international-style
its first award in 1939, beginning
lager at the World Beer Cup
its journey as an award winning
2010 and a Gold Medal for the
beer on an international stage.
International Golden Lagers
The recognition catapulted
category at the BrewNZ Awards
Tiger Beer’s internationalisation
in 2011.
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THE JUDGES
YOUR AOTY AND MARKies JUDGES
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Alan Tan Head of Digital Marketing Allianz Malaysia Berhad
Deon Lee Deputy General Manager, Sales & Marketing BLoyalty
Sashi Ambi Head of Corporate Communications BMW Group Malaysia
Heather Goh Group Head of Brand Advertising Celcom Axiata
Teh Wei Seong Senior Vice President, Marketing Planning & Insights Citibank Malaysia
Audrey Chong Head, Marcom DiGi Telecommunications
Linda Hassan Deputy General Manager, Marketing Domino’s Pizza Malaysia & Singapore
Anthony Edwin Director of Marketing Communications Fraser Place Kuala Lumpur & Fraser Residence Kuala Lumpur
Thila Munusamy Director of Sales & Marketing Legoland Malaysia Resort
Rachel Wong Director Sales & Marketing Mandarin Oriental Kuala Lumpur
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THE JUDGES
YOUR AOTY AND MARKies JUDGES
Wong Meng Lee Senior Manager, Marketing Nippon Paint
Nancy Tan General Manager Marketing Pavilion Shopping Centres (subsidiary of the Pavilion Retail Group)
Harith Menon Head of Customer Marketing Nokia
Ang Boon Chow Country Manager OpenRice Malaysia
Kaladevi Ramasamy Head of Group Marketing Pantai Holdings
Elaine Soh Marketing Director Samsung Malaysia Electronics
Simon Si Head Regional Communications Seek Asia
Ir. Nirinder Singh Johl General Manager (Strategic Communications) Tenaga Nasional
Kim Lim Head of Marketing & New Business (Malaysia & Singapore) Universal Music Group
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UNI 160406 Msian Publication Trade Ad 210mm x 280mm FA.pdf
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OVERALL AGENCY OF THE YEAR
LEO BURNETT GROUP MALAYSIA SLAYS ITS COMPETITION TAKING HOME THE AGENCY OF THE YEAR TITLE ONCE AGAIN With five gold awards, four silvers and a bronze, Leo Burnett Group Malaysia showcased its industry prowess at the 2016 Agency of the Year Awards. The agency clinched the overall title for the third consecutive time. Some of the categories it won gold for were in Creative, Content Marketing and Public Relations Agency of the Year. Last year was a big year for Leo Burnett Malaysia as it announced a new creative structure following the hire of Andrew Low. A creative council was formed with six of Leo Burnett Malaysia’s senior creative
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directors jointly taking the creative helm of the agency. Pushing for creativity to be at the heart of all its campaign executions is Tan Kien Eng, CEO of Leo Burnett Malaysia, who also comes from a creative background. Over the past year, the agency has been hell-bent on structuring itself in a manner which ensures its competitive best in creatively delivering dynamic business change for its clients. This comes as in the past few years, Leo Burnett Malaysia has seen an evolution from being just a traditional advertising agency to a fully integrated communications company.
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With its HumanKind philosophy being the backbone of all its decisions and problem-solving ideas, the agency strives to unlock opportunities for each and every client partner. This year, it used its extended HumanKind toolkit for clients, and clearly won the hearts of marketers and judges in Malaysia. The agency says its philosophy is simple: “reach for the stars” – a legacy that has been demonstrated time and time again by the work of its late executive creative director, Yasmin Ahmad. With that vision and mindset, on 15-16 August 2015, a team of Burnetters, along with members of Persatuan Yasmin
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OVERALL AGENCY OF THE YEAR
“With its HumanKind philosophy being the backbone of all its decisions and problem-solving ideas, the agency strives to unlock opportunities for each and every client partner.’’ Ahmad, brought together like-minded individuals and hosted a community outreach activity at the Yasmin Ahmad Museum in Kong Heng, Ipoh, further bridging the gap between the creative advertising community and local Malaysian communities. “The objective of the activity was to bring artists and the local community together and build a supportive network where art enthusiasts can empower each other to do great things,” said the agency. Strong growth for the agency in 2015 was also driven by solid new local and regional business wins. Realising the growing
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importance of digital innovations, new initiatives rolled out in 2015, including a 360-digital structure at the core to ensure fully integrated creative solutions. Leo Burnett also set up a new digital film content division catering to the increasing demand for web films and shrinking production budgets. The agency also took measures to become the agency of the future by increasing its integrated offerings beyond traditional advertising by staffing up in a new way, mixing traditionalists with hybrids and up-and-coming digital natives. Leo Burnett also mapped
digital into other disciplines by absorbing Arc Creative into the agency, dissolving the boundaries between what is digital and ATL. This is the awards’ seventh edition since it started in 2010 as an agency awards programme judged solely by client marketers. This year, 19 senior client marketers representing brands such as BMW Group Malaysia, Celcom Axiata, Samsung Malaysia Electronics and Tenaga Nasional, among others, took part in the judging process. The awards were held on 6 May 2016 at Hilton Malaysia and sponsored by NBCUniversal and supported by partner Tiger Beer.
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BRAND CONSULTANCIES
LEO BURNETT GROUP MALAYSIA Owned by : Publicis Groupe Headed by : Tan Kien Eng, CEO Leo Burnett Group Malaysia maintained its top run in the Brand Consulting of the Year category this year and it did so by capitalising on digital, the growth of which it says, has outpaced traditional mediums. 2015 saw its continued mutual growth with long-standing clients, with relationships based on trust and respect, and at a client retention rate of 100%. Much of its
THE WINNERS GOLD
Leo Burnett Group Malaysia
83.75%
SILVER
VLT
81.67%
BRONZE
Publicis Communications Malaysia
79.17%
LOCAL HERO
VLT
81.67%
THE FINALISTS MullenLowe Malaysia Verso & Recto
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success it attributed to its team at LB Brand Consultancy. In 2015, LB Brand Consultancy was successful in consolidating its place as an established and respected brand consultant that provides end-to-end service in this area. With more clients exploring data analytics and shopper marketing, LB Consulting has done considerable work in these areas, as a way to help clients further. Using a combination of targeted research techniques, combined with a comprehensive analysis of social and digital channels, LB Brand Consulting was able to create a highly actionable Malay insights workshop which is being now being used by some of its clients to refine and enhance their marketing plans. LB Consultancy’s in-house knowledge centre is staffed with people with years of experience, and a curiosity about people and their motivations. They have research and analytical skills coupled with deep empathy for human behaviour and emotions. Over the years, LB has performed a number of projects for clients such as Proton, PETRONAS, TNB, Dutch Lady and McDonald’s, to name just a few. The LB knowledge centre is well-known for its depth of local insights and range of knowledge gleaned from having an ear on
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the ground as well as the latest insights from around the world – from human insights to shopper and retail to digital insights and regular cultural fuels, and by having a pulse on the latest trends. Projects have also included shopper/retail solutions. The group also created LB CSR (corporate social responsibility) in March 2014 which was officially launched in 2015 to help clients create and communicate much needed CSR strategies that is a growing mandate today. It saw the results in 2015, with successful campaigns for PETRONAS where it was tasked to highlight some of its noteworthy, but less well-known initiatives outside its core business of oil and gas. Always on the look out to groom talent, especially fresh graduates entering the working world who are not industry-ready and often lacking real experience, it created specialised programmes to expose students by opening doors to them via talks and internship programmes. It partnered with Taylor’s World Class Scholarship to offer management trainee positions upon graduation. This helps provide scholars with an added edge to succeed in their careers after graduation.
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BRAND CONSULTANCIES
VLT Owned by : Independent Headed by : Warren Tan, CEO The new revamped and refreshed business structure the agency unveiled in 2015 seems to have borne fruit as it bagged multiple awards this year, one of them being the silver and Local Hero award in the Brand Consultancy of the Year category. In 2015, VLT consolidated its vision of building three complementary businesses in one company that would redefine the
“agency” model. It created VLT: a digital-led 360 agency that creates experiences for brands to inspire people; VLT Labs, a start-up studio and start-up accelerator that partners with founders to invent and build new products and start-ups that disrupt the status quo; and VLT Community – an ecosystem and community builder that creates initiatives and events that impact the creative, technology and entrepreneurial communities around us. The collaborative sum of all three would define VLT’s vision of the “agency of tomorrow”, the agency said. It believes in a future where it can apply all that it
content, NewsDesk is central to its single planning process where the best talent comes together to develop brand ideas, engagement and a messaging strategy. In response to the India recall, MAGGI® Malaysia was tasked to produce a proactive
campaign for Malaysians that MAGGI in Malaysia was safe, before it became an issue. Within eight hours, the “100% Malaysian. 100% Malaysian Taste” campaign was created by the agency, produced and made live across digital, social, press, radio and OOH. The result was zero impact of the India crisis to the Malaysian business. Much of its success it attributes to its focus on its people, in particular on strengthening its digital capabilities – from agency culture initiatives to key hires, promotions and training.
of a “resultant” is what both conventional advertising agencies and jet-setting brand consultants shy away from, says the agency. This approach has not only helped MullenLowe Malaysia today earn the reputation of a “strategy-led creative solutions company”, but also pushed the agency to create an unmatched vocabulary ensemble of domain expertise across disciplines. In 2015, it collaborated with more than six top global consultants on various mission-critical client projects. Its single biggest product innovation
story in 2015 was its overall business approach, driven by its challenging “Can We ...?” mindset that has continuously pushed the agency to do newer stuff with both existing clients and new businesses.
communications and digital, supported with creative designs, visuals, videos and good copywriting. Delivering differentiation in niche brand campaigns is one of Verso & Recto’s biggest strengths. A strong and unique brand campaign with differentiation, it says, allows its clients to stand apart from competitors and to actively focus on creating things that cater to their needs and wants. It also helps to define a client’s unique position in the marketplace, a very important element in creating a business that consumers love. With a focus on
brand management, including competitive positioning and the impact of a marketing mix and resource allocation, the agency is able to efficiently bring up sales and profits for its clients, especially since products and services have become more difficult to differentiate. Verso & Recto’s relationship with its clients is a three-way process between the agency, the client and the target consumers. This process is reviewed from time to time to ensure effectiveness in staying focused on delivering campaigns and communications in the marketplace.
PUBLICIS COMMUNICATIONS MALAYSIA Owned by : Publicis Groupe Headed by : Dean Bramham, regional CEO Publicis Communications Malaysia had a big year in 2015. As part of its business innovation, it created “NewsDesk” which allows real-time insights and content engine for brand storytelling at the speed of culture. From planned content to real-time
MULLENLOWE MALAYSIA Owned by : Interpublic Group Headed by : Mazuin Zin, managing director MullenLowe Malaysia has since 20132014 been transforming from the conventional advertising space to emerge as a more results-oriented “trusted value partner” to client businesses. Interestingly, this in-between space
VERSO & RECTO Owned by : Independent Headed by : Carter Chia, managing director Verso & Recto has developed a product and services offering through generating niche clientele by tailoring brand campaigns to the needs of the clients and market to achieve their goals. Niche brand campaigns are carefully tailored and integrated with activations, marketing,
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knows and loves – creativity, technology and entrepreneurship – to not just build participative platforms or tell emotive stories, but to solve real problems. The agency helped BMW Malaysia launch half a dozen new models, with digital and social leading the way. In a challenging year where its competition had the advantage of hybrid tax incentives and more new products, it said it overachieved on many of its client KPIs. It also helped Malaysian start-up Urban Stove pioneer a food delivery service that enables customers to cook their own restaurant-grade dinners at home.
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CONTENT MARKETING
LEO BURNETT GROUP MALAYSIA Owned by : Publicis Groupe Headed by : Tan Kien Eng, CEO In a newly launched category this year, Leo Burnett Group Malaysia bags top spot. As one of the country’s leading communications agencies, it has been creating entertaining and relevant content that has resonated with Malaysians for more than two decades. According to the agency, it all started with the PETRONAS festive films and the late Yasmin Ahmad’s legacy. It pioneered the format: long-form storytelling with TV commercials that broke the traditional
THE WINNERS GOLD
Leo Burnett Group Malaysia
SILVER
Publicis Communications Malaysia
82.17%
BRONZE
VLT
79.17%
LOCAL HERO
VLT
79.17%
THE FINALISTS Ensemble WorldWide MullenLowe Malaysia
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87.50%
30-seconds duration. Its mantra? To create content that people look forward to; content that people will talk about and share. It recognised the need that clients have to produce more content with the same budgets as before, hence, LB developed its own digital content boutique “Spyder” to assist brands with this struggle. Spyder specialises in digital content creation and uses specialist creative, production, crews and equipment. This enables clients to create highly engaging content in the form of web films/ web videos, video marketing collateral and educational videos. Spyder delivers high quality content at competitive rates, all with the support of the brand creative teams. Some of the agency’s long-standing clients include Philip Morris, McDonald’s, PETRONAS, YTL and P&G. For Carlsberg, the agency created a year-long campaign in Malaysia, putting a modern twist on one of the brand’s iconic beer advertising campaigns called “If Carlsberg did …” The campaign demonstrated what the world would be like if it was as superior as the Carlsberg beer. Engaging consumers from a digital front, Carlsberg’s thematic campaign was launched with a 30-second web video which offered an amusing take on a common
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experience of an everyday beer drinker. The video captured a man’s weariness as he accompanies his girlfriend while she shops. The story takes a twist when he discovers, to his sheer delight, a men’s oasis behind the walls of the fitting room. This video was produced locally and released in other Carlsberg markets around the world. As a build up to that, the agency also created another campaign for Carlsberg, proposing a toast to Lunar New Year 2016 being “Probably The Best Year” (20一流–堪 称最佳新年). Playing on the Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciation of the number “16” [Yī Liú] with the Chinese character “ 一流”, refers to excellence, top notch or simply the best. As part of the campaign, Leo Burnett Group Malaysia created a website capturing 168 years of the brand’s history. The agency completely customised the website making it feel like a conversation rather than a monologue. Instead of the usual log in, the site requested for a log in through Facebook and created personalised content for visitors. They also got a chance to come up with a brand name of their own. More than 5000 Malaysians “bergified” themselves and engagement went up multiple-fold, said the agency.
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CONTENT MARKETING
PUBLICIS COMMUNICATIONS MALAYSIA
moving away from the one-size-fits-all agency model to unique and bespoke client teams and brand solutions; individual talent and services that focused on building the client’s individual business needs. In response to clients, it moved away from the traditional agency rate card-process
execution formulae and mandated process innovation to increase speed, flexibility and reduce costs. It did so by the full integration of its services tailored to each client from brand and business consultancy to digital to social to shopper to packaging. These transformations allowed the agency to consistently perform at high speed and ensure lower cost of delivery. In 2015, in order to establish MAGGI as a mother’s go-to destination for cooking inspiration, it re-looked at all the content the brand owned and aligned it to a mum’s needs.
VLT bags the bronze award in this category this year. In the past 12 months, it has worked on more than a dozen initiatives, events, collaborations and partnerships. Among them was The Co. Bangsar and The Co. Kuala Lumpur, a co-working space and community builder designed to enable the digital, creative and entrepreneurial community. With an investment of over 8,000 square feet of working, event and collaborative space in two locations, it is home to the likes of 500 Startups, Golden
Gate Ventures, Cradle and GoCar with hosted communities, including TeAM, Echelon Asia, Startup Grind KL and Techstars. It also worked on Alps – a designer and developer apprenticeship programme, in collaboration with MaGIC and the Malaysian government. Over 20 young designers and developers have been impacted by these apprenticeships, learning the best practices and craft from VLT’s senior team. In 2015, VLT consolidated its vision of building three complementary businesses in one company that would redefine the “agency” model.
Nestlé Milo and Johnson & Johnson. The agency aims to bring innovative methods to engage audiences. The agency’s strengths lie in collaboration, data-driven thinking and agility. This year it makes it as a finalist in this category. Ensemble Worldwide aims to establish a new creative model that puts storytelling at the forefront by fully utilising the power of data and technology. With the belief that data can help create better insights and brand experiences, the agency creates stories that resonate with viewers on a personal
level. Another belief the company holds is in creativity with context – an idea should be something that breaks conventional formats of branding. Ensemble sees the importance of targeting all devices due to the consumers’ media habits, and the ability of fluidity between mediums to offer a seamless user experience. The flexible work culture at Ensemble encourages the team to explore its role. Job titles are treated as suggestions and not absolutes. It is believed at Ensemble that creativity is where both art and science meet.
conceptualised a CR platform for the stateowned private equity player that is not a social obligation, but a social enterprise to empower aspirations. For the ILMU Education Group it formalised a brand vision and path for one of Malaysia’s largest integrated education groups. For BSN, it repositioned the bank as formidable competition for commercial bank brands by shedding its national image of a community grassroots bank and offering a slew of sharply defined financial products for young Malaysians aspirations. The duties
ranged from the brand campaign launch to distilling it across the bank’s products and services portfolio, including touch-points. For CLEAR, it partnered with Unilever Malaysia to create a branded content web series on YouTube, with an intent to build brand affinity and advocacy. After partnering the global forum’s formal launch on the world stage in London in 2013, MullenLowe teamed up again with WIEF Foundation to create a new brand architecture in conjunction with its 11th edition Forum in KL.
