Marketing Magazine SG - Jun 2015

MARKETING MAGAZINE SINGAPORE EDITION

THE ART & SCIENCE OF CONNECTING WITH CONSUMERS

SINGAPORE

JUNE 2015

marketing-interactive.com

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

Elizabeth Low, Deputy Editor elizabethl@marketing-interactive.com Rezwana Manjur, Senior Journalist rezwanam@marketing-interactive.com Noreen Ismail, Journalist noreeni@marketing-interactive.com Editorial – International Matt Eaton, Editor (Hong Kong) matte@marketing-interactive.com Production and Design Shahrom Kamarulzaman, Regional Art Director shahrom@lighthousemedia.com.sg Fauzie Rasid, Senior Designer fauzier@lighthousemedia.com.sg Advertising Sales – Singapore & Malaysia Johnathan Tiang, Senior Account Manager johnathant@marketing-interactive.com Ee Kai Li , Account Manager kailie@marketing-interactive.com Grace Goh, Account Manager graceg@marketing-interactive.com Jocelyn Ma, Account Manager jocelynm@marketing-interactive.com Ong Yi Xuan, Advertising Sales Coordinator yixuano@marketing-interactive.com Advertising Sales – International Josi Yan, Sales Director (Hong Kong) josiy@marketing-interactive.com Events Yeo Wei Qi, Regional Head of Events Services weiqi@marketing-interactive.com Circulation Executive Deborah Quek, Circulations Executive deborahq@marketing-interactive.com Finance Evelyn Wong, Regional Finance Director evelynw@lighthousemedia.com.sg Management Søren Beaulieu, Publisher sorenb@marketing-interactive.com

Innovation – either the most annoying buzzword to hit the marketing industry or a great solution to the industry’s pressing need for disruption.

Eyes have been on the start-up incubator models of Mondelēz with its Mobile Futures programme, or Unilever with its Foundry initiative. Such huge conglomerates are now systematically integrating the nimble and creative start-up culture into their ranks to solve the pressing need for disruption.

The trend has pushed the marketing function, (often bogged down with red tape), and the fragmented world of start-ups together in a fairly uneasy union. While some brands invest in such incubator models easily, for others it is complete confusion. This goes for the agency model, often bogged down by its own P&L concerns, as well.

“Any time you ask someone an example of innovation, they would say, ‘Oh Nike Plus’ – the one example of where it has been successfully done. Most of the other stuff I would not call innovation, I would call it gimmicks – just little things here and there,” said Ogilvy & Mather president of K1ND (its innovation unit), and CEO of China, Chris Reitermann.

“That was how it was like in Ogilvy before, there was one guy with a card that said ‘innovation director’. Innovation (in a title) sounds good, but mostly what that person does is digital strategy or gimmicks.”

A marketer of a major hotel chain quips ironically on the company’s struggle to find innovation – it thought its latest “innovation” was someone deciding to make origami folds in the toilet rolls for guests. “What is innovation? It has to also make a business impact,” she said.

Real innovation calls for a major change in processes; sometimes an innovation in the overall division or business model itself.

While it’s an exciting landscape, this throws up huge questions for brands and agencies.

What are the barriers to innovation in the business? Can the organisation you’re sitting in take such a move? If it can, who’s the right partner and what can you expect?

In this issue, we attempt to shed light on the issue, asking major brands what innovation means to them (page 26). Page 34 covers eight essential keys to pushing for innovation within your firm as well.

Enjoy the issue.

Tony Kelly, Editorial Director tk@marketing-interactive.com Justin Randles, Group Managing Director jr@marketing-interactive.com

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

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

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

Elizabeth Low Deputy Editor

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Photography: Teck Lim — Lumina Photography (www.animulstudio.com); Makeup & Hair: Michmakeover using Make Up For Ever & hair using Sebastian Professional – www.michmakeover.com

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

IS IT MARKETING INNOVATION YOU’VE GOT – OR ARE YOU JUST MARKETING THE IDEA OF INNOVATION?

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CONTENTS

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14 NEWS ANALYSIS: O&M’S PROVOCATIVE ‘MUMS AND MAIDS’ SPOT SPARKS HEATED DEBATE Ogilvy & Mather’s campaign showing how maids are closer to children than their own mums has sparked a highly emotional debate. Rezwana Manjur writes.

22 THE FIRMS YOU SHOULD BE WORKING FOR IF YOU WANT TO BE A CMO The firms that most APAC CMOs have on their resumes, and here’s why. Elizabeth Low writes.

26 HOW HARD IS IT TO INSTITUTIONALISE INNOVATION? Clients and agencies everywhere are struggling to integrate innovation into their processes. Just what does it take to do this? Elizabeth Low writes.

34 THE EIGHT ESSENTIALS OF INNOVATION Strategic and organisational factors are what separate successful big-company innovators from the rest of the field. Marc de Jong, Nathan Marston and Erik Roth of McKinsey write.

Change comes slowly, with many factors such as culture, organisational structure and process being barriers to innovation. What will it take for both brands and agencies to truly embrace innovation? Read page 26 for how agencies and brands are doing it and page 34 for practical tips to integrating it into your firm.

40 PROFILE: DOUBLE A’S THIRAWIT LEETAVORN Behind a blank sheet of paper is years of toil and sweat and thousands of farmers, and a string of branding stimulus measures, writes Jennifer Chan.

45 HERE’S HOW GOOGLE’S MOBILEGEDDON WILL AFFECT YOUR BUSINESS If you haven’t invested in making your site mobile-friendly, it’s bad news for you, writes Noreen Ismail.

46 APAC CEOS NEED TO UP THEIR SOCIAL MEDIA GAME Is culture and tradition holding APAC CEOs from being socially active online? Rezwana Manjur finds out.

48 MARKETING TO WOMEN REPORT Read about the fashion and beauty industry’s new “it” girls and key trends in marketing to women.

56: LAST WORD: SIX SIGNS YOUR AGENCY’S WEBSITE IS GIVING EVERYONE A HEADACHE Is your site just a pretty face? Andrew Davy writes.

SCAN TO SUBSCRIBE!

22 14 KEY TAKEAWAYS: >> The barriers to innovation. >> Tips for integrating innovation into your firm. >> How Google’s Mobilegeddon will affect your brand.

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NEWS

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

Creative competition The Building and Construction Authority appointed Addiction Advertising as its integrated marketing communications agency for the conceptualisation and management of Project BUILD – a competition aimed at enhancing the appreciation for Universal Design in the built environment. The contract includes an island-wide publicity campaign expected to run in the third quarter of 2015 across multimedia platforms, including out-ofhome, online and social.

Subway consolidates Subway regionally aligned its media buying and planning account with MediaCom. The key markets for this alignment are Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, China, India and Korea.

The appointment followed a closed-door pitch with the company’s partners in the respective countries as well as its incumbents. MediaCom also handles Subway’s accounts in key global markets such as the UK, Canada and Ireland, which led to the regional consolidation.

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Pitching for FairPrice According to sources, incumbents Havas Media, Maxus and Mindshare have made the cut on the media side for the FairPrice account. The pitch was first called in late February with an ad placed in the classifieds section of The Straits Times.

This is part of its periodic review which happens every two years.

Both Havas Worldwide and Havas Media have been working on FairPrice since 2008.

Million dollar makeover The Singapore Boat Quay is getting a SG$5 million makeover.

This comes after a majority of its stakeholders gave the green light for plans to enhance the outdoor refreshment areas along the promenade at Boat Quay.

Upon completion next year, diners and visitors can look forward to an “improved ambience and enhanced public realm”, said the URA. This project was initiated by Singapore River One to enhance the Singapore River precinct.

Lighting up For a single night on 17 April, Lenovo staged an art exhibition powered by its Yoga Tablet 2 Pro, looking to transform 10 urban spaces around Arab Street in its #LightandSeek event. Aimed at engaging the art community, the campaign was done by its social media agency We Are Social. The public was encouraged to snap a photo of their favourite projected art piece and upload it onto their social media accounts.

Taking it to the streets MINI’s brand activation campaign for the “MINI We Tow You Drive” programme saw the brand taking a test drive out of the showroom and onto the streets. The brand partnered with a tow service company to help drivers whose cars, of all brands, had broken down. The programme responded to breakdown calls in real time, with a MINI dispatched together with the tow truck.

HPB looks for creative agency The Health Promotion Board has called for a creative pitch. The duration for this contract is for a period of one year from the date of the appointment, tentatively set for mid-July 2015. There is an option to extend the contract for a period of up to two years. The agency appointed will be tasked to manage campaign planning and development. The tender closed on 14 May.

Marketing blitz Soon-to-launch telco MyRepublic announced it was handing out 1,000 free SIM cards which will be loaded with unlimited 4G mobile data for a limited period of three months starting from August. The SIM cards allow users to access unlimited 4G for services such as WhatsApp and Viber. A spokesperson from MyRepublic said the SIM card handout was primarily a call for public participation.

Labstore launched Y&R launched Labstore, Y&R Advertising’s digitally led retail and shopper marketing network in Singapore. Labstore offers clients solutions in disciplines ranging from communications, activations, identity, merchandising, retail and store design. Through Labstore, clients can gain access to resources such as shopper research and insights to lead retail marketing strategy and execution. Shopper and retail business director Peter Miller (pictured) and creative director Mark Whyte are spearheading Y&R Labstore Singapore.