Owned by : Publicis Groupe Headed by : Dean Bramham, regional CEO
Publicis Malaysia had a fruitful 2015 across business innovation, new business, talent acquisition and retention, campaign results and client business success. It had a simple strategy in response to the growing industry digitalisation and resultant client needs. Its strategy focused on
VLT Owned by : Independent Headed by : Warren Tan, CEO
ENSEMBLE WORLDWIDE Owned by : IPG Mediabrands Headed by : Amit Sutha, managing director Just two years ago, Ensemble Worldwide started as a six-person team, but has since expanded more than five-fold and is now a strong mid-sized agency in Malaysia. The agency is clearly one to watch with clients across many industries such as Shell,
MULLENLOWE MALAYSIA Owned by : Interpublic Group Headed by : Mazuin Zin, managing director Since 2013-2014, MullenLowe Malaysia has been transforming from the conventional advertising space to emerge as a more results-oriented “trusted value partner” to client businesses. For Ekuinas Iltizam, it scripted and
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CREATIVE AGENCIES
LEO BURNETT GROUP MALAYSIA Owned by : Publicis Groupe Headed by : Tan Kien Eng, CEO
THE WINNERS GOLD
Leo Burnett Group Malaysia
76.56%
SILVER
M&C Saatchi Malaysia
76.25%
BRONZE
Lion & Lion
71.88%
LOCAL HERO
VLT
67.08%
THE FINALISTS MullenLowe Malaysia Publicis Communications Malaysia
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Maintaining its top spot as the creative agency gold winner is Leo Burnett. In 2015, Leo Burnett Group Malaysia announced a creative structure following the hire of Andrew Low, who joined the agency as executive creative director. The creative council comprises six of Leo Burnett Malaysia’s senior creative directors who jointly take the creative helm of the agency. They are Iska Hashim, group creative director; James Yap, creative director; Ian Lee, creative director; Christie Herman, creative director; Theresa Tsang, creative director of Alpha245 and Andrew Low. According to Tan Kien Eng, CEO of the agency, Leo Burnett wanted to structure itself to ensure its competitive best in using creativity to deliver dynamic business change for its clients. This comes as in the past few years, Leo Burnett Malaysia has been trying to evolve from an advertising agency to a fully integrated communications company. The new creative structure aims to align with clients’ changing needs. It has made significant strides to manage and engage its talent by creating opportunities to work on projects regionally to experience a different culture. The collaboration with its regional offices resulted in campaigns developed for Vietnam
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(Samsung), Australia (Philip Morris) and ASEAN (Coke). Leo Burnett’s HumanKind philosophy has been the cornerstone of its approach to solving client issues and unlocking opportunities. It has used its extended HumanKind toolkit for clients, for example, “WhatIf” to come up with the AIA Agency Proposition; “People Shop” to better understand shopper profiles to help Maxis and Nestlé be even more effective in retail; and “Dirty Feet and Human Journey” which proved highly useful in helping the decision-making and customer journey for ISKL (International School of KL) and McDonald’s. The agency says its philosophy is simple: “reach for the stars” – a legacy that has been demonstrated time and time again by the work of its late executive creative director, Yasmin Ahmad. With that thought in mind, on the 15-16 August 2015, a team of Burnetters, along with members of Persatuan Yasmin Ahmad, brought together like-minded individuals and hosted a community outreach activity at the Yasmin Ahmad Museum in Kong Heng, Ipoh. The objective of the activity was to bring artists and the local community together to build a supportive network where art enthusiasts can really empower each other.
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CREATIVE AGENCIES
M&C SAATCHI MALAYSIA Owned by : M&C Saatchi Headed by : Datin Lara Hussein, managing director 2015 wasn’t an easy year for many Malaysian companies. The Asian economy slowed and there was much controversy surrounding Malaysia, with political tension, racial instability and two aviation disasters, which stopped many investors from looking to Malaysia. But M&C Saatchi still managed to pull through with an almost perfect key client retention rate, holding an industry record of sorts in client/agency loyalty with an average of five-year long partnerships that have been driven by creative work and effective client relationship management. The agency’s teams have received lots of praise from clients for their dedication, professionalism, sharp-thinking and analysis, fast turnaround time and creative excellence. The agency has had multi-level internal programmes designed for various levels across disciplines; with the goal in mind to align every staff member to the company’s
LION & LION Owned by : Independent Headed by : Hugh Batley and Casper Andersen, founders and managing partners In the past year, Lion & Lion has grown exponentially, hence the decision to officially launch in Singapore mid-2015. By then, the agency had already acquired several blue-
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philosophy of “brutal simplicity of thought” and “creating impact”. With various training available to its employees, the agency uses it to foster knowledge-exchange and hone the expertise of staff. The agency believes it needs to be able to innovate and staff need to have fun on the job. Through extravagant company trips, the staff are treated to new and unforgettable experiences while encouraged by a culture of exploration and experimentation. M&C also pays a lot of attention to ensure all its staff strikes a good work-life balance, be it through weekly yoga classes, futsal tournaments or
running clubs. These activities promote a healthy lifestyle to promote a healthy mind and an open culture. Additionally, M&C Saatchi also practises an employee network exchange programme; the best performer from any department is sent to an international M&C Saatchi office for two months. This provides the employee with international, professional exposure and allows them to further hone their skills. Often, the staff who return from the exchange programme will have many ideas to improve M&C Saatchi KL, which in turn, helps to impact the Malaysian advertising industry.
chip clients in Singapore. With that, the company grew its creative team to more than 30 people with skills ranging from creative concepts, design, video production, content, UX, photography and motion graphics. Lion & Lion has executed campaigns for several named brands such as Apple, L’Oréal, AXA and IKEA. The agency is focused on delivering remarkable and impact-driven work for its clients, striving to be proactive in everything it does – from client relationships
to internal processes. By using real data-driven analysis, the agency is able to deliver on its promises and exceed clients’ expectations. By building an inclusive, supportive and exciting environment that encourages regular feedback to ensure partners and leaders are aware of happenings in the office, a good culture in the workplace is being nurtured. Lion & Lion’s creative department is filled with a multinational team of art directors, content strategists, content writers, designers and UX designers. The team ensures innovative and top quality work across all brands and is a creative hub for both local and regional clients. At Lion & Lion, training and skill development is very important to the creative department’s growth, with regular workshops on the latest design tools, social and web trends. Besides training companies and start-ups on the way they can build traction for their brands online, Lion & Lion is committed to passing on its knowledge to a new generation of digital innovators. It has expressed interest in potentially investing in a learning system that will strike a balance between learning and daily work tasks in the hope of developing future talent.
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CREATIVE AGENCIES
VLT Owned by : Independent Headed by : Warren Tan, CEO VLT bags the Local Hero title in the Creative Agency of the Year category. It believes in a future where it can apply all that it knows and loves – creativity, technology and entrepreneurship – to not just build participative platforms or tell emotive stories, but to solve real problems, discover solutions and reframe possibilities for clients, colleagues and the community. VLT has launched and improved many innovations and discipline initiatives. In 2015, it further innovated new models to work with start-ups: earning equity stakes instead of (and in addition to) fees. Its new “clients” thrived in a partnership where they were truly aligned with the goals and fully invested in their “work”. Product and brand innovation conversations with VLT’s traditional big brand clients went up a notch – further educating them on how they could also apply design thinking, pivot and “growth hack”. Sharing its start-up and product development experience led to truly
MULLENLOWE MALAYSIA Owned by : Interpublic Group Headed by : Mazuin Zin, managing director The business of creativity has always been about stepping out of the comfort zone, MullenLowe Malaysia believes. “The longer we resist, the tougher it becomes. Marketing challenges demand it, changing consumer context mandates it, and
collaborative work with brands such as Axiata and DBS. On the creative front, it hired Alexander Cheah as creative group head. Formerly of IF Interactive, and with more than eight years of experience working in New Zealand, he is a Cannes award-winning creative and technologist who now provides creative leadership to VLT’s creative team. It also hired Racheal Kow as people and culture lead.
Well-liked and well-connected, as the agency describes her, she is a suit-turnedheadhunter who finally found her calling as VLT’s people and culture lead. With 11 years of experience in the creative industry, and winner of the Font (her previous employer) Global Service Excellence Award 2015, she says she “joined her favourite client after seven years in the recruitment industry knowing the ins and outs of almost every agency in town”.
complex client business challenges yearn for it,” it says. So the agency started 2015 with a philosophy of, “Can we do it?” – a sentiment that drives the start-up’s culture of today, be it the multinationals in search of breaking new barriers; government-linked companies looking for ways to fire-up a culture of innovation within their ecosystem; or humble SMEs and start-ups looking to take their businesses to the world. In terms of work, for BSN Happy Rewards/VTM, it partnered to conceptualise a loyalty programme in Malaysia with a
signature web and mobile app platform – a move it says will “change the way we interact with loyalty programmes”. It also helped create an interactive tool kit for its biggest service innovation ever with the virtual teller machine by infusing a human element to help instil confidence among the uninitiated. For Flyklia.com, it created a social curation platform for everyone travelling to and from Malaysia. MullenLowe helped create a holistic e-commerce-driven business strategy for this flagship portal of Malaysia Airport Holdings.
PUBLICIS COMMUNICATIONS MALAYSIA Owned by : Publicis Groupe Headed by : Dean Bramham, regional CEO Publicis Communications Malaysia believes change has become the defining characteristic in today’s business environment. To keep its relevance among customers, managing change and uncertainty is a prerequisite, it says.
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“Creating leading strategies and powerful ideas that allow our clients to be and remain the leaders they want to be – to lead the change.” In 2015, it put this philosophy – acts not ads/PR – into action with major “lead the
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change” strategy developments across all clients. Much of Publicis Communications Malaysia’s success is attributed to its focus on its people, in particular on strengthening its digital capabilities – from agency culture initiatives to key hires, promotions and training. Recently, it named Mike Foster as executive planning director; Katheryn Sutcliffe as digital client services director; Kevin Foong as digital associate creative director; Grace Loh as digital engagement planner; and Alex Sin as digital group account director.
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DIGITAL AGENCIES
M&C SAATCHI-I MALAYSIA Owned by : M&C Saatchi Headed by : Datin Lara Hussein, managing director Clinching top honours in Digital Agency of the Year is M&C Saatchi-i, which saw exponential growth in 2015 with significant key account wins, creative accolades and consistent target achievements for all client KPIs. The agency maintained steady business growth with new business wins such as Malaysian Airlines, Mitsubishi, Village Grocer and Ritz-Carlton. M&C Saatchi-i also continued its long-standing relationships with
THE WINNERS GOLD
M&C Saatchi-i Malaysia
81.50%
SILVER
Leo Burnett Group Malaysia
77.50%
BRONZE
PHD Malaysia
74.38%
LOCAL HERO
Consider Digital
68.13%
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clients, including Celcom, its key anchor client spanning a record-breaking 12 years, as well as Tourism Malaysia for the past 11 years. It continued to expand not only the team, but to widen the scope in its portfolio by venturing into content marketing and strengthening its social media marketing services to meet the growing demands of its client. The agency launched two initiatives in the form of mobile applications for Celcom Axiata – Storyline – a social care platform that connects residents of senior citizens homes with children at orphanages through storytelling; as well as Odysee, a mobile app developed to raise awareness of visual impairment in the community in collaboration with Celcom and Save Ones Sight Missions. With Malaysia Airlines onboard in 2015, the agency launched a key campaign to push domestic flights through a series of short stories for social media. They revolved around simple human stories about love, family and home from all walks of lives and perspectives. M&C Saatchi-i also made significant senior key hires to strengthen its creative team. Ben Welsh was appointed chairman of creative for Asia, while Farrokh Madon was named creative consultant.
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In 2015, the agency also continued to engage in initiatives that accelerated its social responsibility to the industry as well as the community. M&C Saatchi-i collaborated with Yayasan Sultanah Bahiyah, a charity organisation, to help the development of the state of Kedah. The agency provides input and strategic direction to further enhance YSB’s communications such as website development, and events management online. The agency focuses on developing its own talent and hiring the best. The M&C Saatchi global scholarship runs on a regular basis to promote the best young talent, giving every employee a chance for global exposure and skill development. Unthink workshops are also conducted twice a year to challenge the employees with talks and classes on creative writing, photography and even martial arts with expert speakers from all across the network. M&C Saatchi-i also believes in rewarding the best performers with incentives. The agency conducts yearly company trips to international destinations to encourage a sense of teamwork that goes a long way in defining the culture of the agency in Malaysia.
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DIGITAL AGENCIES
LEO BURNETT GROUP MALAYSIA Owned by : Publicis Groupe Headed by : Tan Kien Eng, CEO Leo Burnett Group Malaysia wins the silver award in this category this year. Strong growth in 2015 was driven by solid new local and regional business wins, despite
the industry still recovering from a global recession. Its new business wins included Carlsberg, Isuzu, F&N and Proton. New initiatives rolled out in 2015 included a 360-digital structure at the core to ensure a fully integrated creative solution, as well as setting up a new digital film content division catering to the increasing demand for web films and shrinking production budgets. Leo Burnett created campaigns such as the Durex “Real Feel Touch”, a digitally led campaign using an interactive film on a
mobile platform, which helped to increase the brand’s market share. The agency also took measures to become the agency of the future by increasing its integrated offerings beyond traditional advertising by staffing up in a new way – mixing traditionalists with hybrids and up and coming digital natives. Leo Burnett also mapped digital into other disciplines by absorbing Arc Creative into the agency, dissolving the boundaries between what is digital and what is ATL. It increased its digital and innovation capabilities by hiring specific digital natives to build up its digital, strategic and technical offerings in social media, web and mobile. The strength and soul of the agency lies in its 250 distinctive staff, with key new positions created in 2015, including Andrew Leong as managing partner; Oliver Woods as head of social; Jonathan Beament as head of AV and digital content; and Maureen Gomez as head of people and culture. Leo Burnett’s CEO Tan Kien Eng said: “We champion HumanKind, Leo Burnett’s values and approach to work, believing that if we start inspiring and supporting our people, they will produce their best. With great people and great product, profit will follow.”
SME Academy to provide digital training sessions for local SMEs to understand regional consumer trends and best-marketing practices. 2015 also saw PHD improving SOURCE, a global operating system that allows everyone within PHD to tap into the collective mind of the network. By tapping into SOURCE, PHD conceptualised the MyRestaurant programme. The final year students of Taylor’s University School of Culinary were invited to propose new restaurant concepts to be judged by successful owners
with the eventual winner undergoing an apprenticeship with the owners. It has been documented into a reality show to be aired in August 2016. From upping its energy into building the brand, PHD Malaysia’s big focus in 2015 has been to leverage this positive energy into driving business growth and inspiring thought leadership. Its heritage as the first planningfocused media agency has historically helped differentiate it from the competition and continues to differentiate the agency today, in every market.
PHD MALAYSIA Owned by : Omnicom Media Group Headed by : Jimmy Lim, general manager Taking home the bronze award this year is PHD Malaysia, who says it has become one of the fastest growing media agencies in Asia Pacific. Its growth has been driven by deeper engagements in digital, outside of paid media and “hunting” aggressively for new pastures and new client categories. PHD believes in transforming clients into enthusiastic referral sources and lifelong clients who stay not only because of its great work, but because of the value the agency has brought to their business. In Malaysia, PHD blazed the industry with proprietary products such as the Shrinking Wallet; a study on changing consumer behaviour with the GST implementation and the shrinking ringgit; as well as the PHD Shopee Toolkit, which was developed to educate brands on how to navigate into online commerce. Teaming up with Malaysia SME, a well-known publication, PHD launched The
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DIGITAL AGENCIES
CONSIDER DIGITAL Owned by : Independent (in 2015) Headed by : Kasper Wandi, CEO and founder This was Consider Digital’s last chance to grab the Local Hero title and it did so in style. Most recently, the agency was acquired by Dentsu Aegis Network. When it started as a digital agency, Consider Digital was focused on providing SEO and SEM as its core digital marketing services. Since then, it has evolved into a 360-degree digital agency providing consultancy, content marketing, social media management, creative design, web and app development, e-commerce and more. As a digital agency it finds the most important task is to achieve long-term relationships with its clients. The key to success is building relationships for more than one-time projects whereby it provides clients consistent help on an ongoing basis. The agency works across a range of different industries, geographies and sectors, and is constantly expanding its collective knowledge base.
Some of its clients include Abbott, AIG, Huawei, Clinique and HSBC. Since its inception, Consider Digital has formed a development team and an analytics team to optimise conversion rates and maximise campaign results. A social media team was also formed in 2014 to deliver 360 content campaigns and social media engagement. It continues to inspire its employees to keep learning and evaluating their skills, providing internal training programmes for staff members in soft skills, including sales, client management and presentation skills. Consider Digital also has external training
PUBLICIS COMMUNICATIONS MALAYSIA Owned by : Publicis Groupe Headed by : Dean Bramham, regional CEO 2015 was the most successful year ever for Publicis KL across business innovation, new business, talent acquisition and retention, campaign results and client business success. Its strategy focused on moving away
from the one-size-fits-all agency model to unique and bespoke client teams and brand solutions. Publicis KL creates large and growing relationships through continued results in a dynamic and changing marketplace, with
SAATCHI & SAATCHI ARACHNID Owned by : Publicis Groupe Headed by : David Soo, managing director Saatchi & Saatchi Arachnid spent 2015 focused on pursuing new business opportunities. This helped the agency go through its best performing year in its 19-year history. In the past five years, the agency has continued to evolve its service offering from a Malaysian digital agency to a regional
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participation marketing agency. It believes that through consumer participation, brands resonate better and are more influential than those that rely on the outdated approach of disruption and one-way messaging. Saatchi & Saatchi Arachnid has become a media-neutral experience agency with digital at its core – something most agencies around
programmes such as the Google Analytics Test, which teaches employees the principles of digital analytics, creating a Google Analytics account, how to collect data and navigate reports. The agency has earned the Google Partner badge, which certifies it to manage Google AdWords accounts. On Fridays the entire team has a meeting to share work-related updates and socialise, and each department shares their major innovations of each month. Overall, 2015 saw the company focused on developing key industry partnerships with other online and offline agencies based around its search performance offering.
clients such as Maggi, Nescafé, Lactacyd and Citibank. One innovation the agency launched is NewsDesk, which allows real-time insights and a content engine for brand storytelling at the speed of culture. It is central to Publicis’ single planning process where the best talent comes together to develop brand ideas, engagement and a messaging strategy. Service innovations also include B2B and downstream communication services, content strategy and execution, as well as strategic brand consultancy.
the world are still striving to become. In 2015, it focused on content creation that hopefully resonated with consumers. Saatchi & Saatchi Arachnid’s service evolution went beyond its pioneering heritage of being a digital specialist, which further differentiated it from other agencies. It provides both specialised and integrated services to clients both locally and internationally. Despite still being modest in headcount, Saatchi & Saatchi Arachnid is playing well above its size.
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DIRECT MARKETING
LION & LION Owned by : Independent Headed by : Hugh Batley and Casper Andersen, founders and managing partners Winning the coveted gold award in the Direct Marketing of the Year category is Lion & Lion. The agency had a great year in 2015, with not only new additions to its client portfolio, but also retaining its long-term accounts, including L’Oréal, IKEA, FWD, CompareGlobal Group and Emborg. The winners currently partner with more than 30 global-leading brands within the FMCG, finance, consumer
THE WINNERS GOLD
Lion & Lion
69.38%
SILVER
Leo Burnett Group Malaysia
65.31%
BRONZE
MullenLowe Malaysia
61.19%
LOCAL HERO
VLT
58.13%
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electronics, beauty and fashion industries. Its focus on conversion, not reach, has led the agency to execute clear and objective-driven campaigns coupled with the right talent to help bring these campaigns to fruition. For example, its media performance team of 28 digital media specialists are all Google Analytics-certified and more than half are certified in Kenshoo, Facebook Blueprint and DoubleClick. Data, integration and business is in the DNA of the agency – the key ingredients in direct marketing. Apart from sharing digital knowledge with clients, Lion & Lion is committed in contributing towards the growth of the digital industry, done through its partnership with the Malaysian Global Innovation & Creativity Centre (MaGIC), an initiative by the Malaysian government to boost the spirit of entrepreneurship among Malaysians. It has conducted workshops to equip members of the start-up community with the right knowledge to bring their businesses to the next level. Beyond training companies and startups on how they can build traction for their brands online, the company has been
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committed in passing on its knowledge to the new generation of digital innovators. Its commitment towards developing future talent goes beyond Lion & Lion. Last year it was a guest judge at L’Oréal’s Brandstorm awards, as well as training both staff and senior leadership teams across APAC at L’Oréal, Valiram and so on. The agency also opened its fourth office in Singapore. Its clients in Singapore include the likes of furniture company IKEA, luxury cosmetics e-tailer Hermo and financial planner SingSaver. The office will be led by managing director Sumit Ramchandani, and the Singapore team will be supported by the agency’s team in Kuala Lumpur which boasts more than 100 employees. The agency is recruiting for its Singapore office for a number of positions. The agency believes Singapore has been one of the most, if not the most, vibrant economies to encourage start-ups in the region, hence, it is also focused on providing these early stage entrepreneurial companies the same level of quality service that so far has only been available to larger clients with deep pockets.
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DIRECT MARKETING
LEO BURNETT GROUP MALAYSIA Owned by : Publicis Groupe Headed by : Tan Kien Eng, CEO Clinching silver in the Direct Marketing of the Year category is the Overall champion of this year – Leo Burnett. 2015 saw the agency harnessing its strengths and growing with its clients’ brands by embracing fast changes with technology and progressive CRM communication
solutions that included digital, social, mobile and analytics. Through this effort, it was able to provide clients with an engaging multi-dimensional, media brand immersion experience between brands and target segments that helped retain customer loyalty, acquire new untapped segments and convert the fence sitters. Strong growth was driven by solid new local business wins, with organic growth coming from international clients such as Philip Morris, McDonald’s and Samsung. This is a reflection of its in-depth local market understanding to support local and international clients.
It achieved its overall projected revenue because of the shift in digital growth that has outpaced traditional mediums. The agency intends to capitalise on recent wins to build digital expertise for sustainable long-term growth. Its strategic success comes from winning new business with a partner or consultant approach via honest and intuitive understanding of the client’s business, offering tailored communication solutions as a consultant rather than as an agency. It also differentiates itself through its deep understanding of people and behaviour through its play-buy-share methodology. Leo Burnett has also made some key hires to its team, with Andrew Leong as managing partner; Maureen Gomez as head of people and culture; and Jonathan Beament as head of AV and digital content. Its strength lies in having the best people to create the best work. This is continually built through its Leo Burnett Knowledge Centre. To the agency, gone are the days where direct marketing was just a support tactical vertical; instead it is now a strategically crafted, targeted and personalised brand engagement and experience.
culture of innovation, improvisation and do-ityourself attitude in the way agencies function in today’s context. MullenLowe Malaysia executed a campaign for Unilever’s Clear brand to create one of the most ambitious online content engagement programmes through a four-episode web series. It emerged as one of the top 10 most loved online content on YouTube Malaysia in 2015. It has also partnered with Telekom Malaysia to execute start-up accelerator programmes as well as positioning its UniFi brand in its “Makers of Tomorrow” campaign.
It is also spearheading the efforts behind Flyklia.com which will be the first-of-its-kind social content curation platform. Other clients in its portfolio include Malaysia Airport Holdings, ILMU Education Group and Ekuinas. The MullenLowe core leadership team has continued to spearhead “thought leadership” initiatives across industry and business platforms. It is actively involved in providing an apprentice programme for deserving youngsters with Multimedia University and UTM looking to make a career in its business.
MULLENLOWE MALAYSIA Owned by : Interpublic Group Headed by : Mazuin Zin, managing director Driven by the two Cs – “consistency” and “can we do it?” attitude and philosophy, MullenLowe has clinched the bronze award in this category. For MullenLowe, the business of creativity has always been about stepping out of the comfort zone as demanded by marketing challenges, and changing consumer context and complex client business challenges. It believes this is a sentiment which drives the “start-up” culture of today which helped it to expand its horizons beyond the conventional advertising agency space. Its business strategy simply consists of two things: doing new things with existing clients that most agencies would hesitate to take on, and finding new dynamic clients who will push the team to do things that are considered unsexy in the advertisingcommunication world. Its “start-up” mindset has helped infuse a
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EVENT MARKETING
LEO BURNETT GROUP MALAYSIA Owned by : Publicis Groupe Headed by : Tan Kien Eng, CEO
THE WINNERS GOLD
Leo Burnett Group Malaysia
85.00%
SILVER
Star Event International
80.00%
BRONZE
In2 Marketing & Consulting
78.33%
LOCAL HERO
Star Event International
80.00%
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Taking home top honours in the category is Leo Burnett Group Malaysia – a result of its vision to be the most preferred solutiondriven creative agency by marketers in 2015. The agency sustained its market position due to the shift in digital growth that has outpaced traditional mediums. It capitalised on its recent wins to build digital expertise for sustainable long-term growth and made it a priority in 2015. 2015 saw a continued mutual growth with its long-standing clients such as Philip Morris (35 years), McDonald’s (33 years) and Petronas (20 years). New accounts won included Carlsberg, Isuzu, F&N and EcoWorld. By treating each and every brand as an individual with different sets of personalities, Leo Burnett was able to effectively portray the brand images to its relevant consumers and further enhance the brand image to set them apart from their competitors. The agency said: “At Leo Burnett, we believe that activation is not about organising standalone events for consumers. It is about creating unique experiences that the consumer will remember and share with those around them. “The most influential activation ideas are those that connect with any of our five senses and in these times, effectively uses the available tools as a means of delivering the client’s message.”
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A notable event the agency worked on was the Audi Malaysia 2015 Audi TT Launch, in which the brand wanted to introduce the new Audi TT by linking the product’s roots in its vast heritage and also setting its modern features apart from competition. The event also had to be loud and bold to showcase the vehicle at a high-traffic area. Leo Burnett executed the event, exceeding both estimated PR value and sales forecast. Andrew Leong became the newly appointed managing partner. He was also representative of Leo Burnett’s “+1” hiring, with expertise and skills in brand management, strategic planning as well as media. Jonathan Beament was also named head of AV and digital content. Aligned with its direction to train multi-skilled talent, the agency focused on enhancing its people’s knowledge and skills in various areas, including public relations, digital, talent management, CRM, finance and creativity, resulting in 100% personnel capability to support clients’ integrated requirements. Leo Burnett also believes in the need to inspire other marketers to value and place a premium on creative ideas. The agency ensures its people focuses on creating thought-provoking work that builds love for brands and drives business results. It does not encourage creativity for creativity’s sake.
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EVENT MARKETING
STAR EVENT INTERNATIONAL Owned by : Independent Headed by : Brandon Lim, founder and director A full-service event agency, based in Malaysia and Singapore, Star Event International has bagged the silver award and local honours in the category. Established in 2001, Star Event has designed and delivered a large number of successful events for large corporations in Malaysia and Singapore. Its clients range from regional telcos such as Axiata, a public listed
financial organisation such as OCBC Bank, MLM giants Amway and Mary Kay, as well as entertainment maestro Astro. Its exposure with marketers from different industries has given it the knowledge of current trends and market expectations, which allows the agency to plan the event accordingly so as to maximise returns. Star Event is trusted by companies
across every industry to provide creatively designed event solutions. Some new clients of Star Event in 2015 included Toyota, Lexus, NBCUniversal and AIA. The team constantly explores new technology such as animated photos (GIFs), and the recent 360 camera as well as VR goggles to engage event guests. These innovations are often the “wow” factor among guests and become the topic of sharing on social media. Star Event started with a team of two and a zero portfolio. In 10 years, it has brought in big-name clients and managed to get the community talking.
IN2 MARKETING & CONSULTING Owned by : Independent Headed by : Liu Li Ling, CEO In2 Marketing & Consulting takes home the bronze award in this category. Since its inception 14 years ago, the agency has built a sterling reputation as a leading hybrid activation agency to some of the world’s leading hardware and communication technology service brands. Apart from Malaysia, it undertakes events in
Jakarta, Australia, Hong Kong, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore. 2015 saw the team work on the launch of Avengers: Age of Ultron, which used the creation of interactive games, augmented reality, dioramas and tie-ups with toy makers as well as social media measurement. The agency strives to offer more than a
benchmark, the company holds a wide portfolio with an array of international clientele from non-profit organisations, private and public sectors. Since its establishment, the company has displayed a dedication to providing
quality services and has gained its clients’ trust, hence, receiving high levels of business repetition. Growing from its humble origins into one of the most recognisable events and entertainment companies in Asia, it has morphed from events management into an integrated marketing company providing events, marketing, advertising, public relations, graphic and 3D design services. Its key clients include the Melaka Art & Performance Festival and the ATP World Tour Malaysia Open, both of which have engaged the agency for the past six years.
Its business strategy simply consists of two things: doing new things with existing clients that most agencies would hesitate to take on, and finding new dynamic clients who will push the team to do things that are considered unsexy in the advertisingcommunication world. MullenLowe’s mindset in 2015 helped the agency infuse a culture of innovation, improvisation and a DIY attitude in the way agencies function today. The agency organised the TM BizFest 2015, where it partnered Telekom Malaysia and SME Corp
in accelerating ICT adoption among SMEs in Malaysia. 2015, for the agency, was a year of consolidation and nurturing a start-up mindset culture amongst its teams.
E-PLUS ENTERTAINMENT PRODUCTIONS (M) Owned by : Independent Headed by : Andrew Ching, CEO E-Plus Entertainment Productions, a finalist in the category, is one of the wellknown event marketing agencies in Asia, consisting of a dynamic and creative team that provides innovative and creative ideas. Constantly setting the industry
MULLENLOWE MALAYSIA Owned by : Interpublic Group Headed by : Mazuin Zin, managing director MullenLowe Malaysia started the past year with its philosophy of: “Can we do it?” This spirit of pushing itself out of the comfort zone has helped the agency expand beyond the conventional advertising agency space.
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typical event. It ventures into services such as retail support through its dedicated in-house retail teams who manage in-store collaterals and merchandising for clients and train and support their sales and promotional staff. Its in-house digital team handles everything from social media management, apps to EDMs.
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YOUTUBE WEEK 2016
CAPTURE ATTENTION – BE UNSKIPPABLE
The standard TV ad in the Mad Men era was 60 seconds long. But to bring more advertisers to the platform, networks first offered 30-second ads, and then 15-second ones to serve advertisers with smaller budgets. As a result, ad length became a function of price, not attention or effectiveness. Fast forward to today, a time when people have honed their skipping skills on TV regardless of ad length. Thanks to DVR, second screens, and remote controls, TV viewers have plenty of ways to avoid watching commercials. And ad skipping is just as prevalent on digital channels; YouTube TrueView even has a built-in “skip” button, allowing people to skip past the ad after five seconds, with advertisers only paying when people choose to watch the ad. Previous research has shown that there is a consistent relationship between how long an ad is viewable and increases in brand awareness and consideration. And results illuminated that viewers are certainly willing to watch longer ads if they are relevant to them: The average length of ads on the Malaysia YouTube Ads Leaderboard in 2015 was over 5 minutes—an increase of 25% versus 2014.
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The good news is that, with digital video platforms, YouTube can more accurately measure how many people skip, and more importantly, why and when they skip. We dug into which creative choices capture audiences’ attention, and put together five keys for how advertisers can start creating unskippable ads.
UNDERSTANDING WHY PEOPLE SKIP IN OUR NEW MEDIA LANDSCAPE Malaysians are big fans of being able to skip ads: 80% say they like skippable-ad technology because it allows them to choose ads they’re interested in seeing.1 This is a great opportunity for brands. Be relevant and interesting and you’ll get rewarded with an audience choosing to watch your ad. This is a new kind of lean in to advertising.
BE UNSKIPPABLE: FINDINGS FROM THE RESEARCH Thousands of ads run on YouTube every day. So, when our analysts look at that data in aggregate, what patterns emerge? What can be learnt from existing video ads about creative that works in the first five seconds? The study looked into thousands of TrueView ads across 16 countries and 11 verticals, categorising them according to 170 creative attributes, including brand-name mentions and featured celebrities.2 We used aggregated analytics from AdWords to see how long people watched these ads without
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YOUTUBE WEEK 2016
hitting the skip button. To measure brand awareness and ad recall, we took advantage of Google’s Brand Lift.
Happy, uplifting, or mysterious music was shown to boost viewthrough rates.
Although there are no set rules for creating ads people choose, findings shown that certain creative choices are associated with how long viewers watch and how well they remember ads.
Surprisingly, when it came to brand awareness, our analysis shown that featuring any music in the first five seconds may have a negative impact. Perhaps people are intrigued by the change of pace in ads without music or don’t immediately recognise videos without music as ads, which forgoes music and gets straight to the action. Try testing ads with and without music, and use analytics and Brand Lift to see what works for your brand.