Campaign to boost tourism Five hotel brands teamed up to launch an overseas marketing campaign, with ground travel products and services firm Gullivers Travel Associates spearheading the campaign.

The Ritz-Carlton, Resorts World Sentosa, Global Premium Hotel, FRHI Hotels and Resorts and Far East Hospitality are pooling in SG$2 million in funding for a marketing campaign aimed at boosting sluggish tourist numbers that have hit Singapore in recent years.

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NEWS

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SMRT Media appoints assistant GM SMRT Media appointed Glenn Seetoh as assistant general manager. He reports to Jeslyn Tan, senior general manager, SMRT Media and digital business, and will assist her to oversee SMRT Media. He joined from MediaCorp where he was vice-president of group sales and marketing. Before his appointment, he was with leading OOH, print and broadcast media companies, where he drove sales, marketing, business development and partnership management.

Creating your own taste McDonald’s SG continued the rollout of its customised burger offerings. McDonald’s Singapore launched “Create Your Taste”, a new customisable premium burger experience from which customers can build their own burgers from scratch, choosing from 26 different ingredients, including grilled pineapple rings, guacamole and tortilla strips. The Singapore rollout is the first in Asia. It has already launched in the US and Australia.

MHA appoints Group M The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) appointed Group M to handle its media buying.

According to sources, a team was put together involving members of the Group M agencies Maxus, MediaCom and Mindshare. The appointment period is said to be for two years with the option to extend for another. The account was last handled by UM Singapore for six years.

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Pushing local creativity POSB launched the POSB storytellers grant – a SG$150,000 initiative to fund the creation of works from aspiring storytellers.

Launched as part of its SG50 initiative NeighboursFirst, the grant aims to uncover and share compelling stories that redefine the way Singaporeans see neighbourhoods and communities today. The POSB storytellers grant aims to inspire Singaporeans by documenting the new possibilities, connections and discoveries ignited by their neighbourhoods.

Remains Rema Re main ins s from the earliest ancient campfire sites include burnt antelope bones that date back to over 1.5 million years ago

600-1000 c 1000-1200 c

“hello”

“all’s well”

Early societies used campfires to create smoke signals that conveyed messages based on 1, 2 or 3 separate puffs of smoke “danger”

1200-1400 c Ancient Egyptians were the first to use the sap of marshmallow plants to create sweet treats

Family thanks Singapore The family of the late Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew published an ad across several newspapers in Singapore thanking the public for the respect they have shown the family and the late minister during his passing. The ad ran on 23 April marking the one month passing of minister Lee. The message thanked his medical and security teams and his office and home staff.

Abbott appoints Maxus Abbott Medical Optics appointed media agency Maxus Singapore as its media buying partner.

An Abbott Medical Optics spokesperson said the company would be keeping Maxus as an agency on its roster for future services. Maxus is handling traditional media buying duties on OOH mediums. Ads began running on 1 May and will run for 13 weeks and are aimed at creating awareness for the company’s “Blink” range of products.

Insight Worth Sharing. www.kadence.com/share US UK UAE India Singapore Indonesia Vietnam China J UN E 2 01 5 M ARKE TI N G 5

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NEWS

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Content push by FEH Far East Hospitality Management (FEH) launched a campaign called Far More Singapore.

The campaign was created by its agency partner Zeno Group Asia. FEH partnered with Zeno on strategy, content and engagement across all paid, earned and owned channels for the campaign to increase brand affinity in key markets across Asia Pacific. The integrated marketing campaign showcased how FEH delivers a far more authentic and unique Singapore experience to travellers.

Becoming a smart nation The Infocomm Authority of Singapore (IDA) has mapped out a vision to create a comprehensive data pool, with government agencies as well as corporates having access, to build new technical infrastructure. Called the Smart Nation Platform, the massive project is aimed at driving connectivity in Singapore, as well as creating a database to build new tech infrastructure on. This is expected to affect areas such as transport, communications, governance and business.

IKEA under fire Furniture brand IKEA came under fire for partnering with Faith Community Baptist Church’s controversial pastor Lawrence Khong to offer promotions to its members. Khong was in the limelight for openly opposing homosexuality and campaigning to maintain a law that criminalises homosexuality. The controversy stirred strong reactions from netizens.

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Wunderman wins adidas account Sports brand adidas appointed Wunderman as its social media agency of record. The appointment came following a pitch. The contract runs until the end of the year. Wunderman is tasked to handle all existing and future social media accounts for the Singapore market, and will offer adidas strategic support for SEA markets. Wunderman is also tasked to substantially increase adidas’ organic growth on social media.

AIA picks new media agency AIA handed Starcom MediaVest Group its media business in Singapore. The business last sat with UM Singapore. SMG’s scope of work includes media planning, performance marketing and content solutions. SMG’s win follows the recent campaign SMG’s Malaysia office created for AIA called “Letters for the Future”.

The campaign encouraged reserved Malaysians to express their heartfelt sentiments by writing letters to their children for a time capsule.

Unsung heroes FairPrice launched a movement called “For the Heroes in our Lives” to celebrate the nation’s 50th birthday. The campaign was a way for FairPrice to uncover everyday heroes who have contributed to society or towards the personal development of individuals in the community. The campaign invited Singaporeans to identify the unsung heroes in their lives and share their stories with the public.

Insurance access Etiqa Insurance and Maybank is sponsoring the personal accident insurance for 3,000 low-income families in Singapore. Renamed as the Maybank-Etiqa Family Shield, this initiative expands on an existing community insurance programme by Maybank. Celebrating SG50, Maybank and Etiqa will jointly pledge SG$500,000 over three years for this programme. Each breadwinner will receive two years of free personal accident insurance coverage.

Breaking records P&G’s Head & Shoulders broke the Singapore Book of Records’ record for most number of #SGLargestGroufie Instagram uploads in four hours, with a final count of 1,111 uploads on a campaign it did. The anti-dandruff shampoo brand partnered with Spotify-powered The Music Run, sponsored by insurance company AIA, to start a movement of closeness and confidence through group-centred activities.

SIA hunts for media agency Singapore Airlines (SIA) is on the hunt for a media agency to handle its global media planning and buying services. SIA stated that interested agencies should have integrated marketing communication capabilities across offline and online media channels. The agency must have the reach and networks to match SIA’s global reach, along with a good track record in managing online and digital media and relevant experience in working with global brands.

Paragon appoints Neighbor Paragon appointed local creative agency Neighbor to create a series of tactical ads for the premium shopping mall. The scope of work includes rebranding ads for its sub-brands Paragon Medical and Paragon Junior. The first campaign to roll out is the spring summer 2015 promotion for Paragon mall.

NEA calls for media pitch The National Environment Agency called a pitch for its media buying business. According to GeBiz, the agency selected will be tasked with media buying and planning initiatives for its public education and communications campaigns.

The tender was put up on 31 March and closed on 21 April.

The contract is for a period of an initial 10 months with the option to extend until March 2017.

Powering up Battery manufacturer GP Batteries was appointed the official batteries partner for the upcoming SEA Games 2015. The third tier sponsorship involves about half a million dollars worth in goods, supplying all batteries required in the official SEA Games activities.

GP Batteries will charge up the lighting equipment and sponsor its alkaline batteries with the SEA Games official logo in 50,000 fun packs for the closing ceremony.

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NEWS

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Marriott expands services The Marriott International expanded its digital travel services through its mobile app partnership with Apple Watch. Members of the Marriott Rewards programme, who purchased the Apple Watch, are able to access Marriott’s mobile app for check-in and checkout. They will also receive an automatic receipt of roomready alerts, booking and review reservations as well as detailed directions to the hotel.

Scoot finds its spirit Scoot continued its jabs at Spirit Airlines and named its new Boeing 787 Dreamliner “Inspiring Spirit” after the airline. This comes after Scoot pointed out the similarities between Spirit’s logo and marketing collaterals and its own. When Scoot first found out about Spirit’s marketing tactics, the airline posted a video on its Facebook page highlighting the similarities between the two.

The video was narrated by CEO Campbell Wilson.

Helping out in Nepal Following the Nepal earthquake, brands quickly stepped in to offer their services and to raise funds for those affected by the quake.

As part of a disaster relief effort, Google and Facebook quickly activated apps for people to find their loved ones. Google launched a person finder tool to help people locate visitors and residents, while Facebook’s safety check helped to track those displaced from their homes.

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MediaCorp looks to Indonesia To push its digital revolution further, Singaporean media company MediaCorp has invested in a 52% equity stake in the KLN Group which owns several of Indonesia’s successful web portals. The partnership is aimed at delivering fresh experiences for consumers across the region, and creating innovative solutions for advertisers to embark on new approaches to reach customers and prospects.

FOX goes OTT FOX International Channels (FIC) has launched over-the-top (OTT) services in partnership with leading platforms in Asia.

FOX, FOX Sports and National Geographic Channel have been made available for OTT in partnership with leading platforms, including Avex in Japan, Tencent and its OTT partners in China, Astro in Malaysia and Cignal in the Philippines. These services range from SVOD, linear streaming to catch-up, and will offer FIC’s content across all genres.

Trendy jeans To strengthen its brand positioning, “Live your life”, American Eagle Outfitters launched #AEOLive Express, a campaign to encourage customers to be original and express themselves. Created by TBWA\Digital Arts Network\Hong Kong, the campaign launched alongside the Destroyed Denim line – a collection of ripped jeans – for the spring/summer season.

With the use of voice and word recognition technology, the campaign allows users to turn their mottos into temporary sticker tattoos.

Switching sides OMD Sydney appointed Gideon Hornung head of strategy for McDonald’s. He joins OMD from his role as strategic lead at Mindshare. With more than 10 years of experience in the industry, he has led the strategic product for a number of clients in Australia, including NAB, GE, Carlton & United Brewery and Danone. He has expertise in consumers and retail, having worked five years on the client side.

Audi goes along for the ride Audi and Marvel Studios teamed up for the release of Avengers: Age of Ultron. The film will feature the next-generation Audi vehicles alongside the next generation of Avengers characters. For the promotions, Audi released exclusive pieces of digital content available on the Audi brand’s Avengers: Age of Ultron website.

The brand also collaborated with Marvel’s comic book creator Stan Lee to create a digital short closer to the film’s release.

Porsche accelerates Porsche APAC appointed incumbent Accelerate Advertising as the regional lead agency for marketing communications.

The markets which the agency will handle include Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, Brunei, French Polynesia and New Caledonia.

Flying high British Airways appointed SapientNitro its global digital agency for its creative technology and social media activities. The account was last handled by OgilvyOne. Following a handover, SapientNitro will begin working for British Airways in July.

SapientNitro will work with other British Airways agencies such as BBH and Carat/iProspect.

HOW MUCH DOES THAT COST?

DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS EXPOSED

Strip’s campaign captured the attention of its target audience through a bold showcase of shavers on Clear Channel’s out-of-home medium. The objective of the campaign was to expose the other salons’ dirty little secrets of unhygienic hair removal practices.

At a bus stop shelter along Orchard Road, Clear Channel’s six-sheet

panel was removed and half-filled with 2,500 disposable razors, while the other half displayed an electric shaver with hair remnants. The campaign ran on Clear Channel Singapore for four consecutive weeks from 9 April to 6 May 2015. Clear Channel was the creative agency behind the campaign that cost an estimated SG$10,000.

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

1 Campaign One Life Brief The new campaign supports the “One Life” idea which articulates the brand’s belief that life is for living. The two 30-second spots feature people living life to the full in a series of different situations while using their phones to take photos, play music and take selfies to amplify their experiences.

The fully integrated campaign appears on terrestrial and satellite TV, online and cinema and will be supported by some wider print and digital activity.

The campaign broke on 1 April in the UK on BT Sport 1 and has since been rolled out globally across Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East and the US. It is expected to run for about three months.

Client

HTC

Creative

SapientNitro

Media

M2M in the UK, and OMG for global

1

2 Campaign Fans Do Wonders Brief The campaign emphasises Ooredoo’s data leadership and the power of its growing networks around the world.

The campaign features five of Paris Saint-Germain’s most recognisable players – connecting with young fans worldwide from the team’s Parc des Princes stadium, using Ooredoo’s faster networks and the power of the internet. It is a full 360-degree campaign with a strong social media presence to bring “Fans Do Wonders” to a global audience. Through this campaign, Ooredoo is looking to reach out to football fans across its markets in the MENA region and Southeast Asia.

Client

Ooredoo

Creative

Ooredoo and Paris SaintGermain

Media

Universal Media

2

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

3 Campaign Life’s Little Luxuries (Paragon Junior) Brief The campaign aims to reposition the brand image of Paragon Junior, comprising over two floors of brands targeted at children. The yearlong campaign runs on magazine advertisements, in-mall as well as online.

Client

Paragon

Creative

Neighbor

Media

SPH Corporate Communications

3

4 Campaign For the heroes in our lives Brief To celebrate SG50, FairPrice seeks to uncover everyday heroes who have contributed to society or towards the personal development of individuals in the community – to appreciate and celebrate homegrown heroes. To promote the campaign, a series of short films are being screened across cable TV, outdoor screens, digital and social media platforms. The campaign is marketed to Singaporeans, and it will run until the National Day period.

4

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Client

NTUC FairPrice

Creative

Havas Worldwide

Media

Havas Worldwide

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

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11/6/2015 5:58:40 PM

OPINION: AD WATCH/WEB WATCH

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Hagan de Villiers Creative director TBWA\Singapore

AD WATCH HOT: Shot on iPhone I’ve noticed these iPhone ads creeping into our cities recently. And I bet you have too.

Because apart from their arrestingly beautiful images, the media sites have evidently been chosen to make the work more affecting: these quietly powerful photographs are often in sharp contrast with their somewhat ugly, patchwork city backdrops. That struck me as an incredibly smart and interesting thing to do. They’re using unsightliness to showcase the beauty that their products can capture, employing billboards as “galleries” in city streets all over the world. Which in turn makes our cities that little bit prettier. There’s something just lovely about that ambition. And if I was tasked to create an impactful global campaign that would work across borders, cultures and languages, I’d be pretty happy if we came up with this. And I bet you’d be too.

NOT: Any brand that’s done this Since the column alongside deals with advertising smarts in outdoor, let’s talk about the antithesis. First let’s play a game. Can you guess which vehicle pictured above has a QR code on it? Yes! It’s the one with all sorts of illegible copy all over it. Not so Easy, Taxi.

The code is on the front left fender, presumably because that’s a safe place to put it? We’ve struck gold in the awful art direction and stupid use of technology sweepstakes. Calling this media placement counter intuitive barely manages to capture the magnitude of its absurdity, but can we learn something from this? No. Because we already know it – just because something can be done, it doesn’t mean that it should be. We’d all do well to remember that.

Brandon Berry Edwards Executive creative director Frog

WEB WATCH HOT: hbr.org

manulife.com.sg

The new HBR site is an example of stunning design simplicity that puts people first. The Business Review is one of the most well regarded print publications out there, with a vastly diverse global audience, ranging from discerning entrepreneurs to detail-oriented academics. It’s often hard to please everyone, but that’s just what HBR has managed to do by allowing the content to shine, and adding nuanced features. Beyond an improved archive, and search engine, there are now custom topics to “follow”, and readers can drop new articles directly into their digital library for future reading. HBR also allows the creation and sharing of custom lists of content – a slightly rudimentary, but extremely useful nod to Spotify’s shareable playlists functionality. Of course, the articles read beautifully across any device.

Hopefully the next release will allow you to pick up where you left off – from desktop to mobile – when you head out.

Let’s take a look at ManuLife Singapore for a moment. Here is a site that’s a reflection of the internal workings of the organisation.

Unfortunately, this “inside looking out approach” is all too common in the insurance industry in Asia. It ensures that new customers looking for information find it really tough because of an overwhelming amount of extremely complex insurance product options, complex legalese, endless footnotes, numbers without backing, and dozens of page PDFs to be read. We recently did a study that showed more than 90% of people in Asia are looking for new insurance products using a mobile device. And yet here is a site that is not optimised for mobile.

ManuLife is, no doubt, a great insurance company which highly regards its customers and has a great portfolio of products … it’s just the online prospect would never know it.

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DIRECT MAIL CASE STUDY

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AXA GETS POSTCARD -WORTHY AXA left an impression with the media with a direct mailer styled like a classic postcard.

THE MAIL Objective: The objective was to get the attention of the invitees and encourage them to RSVP to our event.

Axa’s direct mail helped draw attention for this event.

With media usually receiving dozens of media invites, we wanted to leave them with something that was not only interesting, but also left a good first impression – the media invite.

To stand out from the usual clutter of media invites, we decided to send something with an added touch of zest and liveliness to get their attention.

More importantly, we wanted to present a gift that was not only attractive, but functional.

With the invite, it served as a hint of what to expect at the event – a good mix of serious business strategy with a dash of celebratory fun.

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Every single aspect of designing the media invite was thought out to bring out the “post” theme. In line with this theme, we sent out post box coin boxes as invites with a “postcard” invite attached to the coin bank.

The mailer was specially designed to look like a real postcard – from its stamps, font type and colours. The invite details were printed and tied with a parcel string.

Symbolically, the post box itself aligned with the theme of the invite, while serving as a mini replica of the event venue’s actual post box at The Post Bar at Fullerton Hotel.

Idea: This media invite was directed at mainstream media – from print media to online media.

Results: We were heartened by the attendance received from key newspapers, magazines and online sites for the event. Out of the total direct mailers sent, more than 50% attended the event.

Cheryl Lim Head of branding and external communications Axa Singapore

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O&M’S PROVOCATIVE ‘MUMS AND MAIDS’ SPOT SPARKS HEATED DEBATE Ogilvy & Mather’s campaign showing how maids are closer to children than their own mums has sparked a highly emotional debate. Rezwana Manjur writes.

Ogilvy’s Maids and Moms ad: Insightful or needlessly provoking?

Ogilvy & Mather is running a campaign for the non-profit organisation, The Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), that is dedicated to improving conditions for low-wage migrant workers in Singapore, which has gone viral.

The polarising campaign draws attention to the fact that sometimes maids tend to know children of the household better than the working mothers. It tries to drive home the point that families, and more specifically mothers,

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should give maids the day off and aim to get to know their children better.

It is also trying to campaign for awareness on the plight of foreign domestic workers or “maids” that work for months or years on end with no rest days. The campaign was launched in the run up to International Workers’ Day, or Labour Day, on 1 May. According to statistics from the Humanitarian Organisation for Migration

Economics (HOME), it is estimated that about 40% of Singapore’s 222,500 domestic workers do not have a weekly day off, despite a law coming into effect in January 2013 making it mandatory.

This campaign centres around the idea that what may help parents to bond with their children is also a fundamental worker’s right – a weekly day off.