1. Brand placement matters. When ads on YouTube include the brand early on, through a logo or an audible brand mention, there’s an inverse relationship between recall and engagement. Although ads with the brand in the first five seconds have higher ad recall and brand awareness lift, people are more likely to skip them.
4. Lead with recognisable faces. No surprises here: Happy, smiling faces make people want to see more. Ads that incorporated YouTube stars or local celebrities were found to increase brand lift and view-through rate. Featuring women and children in the first five seconds also gave view-through rate a bump.
Our study showed that viewers are less likely to watch and remember brands and ads when they feature floating brand logos that aren’t actually on the advertised products. If you’re going to show your logo in the first five seconds, make sure it’s tied to your product.
5. Use creative elements wisely. Creative elements can impact brand metrics in different ways. Animation is good across the board, boosting view-through and ad recall. Clear calls to action, like this “ask for tips” or “find out more”, are correlated with higher brand awareness lift.
2. Make ‘em laugh. YouTube organised ads into ten categories of style and tone, including “humorous,” “emotional,” and “calming.” Across the board, whether we were looking for a lift in brand metrics or how long the viewer watched, humour took the cake. People are more likely to watch humorous ads, which also see greater lifts in ad recall and brand awareness.
Interactions with the viewer can cut both ways. Looking at the camera, speaking to or asking the viewer a question, and giving a testimonial all have negative associations with view-through rate. However, talking directly to the camera has a strong positive association with ad recall lift.
If humour just isn’t right for your brand, consider taking a “suspenseful” or “emotional” tone in the first five seconds. These types of ads were also associated with high ad recall.
The good news for all of us is that attention spans aren’t simply shrinking down to nothing. A great story can still grab and hold an audience, even with the skip button ever-present. The challenge is the same now as it was in the beginning of advertising: to figure out how to blend story and brand successfully. This has never been tougher, as we’re now competing to reach people who are hit with thousands of messages a day from every direction. This media pressure can lead brands to feel like everything needs to be faster, faster, faster. But, as this experiment showed, making ads shorter doesn’t get them more attention—it may get them even less. With a great story, brands can take the time to create a connection and change a mind. Advertising + Marketing Magazine is the official content partner of YouTube Week 2016. Google, TNS research, 2015 All ads used had at least 10,000 impressions between January 2012 and February 2014. 10% of ads were coded by two people to ensure consistency, and attributes with less than 90% agreement were discarded. 1 2
3. Mixed results on music. Music was included in 80% of the ads and we found some musical styles to be more effective than others in the first five seconds. People were more likely to skip ads that featured calming, relaxing, or action-oriented music.
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MARKET RESEARCH
IPSOS MALAYSIA Owned by : Independent Headed by : Katharine Davis, managing director, Singapore and Malaysia
THE WINNERS GOLD
Ipsos Malaysia
73.20%
SILVER
Nielsen Malaysia
72.80%
BRONZE
Acorn Marketing & Research Consultants
72.20%
LOCAL HERO
Dynamic Search
65.00%
THE FINALISTS Potentiate
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The winner of the gold award for the marketing research category goes to Ipsos Malaysia. Despite the sluggish economic growth and fluctuating currency value, Ipsos experienced double-digit growth, winning several major projects as it carried out its largest qualitative study in its history. Last year also saw Ipsos celebrating its 40th anniversary, retaining its heritage as one of the last few independent research agencies worldwide. The Ipsos global structure is organised by research specialisations; market understanding, qualitative research, business consulting, loyalty and customer experience, advertising, product innovation, healthcare, media and technology and survey management, with each research specialisation committed to the improvement of its models and methodologies. It has also been home to numerous analytic and management hubs providing key services globally. March 2015 saw the launch of Ipsos Interactive Services, its online research specialists in Kuala Lumpur, which has since managed more than 170 projects across APAC, housing 48 online research specialists from its initial nine. To diversify its existing client base, Ipsos proactively pursued opportunities which eventually saw it win projects in nonresearch heavy industries and sectors such as
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agriculture, tiling, fish oil and adhesives. It also managed to meet its target score of eight out of 10 for client satisfaction. Ipsos ramped up its efforts in developing more locally relevant reports and papers to share freely with clients and organisations, which were also released to the local media. Through its monthly newsletter, Ipsos invested in a dedicated website to host content and disseminate information to ensure clients have ready access to its papers. This coupled with Twitter and LinkedIn accounts helped to increase accessibility through the sharing of bite-sized information. This year also saw the successful transition of a new managing director for Ipsos, with Katharine Davis taking over from Miranda Cheung who moved onto a regional role as chief client officer. There was also a healthy movement of key and senior talent across business units; with the head of connect taking on the operations director role for Singapore and Malaysia, and the senior IT manager taking on the loyalty ViewsCast director role. Major events for Ipsos included the National Death Penalty forum which helped facilitate a discussion about the current laws; the Market Research Conference Malaysia; the Brandfest Conference; and the Auto Event which focused on the automotive sector.
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MARKET RESEARCH
NIELSEN MALAYSIA Owned by : Independent Headed by : Richard Hall, country manager The year was an eventful one for Nielsen Malaysia, the silver award winner in this marketing research category. With footprints in 17 cities and towns in all six regions in Malaysia nationwide, and its continued mission to gain “the most complete understanding of consumers worldwide”, it’s not hard to see why.
Nielsen Malaysia is the pioneer in mixing holistic measurement methodologies and has seen industry growth in the past year, particularly in emerging industries such as automotive and financial services.
ACORN MARKETING & RESEARCH CONSULTANTS Owned by : Independent Headed by : Julius Augustine, country manager; Lye Kah Hou, group director Winning bronze in the category is Acorn Marketing & Research Consultants. With its philosophy to not simply rely on cookie-cutter solutions, it has been consistently recognised by clients for its solid fieldwork quality and the actionable nature of
its findings and recommendations. 2015 was a great year for Acorn as it continued to make a name for itself by being focused on helping local brands with research and insights to help grow the business as well as enhancing competitiveness.
tested new modules for their 2016 launches, Dynamic Search successfully diversified into the FMCG sector. Quantitative still dominated over qualitative research which was a key goal for it as well. 2015 saw Dynamic Search researching and discovering behavioural economics,
analytical software solutions for clients. It developed a methodology to provide constant tracking on shopper behaviour, designed to provide clients with actionable insights for the marketing team to develop operational plans as well as fine-tune the tenant mix. With a dynamic and diverse team, some recent key hires at Potentiate include Johnson Tan as director of research and consulting; Tock Thye Yik, head of data processing and analytical software solutions; Adino Chang as leader of software
development; and Shereen Song, head of data collection. Playing an active role in the local industry, Potentiate’s managing director Barry Ooi was the past president of the marketing research society of Malaysia. Its director of research and consulting was a past committee member of the society. As part of a client engagement initiative, Potentiate organises learning seminars on topical issues. The company also contributes articles on various topics related to the industry.
Owned by : Independent Headed by : Ng Hsin-Ling, MD; Sharon Chuah, GM; Sam Leong, research director
POTENTIATE Owned by : Independent Headed by : Barry Ooi, managing director
Coming up as a finalist in this year’s category is a young data intelligence company Potentiate, established in 2014. With expertise in the area of customer experience management, data integration and visualisation and market research and consulting, it provides data collection and
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It hopes to instigate new ideas with its research with its proprietary methodologies, consisting of its integrative dimensions in the hands of highly engaged Acorn researchers who possess an insightful understanding of the local and regional markets. Acorn contributes actively to the industry via input to raise professional standards and participating in events that foster greater co-operation and networking among industry players. It has continued to develop Malaysian talent by taking in a number of fresh graduates every year.
which sharpens the understanding of consumer decision-making processes and choices. It also engineered a new product launch called endorsement research, which uses consumer research to authenticate specific tangible claims made by the client. The agency takes pride in both renowned multinational corporations and Malaysian national companies as its clientele comes from various industries such as automotive, banking and finance, education, electronics and many others.
DYNAMIC SEARCH
Clinching the Local Hero award in this year’s category is Dynamic Search, which enjoyed a great year. As a home-grown agency, Dynamic Search boasts of its expertise in the local market. Having sustained business from international agencies and successfully pilot-
Another major success included its launch of Digital Ad Ratings in partnership with Facebook as a census-based panel, helping leading telecom providers enhance their brand presence and service level among Malaysian consumers through extensive consumer programmes and B2B studies reaching nationwide. Promising an uncommon sense of the consumer for faster, smarter, more confident decisions that improve performance, it has undertaken some new syndicated studies in 2015 – from migrant lifestyle, food trips, shopper trends to smartphone insights.
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TURNING BIG DATA INTO SMART DATA Organisations today have more data at their fingertips than ever before. Eliminating data overload and making sense of all the data, distilling what is relevant and useful and bringing it together in ways that resonate, is key to deriving insight that is actionable. Potentiate has been helping clients to maximise the value of their data for more than 20 years. Whether you are after software to collect, analyse or report data, an entire program of research services or anything in-between, Potentiate can help.
OUR SERVICES • Data Collection and Analysis Tools
• Marketing Research and Consultancy Services
• Online Knowledge Banks
• Social Media Data Analysis
• Data Integration Portals
• Live Feedback Programs
Please contact Barry Ooi at:
Potentiate Awards & Recognitions:
T:
(60-3) – 7885 5050
2016 USA : Temkin Group Vendor Excellence Awards
M:
(6) 012 – 210 2108
E:
barry.ooi@potentiateglobal.com
2014 USA : Acknowledged by SURVEY Magazine as a Technology Trendsetter
W: www.potentiateglobal.com
2014 AUSTRALIA : Awarded by RICA for work done for Toyota Australia
MEDIA AGENCIES
ZENITH MALAYSIA Owned by : Publicis Groupe Headed by : Gerald Miranda, CEO Clinching the gold award this year is media agency Zenith Malaysia. Established in 1994, Zenith is one of the first specialist media agencies in Malaysia. The agency is amongst the top global media networks established in Malaysia with an experienced local team. As such, the agency is a favourite for both local and global businesses. Last year was undoubtedly a challenging year for clients and agencies in Malaysia. As
THE WINNERS GOLD
Zenith Malaysia
74.79%
SILVER
Carat Malaysia
74.58%
BRONZE
PHD Malaysia
72.55%
LOCAL HERO
K-Gic Advertising
62.40%
THE FINALISTS OMD Malaysia
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the year unfolded, agencies and clients in Malaysia faced a number of unforeseen challenges such as the economic slowdown, Ringgit devaluation against all major currencies and the GST implementation. All of these led to consumer confidence touching an all-time low. In these desperate times, instead of getting defensive, the agency decided to stay positive and expand its operations and took a number of initiatives to turn the tide. Its strategy was to grow and this involved both horizontal as well as vertical pillars of expansion. For horizontal growth, the agency decided to offer more services to existing clients. The first step Zenith Malaysia took was to enhance that capacity of existing services. It launched a CSR and sports marketing wing. This was further bolstered with the launch of specialist performance marketing and mobile-first divisions. Last, but not least, the agency also created an in-house production department. As for vertical growth, the agency
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expanded the business by acquiring new clients BMW Malaysia, UOB and Domino’s. Despite an extensive focus on new business, Zenith made sure its long-standing relationship with key clients such as PETRONAS, Maybank and LVMH remained strong. Despite 2015 being a challenging year for the industry, Zenith spent way more than previous years on team-building exercises. This is because the agency strongly believes that learning new skills is important not just to get the desired outcome from the team, but to keep it motivated. It also built up its team and some key hires included Julian Jackson as managing director of Zenith’s sports and branded content division and Nicholas Chung, who took on the role of general manager. Return on investment for its clients, is embedded in Zenith’s core philosophy and moreover, it also took the initiative of contributing to society by launching a corporate social responsibility and sustainability division in Asia. It also launched the first Sustainable Brand Conference of Asia in Kuala Lumpur.
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MEDIA AGENCIES
CARAT MALAYSIA Owned by : Dentsu Aegis Network Headed by : Nicky Lim, CEO, Malaysia
Carat’s global vision is to “redefine the value of media” by creating better business value for clients. This year the agency took home the silver award for successfully doing this for clients. In 2013, Carat set out on the mission of “redefining”. In 2014, it was “transformational”. In 2015, this moved to being “innovative”. In the past 12 months, Carat has focused on innovations and tasks anchored around five core values of being: agile, pioneering, ambitious, responsible and collaborative. Carat also strengthened its relationships with top clients through an expansion of the service scope that allowed for business continuity planning and long-term partnership deals with vendors. Eight of its top 10 clients have been retained over five years and one of its key wins last year was Mondelēz. As for the Malaysia market, Carat has a strong sense of responsibility towards talent
PHD MALAYSIA Owned by : Omnicom Media Group Headed by : Jimmy Lim, general manager Taking home the bronze award once again this year is PHD Malaysia. As the media and business environment gets more challenging, clients are seeking agencies that offer value, not just in dollars, but in terms of
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development. Staff satisfaction is one of the highest among Malaysian offices resulting in a dramatic reduction in staff turnover. Last year, staff count for the agency increased significantly with proportional investments in digital, strategic planning and innovations in people-development programmes. Through its CSR programme, Carat is heavily involved in socio cultural causes to advance other sectors’ value of innovation. The agency organised a charity auction
that raised over RM50,000 in just one day for the National Stroke Association of Malaysia (NASAM). Carat provided extensive media coverage and event logistics pro bono. The agency also brought in clients to support the annual NASAM Fun Fair where Carat had its own booth to sell client products with proceeds channelled back to NASAM. The agency participated in the NASAM Colour Walk by bringing in co-workers to become co-walkers in support of World Stroke Day.
strategic thinking and exceptional service. Its heritage as a planning-focused media agency has historically helped differentiate it from the competition and continues to do so in the Malaysia market even today. PHD says it believes in transforming potential clients into enthusiastic referral sources and lifelong partners, who stick with the agency not only because of great work, but the added value the agency brings
to clients. Over the years PHD has aimed consistently to deliver better work and ideas that have helped clients achieve success and growth. The agency has also been built on a culture of strategic planning, thought leadership, innovation and finding a better way for clients. Its unique culture and DNA is also one of the key reasons the agency is able to attract and retain the best talent in keeping with PHD’s culture of being an ideas company. PHD’s strength lies in finding the people with the right fit. Across the region, it hires people to better serve clients’ changing needs and those who can inject new perspectives into the business. From upping its energy into building the brand, PHD Malaysia’s big focus in 2015 was to leverage this positive energy into driving business growth and inspiring thought leadership. Last year marked the 25th anniversary of the agency globally. The agency is proud to claim it has stayed true to the values on which it was founded. Its mantra remains “finding a better way” and this is still deeply rooted in its values of openness, curiosity, creativity, courage and collaboration.
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MEDIA AGENCIES
K-GIC ADVERTISING Owned by : Independent Headed by : Joe Lee, managing director K-Gic Advertising was established in 2001 and throughout these 15 years, the agency has worked hard to persistently grow its client database. This year, that persistence paid off as the agency took home the Local Hero title. The agency is an independent fully fledged local advertising agency that was
founded by the dynamic Lee siblings – the late KK Lee (founder), Joe Lee (managing director) and Elaine Lee (finance director); after discovering their one common avid passion for the world of advertising. Being a fully fledged local agency, K-Gic Advertising’s comprehensive understanding of the local marketplace such as its cultural influences, traits, latest trends, changing consumer behaviour, wants and needs in the Malaysian business environment is second to none. Its long-standing local client base includes the likes of 3M Malaysia, Everlast,
Nagoya Textiles & Fashion, Hup Seng, Eu Yan Sang, Stabilo, Tune Talk and others. Some of the newer clients it acquired last year included Thermo NS, Chuan Sin, Mega Homemart, Marco Polo and G200. The team in the agency is made up of young dynamic go-getters from different disciplines. Its people are efficient and competent enough to handle multiple tasks at work and are diverse in their skill sets. For example, its account servicing team is not only skilful in client servicing, it is also trained to be proficient in media planning and scheduling. The management also weighs staff satisfaction heavily to ensure a positive environment with satisfied employees is cultivated. To ensure its staff maintain satisfaction in the workplace, the following initiatives were introduced: an annual company incentive trip; a relaxing social room to unwind in and brainstorm creative ideas; monthly birthday luncheons; and an annual sports day and team-building session. As sharing is caring, the team at K-Gic is ever-ready to impart and share its creative know-how and knowledge with the industry and to contribute back to the industry all that it has gained over the decade.
programmes that reinvented the traditional way employees looked at success, and marked clear career paths, clear measurement of KPIs and inculcated a sense of belonging. A strong supporter and member of the MDA, the agency is also constantly promoting digital platforms and the digital industry
growth. To the agency, reinvention was more than a simplistic call to arms or a rallying cry – it was a reaffirmation of doing great and honest work that helped clients stay ahead of the game. The network has never been more focused on being a creative-solutions led agency through reinvention.