The film shows both mums and maids being

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NEWS ANALYSIS

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quizzed on the habits and thoughts of the young children in the family, before the children answer the questions themselves. The campaign shows the domestic workers answering the questions correctly while the mums fumble for answers, demonstrating the importance of spending quality time with children.

Whether loved or hated, the video sparked a heated debate.

Angering mothers Marketing received a call from a mother, who asked not to be named. Angered by the video, she said she found the ad distasteful and offensive, questioning the ad’s objective.

She shared her own story, saying her son had passed away from a serious ailment last year, and she had to work to pay off his medical bills.

“Living costs today are immensely high and it is necessary for the mothers to work.

“Is the ad really to promote giving workers a day off or is it rather to shame and offend mothers?” she asked.

While others may not have had such a strong reaction, there were others who disagreed with the direction of the ad.

First, some pointed out the relation to its final objective of pushing for days off for maids was unclear.

Working mother Natasha Nair, 39, who works in the communications industry, also told Marketing that had she not read the article initially published on the site, she would have not known this was an ad asking families to give a day off to the maids.

“The ad doesn’t drive home the point that maids need a day off. It could have worked better if the story was a more direct one where we could understand the plights of the maids.

Everyone needs a day off. The ad simply comes across as mothers needing to be less busy and more present with their children,” she said.

Alethia Tiang, 28, who works in the media industry, said: “It drives home a very fair and valid point in our society today. However, I don’t really see the obvious link in the campaign to giving the maids a day off. I get the idea, but it’s like saying ‘give your maids days off to chase them away from spending too much time with your child’.”

Second, others felt both parents should be targeted, and not just the mums.

Echoing similar sentiments is Nabila Zia, 30, who works in the shipping industry. She told Marketing she feels the ad should have been directed to both parents and not the mother.

While not a mum, Ankita Varma, aged 27, who works with a local newspaper, also said the ad should not be applauded. Most mothers

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“I think the ad needs to get down to the root of why parents are so dependent on their maids that they can’t even survive a day without their help...Currently, it feels like a forced-fit based on an interesting observation.”

Valerie Cheng - global executive creative officer, JWT.

today have to work, which is often why families have to have help in the first place.

“While it’s shocking we have to still cajole people to give their helpers a day off (an issue that should by no means be ignored), this campaign misses that point entirely if you ask me. Also, why were fathers not quizzed in the video?” she asks.

However, there were others who were not as offended by the ad.

Berlinda Gooi, 46, who works in the education industry, added that while she was not personally affected by the ad, she could see why it could be offensive to mothers who might not be able to know their children as well as the helpers. This is only natural when helpers spend more time with the children than working mothers.

O&M and ad agencies speak up When asked to respond to the comments by the public, O&M told Marketing that the agency was “glad to see that the film is attracting attention and raising awareness of the issue of worker rights”.

“Our mission is to bring the problem to light, get people talking and ultimately change behaviour. There will be many opinions on the video, but the important thing is to focus on the end goal – making sure domestic workers have a weekly day off.”

Marketing also reached out to creative experts in the ad industry to share their views.

Valerie Cheng, chief creative officer at JWT, said that while the observation was a disturbing one, trying to use it to convince parents to give a day-off was a stretch.

“I think the ad needs to get down to the root of why parents are so dependent on their maids that they can’t even survive a day without their help. Do the parents need the weekends for themselves to recuperate from the week? Are they so afraid of handling the child themselves for a full day? Currently, it feels like a forcedfit based on an interesting observation,” Cheng said.

Irene Wong, CEO of Grey Group Malaysia, also echoed similar sentiments raised by our readers. She asked why only mothers were at the centre of this conversation. She added

this was a “backward Asian approach” towards family roles as fathers were not in the video at all.

“Do they expect fathers to know the kids as well as in this video? Mums are doubling up as a second dad to win the daily bread to help secure the future of their kids,” she says.

Added Patrick Low, founder of Goodfellas: “I like the ad for its simplicity and execution.

However, I think denying maids their day off to look after the children is just a small part of the problem. The bigger issue is that most of these employers believe that a maid isn’t an employee, therefore shouldn’t be entitled to a day off accorded to all workers. They mistake ‘maid’ for ‘slave’.”

The client’s response TWC2 released a statement to the media saying this was exactly what the team had hoped for when it lent its support to the campaign.

“Four days after its launch, the campaign video has reached more than 2.6 million viewers worldwide, according to O&M’s tracking. Never has the issue of domestic workers’ right to a day off been discussed on this scale and generated so much buzz,” the statement to Marketing read.

At the same time, TWC2 said it would like to acknowledge all views about the film – which was after all meant to be provocative.

It explained that anticipating the film would draw flak from the public, TWC2 had shared its concerns with O&M. O&M then explained to the client the families portrayed in the film had participated in the film because they wanted to do their part to advocate for domestic workers’ rights.

“We jointly applaud these women and their families for their contribution to the cause.

Whether you liked the film or not, let’s not forget that as a society we have failed miserably in our treatment of domestic workers. Many domestic workers toil day in and day out without the fundamental labour right of a weekly day off. We have been campaigning for this for more than a decade,” the spokesperson said.

She added that much still needs to be done to change the mindsets in societies and hopes the public will carry on supporting the cause.

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HOW SINGAPORE’S SMART NATION PROJECT WILL AFFECT COMMUNICATIONS The country is building a massive data-led communications platform, allowing government agencies and corporates a pool of info. Here’s how it will affect communications, Elizabeth Low writes.

What has the marketing and digital industry have to gain from the move?

The Infocomm Authority of Singapore (IDA) has mapped out a vision to create a comprehensive data pool, with government agencies as well as corporates having access to build new technical infrastructure.

Called the Smart Nation Platform (SNP), the massive project is aimed at driving connectivity in Singapore, as well as creating a database to build new tech infrastructure on. This is

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expected to affect areas such as transport, healthcare, communications, governance and business.

This will also create business opportunities for firms with experience in communications to work on the project. Marketing understands the IDA is currently in talks with several major social networks as well as tech players and agencies.

Earlier the IDA also kicked off industry round

tables to source for views on SNP. Forty four companies have since been short-listed, with their names not mentioned.

As many corporates move their businesses as well as marketing efforts towards a datadriven strategy, this has massive implications for both the government as well as the corporate sector, allowing for even more personalised targeting.

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The Spark Awards is back in 2015 to recognise the top performances, solutions and campaigns by media owners and publishers from across South Asia, Southeast Asia and ANZ. The only awards programme of its kind in these regions and with 26 categories open for entry take this opportunity to shine bright and be recognised as a trusted partner among agencies and clients.

To enter and for more information visit: www.marketing-interactive.com/spark-awards/sea Submission Deadline: 22 June 2015 Gala Ceremony: 27 August, Singapore Marriott Hotel Contacts: Entry submissions and table bookings: CARLO RESTON +65 6423 0329, +65 9727 0291, carlor@marketing-interactive.com Sponsorship opportunities: SOREN BEAULIEU +65 6423 0329, sorenb@marketing-interactive.com

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“As many corporates move their businesses as well as marketing efforts towards a datadriven strategy, this has massive implications for both the government as well as the corporate sector, allowing for even more personalised targeting.”

However, this also drives concerns of cyber security, which the IDA has mentioned it is looking into, without further details.

There are four phases to the project, as articulated by the IDA: connect, collect, comprehend and create.

Connect – better connectivity for tech innovation In the “connect” phase, the aim is to drive higher connectivity and create a “communications backbone” to collect data for SNP. Under this, the IDA has created a heterogeneous network (HetNet) programme, where it is aiming to increase the nation’s capacity for broadband data traffic. This is expected to boost coverage and capacity in Singapore allowing for higher bandwidth.

This will also allow consumers to roam across different environments covered by networks of different mobile technologies and have seamless access to the internet. This means users will be connected even if a single network is down.

A series of trials with all the four telcos, Singtel, StarHub, M1 and MyRepublic, will be conducted in Q3 this year, and first be rolled out in the Jurong Lake District. Some of the locations include lifts, pedestrian walkways,

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bus interchanges and MRT stations. Each telco will roll out its own HetNet test circuits.

In the long run, this is aimed at building an infrastructure to allow applications such as tele-medicine, autonomous vehicles, remote learning and more. For businesses, this means access to more comprehensive data nationally.

Collect and comprehend – real-time analysis across the country?

According to the IDA, there will be a deployment of an operating system that enables public agencies to be plugged into a data pool, where sensor data can be “collected, anonymised, protected, managed and aptly shared”. This will allow the government agencies to create more responsive and anticipatory services for citizens, it said.

Create The opening speech by IDA’s executive deputy chairman Steve Leonard opened the discussion to the tech industry, inviting corporates and entrepreneurs to partner and “challenge” the IDA for the project. Tech companies were invited to create technologies and business models with the Sentosa Development Corporation (SDC) for commercialisation. Areas where the industry can collaborate with the IDA on are:

•

•

•

•

A communications infrastructure, including the design and implementation of a core network, fibre connectivity and deployment of Aggregation Gateway (AG) boxes for government sensor communications.

Secure wireless network to enhance communication capabilities for government agencies with limited coverage for government sensor communications .

The deployment of common sensors across Singapore to improve sensing capabilities for enhanced data-driven planning and citizen service response.

The development of a smart nation operating system to provide data-processing, analytics and sharing capabilities to bolster cross-agency integration.