OMD MALAYSIA Owned by : Omnicom Media Group Headed by : Margaret Lim, managing director A strong finalist in this category this year is OMD Malaysia. The marketplace, now changing at a pace which threatens a marketer’s ability to stay ahead of the curve, is forcing hard questions to be asked. One question OMD Malaysia looked to ask was: If the world’s changing, are we changing enough along with it? OMD decided that to be truly strong, one has to be flexible. To be truly fast, one has to be adaptable and to be truly better, one has to be free-form. The agency is also of the view the media industry is at a point of reinvention and in 2015, it set out on a path to answer this question. A fired up OMD has also experienced a prolific 12 months of business wins and retention. Its unique capabilities were recognised by the clients, and the changing nature of audiences, also meant changing the talent and skills needed to operate. This was achieved through several
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MOBILE MARKETING
ZENITH MALAYSIA Owned by : Publicis Groupe Headed by : Gerald Miranda, CEO Earning top honours in the category is Zenith Malaysia, the first specialist media agency in the country since its establishment in 1994. Being among the top global media networks with an experienced local team, Zenith’s clients consists of local and global businesses. Zenith Malaysia has worked on both horizontal and vertical growth. It has strived to offer more services to its existing clients,
THE WINNERS GOLD
Zenith Malaysia
71.00%
SILVER
Leo Burnett Group Malaysia
68.28%
BRONZE
PHD Malaysia
66.41%
LOCAL HERO
IMMERSE
56.81%
THE FINALISTS Lion & Lion MullenLowe Malaysia
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while enhancing the capacity of existing services. The agency launched three specialist divisions: Mobile-first wing, specialist performance marketing, and programmatic buying services. It also worked to expand the business by acquiring new clients in 2015, with some notable ones being BMW Malaysia, UOB and Domino’s (Malaysia and Singapore). Despite an extensive focus on new businesses, it also maintained its long-standing relationships with key clients such as PETRONAS Group, Celcom and LVMH, which have been with the agency for more than 12 years. Zenith had focused on mobile marketing since its beginning, but owing to a growing complexity in traditional digital and mobile marketing campaigns, it decided to launch the mobile-first wing division to focus primarily on mobile campaigns. The agency introduced the first ever mobile and TV sync, which was a major breakthrough in multi-screen planning. It also enabled custom-audience creation on social platforms for its clients. It worked closely with big telcos, especially Celcom, to specialise in SMS marketing which helped improve precision
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in targeting, being personalised and avoiding wastage. The new performance marketing unit also used new technologies such as click to SMS, click-to-call and click-to-apply from mobile ads to increase performance results for its major clients. To ensure its new initiatives were seamlessly managed, the agency hired several new staff across senior, mid and junior levels. Despite the additional workload, Zenith invested in the hard skills of its staff through initiatives such as weekly training by senior staff; media basics and tools training for junior staff; regional training for mobile and digital; and integrated media in new-age programmes for mid-level staff. 2015 saw Zenith focus on solving major client issues via research, doing research on Indonesian immigrants in Malaysia to find out their mobile habits for Celcom; and a touch-point study for emerging affluents for Maybank. Access to databases such as the GlobalWebIndex, Affluent Asia and Business Elite, has also increased Zenith’s planning capacity for mobile marketing, and helps it to gain detailed information on the mobile and tablet habits of clients’ target audiences.
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MOBILE MARKETING
LEO BURNETT GROUP MALAYSIA
from within as well as creative leaders with international work experience to infuse fresh thinking. It offers a range of innovative technologies to help its mobile marketing strategies for clients. The agency brought in real-time messaging capabilities for mobile devices that allowed it to explore ideas which were a class above its competitors. Haptic mobile technology was applied through interactive mobile videos in
the Durex Touch campaign to maximise the interactivity and heighten the brand experience with consumers. Drone technology was also used to amplify the experience further in brand activation. Leo Burnett also developed more mobile communication strategies and solutions, with its in-house LB knowledge centre providing studies of human behaviour towards mobile usage and experience. A notable campaign was FIT Malaysia, which saw a mobile-friendly UX design accommodate for the high number of Malaysians connected via broadband to maximise reach and interactivity. This helped create a viral campaign due to a high number of Malaysians on mobile. Aligned with its direction to train multiskilled talent, it focused on enhancing the staff ’s knowledge and skills in various areas, including public relations, digital, talent management and CRM, resulting in 100% personnel capability to support clients’ integrated requirements. With mobile and digital a priority in 2016, Leo Burnett is set to grow further as social media, mobile marketing, e-commerce and web analytics take prevalence for online communications.
provide digital training sessions for local SMEs to understand regional consumer trends and best marketing practices. PHD used SOURCE to conceptualise campaigns such as the Escape Room Youth Platform, which saw students of Taylor’s University School of Communication manage a viral marketing campaign to promote the Escape Room. To keep its staff up to speed with the digital evolution, storytelling and certification, a range of in-house and customised training programmes were organised.
Identifying potential talent and signing them up for industry programmes such as MediaWorks & Young Spikes was another way of keeping the staff motivated. Jimmy Lim, general manager of PHD Malaysia, said: “Our mantra of finding a better way is rooted in our values – openness, curiosity, creativity, courage and collaboration.” PHD’s heritage as the first planningfocused media agency historically helped differentiate it from the competition in every market – even today.
Owned by : Publicis Groupe Headed by : Tan Kien Eng, CEO
Clinching silver in the category is Leo Burnett Group Malaysia. 2015 saw the agency harnessing its strengths and growing with its clients’ brands by embracing fast changes with technology and progressive communication solutions that included digital, social and mobile. Leo Burnett’s strength lies in having the best people create the best work. It focuses and invests on training to help its staff grow – continuously injecting new leadership, people
PHD MALAYSIA Owned by : Omnicom Media Group Headed by : Jimmy Lim, general manager PHD Malaysia takes home the bronze award in this category this year. In 2015, PHD Malaysia wanted to be the agency that all clients wanted to work with, and all bright talent wanted to work for. It became one of the fastest growing media agencies in Asia Pacific, thanks to the deeper engagements in digital, outside of paid media, and “hunting” aggressively for new pastures and new client categories. Some of its notable clients include Baskin Robbins, Nikon, HP and Curve, which have been with the agency for six years. PHD also blazed the industry with proprietary products such as the Shrinking Wallet; a study on the changing consumer behaviour with the GST implementation and shrinking ringgit; and GenZilla, a study on the spending power of Gen Z. The agency also partnered with Shopee to launch a learning toolkit to educate brands on how to navigate into online commerce, as well as a partnership with Malaysia SME to
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MOBILE MARKETING
IMMERSE GROUP Owned by : Independent Headed by : Jeffrey Tang, MD and Kerry Khoo, group CD Immerse Group wins the local honours in the category this year, while celebrating its 11th year in business. The agency started a new business pillar/service that focused on media buying on Facebook and Google SEM to support content effort with a “real-time” response to optimising content. As a mobile marketing digital agency, Immerse has taken a mobile-first approach for all its content and activations since 2015. Fuelling its long-term regional growth ambitions, Immerse also established a presence in Singapore last year. A notable campaign created was “Sunsilk’s Biggest Selfie Movie in Malaysia”, where participants could upload their selfies from their mobile phones via the campaign microsite. The campaign aimed to foster a stronger collaboration with fans on social networks in creating content, while strengthening brand loyalty. For the launch of Vaseline’s Intensive
LION & LION Owned by : Independent Headed by : Hugh Batley and Casper Andersen, founders and managing partners Currently partnering with more than 30 globally leading brands within FMCG, finance, consumer electronics, beauty and fashion, Lion & Lion successfully retained many of its accounts in 2015, including IKEA and L’Oréal. The agency also won new accounts such
MULLENLOWE MALAYSIA Owned by : Interpublic Group Headed by : Mazuin Zin, managing director MullenLowe Malaysia started in 2015 with the spirit of pushing itself out of the comfort zone. Partnering Telekom Malaysia to take the marquee IPTV experience on the go, the agency developed a HyppTV Everywhere app to target all UniFi and Streamyx
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Care Spray Moisturiser, Immerse also crafted a mobile-first digital experience that allowed users to try the process of spraying with their smartphones as the “actual” spray. Apart from building strong ties internally, the agency also invests in talent development. Some key training programmes in 2015 for the team included the 4As Navigator’s Programme held in collaboration with Berlin School of Creative Leadership; and TAP’s Super Suits training which was held over one month. Immerse promoted Yippie Yip to account
director after a year’s sabbatical leave, and hired Lee See Yin as general manager. Both individuals have a wealth of experience in their respective fields. The agency said: “Our belief as a marketing consultant is not only about pushing the best creative solutions for our clients, but to ensure every dollar invested is money well spent to deliver true business value. “We see ourselves as a valued business partner to our clients and we believe a new breakthrough is around the corner!”
as Apple, Nestlé, TIME, The Guardian, LVMH and Victoria’s Secret. 2015 saw the agency continue its regional expansion, having gone into the Singapore market, adding to its existing integration in Malaysia, Indonesia and Hong Kong. At Lion & Lion, mobile marketing is not a product, concept or approach, but a natural part of every digital action it takes. The agency goes mobile, regardless, in building a website, creating ads and defining media targeting strategies. It embraces every new innovation that mobile offers.
Embracing the multi-screen world, the agency has learnt to utilise different screens in various contexts, where goals and KPIs are adjusted for specific screens. When possible, a seamless transition is also created between screens to keep customers engaged. A brand’s search presence across multiple channels is also ensured. Training and development is a key function towards its growth. The company’s employees receive free training on Google AdWords, Analytics and more with in-house training.
customers. A specialised mobile-first marketing programme was conceptualised to engage with always-mobile, always-on Malaysian content-hungry customers in the online world. A comprehensive mobile content marketing strategy targeted specific segments. MullenLowe also worked with Malaysia’s leading Multimedia University to drive a “mobile-first” engagement for its undergrad and post-grad programmes targeted at both domestic and international students. A first-of-its-kind engagement for MMU
saw a series of mobile banner campaigns and mobile site registrations for Open Day, with shared stories by MMU alumni. 2015 was a year of consolidation, and nurturing a startup mindset culture among the MullenLowe teams. A focus was put on not hiring new talent, but helping train existing employees. An annual agency wide training calendar was set up to help employees benefit from year-round various training sessions, which saw eligible staff members attend sessions with the Berlin School of Advertising, Neil French Creative Sessions and more.
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PRODUCTION AGENCIES
SHOOTING GALLERY Owned by : Independent Headed by : Sebastian Tan, group MD No matter how elaborate the vision is, Shooting Gallery is in the business of helping it take shape. This year the agency takes home the gold award. The Shooting Gallery is a group of international media production companies. It was established in 1987.
THE WINNERS GOLD
Shooting Gallery Asia
63.44%
SILVER
FOREFRONT Studio
60.81%
BRONZE
The Moxim House
59.38%
LOCAL HERO
FOREFRONT Studio
60.81%
THE FINALISTS Dreamteam Knowmad Productions
44
It is one of Asia’s one-stop shops for TVC and film production. It is also famous for photography, 3D CGI/capture and print, digital imaging and original content creation. Although the agency was birthed in Singapore, and Malaysia was its next destination opening up in 1998, Shooting Gallery anticipated it would need to cast a wider net and grow the business internationally to be really global. One of its well-known and in-demand directors is Yiren Lam who is a Malaysian. He has been with Shooting Gallery for more than 12 years. Currently, Shooting Gallery’s bases cover Asia and beyond. This includes Singapore, Shanghai, Indonesia, Vietnam, Manila, Malaysia, Paris, New Zealand and the Maldives. Each studio is equipped with casting, make-up and changing rooms, kitchen and spacious shooting areas. Be it a simple portrait, a car or a purpose-built set shoot, it has something that caters to your needs.
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“Surprisingly, we’ve been terribly busy since the beginning of the year. Although everyone is faced with tighter budgets and much thinner margins in view of the market situation, we just have to work harder around the circumstances and still give the best value for our production and maintain a high quality end product,” Sebastian Tan, group MD said. He added the team has been travelling and shooting in different parts of the world and has just finished a Subaru TVC that was shot in KL and Terengganu in February. The team has also just returned from Hokkaido, Japan, shooting another project for an Indonesian client, and is leaving soon for a four-day shoot in Bangkok for a client from China. Currently Shooting Gallery is a multinational organisation with more than 120 people of different nationalities spread across the network. “We hope to take delivery of a highspeed motion control Cinebot by the second half of this year,” he added.
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PRODUCTION AGENCIES
FOREFRONT STUDIO Owned by : Independent Headed by : Darien Mah, CEO Taking home the silver and Local Hero award is Forefront Studio. The production crew and video team’s work has grown substantially since its birth in 2012. Particularly last year, a considerable amount of work was delivered – garnering splendid reviews from clients, the media and the public. To date, Forefront Studio has produced work that has involved an in-house studio, inclusive of a green room, called Infinity – and outdoor shootings across the nation. The increase of human capitalisation combined with talent acquisition has intensified the performance and the team. Forefront Studio also encourages passionate fresh graduates and interns to join its team for practical learning. Forefront Studio’s very own YouTube channel has been garnering a positive response to add substantial value to the expansion of its production crew.
THE MOXIM HOUSE Owned by : Independent Headed by : Elaine Teh, director/creative, business development The Moxim House takes third place in this year’s Production Agency of the Year category. The agency is much more than just
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The production house also has an added a sound studio, which is managed and operated by a sound engineer it hired over the year. Forefront Studio ensures it goes way beyond the expected requirements to provide clients the best work that captivates audiences, increases steady growth of viewership, and ultimately, supreme quality deliverables. “To labour such quality work, it is highly important that we engage with our clients and work as a team to collate, edit and
continually refine,” said the agency. As the industry moves forward in the coming years, Forefront aims to be in the front line when delivering quality work. “We believe in being at the forefront of breakthrough innovation and cutting-edge solutions as a means to continuously create magnificent stories, chapter by chapter – as it is certain that production and film making, from our point of view is the epitome of mass communication from now and into the near future,” it said.
a production house, it says. It has an in-house advertising facility and workforce which focuses on creating out-of-the-box campaigns and creative productions. By offering an integrated all-in-one creative and production range of services, it is easily able to deliver both big and small projects. Thus, it continues to strengthen its relationships with clients and win new bluechip businesses.
The agency is also an associate of Pico International, a renowned global total brand activation company with a proven track record nearly half a century long. Therefore, being a fully integrated and all-encompassing production company gives it the advantage to fully understand its clients’ needs – both from the ad agency and direct client perspectives. In 2015, while the nation and the world at large was struggling with the economy, Moxim did not defer from its pursuit of excellence. It continues to not only meet, but exceed clients’ expectations. Due to the economic uncertainties, some clients have taken some steps to cut their production costs or limit them. However, Moxim didn’t take it as a setback. Instead, it took it with great strides, ensuring cost-effective campaigns and production for its clients, but never compromising on quality. Upholding its business philosophy, “Battle of the wits”, the agency is surging ahead with a never-say-die attitude and it is conveying this perspective with pride and dignity to clients. Today, it is proud to chart new milestones of success with clients and industry players in Malaysia.
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Epsilon International, a trading name of Alliance Data, FHC, Inc.
Epsilon Harmony_cello_Lighthouse (outlined).indd 1
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PUBLIC RELATIONS
LEO BURNETT GROUP MALAYSIA Owned by : Publicis Groupe Headed by : Tan Kien Eng, CEO Returning victorious with the top award this year has added to the remarkable results Leo Burnett Group Malaysia achieved in 2015 in terms of financial growth, originality, media coverage and target audience reach for its clients. The group is set on key priorities in focusing on people, product and profit – in that order. Its unique HumanKind approach to creativity centres upon behaviour to
THE WINNERS GOLD
Leo Burnett Group Malaysia
74.72%
SILVER
Cohn & Wolfe Malaysia
74.00%
BRONZE
Text100 Malaysia
72.80%
LOCAL HERO
ROOTS PR
71.20%
THE FINALISTS Rantau
50
achieve maximum effectiveness in results for its clients. Leo Burnett’s combination of HumanKind, and creative PR and social media solutions, kept the agency ahead of the competition and winning new businesses, including PETRONAS, Maybank, Carlsberg, and AirAsia. It also saw the strengthening of relationships with its long-standing clients, such as Philip Morris and McDonald’s, both of whom have been with the agency for more than three decades. On top of its integrated offerings, Leo Burnett has gone beyond traditional PR to encompass community, perception and issues management on social media, and further expanded its offerings to include CSR and web content creation from a unique PR perspective to address its clients’ changing needs, hence, maximising their business results. Leo Burnett CSR officially launched in 2015 to help clients create and communicate the much-needed CSR strategies that is a growing mandate today. The group has also hired people with “+1” skill sets – mixing traditionalists with hybrids and young digital natives to assemble diverse creative skills that address clients’ changing business needs.