The Sentosa project As a start, it will begin with Sentosa where the IDA will work with the Sentosa Development Corporation to innovate and develop new technology to address challenges in the tourism and hospitality sector, for prototypes.

Examples of challenges it looks to tackle there include management of peak hour traffic, transport and fleet management and energy and waste management.

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11/6/2015 6:38:12 PM

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 ďŹ t 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: WWW.MARKETING-INTERACTIVE.COM/MASTERCLASS-SERIES/SG

COMING UP Engagement: Doing it with content, native and sponsorship Date: 5 August For Singapore registered companies, enjoy 60% rebate off the course fee under the Productivity and Innovation Credit (PIC) scheme.

Contact Joven Barcenas, jovenb@marketing-interactive.com, +65 6423 0329 for further information on agenda and registration.

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MAYWEATHER VS PACQUIAO: A CASE OF GREAT MARKETING? Was this a perfect example of story telling going brilliantly right? Rezwana Manjur writes.

In early May, Facebook and Twitter seemed to be blowing up with comments over the Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao match.

On my personal feed, friends who I knew had no interest in boxing, were enthralled with the match and kept up a stream of constant updates.

In fact, local pay-TV operator StarHub faced the wrath of consumers who were trying to purchase the channel just for the match, but were unable to do so, all at the eleventh hour.

This problem was not one isolated to StarHub. The enthusiasm to catch the match through payper-view orders globally resulted in technical difficulties that led to a delay of the fight.

While I understand the overwhelming love for sport in Singapore and the growing enthusiasm for sports such as rugby, cricket and MMA, the sudden rush of enthusiasm for this match truly surprised me. Was it just me living in a cave and not understanding the enthusiasm? Or was this a perfect example of marketing gone brilliantly right?

The rise of FOMO Don Anderson, managing director of We Are Social, was of the view that this consumer enthusiasm was clearly another case of FOMO (fear of missing out). He explained the proliferation of social media and conversational channels made it virtually impossible for anyone to be able to escape the sheer magnitude of hype that an event like this was capable of producing.

“Even if you’re not a boxing fan, or have never heard of Floyd Mayweather or Manny Pacquiao, simply not being part of the conversation can leave you with a sense of dread or feeling isolated. Few really want that anymore,” he said.

He added the fact that so many people rushing at the last minute to secure pay-perview packages was a testament to the “FOMO behaviour”.

Meanwhile, the fact the show was aired

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Mayweather won, it looks like the fight’s marketers threw the biggest punch.

during a long weekend where many consumers were in a relaxed state of mind also contributed to the hype, he added.

Preetham Venkky, head of digital strategy and business for KRDS Singapore, agreed with the notion, adding that ultimately both the digital and traditional marketing culminated perfectly into word of mouth, generating conversations between die-hard boxing fans and non boxing fans.

The winning ingredient: Art of storytelling He also added this was a classic case of storytelling at its very best. The title of the match – “Fight of the Century” – also helped in the narrative as more than five million people worldwide were invested in the characters themselves, he said.

Following any good classical storytelling narrative, the story had all the elements of opposing characters holding the “good versus evil” spectrum and a great back story with the

perfect tease of possible bouts in the past five years.

The icing on the top was HBO-Showtime being the exclusive partners who invested heavily in the fight.

Venkky added that as reported in several media outlets, the “purse of over US$300 million helped propel the story further”.

This is usually a budget set aside for blockbuster movies and is not usually a budget forked out for one-day events. He also added that besides traditional marketing, social media and digital were used effectively by both the boxers to drive anticipation and build the characters to near perfection.

“This fight wasn’t just ‘money versus Pacman’ but was crafted to be an ‘evil versus good’ story. And just as with any great story (remember David versus Goliath), people took to social media and were happy to share every element of it – adding to its popularity,” he said.

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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 ďŹ t 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: WWW.MARKETING-INTERACTIVE.COM/MASTERCLASS-SERIES/MY

COMING UP Developing social media intelligence Date: 23 June Returns on social media marketing investments Date: 24 June 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.

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ARE THESE THE FIRMS YOU SHOULD BE WORKING FOR IF YOU WANT TO BE A CMO? Here are the firms that most APAC CMOs have on their resumes, according to LinkedIn data.

Elizabeth Low writes.

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Earlier, Marketing wrote an article on how many senior marketers and chief marketing officers have credited Procter & Gamble for kicking off their foundations in marketing.

LinkedIn has recently given us search findings on the companies in Asia Pacific most chief marketing officers have worked at before.

This was done across its network on professionals with the titles “chief marketing officer” or “CMO” for the Asia Pacific region, and the data was compiled on March 2015.

IBM comes in on top with 29 Asia Pacific CMOs hailing from it, and P&G and Unilever

second, with 22 CMOs hailing from them. Citi comes in third, with 19 CMOs in APAC hailing from its ranks. See the full list here below.

Interestingly enough, only two agencies were in this list – Ogilvy & Mather and JWT. We spoke to several of these firms on their marketing grooming strategy, and why they thought they were able to groom so many senior marketers.

Unilever Wendy Aitken Global marketing learning director Unilever has always grown its own talent – graduates join the business and there is a strong and consistent training programme which teaches young marketers career-long learning on the fundamentals of marketing and how we do marketing at Unilever, using best practice from inside and outside the company. The global programmes also incorporate a number of digital and agency partners, for example a Google Talent Exchange, to help develop and evolve the course. As marketers progress we continue to develop their fundamental marketing expertise, while also focusing on new Company

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APAC CMOs

IBM

29

Procter & Gamble

22

Unilever

22

Citi

19

Airtel

17

Standard Chartered Bank

17

Samsung Electronics

16

Microsoft

15

The Coca-Cola Company

14

Ogilvy & Mather Advertising

13

Johnson & Johnson

13

Nestlé S.A.

12

Deloitte

12

HSBC

11

Wipro

11

American Express

11

Commonwealth Bank

10

PwC

10

PepsiCo

10

Reliance

9

J. Walter Thompson Worldwide

9

GE

9

Philips

9

and emerging skills and other areas, including digital marketing and communications.

We also provide training to our marketers on Unilever’s sustainable living plan, which plays a strong role in attracting and retaining talent. The plan (launched in 2010) decouples growth from our environmental impact, while using growth as an enabler for positive social impact.

For example, marketers working with Dove are not only exposed to the best innovation in the beauty market, they are also helping boost self-esteem. Marketers working on the Lifebuoy brand are not only marketing hand wash, they’re also working on one of the world’s largest hand washing programmes to help save lives.

We have also surveyed our own graduates and we have found that around half of them highlight sustainability as the main reason to join Unilever. Having this sense of purpose in their day-to-day roles increases retention and productivity, as people care about what they are doing and can see the impact they can have on other people’s lives.

In addition to providing access to professional skills training, we encourage our marketers to build experience across the marketing discipline, working across different teams – from consumer insight to business development – and across different categories such as personal care and refreshments in order to progress in their career.

The increase of the use of digital in the workplace has provided new ways of delivering learning. In order to meet the needs of the business, we’re looking at how to make learning more agile and cost-effective, providing a blend of agile learning.

Technology is an enabler of this change which is really exciting and we are embracing this at Unilever.

Citibank Jerry Blanton Global marketing director, Asia and EMEA Acting regional marketing head Citi has a two-pronged strategy for finding, managing and developing marketing talent: (1) identifying talent internally and moving them across product and countries and (2) hiring talented marketers from outside the financial services industry to bolster specific areas of need. Successful or promising marketers are rotated into different countries and regional and global roles to broaden their experience as well as to share their expertise across the Citi network.

Citi is a strong training ground for a number of reasons. First and foremost, Citi is a global

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What do top brands do right with their marketers?

financial services brand that competes in very competitive markets where the local banks generally have larger presence, budget and share of voice.

To succeed in the way that Citi has in this environment requires innovative marketing approaches and creative uses of alternative media types since expensive mass media such as TV and extensive print is outside of most of our marketing budgets.

Delivering meaningful business results in a constrained environment requires significant creativity, adaptability and deep knowledge of the customer in your respective market. It also requires an understanding of emerging and changing communication/experience channels to reach our customers and prospects in an increasingly fragmented media environment.

Citi relies on a number of measures to gauge marketing effectiveness. NPS, brand preference and business performance are ultimately how our marketers and marketing programmes are measured and evaluated.

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That said, we believe strongly in a “test and learn” philosophy with regard to new ideas and we commit resources to trying new ideas and approaches that our marketing teams identify as worth exploring.

Samsung Irene Ng Vice-president of marketing, Samsung Electronics, Southeast Asia and Oceania.

Our brand is aligned closely with the quality, design and innovation of our products and services. Over the years, we have successfully increased our brand value through marketing, sponsorship and advertising activities. Our marketing performance has been recognised as among the best-in-class, with Samsung ranked seventh in Interbrand’s “Best Global Brands” 2014.

This marketing excellence has not come about by chance. Samsung has a unique work culture defined by its strengths in quick

decision-making and ability to implement a decision, which allows us to adapt to the everchanging IT trends.

This is possible because we have some of the best people in the world working at Samsung. What’s really important is nurturing them by creating the best working environment and to provide employees with the resources to achieve their full potential.

We give employees the freedom to be creative and to learn new things. We offer optimised career planning, with our marketers having the opportunity for on-the-job rotation to develop their skills across the full range of product marketing, retail marketing and consumer marketing. We also offer structured training courses, both classroom and online, covering areas such as customer service, retail excellence and scenario planning.