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2015 also saw Leo Burnett using its extended HumanKind toolkit for its clients. Examples include the creation of “People Shop” to better understand shopper profiles to help Maxis and Nestlé be even more effective in retail; with “Dirty Feet” and “Human Journey” proving highly useful in helping the decision-making and customer journeys for the International School of KL and McDonald’s. Some key new positions created included Andrew Leong as managing partner; Maureen Gomez as head of people and culture; and Jonathan Beament as head of AV and digital content. Leo Burnett focuses and invests on training to help its staff grow; continuously injecting new leadership, people from within, as well as creative leaders with international work experience, to infuse fresh thinking and taking the agency’s creativity to greater heights. Aligned with its direction to train multiskilled talent, Leo Burnett also focuses on enhancing its staff ’s knowledge and skills in various areas, including PR, digital, talent management, CRM, finance and creativity, resulting in 100% personnel capability to support clients’ integrated requirements.
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PUBLIC RELATIONS
COHN & WOLFE MALAYSIA Owned by : WPP Headed by : Karen Ho, group MD; Jonathan Tan, associate managing director, Malaysia
Clinching the silver award in this category is Cohn & Wolfe Malaysia. Identified as a key growth market, Cohn & Wolfe Malaysia was tasked with growing the agency’s business and reputation – building upon the team’s technology heritage with a specific priority on Malaysia’s highly consumer-focused market. 2015 saw the agency successfully retain existing clients such as AkzoNobel Dulux, 3M, NS BlueScope and Cycle Asia for more than three years. New clients won in the past year also include Cobra Puma Golf, Epicor Software, Munchy’s, and Colgate-Palmolive.
operations – Lenovo, Cisco and Autodesk – the agency retained several key brands, including IKEA, Hong Kong Tourism Board and Mondelēz. Some new clients that came on board with Text100, owing to its reputation and industry recognition, included big brands such as P&G, Dynamo and Gillette. Transitioning clients for work beyond
traditional PR was a key driver in elevating Text100’s reputation as the agency that understands integrated communications. Text100 has already moved ahead of the game in the integrated communications arena, having led ideation for brand campaigns, as well as implemented work that weaves together paid, owned, earned and shared media. Text100 also places an immense focus on staff development, morale and recognition, where dedicated budgets are set aside for these initiatives.
as its second nature. The agency is a believer that no one is unqualified to lead, as long as you are willing to grab the bull by the horns. ROOTS PR has created an ecosystem where its employees can champion an idea, new methodology or activity without feeling inferior due to seniority in the field or position in the company. ROOTS PR has maintained long-term partnerships with clients such as Sony Pictures Entertainment, HTC, Western Digital and Tefal. New clients that were added to its
portfolio in 2015 included Heineken, Guinness Anchor Berhad and IBM. Notable work from the agency included the 1,600 Pandas World Tour in Malaysia, where ROOTS PR worked closely with Faster Advertising to create publicity around the tour – pre-event, during and post-event activities. 2015 also saw ROOTS PR start its branded content department to fill the gap and clients’ demand for informative, educational and entertaining inbound marketing content that is engaging, customised and targeted.
future-centric agency that embraces the fluid nature of communications. Keeping it simple and identifiable, the agency became simply known as “Rantau”. The company also solidified its offerings in digital strategy and communications, as well as sports PR with partners. Rantau’s belief in a culture that encompasses deep employee engagement, meaningful work, strong leadership and job and organisational fit made retaining talent and promoting from within one of the agency’s key objectives.
The agency also believes in maintaining its boutique agency status, thus focusing its skills and resources in building and maintaining strong relationships with clients and the media. This is done by partnering with like-minded agencies such as the digital, sports, advertising and event management partners it engaged with in Malaysia over the past year. In 2016, Rantau foresees another colourful year, with industry and market developments inspiring creativity, even as challenges also inspire empathy and unity.
TEXT100 MALAYSIA Owned by : Next Fifteen Communications Group Headed by : Yeow Mei Ling, managing consultant and senior vice-president Returning with the bronze award is Text100 Malaysia, which had an exceptional 2015, charting stellar wins and business achievements that cemented its stability and long-standing reputation as the agency at the forefront of integrated communications. Apart from flagship clients that have been with the agency since its first year of
ROOTS PUBLIC RELATIONS Owned by : Independent Headed by : Alex Ooi, managing director ROOTS PR lives by the values of family opportunities, craziness and leadership. Be it new avenues for its clients to venture into, or new marketing platforms, methodologies or tactics that will help enhance its services, ROOTS PR is tuned to seek new opportunities
RANTAU Owned by : Independent Headed by : Gogulan Dorairajoo, CEO Rantau had a promising 2015, with the retention of key clients such as Philips and Sepang International Circuit, and signed new clients, including Yonder Music, Spritzer, Häagen-Dazs and Roche. 2015 also saw Rantau kick off its rebranding, transforming itself from a mainstream public relations agency to a
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Cohn & Wolfe continuously challenged the boundaries of innovation, particularly through crowdsourcing creative short films such as Let’s Not Break Up Anymore for client Tetra Pak, which ignited cause-minded celebrities who roped in their friends as talent. Seeing video as digital’s most valuable medium today, Cohn & Wolfe invested in its own in-house offering to develop short, impactful and cost-effective social media video offerings for Tetra Pak. Lower costs allowed for higher frequency that resulted in higher user engagement.
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SEARCH MARKETING
LOCUS-T ONLINE Owned by : Independent Headed by : Joseph Ting, CEO and co-founder
THE WINNERS GOLD
LOCUS-T Online
84.38%
SILVER
FALCON Agency
73.13%
BRONZE
Leo Burnett Group Malaysia
71.25%
LOCAL HERO
LOCUS-T Online
84.38%
THE FINALISTS Lion & Lion PHD Malaysia
52
LOCUS-T Online clinched the gold award this year, along with the Local Hero title once again. LOCUS-T Online understands that search marketing is very results-driven, and the quality of work defines itself. To maintain its market position, amid a challenging market landscape, 2015 saw the agency drive its business direction towards company growth. The agency retained all of its key clients such as Allianz Bank, Watsons, Sunway Property, Club Med, Zouk and Chevrolet. Clients such as Triways Travel Network and Camware International have also been with LOCUS-T Online for more than 10 years. As a Google Premier SME Partner, LOCUS-T Online was hand-picked by Google Asia Pacific to empower, nurture and grow Malaysia’s SMEs to adopt digitalisation. With few SMEs in Malaysia being online, the market has high potential for growth, which gives the agency a great outlook for 2016. Working closely with Google and Yahoo for more than six years has enhanced the agency’s understanding towards international and local digital trends, search engine technology, dynamic consumer behaviour, industry insight and various beta testing. Combined with its 17 years of local
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expertise and experiences with handling numerous clients from various industries, it has become a credible search engine knowledge hub. Differentiating itself from the competition, LOCUS-T Online offers a money back guarantee to clients if it does not rank clients’ websites top with 50 keywords. Looking at Malaysia’s uphill digital trend, LOCUS-T Online also no longer offers a guaranteed number of keywords, in fact, it is unlimited, to best meet different business needs and expectations of clients. The agency also ranks clients’ websites internationally to help brand expansion beyond Malaysia. LOCUS-T Online believes everyone plays a prominent role in the company’s success, making a point to reward staff deservingly. Besides monthly sales incentives and annual performance bonuses, the agency created a quarterly bonus to reward its entire staff as an appreciation towards their contribution to business growth. Joseph Ting, CEO and co-founder, said: “With the utilisation of search marketing, it enables businesses to rely lesser on its sales force, resulting in more precious time to focus on expanding and growing their business instead. It is a joy to see fellow clients excel with their business, as it reflects the impact of our quality services.”
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SEARCH MARKETING
FALCON AGENCY Owned by : Independent Headed by : Daniel Endres, MD, product; Max-F. Scheichenost, MD, marketing FALCON Agency’s performance marketing team is dedicated to developing the most effective search engine marketing strategies for every client, in every market.
This year the agency bags the silver award in the category. At FALCON, the focus is on achieving measurable results and providing quality traffic to its clients, to help clients reach their audience at every touch-point, in a way that is relevant to them in their daily lives. FALCON has developed a proprietary KPI dashboard on a SEM off-site basis with key metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, cost income ratios and quality scores. In addition, the agency developed a SEM on-site dashboard with
metrics based on the behaviour of the user who came exactly from these campaigns, ad groups or keywords. FALCON takes pride in being known as a technology focused digital marketing agency. The approach it uses leverages on its SEM experts’ experience, along with top-notch reporting and campaign management tools, which helps satisfies clients’ paid search needs. It is company policy that every FALCON team member must be certified in both Google AdWords and Analytics before commencing on any client work. Hence, the agency has the highest percentage of Googlecertified employees in Malaysia. As a Google Partner agency, FALCON receives invitations to the AdWords latest training programmes which are attended by staff to stay updated with the latest trends and feature releases. In addition, all employees are advised to subscribe to the Google updates to stay abreast of all industry changes and developments. At the end of the day, the success of any campaign is ultimately measured in numbers. FALCON Agency is driven by data and is always looking for new and creative ways to analyse and optimise so its clients can reach their goals.
priority across teams and specialists at Leo Burnett. It positioned itself as a “strategic integrator” that allows clients a one-stop shop for all aspects of search, by integrating with platform owners such as Google and Facebook, in addition to a continually improving internal approach to improving SEO abilities. Leo Burnett combined both search and CSR in 2015 by helping clients create and communicate the much-needed CSR strategies that is a growing mandate today. A notable campaign was one for PETRONAS, where its successful social
media-driven campaign highlighted some of the company’s noteworthy, but less wellknown initiatives outside its core business of oil and gas. Key positions created saw Andrew Leong become managing partner; Jonathan Beament as head of AV and digital content; and Maureen Gomez as head of people and culture. “We champion HumanKind – Leo Burnett’s values and approach to work, believing that if we start inspiring and supporting our people, they will produce their best. With great people and great product, profit will follow,” said the agency.
LEO BURNETT GROUP MALAYSIA Owned by : Publicis Groupe Headed by : Tan Kien Eng, CEO With the vision to drive search into the core of its digital offering in 2015, Leo Burnett set out to do some solid work in this space. And this year the agency bags the bronze award. Positioning itself as an “integrator” across digital disciplines, Leo Burnett trained the entire agency in both organic and paid search strategy, management and implementation techniques. Its teams were given a new-found impetus to focus on search performance as a key aspect in any website or integrated marketing. 2015 saw Leo Burnett’s continued mutual growth with long-standing clients with high retention rates. Some major client wins or role expansions in 2015 included TNB, PETRONAS and Samsung. As part of its drive to become the agency of the future, search is a strategic
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SEARCH MARKETING
LION & LION Owned by : Independent Headed by : Hugh Batley and Casper Andersen, founders and managing partners Currently partnered with more than 30 global leading brands within FMCG, finance, consumer electronics, beauty and fashion, Lion & Lion retained many of its accounts, including IKEA and L’Oréal. The agency also won new accounts such as Apple, Nestlé, TIME, The Guardian and Victoria’s Secret. 2015 saw the agency continue its regional expansion, having gone into the Singapore
PHD MALAYSIA Owned by : Omnicom Media Group Headed by : Jimmy Lim, general manager In 2015, PHD Malaysia wanted to be the agency that all clients wanted to work with, and all bright talent wanted to work for. It became one of the fastest growing media agencies in Asia Pacific, thanks to its deeper engagements in digital, outside of paid media, and “hunting” aggressively for new pastures and new client categories. PHD also blazed the industry with
market, adding to its existing integration in Malaysia, Indonesia and Hong Kong. “Our passion for integration has driven it to be the first agency in Malaysia to integrate data from search to Facebook, Google (YouTube and Display) and others to help ‘hack’ end-to-end attribution and investment modelling,” the agency says. Helping its clients better understand how consumers find their products, and how media supports the journey has improved ROI across the board. In 2015, the agency moved away from fee-based on a percentage of media to performance-related retainers. This change
helped to build trust with clients and ultimately allowed Lion & Lion to drive even more value, in collaboration with its clients. Making it a priority to innovate and grow the teams to deliver impactful solutions for its clients, Lion & Lion’s specialised team of experts have created web analytics, tracking, audience management and search audit in the past year. The agency is also a partner with Google to become Malaysia’s first DoubleClick channel partner. To boost the team’s digital knowledge, the agency often sends key staff to seminars by Google all around the world.
proprietary products such as the Shrinking Wallet; a study on the changing consumer behaviour with the GST implementation and shrinking ringgit; and GenZilla, a study on the spending power of Gen Z. The agency also partnered with Shopee to launch a learning toolkit to educate brands on how to navigate into online commerce, as well as a partnership with Malaysia SME to provide digital training sessions for local SMEs to understand regional consumer trends and best marketing practices. Last year, it continued improving SOURCE, its global operating system that
harnesses gamification and produces ideas from its people across the globe on a daily basis. PHD used SOURCE to conceptualise campaigns such as the Escape Room Youth Platform, which saw students of Taylor’s University School of Communication manage a viral marketing campaign to promote Escape Room. PHD has been built on a culture of strategic planning, thought leadership and innovation. Its distinct culture and DNA is also one of the key reasons it is able to attract and retain the best talent.
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AUG
FOUR SEASONS HOTEL, SINGAPORE
Digital marketers are now faced with management teams that are more and more, equating ‘performance’ with ROI and nothing else. And in the evolving digital landscape - with emerging technologies, alternative attribution models and savvier consumers as well as real threats to measurability and reach - including ad fraud and adblocking, how can marketers make their ad spend deliver? Marketing Magazine is here to discuss these issues and the next stages of performance marketing at the second annual Digital Performance Marketing conference. Get involved and hear from digital experts from the region. Speakers to be announced soon!
Pre-early bird rates (save 20% if you book by 18 June!) Client-side marketers: SGD 790
Solutions providers: SGD 1,490
www.marketing-interactive.com/performance-marketing/sg Contact: Attending the conference: Bernadine Reyla: +65 6423 0329 +65 97735523 bernadiner@marketing-interactive.com
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Knowledge Partner: Sponsorship and advertising opportunities: Johnathan Tiang: +65 6423 0329 johnathant@marketing-interactive.com
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SOCIAL MARKETING
M&C SAATCHI-I MALAYSIA Owned by : M&C Saatchi Headed by : Datin Lara Hussein, managing director Taking the gold award this year is M&C Saatchi-i, which saw significant key account wins, creative accolades and consistent target achievements for all client KPIs. Its new business wins included Malaysia Airlines, Mitsubishi and Ritz-Carlton. Key social media clients that M&C Saatchi-i managed to retain included Hennessy and Volkswagen, which have been with the agency for two and three years respectively. M&C Saatchi-i continued to expand, not
THE WINNERS GOLD
M&C Saatchi-i Malaysia
75.00%
SILVER
Leo Burnett Group Malaysia
71.25%
BRONZE
Rally Worldwide
69.38%
LOCAL HERO
Kingdom Digital Solutions
68.13%
THE FINALISTS Lion & Lion
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only its team, but to widen the scope in its portfolio by venturing into content marketing and strengthening its social media marketing services to meet the growing demand by its clients. Two significant senior hires were made to strengthen the agency’s creative team. Ben Welsh was appointed chairman of creative for Asia, while Farrokh Madon was appointed creative consultant. The M&C Saatchi global scholarship is run on a regular basis to promote the best young talent, which gives every employee a chance for global exposure and skill development. This creates a cohesive international network, increasing staff retention and maximising category experiences. Servicing workshops are held monthly for serving and planning teams to ensure they learn as they go. These workshops are held between the managing director and respective teams. Digital workshops are also held by inviting the renowned digital production house from London, Framestore, to share and discuss the latest innovations and how M&C Saatchi-i can create and execute ground-breaking digital work.
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The agency believes in rewarding the best performers with incentives that have been recorded to be the highest in the industry. Apart from its extensive bonus system, M&C Saatchi conducts yearly company trips to international destinations to encourage a sense of teamwork that goes a long way in designing the culture of the company. In 2015, M&C Saatchi also continued to engage in initiatives that accelerated its social responsibility to the industry as well as the community. Working with NGOs and other volunteer groups proved it is an agency that makes a difference. The agency also provides input and strategic direction to further enhance the communications of Yayasan Sultanah Bahiyah (YSB), a charity organisation that aims to develop the state of Kedah in areas of education, community, health and youth. M&C Saatchi also offers international internship programmes to provide undergraduates with the opportunity to work in either client servicing or creative, depending on their preference, and to also experience working across all divisions from ATL to digital.