We have diverse and global talent in our company – across all ethnicities, genders, languages and regions. Samsung’s strength lies in our marketers across the region

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collaborating and learning from each other. We strive to gather our brightest minds at global and regional events and training workshops.

If they are not able to fly in across the region for these events, we offer online training as an alternative to allow them to connect and share best practices with their counterparts in other parts of the world, such as the US and Europe.

Coca-Cola Elizabeth Suwanto Marketing capability director, ASEAN For many years, our objective has been to build the world’s most loved brands in ways that fuel the sustainable value growth of our business.

This calls for a fusion of marketing art and marketing science, a critical skill of any good marketing leader.

From a talent and development perspective, in addition to the regular conversations with managers, we have disciplined routines to discuss our talents and develop strong talent pipelines. We track talent movements as

talents, there is no one right or correct way.

There is a need to balance market needs with talent aspirations, as well as to take into consideration market complexity, talent readiness, etc. The constant engagement with talents is critical, so we understand the situation and context and are able to provide the right and timely response.

To groom marketing leaders, we organise development forums where our marketers experience “a day in the life of a senior marketer”. As they go through various simulation exercises, they will learn their natural strengths and identify potential development areas. This gives great insight into the design of their personal development plan, making it more effective and focused.

Ogilvy & Mather Alan Couldrey Chief talent officer, Asia Pacific Those of us who have been at Ogilvy for any length of time need to be careful not to sound

very driven, people. We do have formal training that explores the changing nature of the communications profession as we respond to clients’ changing needs.

But managers at Ogilvy learn most from working closely with clients and live business issues. The familiar balance of “heart” and “mind”, of “logic” and “magic”, is as true today with grooming marketers as it has ever been in the agency’s long history. The skills may be changing, but the way to be sure those skills are relevant is to watch how they help solve real brand issues.

Ogilvy’s own internal research shows us, reassuringly, that our most contented professionals are those whose jobs involve the most diverse range of skills and challenges.

Our structure is geared towards encouraging cross-fertilisation of learning so that solutions can be found laterally that would simply not be possible otherwise. And, of course, a high level of interconnectedness between teams and across national or discipline borders is essential for that – something that’s hard to replicate.

“Citi relies on a number of measures to gauge marketing effectiveness. NPS, brand preference and business performance are ultimately how our marketers and marketing programmes are measured and evaluated.”

Jerry Blanton - global marketing director, Asia and EMEA Acting regional marketing head, Citibank

they take on new challenges outside of their comfort zone (for example, outside of their function or home market) before coming back to be stronger leaders. We also review scope of work to see how to expand or stretch them to continue to learn and grow.

As part of marketing capability, we look at a variety of ways to groom marketers: • On-the-job experience: What roles or assignments would be appropriate to help marketers grow? How do we expand their scope so they are able to evolve from managing a brand to a category or a total portfolio?

• Mentoring/coaching: Apart from their manager, we believe it is important for marketers to identify mentors they can learn from.

• Training: We have a list of trainings that caters to various learning methods – from e-learning modules and classroom sessions to workshops that combine theory with application. With our concept of “leaders as teachers”, our marketing leads walk the talk in building capability and we ensure it’s embedded as part of what they do.

While we have a framework for growing our

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arrogant when we talk about the culture of training and development that we believe makes us different. Hidden in the simple fact that many of Asia’s marketers have spent time at Ogilvy is the fact Ogilvy is constantly changing, always adapting.

Yes, some of the central tenants of David Ogilvy’s approach – that creativity matters above all, that you can be “gentlemanly” (or womanly) and still be professional and successful, that the more you know about who you are communicating to the more effective your work will be – those don’t change.

But anyone joining Ogilvy today would equally be learning about the continuous interactions of social media and the latest ways to work with data, mobile and user experience.

The brand has always come first – David was one of the first to see that and understand its implications. Today, advertising is part of a well-told, well-co-ordinated story that reaches consumers wherever they are, and on their terms. Keeping ahead of those trends is a challenge, and explains why Ogilvy is always on the look out for hires which will feed the process of transformation.

There is no better learning environment than to be on the same team as very bright,

We have to be brave and open to the fact that not everyone will stay at Ogilvy for as long as we would like – there’s a big world of opportunity out there and markets are competitive. Nevertheless we try to ensure long-term career paths within the Ogilvy group are as challenging and rewarding as possible.

Transfers to other markets and different roles are part of the solution. And it is always very reassuring to see a high level of returnees over time.

We have three levels of training ongoing at any time: at a local level for essential skills such as presentation, client service, creative idea development, research and effectiveness and measurement; then regionally we have two sets of client-related training, one focused on introducing new skills that can help with client brand growth, the second focused on helping our service teams explore and develop their relationship with our own client base; and finally we have WPP and other long-term programmes that concentrate on the development of top potential and senior personnel.

As with all such things, it is the doing and the redoing of training that makes a difference – we are always vigilant to protect our learning time against the pressures of day-to-day business.

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MARKETING FEATURE: INNOVATION

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CLIENTS AND AGENCIES EVERYWHERE ARE STRUGGLING TO INTEGRATE INNOVATION INTO THEIR PROCESSES. JUST WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO DO THIS? ELIZABETH LOW WRITES.

Innovation has been the biggest buzzword of the year, with many major firms and agencies starting units to foster it. Innovation units have been started and innovation executives have been appointed.

It’s early stages, and while some are genuinely cutting-edge, others are just buzzwords. The trend has larger firms turning to look at smaller setups for inspiration. The trouble is, few are able to erect the kind of processes needed for true innovation. This affects both agencies and clients.

SoDA, the voice of the digital agency and production community, has released the annual Digital Outlook Study as part of The SoDA Report Volume 1 2015. The report which interviewed 680 global senior executives from advertisers and agencies showed that organisational structures on the client side continue to be seen as a barrier to innovation by more than four out of 10 agency respondents.

As for agencies, moving from a servicebased model to product development involves a steep learning curve.

“After two to three years that learning curve begins to flatten and more financial benefits such as significant funding, revenue growth and new business wins begin to take root,” said Chris Buettner, editor of the SoDa report.

“It could also be that after two to three years, agencies who do not see clear financial ROI on their innovation labs or product incubators choose to disband efforts and focus on their service-based offerings. That has also been the case with a handful of SoDA member agencies.”

But for many agencies is innovation genuine or just skin-deep?

“Any time you ask someone an example of innovation, they would say, ‘Oh Nike Plus’. The one example of where it has been successfully done. Most of the other stuff I would not call innovation, I would call it gimmicks – just little things here and there,” said Ogilvy & Mather president of K1ND (its innovation unit), and CEO of China, Chris Reitermann.

“That was how it was like in Ogilvy before, there was one guy with a card that said ‘innovation director’. Innovation (in a title) sounds good, but mostly what that person does is digital strategy or gimmicks.

“To really institutionalise innovation and make it work like a start-up, you have to create a totally different set up.”

Setting up for agency innovation He talks about the confines of a traditional

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agency structure in inhibiting a real start-up culture.

“There are many things you can’t do financially, structurally, in terms of how you work. Nothing wrong with it, but it’s hard to drive real innovation.

“Existing agencies and many large organisations will tell you the same thing. You see companies like Unilever and P&G, they have a very hard time with driving innovation in their existing structures as this is not how these companies are built.

“The same thing applies for agencies. You would think agencies are innovative thinkers (which we are), but the structures are very traditional – there are P&Ls to live by. Compare this to a start-up which has funding, doesn’t have to care about money and with some crazy people who can do what they want – well this doesn’t work in a larger organisation.”

Reitermann talks about the thinking behind Ogilvy K1ND, O&M’s innovation unit, and how it wanted to be different.

“My hope is that it will eventually become successful, but also accelerate changes and transformation,” he said.

It works by a partnership model “so those who work there have some skin in the game”.

They also don’t report to any other division of O&M. “We don’t get paid by fees. We want joint partnerships on the IP we create (for example, patents may be created). We invest in product developments, we work with start-ups, etc. We work with clients on a partnership model – the client puts in money, we put in money and if that takes off, we both benefit.”

It also works by picking out projects for clients, developing them to a prototype level and proposing them back to clients.

“Clients would offer a small fee to cover the cost – or do a joint partnership like I mentioned,” he said.

Buettner, of the SoDa report, gives 10 tips learnt from setting up innovation labs or units:

“The same thing applies for agencies.

You would think agencies are innovative thinkers (which we are), but the structures are very traditional – there are P&Ls to live by. Compare this to a start-up which has funding, doesn’t have to care about money and with some crazy people who can do what they want – well this doesn’t work in a larger organisation.”

Chris Reitermann - Ogilvy & Mather president of K1ND (its innovation unit), and CEO of China.

The unit was launched a year ago, funded both by Ogilvy and Singapore’s Economic Development Board for the Singapore unit.

K1ND is also based in Beijing. The unit also began with Mondelēz as its first partner.

“When we set up K1nd, we wanted to do it properly, use it as an experiment and to not do everything that agencies do,” he said.

K1ND was taken out of the existing structure of Ogilvy and sits in a different office. Innovation has to be taken out of the day to day business to work, he says. “This is why Unilever had to set up Foundry to take innovation out of the daily business.”

Just like a start-up, it was not expected that the unit would be profitable in the first six months. That, or expansion of the business, would not be its focus.

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1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Separate the product business from your agency services business (a separate P&L and KPIs).