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SOCIAL MARKETING
LEO BURNETT GROUP MALAYSIA Owned by : Publicis Groupe Headed by : Tan Kien Eng, CEO Bagging the silver award for the category is Leo Burnett, which had the vision to become its clients’ most trusted and valuable partner for social initiatives in 2015. The agency set out to solve its clients’ business problems through creativity,
innovation and strategy. In a competitive landscape, the agency was able to improve its market position through innovative solutions, expanding the productivity of its team through training, and building its product offerings and strategic partnerships with platforms (Facebook, Twitter and Google). Major client wins or role expansions for Leo Burnett Group Malaysia included Samsung, Carlsberg and Proton. 2015 also saw its continued mutual growth with longstanding clients. Leo Burnett believes that profit will follow if it focuses on people and product.
Last year saw Leo Burnett’s social media team playing a defining role in lifting up the overall digital performance of the agency through collaboration, training and client engagement. Leo Burnett continuously injects new leadership, people from within, as well as creative leaders with international work experience, to infuse fresh thinking to take its creativity to the next level. Opportunities are also created for its talent to work on projects regionally for a different culture experience. In the realm of social media, the agency aims to provide its team members with ways to improve their skill sets.
Worldwide was already maximising it to help drive solid business solutions by championing content, commerce as well as connections. 2015 was Rally Worldwide’s year as
it picked up several new clients such as Watsons, Nestlé MAGGI, Fox Sports and Timberland. Often cited in industry publications for real-time content and cutting-edge digital crisis management, Rally Worldwide has set the precedence and case studies for the industry in pushing the envelope of innovation and quality of work for Malaysian agencies on a regional and global level. By applying attribution to social media methodology, Rally Worldwide has been able to elevate into social commerce.
RALLY WORLDWIDE Owned by : IPG Mediabrands Headed by : Stanley Clement, managing director
Rally Worldwide clinches the bronze award in the category. At a time when social media was just beginning to be a platform for brands to leverage their marketing plans on, Rally
Kingdom Digital Solutions has maintained strong relationships with its long-standing clients such as CIMB, Weddings Malaysia, and Yahoo. Singapore. It also signed some new accounts in 2015, such as Hotlink, Holiday Tours, Visa and Watsons. A notable campaign was for Haier
Malaysia, where the agency took to Facebook to craft content pillars to personify Haier as a family member to consumers. Kingdom managed to change perceptions and make the brand resonate with Malaysians, with Haier’s fan base increasing, and reaching impressive numbers for post-reach and post-shares. Kingdom Digital Solutions sees the opportunity today to change things and is taking the steps to do it. It wants to change how clients perceive digital and why digital is more than a marketing platform.
accounts such as Apple, Nestlé, TIME, The Guardian, LVMH and Victoria’s Secret. 2015 saw the agency continue its regional expansion, having gone into the Singapore market, and adding to its existing integration in Malaysia, Indonesia and Hong Kong. Lion & Lion is much more than a social agency – it believes in the impact of a strategic digital vision. It is an agency obsessed with data, technology and integration. It is through each of these three pillars that Lion & Lion captures emotions, measures
results, creates trends and establishes true human experiences. The reason brands invest in Lion & Lion is because it doesn’t just create a connection between a brand and consumer – it transforms brands, builds personalised consumer journeys, and shapes the digital rhythm within the Southeast Asian region. In 2016, the agency will look to strengthen its capabilities across distinct disciplines. This, it says, will be done primarily by developing its staff and recruiting new talent.
KINGDOM DIGITAL SOLUTIONS Owned by : Independent Headed by : Ryan Ong, managing partner
The Local Hero title goes to Kingdom Digital Solutions this year. Founded in 2007, the agency has expanded its core specialty, digital display ads, to social media communications and technical web solutions to grow into a fully fledged digital agency.
LION & LION Owned by : Independent Headed by : Hugh Batley and Casper Andersen, founders and managing partners Currently partnering with more than 30 globally leading brands within FMCG, finance, consumer electronics, beauty and fashion, Lion & Lion successfully retained many of its accounts, including IKEA and L’Oréal. The agency also won several new
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THE MARKies BEST IDEA – BUSINESS EVENTS
BEST IDEA – CONSUMER EVENTS
Star Event International
Carat Malaysia
Astro Universe Astro Media Sales Malay Channel
Eratkan Jalinan with Tropicana Permanis Sandilands
FINALISTS
Cake Experiential Communications (Asia)
STWW (NU SKIN) Convention 2015 Success Together Worldwide
Penang Global Tourism (State Tourism Bureau) Penang Trishaw Entourage
M&C Saatchi Malaysia
FCB Kuala Lumpur
Launch of Yonder Music Yonder Music
NIVEA Flaunt It! Getting Conservative Malaysia to Focus on Skin not Sin. Beiersdorf Malaysia
MullenLowe Malaysia
Interplay
RE: Change that inspires Change Telekom Malaysia
Mixed Martial A’rr – Terror on the High Seas Tune Talk
Verso & Recto
OMD Malaysia
Party of the Century Empire City
Watsons’ Massive Event Broke Records Watsons Malaysia
BEST IDEA – CONTENT MARKETING
BEST IDEA – DIGITAL
MullenLowe Malaysia
Immerse Group
CLEAR: Pelangi Cinta Unilever Malaysia
Sunsilk Biggest Selfie Movie in Malaysia Unilever Malaysia
FINALISTS
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FINALISTS
A&D Events
FINALISTS
Carat Malaysia
BPN
If I Gave You A Song, Would You Be Wonderfilled? Mondelēz Malaysia
How U Mobile got Trended! U Mobile
Ensemble Worldwide
Ensemble Worldwide
Good Swap Taxi Grab
Maxis Safe Mode Maxis
M&C Saatchi-i
Fishermen Integrated
No Distance Too Far Malaysia Airlines
BSN Kucing Happy BSN Malaysia
Mirum Kuala Lumpur
Publicis Communications Malaysia
Beautiful Malaysia Tourism Malaysia
MAGGI Letup “Meletup-letup Lazatnya” Nestlé Malaysia
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THE MARKies BEST IDEA – DIRECT MARKETING
BEST IDEA – FEMALE AUDIENCE
Zenith Malaysia
FCB Kuala Lumpur
Maybank Treats Fair – Loyalty Drive Through Direct Marketing Maybank
NIVEA Flaunt It! Getting Conservative Malaysia to Focus on Skin not Sin. Beiersdorf Malaysia
FINALISTS
FINALISTS
Capillary Technologies
Immerse Group
Intelligent Campaign Carnival Courts
Sunsilk Biggest Selfie Movie in Malaysia Unilever Malaysia
FCB Kuala Lumpur
Ignite
Play With Oreo Mobile Games Mondelēz Malaysia
I Am Not Just a “Tudung Girl” Wipro Malaysia
MullenLowe Malaysia
MullenLowe Malaysia
RE: Change that inspires Change Telekom Malaysia
CLEAR: Pelangi Cinta Unilever Malaysia
Zenith Malaysia
Universal McCann
AMEX Revives With Our Bespoke Digital Direct Marketing Strategy Maybank
Johnson’s Baby Immortalising Baby Moments in Movie Posters Johnson & Johnson
BEST IDEA – INTEGRATED MEDIA
BEST IDEA – LAUNCH
Dentsu Malaysia
Dentsu Malaysia
Mountain Dew Neonizes Malaysia Permanis Sandilands
Mountain Dew Neonizes Malaysia Permanis Sandilands
FINALISTS
FINALISTS
Dentsu Malaysia
Cheil Malaysia
How Wonda Owned A Day Permanis Sandilands
Note5 Launch Samsung Malaysia Electronics
FCB Kuala Lumpur
Cheil Malaysia
NIVEA Flaunt It! Getting Conservative Malaysia to Focus on Skin not Sin. Beiersdorf Malaysia
S6 – Powerful on the Inside, Beautiful on the Outside Samsung Malaysia Electronics
OMD Malaysia
FCB Kuala Lumpur
From battling boycotts to building bonds Golden Arches Restaurants
NIVEA Flaunt It! Getting Conservative Malaysia to Focus on Skin not Sin! Beiersdorf Malaysia
OMD Malaysia
Rally Worldwide
Putting the Happy Back into the Happy Meal Golden Arches Restaurants
#DigiWeWant4G Digi Telecommunications
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THE MARKies BEST IDEA – LOYALTY & CRM
BEST IDEA – MALE AUDIENCE
Zenith Malaysia
Sambal Lab
“Drypers Baby e-Loyalty Club: a new global benchmark” SCA Hygiene
Chivas Regal Extra Launch Pernod Ricard Malaysia
FINALISTS
OMD Malaysia
Courts “HOMECLUB” Courts
If Carlsberg Did Marketing Campaigns Carlsberg Marketing
Creative Paramedics
Publicis Communications Malaysia
The 3 Cyber Crooks UOB Malaysia
MAGGI Letup “Meletup-letup Lazatnya” Nestlé Malaysia
FCB Kuala Lumpur/Carat Malaysia /Text 100/Isobar
Zenith Malaysia
Oreo Wonderfilled Mondelēz Malaysia
3D targeting wins the Malaysian immigrants Celcom
In2 Marketing & Consulting
Zenith Malaysia
Citi Utility Value (CUV) Citibank Malaysia
Manchester United Cards – Live at Old Trafford Maybank
BEST IDEA – MOBILE
BEST IDEA – OUT OF HOME
Ensemble Worldwide
Leo Burnett Group Malaysia
Maxis Safe Mode Maxis
Can You Keep A Secret? Women’s Aid Organisation (WAO)
FINALISTS
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Capillary Technologies
FINALISTS
Carat Malaysia
Carat Malaysia
The Best Way To A Teen’s Stomach? Through Mobile Phone Mondelēz Malaysia
Innovation in Motion: BMW Tracks Real Time OOH Traffic BMW Malaysia
M&C Saatchi-i
Carat Malaysia
Odysee Celcom Axiata
How To Make A Billboard Be Seen And Heard From 5 Kilometres Away Mondelēz Malaysia
M&C Saatchi-i
Dentsu Malaysia
Story Line Celcom Axiata
Mountain Dew Neonizes Malaysia Permanis Sandilands
OMD Malaysia
Maverick Creative
Hear The Malaysians Chant Big Mac Again! Golden Arches Restaurants
NESCAFÉ HUB NESCAFÉ
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THE MARKies BEST IDEA – PRINT
BEST IDEA – PUBLIC/MEDIA RELATIONS
Dentsu Malaysia
Text100 Malaysia
Mountain Dew Neonizes Malaysia Permanis Sandilands
IKEA Cheras: Malaysia’s Biggest Housewarming Party IKEA Malaysia
FINALISTS
Leo Burnett Group Malaysia
Wonda Restarts Your Day Permanis Sandilands
#tanahairku PETRONAS
Dentsu Malaysia
Sambal Lab
How Wonda Owned A Day Permanis Sandilands
Chivas Regal Extra Launch Pernod Ricard Malaysia
Ensemble Worldwide
Sambal Lab
What are you protecting? Tune Protect
Royal Salute Polo Experience Pernod Ricard Malaysia
FOREFRONT International
Text100 Malaysia
Black and Gold Series EcoWorld Development Group
Oreo “MYWonderfilled” Oreo Malaysia
BEST IDEA – RADIO
BEST IDEA – RETAIL/SHOPPER
Dentsu Malaysia
FCB Kuala Lumpur
Wonda Restarts Your Day Permanis Sandilands
NIVEA Flaunt It! Getting Conservative Malaysia to Focus on Skin not Sin. Beiersdorf Malaysia
FINALISTS
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Dentsu Malaysia
FINALISTS
Carat Malaysia
Carat Malaysia
Cadbury Created First “Radio-Ji” – Radio Emojis Mondelēz Malaysia
Have a MINI Christmas BMW Malaysia
Dentsu Malaysia
Maxus Malaysia
How Wonda Owned A Day Permanis Sandilands
The thrill of the Game Tesco Malaysia
Dentsu Malaysia
Moving Walls
Mountain Dew Neonizes Malaysia Permanis Sandilands
Christmas In Atlantis Sunway Pyramid
Vizeum Media Services (M)
OMD Malaysia
Let’s “Hear” That Shiny Hair Flip Shiseido Malaysia
Watsons Impress Chinese Shoppers Watsons Malaysia
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THE MARKies BEST IDEA – SOCIAL
BEST IDEA – TV
Leo Burnett Group Malaysia Big Mac Dubsmash Chant Challenge Golden Arches Restaurants
Publicis Communications Malaysia
FINALISTS
MAGGI Royale “Ultimate Noodle Adventure” Nestlé Malaysia
FINALISTS
IPG Mediabrands Malaysia
M&C Saatchi Malaysia
Lundang to Newcastle Malaysia Airlines
Yonder Music Launch Yonder Music
M&C Saatchi-i
OMD Malaysia
No Distance Too Far Malaysia Airlines
A Counterpoint to Hate – Harmonising With the Malays Golden Arches Restaurants
Rally Worldwide
Vizeum Media Services (M)
#DigiWeWant4G Digi Telecommunications
Lights, Camera, Perfecto Time! Mamee Double Decker
Saatchi & Saatchi Arachnid
Vizeum Media Services (M)
The Yes Experiment Friso Gold Malaysia
Mamee Monster Brings Monstrous Fun Everyday and up sales by 25% Mamee Double Decker
BEST IDEA – VIRAL
BEST IDEA – WEB DESIGN
Leo Burnett Group Malaysia
Lion & Lion
Health Report Card Campaign AIA Berhad
TIME – The Future is Flexible Time dotCom
FINALISTS
FINALISTS
FCB Kuala Lumpur/Carat Malaysia/Text 100/Isobar
FOREFRONT International
Oreo Wonderfilled Mondelēz Malaysia
Datum Jelatek – Bridging The Community DatumCorp International
Immerse Group
FOREFRONT International
Sunsilk Biggest Selfie Movie in Malaysia Unilever Malaysia
EcoWorld Development Group Website EcoWorld Development Group
M&C Saatchi-i
Immerse Group
No Distance Too Far Malaysia Airlines
Vaseline Spray-Off! Unilever Malaysia
Zenith Malaysia
Kingdom Digital Solutions
Magic Sim Casts its spell on Malaysian Youth Celcom
Launch of Nescafé Mountain Wash Nestlé Malaysia
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THE MARKies BEST USE OF ANALYTICS
BEST USE OF APPS
Maxus Malaysia
FCB Kuala Lumpur
L’Oréal Paris Hair Fall L’Oréal
Play With Oreo Mobile Games Mondelēz Malaysia
FINALISTS
IPG Mediabrands Malaysia
Deciphering The Go Shop Audience Astro GS Shop
Converting Navigation App into an Alarm Clock CIMB Bank Malaysia
OMD Malaysia
Mantra Interactive
First Ever Spicy Targeting, McD Golden Arches Restaurants
Don’t Ignore The Pain Gleneagles Kuala Lumpur
OMD Malaysia
MullenLowe Malaysia
Indahnya Ramadan Golden Arches Restaurants
TM SME: Shop in the box solutions Telekom Malaysia
Zenith Malaysia
Zenith Malaysia
Property App Finder Analytics Maybank
Small space? No worries, just teleport! BASF Malaysia
BEST USE OF BRANDED CONTENT
BEST USE OF DIGITAL
Leo Burnett Group Malaysia
OMD Malaysia
Cubaan dan Rezeki AIA Public Takaful
If Carlsberg Did Digital Marketing Campaigns Carlsberg Marketing
FINALISTS
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FINALISTS
Mindshare Malaysia
FINALISTS
BPN
Carat Malaysia
U Kafetiam – the virtual café where Malay Youths hang out U Mobile
Jazz, Pop, Rock And Reggae, A New Way To Portray Cadbury Flavours! Mondelēz Malaysia
FCB Kuala Lumpur/Carat Malaysia/Text 100/Isobar
Carat Malaysia
Oreo Wonderfilled Mondelēz Malaysia
The Hallyu Wave Rides AirAsia AIRASIA
Fishermen Integrated
Universal McCann
BSN Sama-Sama BSN Malaysia
How KFC engaged Malaysia’s “skip generation” using programmatic technology KFC (QSR Stores)
Saatchi & Saatchi Arachnid
Universal McCann
The Yes Experiment Friso Gold Malaysia
The Promise Of 5 More Minutes Johnson & Johnson
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THE MARKies BEST USE OF EVENTS
BEST USE OF INTEGRATED MEDIA
Trad3mark Integration
OMD Malaysia
The All New Audi Q7 Launch Audi Malaysia
A Counterpoint to Hate – Harmonising with the Malays Golden Arches Restaurants
FINALISTS
Carat Malaysia
S6 – Powerful on the Inside, Beautiful on the Outside Samsung Malaysia Electronics
MOUNTAIN DEW NEONISES MALAYSIA TO A RECORD ALL TIME HIGH IN SALES! / Permanis Sandilands
FCB Kuala Lumpur
Creative Paramedics
NIVEA Flaunt It! Getting Conservative Malaysia to Focus on Skin not Sin. Beiersdorf Malaysia
The 3 Cyber Crooks UOB Malaysia
In2 Marketing & Consulting
OMD Malaysia
Avengers: Age of Ultron The Walt Disney Company (Malaysia)
From battling boycotts to building bonds Golden Arches Restaurants
OMD Malaysia
Vizeum Media Services (M)
Watsons’ Event in Malaysia Book of Records Watsons Malaysia
The Biggest Housewarming Party in Malaysia! Ikano Handel
BEST USE OF MOBILE
BEST USE OF OOH
BPN
Vizeum Media Services (M)
U Mobile wins the Speed War U Mobile
#PaintAllSurfaces Nippon Paint (M)
FINALISTS
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FINALISTS
Cheil Malaysia
FINALISTS
Immerse Group
Carat Malaysia
Vaseline Spray-Off! Unilever Malaysia
How To Make A Billboard Be Seen And Heard From 5 Kilometres Away Mondelēz Malaysia
Mindshare Malaysia
Carat Malaysia
Cornetto – Shake it Off Unilever Malaysia
Innovation in Motion: BMW Tracks Real Time OOH Traffic BMW Malaysia
Vizeum Media Services (M)
Universal McCann
Not Mobile Optimised? No Problem! Nippon Paint (M)
Dutch Lady Presents a 3D case In store Dutch Lady Milk Industries
Zenith Malaysia
Universal McCann
Maybank treats fair 2015 Maybank
How we inspired the youth of Malaysia by starting a visual dialogue with them Telekom Malaysia
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THE MARKies BEST USE OF PRINT
BEST USE OF RADIO
Carat Malaysia
Zenith Malaysia
MOUNTAIN DEW NEONISES MALAYSIA TO A RECORD ALL TIME HIGH IN SALES! Permanis Sandilands
Malaysia’s First Radio Reality Show PETRONAS
FINALISTS
FINALISTS
Carat Malaysia
Carat Malaysia
Wonda Restarts Your Day Permanis Sandilands
Malaysia’s First Branded Dj Silenced The Competition Mondelēz Malaysia
OMD Malaysia
Carat Malaysia
LET’S GO CAIRNS Tourism & Events Queensland
Wonda Restarts Your Day Permanis Sandilands
Publicis Communications Malaysia
Mindshare Malaysia
MAGGI Letup “Meletup-letup Lazatnya” Nestlé Malaysia
MILO fuels the nation’s drive with inspiration Nestlé Products
Universal McCann
Vizeum Media Services (M)
How Tune Protect “Protected” a Newspaper from Everyday Tragedies Tune Protect
Let’s “Hear” That Shiny Hair Flip Shiseido Malaysia
BEST USE OF SEARCH
BEST USE OF SOCIAL
Maxus Malaysia
Fishermen Integrated
Winning through the Art of Stealing KDU University College & KDU College
BSN Kucing Happy BSN Malaysia
FINALISTS
FINALISTS
Consider Digital
Carat Malaysia
Credit Card Campaign HSBC
How Far Will You Travel The World For A Hug? AirAsia
Lion & Lion
Fishermen Integrated
IKEA Cheras IKEA
BSN Sama-Sama BSN Malaysia
Mindshare Malaysia
Universal McCann
Breaking News Breaks Out of the Ad Box – Astro Awani Astro Awani
How KFC stole a burger-march on McD’s using real time data KFC (QSR Stores)
OMD Malaysia
Vocanic
How Mamil Milked Its Way To Defend Market Share Danone Dumex
Huawei Huawei Technologies (M)
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THE MARKies BEST USE OF TV
BEST USE OF VIDEO
Carat Malaysia
Universal McCann
One Malaysia, One Taste? Let’s Fly To Find Out AirAsia
How KFC stole a burger-march on McD’s using real time data KFC (QSR Stores)
FINALISTS
FINALISTS
Mindshare Malaysia
PHD Malaysia
LEGOLAND Reignites Family Spirit LEGOLAND Malaysia Resort
IKEA Improvements For Your Private Life IKEA Malaysia
Maxus Malaysia
Publicis Communications Malaysia
L’Oréal Paris Skin whitening – White Laser Perfect L’Oréal
MAGGI Letup “Meletup-letup Lazatnya” Nestlé Malaysia
OMD Malaysia
Publicis Communications Malaysia
Super Coffee’s Super 3in1 Mix For Instant Love Super Food Marketing
MAGGI Sos Cili “Cili-licious” Nestlé Malaysia
Zenith Malaysia
Universal McCann
TV Drives Perception Shift PETRONAS
#TMPakcikMisteri – How Telekom Malaysia Gamified a Video to Help Those in Need / Telekom Malaysia
THE MARKies WILL BE BACK NEXT YEAR, STAY TUNED!