Fully understand the supply chain and particularly the cost structure.

Get expert legal advice around intellectual property, employees and freelancers, trademarks and copyright as well as patents.

When developing IP or products on behalf of clients: Having service contracts that retain IP ownership (when you can negotiate it) will put you at a logical advantage.

Consider using Kickstarter not only to raise some funding, but more importantly to gauge interest in an idea and to start marketing the product.

6. Dedicate teams, but in reasonably small chunks (monthly, quarterly) to avoid too much disruption to the agency side of the business.

7. The success of a product is unpredictable and often just a matter of luck (e.g. the Pinterest CEO stumbled upon Stickygram, pinned it, and it took off).

8. Having an outside partner or investor can make sense, but it’s a bigger commitment.

If a product shows promise, consider hiring a CEO to run it full-time.

9. Working on products that are relevant to the client’s work is a good hedge – there’s still value even if they never go big.

10. Innovation labs and product incubators build a culture of experimentation within an agency and will help you recruit and retain the best talent.

Companies’ struggle: Too large to move quickly?

The issue applies to large MNCs as well, and with many at the maturation stages of the business cycle, it is hard to think like a start-up again.

Many, like agencies, look to harness startups, with the likes of Unilever, Mondelēz, Tune Group, Diageo, Coca-Cola and DBS all working with these to introduce innovation into their behemoth organisational ranks.

Change comes slowly, with many factors such as culture, organisational structure and process being barriers to innovation. A company wide move with multiple layers and processes to ensure it, and justifying returns, is also difficult when it comes to innovation.

According to the SoDa study, innovation labs and product incubators take about three years to pay off. The learning curve means there is little clear ROI in the early years, although benefits do flow from talent retention and new business development.

After three years, however, one in four of those tracked had benefited from a company spin-off, VC investment or significant funding, reported the study.

A marketer of a major hotel chain quips ironically on the innovation struggle – the company’s latest “innovation” was someone deciding to make origami folds in the toilet rolls for guests. “What is innovation? It has to also make a business impact,” she said.

In the next part of this article, we’ve spoken to five major brands and companies on how they are pulling innovation into their ranks.

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COCA-COLA – “DIGITISED THINKING”

Long an icon of marketing success, CocaCola has managed to upkeep its strong brand equity over the years. BrandZ’s study ranks brands according to the strength of the brand alone, without the influence of financials or external factors, terming it “brand contribution”, and ranked it as the fourth brand globally for this. It also tracks its brand value at US$70,042 million.

Recent years have also seen Coca-Cola taking steps to change the way it thinks about digital, according to Richard Kiger, innovation solutions director for ASEAN. “One example I like to cite is around our progress in how we think about and use ‘digital’. From being an isolated (and relatively small) element of our marketing mix just a few years back to drive our brand messaging, we’ve

come to realise that digital must be integrated to the way that we think about our brands more holistically and how we engage consumers on an ongoing basis,” he said.

The move had Coke launching campaigns such as its “Make It Happy” campaign during the Super Bowl, asking people to reply to negative tweets with the hashtag “#MakeItHappy”, and Coke’s automatic algorithm would then convert the tweets using an encoding system called ASCII into pictures of happy things – such as a mouse or a palm tree wearing sunglasses.

In Asia, the past two years has also seen Coke launch its own social media hub for Singapore and Malaysia, with one of the goals to the new centre being large-scale social media listening.

He added the company actively integrates innovation into its business model by taking business problems and working on them through incubators.

“Through concepts like incubation and pilots we’ve reduced the hurdles and risks associated with some innovation, allowing us to prove concepts in markets which facilitates a faster scale up.”

While not revealing further on Coke’s current procedures on innovation, he hinted the FMCG firm was also looking at embracing a “start-up mindset”.

DIAGEO – “FOSTER A HEALTHY PIPELINE OF IDEAS” Along the lines of Mondelēz and Unilever, alcohol conglomerate Diageo was the latest to push hard for innovation, with dedicated funding and mentoring for start-ups. Launching its technology ventures programme in September 2014, the programme is run out of its London headquarters, but the team works closely with local teams in various markets throughout the world to run trials of the chosen technologies.

Teams answer briefs from the office, for example, and the briefs are explored with Diageo India, and teams there will manage trials locally.

“There are no limits from where the technology trials originate – we are simply looking for the ones that most successfully answer the call for solutions to our business challenges,” said Helen Michels, global innovations director.

Throughout the year, the company will develop and publish specific briefs that focus on different business challenges, and review proposals from emerging companies in response. The chosen winners will receive a fund of up to £100,000.00 to trial their technology, with additional funding coming from pilot markets and a Diageo team ready to work with the successful applicant. From this Diageo has already launched a “smart bottle” for Johnnie Walker at the Mobile World Congress this year.

The connected “smart bottle” uses printed

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sensor tags which can detect both the sealed and opened state of each bottle. The tags and the sensor information will allow Diageo to send personalised communications to consumers who read the tags with their smartphones.

The innovation was created by Thinfilm in collaboration with Diageo Technology Ventures.

The technology also allows Diageo to track bottle movements across the supply chain, instore and to the point of consumption, as tags can detect if a bottle is sealed or opened with the simple tap of an NFC smartphone, which leads to an added level of security.

Pedro Mendonça, general manager of innovation for APAC at Diageo, said: “Within Diageo we have an approach to marketing innovation which we call next-generation marketing, focusing on the ‘mental availability’ of our brands, meaning they are constantly in the minds of our consumers, as well as ‘physical availability’ of our brands, so that they are visible at a point of purchase.” He said another area of the business where it was pushing marketing innovation was in Reserve, the luxury portfolio of Diageo, where it invests in branded entertainment platforms.

“A great example is our Johnnie Walker House properties that allow us to reach consumers directly through new immersive

luxury whisky experiences, building the Johnnie Walker brand into a lifestyle concept as well as a luxury retail store,” he said. One challenge is that each market keeps evolving so a global innovation team working seamlessly is very important. “Furthermore, all innovation contains an element of risk, so we believe it is important to ensure a healthy pipeline of ideas – a spread between sure wins and big bets. Our innovation teams continuously pursue several avenues of development, such as flavour innovation, packaging methods and innovative routes to the consumer,” he said. As for real innovation, it needs to be integrated within all aspects of a company for it to succeed, he said. “We apply this approach at Diageo where innovation forms a crucial part of our growth strategy across the business and across the globe.”

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INTEL – “BUILD A DIGITAL COMMAND CENTRE”

Founded in 1968, Intel has built its name in the PC business. However, the past few years have seen Intel take huge steps away from its reliance on the quickly dwindling PC market.

Most recently, this saw the firm make a costly US $16.7 billion deal to buy programmable chip maker Altera Corp, which is expected to expand Intel’s profitable chips for corporate data centres, and allow it to step into the Internet of Things market.

According to BrandZ’s index, Intel has been doing well with its brand, tracking a 58% rise in brand value from last year. The survey lists it as being worth US$18,385 million in brand value, being third in the study’s top 20 risers for techs this year in brand value, trailing only Facebook and Apple. In the context of this, how is Intel innovating in the marketing arena?

For its Asia Pacific marketing team, it means building a state-of-the-art digital command centre. Intel launched its first digital hub, based in Singapore and functioning for the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region, in May this year.

The APJ digital hub will operate in real time, combining insights and creativity and integrating the power of paid, earned and owned media in order to amplify conversations and inspire search around the Intel brand and its products.

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The hub is aimed at giving the firm the capacity to measure all its digital activations, optimise content and media for reach, drive higher engagement and cost efficiency, all in real time. This will also allow the company to produce content at a higher capacity. The digital hub will pull in conversational insights and behavioural measures that will be combined with Intel’s research data to bring in valuable longer term insights for product marketing and strategy.

The hub will function in these four areas: overall web monitoring, predictive conversational analysis, owned metrics and advocacy tracking.

Overall web monitoring: The hub will serve to measure Intel’s share of voice, popular content themes and sentiment analysis across Intel as brand and business segments like PCs, 2in1, smartphones, tablets and new businesses like IOT and wearables. This will also include measuring Intel-led campaigns, industry events and Intel-owned events.

Predictive conversational analysis: “Web monitoring in general gives us real time info on what has happened and predictive web monitoring is an additional layer of analysis that is based on historical trends and algorithms that can provide predictive emerging conversations in the next 48 to 72 hours. This will give Intel

a window of opportunity to figure out a conversation or content strategy around that theme,” said Jamshed Wadia, head of digital marketing and media for Asia Pacific and Japan at Intel.

Owned metrics: This will also offer real time analysis on the impact of its owned web and social assets. The impact will be measured in terms of reach, engagement, leads generated, cost of media, content effectiveness and community strength.

Advocacy tracking: The centre can identify in real time online influencers that are influencing the conversations that matter to allow Intel to engage with them via a formal engagement programme that builds long-term relationships, said Wadia.

“One of the biggest challenges about doing things differently is getting the employees and agency partners to think and do things differently as well,” he said.

“You may have the best tools and data at your disposal, but if the organisation is not geared up for the change then not much can be achieved. At Intel we are constantly evolving our organisation to keep pace with the changes.

“Marketing is a constantly evolving discipline. If you are not looking for new ways to reach your key audiences, you risk losing them.”

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KIMBERLY-CLARK CORPORATION – “INNOVATION IS FOR ALL DEPARTMENTS OF A COMPANY”

“Marketing innovation is an extremely important piece of the overall innovation programme for Kimberly-Clark,” said marketing director Rahul Asthana.