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Epsilon International, a trading name of Alliance Data, FHC, Inc.
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From integrating digital into marketing; to creating pure play digital strategies; from discussing skill gaps to recruiting the right digital talent; from strategy to measurement of online campaigns and initiatives; here is a wrap of all that was discussed at A+M’s digital marketing conference.
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SIX TIPS TO FLIRTING WITH YOUR CUSTOMER IN THE DIGITAL WORLD Talking to your customers is much like dating, Chai Hui Fung, marketing director of Nando’s Chickenland Malaysia says. Chai was speaking at A+M’s recent Digital Marketing Malaysia 2016 conference. For Nando’s, the flirty tone the brand takes is somewhat cool and subtle. “We want to stay cool. Our communication has never been too direct, it is a little bit subtle with a hint of humour that makes you wonder what it is,” ” Chai (pictured on page 81) explains. But Nando’s brand personality is also a complicated one, Chai admits. The brand comes with two contrasting elements to its identity. On one hand it has to be fiery and challenging much like its famous peri-peri sauce, but on the other it also needs to be comforting for friends and family to congregate. “We like to discover new ideas and challenge the status quo. So our
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communication always pushes the boundaries. It is unpredictable and exciting. Our communication also comes with humorous elements. At the same time, we want to be welcoming and focus on keeping people together. So, as much as we like to push boundaries, we actually don’t want to come across as arrogant and mean,” she adds. As such, the brand needs to find the balance between being cheeky, genuine and authentic. “Building emotional connections with our customers is not just about creating a piece of content and posting it on Facebook. It is about establishing a connection with our customers on a day-to-day basis. We want the customers to feel we know and care for them. These result in a lifetime relationship.” She shares six different laws of emotional connection the brand swears by in the digital world. Be you. Be natural. Chai says it is important for brands to act like
a “real person with emotions” and use the language consumers are familiar with. Her team also actively avoids sounding corporatised. One such way is by changing from responding with “we” to “I”. Nando’s also actively stays away from phrases such as “Dear customer” and “We would like to inform you …” Make the customer your friend Your brand should sound like someone who chose its customers – much like how a person would choose friends. Your online messaging should be warm and friendly and not too serious. Nando’s also chooses to act like a friend by not hard-selling or asking consumers directly to come eat at its restaurants. Much like how you wouldn’t force a friend to come over if he or she wasn’t interested. “It is almost like flirting with a girl. Imagine when you want to date a girl, how would you approach them? You want to be sincere, you
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relevant to your customer, but also relevant to your brand. “We create content, based on the emotional attributes, think about what are the emotions and feelings you want to be sent out using your content, not based on what we want to sell first.” Having the right content strategy is also vital. “There are some topics that are a no-go and we don’t touch on. An important factor for pushing the boundaries is having a game plan and a direction set internally.” Delighting our customers Delight customers with a personal touch, adds Chai. Nando’s often engages the customers actively in photo-taking, conversations and random surprises. “We observe the conversation, look at what consumers are talking about and sometimes selectively send them a gift to surprise them.” It is important to be aware of what the customer is up to and check if the customer is talking about your brand beyond your own channels.
want to be polite and curious about her. But you don’t want to sound too aggressive and over the top.” She urges marketers to think of how they actually want to start a conversation with consumers, just like how they would with a person of romantic interest. Moreover, identify who are your brand lovers and engage with them to build a relationship. “It is just like our personal social network. We have different levels of friends on our social media pages. There are different levels of closeness of friends. Just remember, your engagement with the customer must always make them feel like it is genuine,” she says. Be relevant Brands must stay current and identify topics that resonate with the emotions of the community as well as society and express
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their own opinion. This opinion needs to be relevant to the majority of its consumers online and offline. While it is important to not be taking any sides, a brand must be quick to say what the audiences are already thinking. “If you are slow, you become irrelevant. At the end of the day, we want to be seen as smart and not doing things just for attention.” However, she warns that while being relevant to your customers is important, a brand should not forget its own personality. The trick is to balance between being the brand and what the customers are interested in without trying too hard. “Just because your consumers are sharing cat videos doesn’t mean you need to be too. If you can’t turn an interesting content into something relevant for your brand, then that is just a random post which does nothing for your brand,” she says. The content posted needs to be not only
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Be available and responsive When the customer is having a problem and tells the brand on its social media platforms, Chai makes sure if a promise to an action is made, it is kept. “Always listen to what the customers are saying and respond with action. Look at what the customers are talking about and act on it. When you truly listen to someone, you’ll gain their trust, and more importantly, their respect,” she says. Nando’s also uses social listening tools to listen to what is being talked about, to manage its reputation, and identify gaps the brand can work on. Moreover, it uses social listening tools to be responsive when a crisis hits. “Don’t hide from mistakes. React quickly by being honest, transparent, and consistent and stick to the facts.” Listen. Listen. Listen Listening can open up doors for any brand. The opportunity to get noticed in the social media world is small and can change virtually everything. “We need to stay relevant and belong at the customers’ pace. Understand what are your customers’ values and what they lean to.” As such the brand constantly engages on feedback from consumers, staff and management to keep ahead of its competitors and on top of its business.
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FINDING AND RETAINING DIGITAL MARKETING GEMS
The complaint on the brain drain is not uncommon, especially in the Malaysian marketing industry. With young Malaysians becoming well connected and opportunities arising, a popular concern among both agency and client-side marketers is that great talent is hard to find and even harder to retain. This concern gets further amplified in the world of digital marketing, many say. So where does one find great talent? In a panel discussion at the recent Digital Marketing Malaysia conference, Sulin Lau, head of marketing at Maxis, said it wasn’t a matter of poaching from the agency side, like many believe it to be. “We don’t actively look for gems from the agency side, although I am formerly from the industry. Rather when looking to hire, we look for someone who is restlessly curious, no matter what the role is,” she said. She added that what is needed, is for a breakdown of silos in looking for “digital talent” and “traditional talent”. To succeed, both criteria need to be met simultaneously as the worlds of online and offline merge. “It doesn’t make sense for companies to want someone with over 10 years of professional experience for a digital role. Digital natives, in all probability, have not been in the workforce for that many years,” she said. To train her teams to be proficient in
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digital marketing, she makes them take tests where everyone’s results are displayed on a giant screen. This name and shame tactic works in pushing everyone to do their best. She said all you can do as the more experienced marketer is get the process part out of the way so the younger talent can shine. “Ultimately you need to hire someone smarter, faster and cooler than you.” Agreeing with her was Timothy Johnson, SVP of marketing, products and partnerships of INTI International University. He said today life-long learning was necessary to keep up with the changes in the marketing world, and ultimately, the talent is only as good as the environment that enables them to be. That is exactly the spirit he hopes to ignite in his students through ongoing curriculum and partnerships within the industry, because in today’s world, it is not about what you learn in the classroom, but also outside experiences that make you relevant to the workforce. Often, what is learnt in school gets dismissed as “traditional”, agreed Johnson. By the time graduates enter the workforce, the modules they learn in school get deemed as old. Johnson said to counter this notion, having the right partners within the industry is vital, and since experiences now also matter tremendously, the early moulding of talent is necessary. As such the university has
tied up with Google for its Ignite programme. Google Ignite is a training-to-internship programme piloted by Google Malaysia. This year it is back for the second year and focuses on the development of digital marketing skills on Google platforms, inclusive of certification for Malaysian university students. Well aware of the hopes and aspirations of youth today, Johnson explained that increasingly, the trend is the youths think they will be the face behind the next best app or discovery. He urges senior folks in the industry to nurture this idea, but at the same time to allow the youth to fail. “While we need to foster talent, we also need to let our students fail fast and fail spectacularly. There is no point just coddling them.” Also speaking on the panel was Jon Day, marketing head of Google. Day explained that Southeast Asia as a region was picking up in digital, and hence, the entire ecosystem of creators, audiences and marketers is coming closer together. This no doubt requires the nurturing of local, digitally savvy talent on both the marketing and content creation side of things. Like Johnson, he agreed that ultimately everyone wants to create the big thing, but what Google does is “give them the opportunity to actually grow and create new products”. “We try to keep the entrepreneurial spirit alive and create a culture where they can actually plan out a career progression,” he added. Meanwhile, speaking at a later session, Amit Sutha, managing director of Universal McCann Malaysia and Ensemble Worldwide, said that over on the agency side of things, it was no longer enough to either look for a “mad man” in creativity or a “math man” who only focuses on data. A mix is needed, but he admits that finding the right mix is not easy. What he urges is for teams to be structured in a cluster form to enable both creative and data-centric minds to work together. “It is hard to be both a mad man and a math man. So instead, create teams of people with both capabilities. We need to put people of different capabilities together,” he said.
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WHY SOCIAL LISTENING NEEDS TO GO HAND-IN-HAND WITH DATA MINING From creating a personalised strategy to putting out the fire when a crisis hits, all of these are made possible when you listen in and monitor the conversations your consumers are having. According to Sakshi Prakash, senior social media expert and analyst, who last worked on the team with Lenovo, not only does social listening help in brand perception externally, but it also is a great way to get employers understanding employee sentiments. “You can listen to anything and everything. It can be as broad or as narrow as you want it to be,” Prakash (pictured) said. She added that while marketing and communications are often the largest stakeholders to any social media listening, there are many other benefits to the act of listening into conversations around your organisation. “Listening in can undoubtedly add value to various functions in an organisation. Social listening has the ability to impact product, services, strategy and even HR. It helps companies understand the perception of an organisation as an employer and the current reputation of the organisation as an attractive employer,” she added. Moreover, accurately listening in on consumer conversations can also shape the type of products a company needs to create to be future-ready. Nisa Seah, business development lead at RadiumOne, added that social listening was integral to creating an always-on strategy for marketers. “The rise of social media – it is not just brands just talking to consumers – it is a two-way conversation which is cyclical in nature. As such, managing owned, earned and paid media is more important in the world of social,” Seah said. But this means nothing if a marketer is not able to track what customers are saying about your content and make sense of the data out there. Marketers must actively know who is watching their content and what they feel about the campaign. Only then, can an optimised campaign strategy be created. The biggest misconception out there,
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Seah explained, is that social refers to public social domains such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. While these contribute a chunk of social data out there, one-on-one chat rooms, Skype, email and group chat messages have an equally important part to play when it comes to understanding a customer portfolio. Today there are plenty of tools in the market place to get brand managers started on their social listening and monitoring journey. Nonetheless, the difficulty remains in cleaning up the dark data to create a centralised system to help marketers spot consumer trends and work better with all external agency partners. “More often than not, your agency partners are not talking to each other. The data collected is fragmented and so it is harder to spot trends. That is why you need a centralised system,” Seah said. Agreeing to the point was Aimia Malaysia’s lead consultant Tee Yan Ven. As daunting as it may be to make sense of data,
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it will only help to make your messaging more targeted in the long run, she added. “Information helps bridge gaps. If I am looking for a certain kind of product and your messaging offers a completely different category of product, it would end up impacting my impression of your brand” Tee said. But the positive sign in the data collection evolution today, added Tee, is that companies are no longer using a “spray and pray” technique and are, in fact, becoming more targeted in segmentation. The next frontier to push will be in using more analytics, automation and segmentation strategies in their marketing road maps, she concluded. AdParlor’s David Ho, director of key accounts, also added that with the likes of social TV picking up, mass targeting is now moving to precision targeting. “People now look for content no matter what the platform. The more control you give to the Malaysian consumers, the more receptive they are to your advertisements,” he said, adding it’s no longer how cheap you can buy the ad, it is about how receptive your ads are.
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Advertising + Marketing’s MasterClass series is an ongoing programme of specialised workshops covering wide-ranging topics relevant to present-day marketing communications disciplines. One day in length and customised to fit the needs of marketers from various functions, each MasterClass course will enrich you with skills and tools to bring your competencies to a higher level. Check out all upcoming courses here:
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COMING UP Explosive Storytelling Skills for the New Economy Date: 14 June 2016 Social Media Crisis Management Date: 21 June 2016 Under the Human Resources Development Fund (HRDF), registered employers can claim rebates for trainings conducted by an overseas trainer/ training provider. Contact Joven Barcenas, jovenb@marketing-interactive.com, +65 6423 0329 for further information on agenda and registration.