“As we develop our plans, there is a mix of product and commercial innovation that can help drive the business without needing to invest in product innovation every year. This is especially true as we have worked hard to develop winning consumer preferred products, and at times, the key barrier is no longer around product.

“We approach our innovation more broadly now, looking at innovating the product,

innovating the promise and innovating the channel. The last two build into marketing innovation. For us, the key is to understand the key insight, that if unlocked, can help drive higher brand sales.

“And often the answer is not just a product innovation, but also a commercial programme, a new way of connecting with the consumer, a new touch-point or a new sales channel that we have not previously maximised.”

He gave three examples of this. First with the launch of the Kleenex moist flushable perineal wipes across the region. The key barrier to overcome was to get consumers to start using “wet” bath tissues instead of dry.

The insight was to highlight the uncertainty that something is left behind when using dry tissues and that wet tissues elevate the standard of clean. This has driven strong business results in Taiwan, Korea and China.

For adult care, it ran a participatory commercial programme in Korea where consumers were asked to wear its Depend adult diaper underwear, together with their loved ones with incontinence, to normalise the condition and address the stigma associated with it. The plan is delivering strong results, he said.

As for its Huggies brand, through its data analytics, it unearthed an insight that most

mothers were tangled in negative emotions at all stages of raising a baby, such as feeling “depressed”, “frustrated”, “sorry” and “tired”.

It created a Huggies happy Momentcam in collaboration with various agencies – a small camera that attaches on to clothes like a brooch and works in pairs. It has an automatic sensor that starts recording when the pairs are within two metres of each other. Hence, when a mother and baby wear the devices, they capture scenes from each other’s viewpoints.

According to Asthana, this helped boost sales.

“The biggest challenge is to make sure that we are uncovering true consumer insights that can help unlock the category benefit. Once we have this, we work with our agencies to develop content that can truly engage consumers and drive behaviour change. We are also trying to move away from excessive pre-testing and moving to more real-time optimisation.

“The single biggest piece of advice is to not look at marketing innovation as a separate bucket from product innovation. Companies should look at innovation as broadly as possible to overcome consumer barriers and identify true insights that unlock category growth.

Secondly, organisations, especially leadership, need to truly believe that marketing innovation can make a difference on the business.”

MCDONALD’S – “TEST, LEARN AND FAIL” McDonald’s has been having a tough period.

While still listed as the top fast-food brand with the most brand value at US$81,162 million (according to Millward Brown’s BrandZ 2015 study), it is having a hard time at reinvention.

“Some businesses have reinvention forced on them,” said BrandZ researchers.

“McDonald’s is on a difficult journey towards being a business that delivers healthy menus, contemporary restaurants and sustainable sourcing. But it doesn’t really have a choice, against a background of changing tastes and declining sales, notably in the US. “A decade ago, McDonald’s was positioned to compete against Burger King. Now it is businesses such as Chipotle, once owned by McDonald’s, that is taking share from it.”

However, the firm has taken drastic steps to change, recently appointing its CMO Steve Easterbrook as its CEO. Following this, he has detailed a major restructure to “reset and turn around” the business.

The first step will be to strengthen its effectiveness and efficiency to drive faster and more customer-led decisions, with the business re-categorised according to regional markets.

McDonald’s describes what innovation means to the firm.

Andrew Hipsley, chief brand officer for

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McDonald’s in Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa, talks about its new customised burger platform called “create your taste”.

“This is one of the biggest ever changes at McDonald’s – from ‘making for you’ to ‘creating your own’,” he said.

“First tested in the US, ‘create your taste’ gives customers the freedom to create their own unique burgers using fresh, quality ingredients in an uplifting restaurant environment absolutely focused on personalised service.

“We make it easy for our customers to customise their burgers using the self-ordering kiosks, and deploying the wireless table locator, our hosts deliver the food to the customer’s table.

“All this probably seems rather unMcDonald’s – and that’s exactly what makes the brand experience innovative, refreshing and exciting.”

The move is being rolled out across in parts of Australia, Singapore and more markets in Asia Pacific, as well as the Middle East.

“The biggest challenge we have is speed at which innovation has to happen to keep pace with changing consumer needs.

“As a brand with a massive restaurant scale, it is not uncommon to subject some of our ideas to ruthless consumer testing and

perfecting of executional details before bringing them to market.

“However, in today’s world where speed is everything, we have had to move more quickly to deliver innovative solutions to our customers.

“We test more things to learn faster and fail them, or scale them, quicker than ever before. And where we may not have first-mover advantage, we make sure we come up with a better or more unique customer experience.”

His advice to other firms on innovation: “Create a culture that celebrates ideation, facilitate tests to learn and promote progress.”

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6/11/2015 10:21:40 AM

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STRATEGIC AND ORGANISATIONAL FACTORS ARE WHAT SEPARATE SUCCESSFUL BIG-COMPANY INNOVATORS FROM THE REST OF THE FIELD. MARC DE JONG, NATHAN MARSTON, AND ERIK ROTH OF MCKINSEY WRITE. It’s no secret: innovation is difficult for well-established companies. By and large, they are better executors than innovators, and most succeed less through game-changing creativity than by optimising their existing businesses.

Yet as hard as it’s for such organisations to innovate, large ones as diverse as Alcoa, the Discovery Group, and NASA’s Ames Research Centre are doing so. What can other companies learn from their approaches and attributes?

That question formed the core of a multi-year study comprising in-depth interviews, workshops and surveys of more than 2,500 executives in more than 300 companies, including both performance leaders and laggards in a broad set of industries and countries (exhibit 1). What we found were a set of eight essential attributes that are present, either in part or in full, at every big company that’s a high performer in product, process or business-model innovation.

Since innovation is a complex company wide endeavour, it requires a set of crosscutting practices and processes to structure, organise and encourage it. Taken together, the essentials described in this article constitute just such an operating system, as seen in exhibit 2. These often overlapping, iterative and nonsequential practices resist systematic categorisation, but can nonetheless be thought of in two groups.

The first four, which are strategic and creative in nature, help set and prioritise the terms and conditions under which innovation is more likely to thrive. The next four essentials deal with how to deliver and organise for innovation repeatedly over time and with enough value to contribute meaningfully to overall performance.

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To be sure, there’s no proven formula for success, particularly when it comes to innovation.

While our years of client-service experience provide strong indicators for the existence of a causal relationship between the attributes that survey respondents reported and the innovations of the companies we studied, the statistics described here can only prove correlation.

Yet we firmly believe if companies assimilate and apply these essentials – in their own way, in accordance with their particular context, capabilities, organisational culture and appetite for risk – they will improve the likelihood they can also rekindle the lost spark of innovation.

In the digital age, the pace of change has gone into hyper-speed, so companies must get these strategic, creative, executional and organisational factors right to innovate successfully.

1.Aspire It helps to combine high-level aspirations with estimates of the value that innovation should generate to meet financial growth objectives.

Quantifying an “innovation target for growth”, and making it an explicit part of future strategic plans helps solidify the importance of and accountability for innovation. The target itself must be large enough to force managers to include innovation investments in their business plans. If they can make their numbers using other, less risky tactics, our experience suggests they (quite rationally) will.

Establishing a quantitative innovation aspiration is not enough, however. The target value needs to be apportioned to relevant business “owners” and cascaded down to their organisations in the form of performance targets and timelines. Anything less risks encouraging inaction or the belief innovation is someone else’s job.

For example, Lantmännen, a big Nordic agricultural co-operative, was challenged by flat organic growth and directionless innovation.

Top executives created an aspirational vision and strategic plan linked to financial targets: 6% growth in the core business and 2% growth in new organic ventures. To encourage innovation projects, these quantitative targets were cascaded down to business units and, ultimately, to product groups.

During the development of each innovation project, it had to show how it was helping to achieve the growth targets for its category and markets. As a result, Lantmännen went from 4% to 13% annual growth, underpinned by the successful launch of several new brands.

It became the market leader in pre-made food only four years after entry and created a new premium segment in this market.

2. Choose Fresh and creative insights are invaluable, but

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in our experience many companies run into difficulty less from a scarcity of new ideas than from the struggle to determine which ideas to support and scale. At bigger companies, this can be particularly problematic during market discontinuities, when supporting the next wave of growth may seem too risky, at least until competitive dynamics force painful changes.

Innovation is inherently risky, to be sure, and getting the most from a portfolio of innovation initiatives is more about managing risk than eliminating it. Since no one knows exactly where valuable innovations will emerge, and searching everywhere is impractical, executives must create some boundary conditions for the opportunity spaces they want to explore.

The process of identifying and bounding these spaces can run the gamut from intuitive visions of the future to carefully scrutinised strategic analyses. Thoughtfully prioritising these spaces also allows companies to assess whether they have enough investment behind their most valuable opportunities.

During this process, companies should set in motion more projects than they will ultimately be able to finance, which makes it easier to kill those that prove less promising.

RELX Group, for example, runs 10 to 15 experiments per major customer segment, each funded with a preliminary budget of about $200,000, through its innovation pipeline every year, choosing subsequently to invest more significant funds in one or two of them, and dropping the rest. “One of the hardest things to figure out is when to kill something,” said Kumsal Bayazit, RELX Group’s chief strategy

officer. “It’s a heck of a lot easier if you have a portfolio of ideas.”

Once the opportunities are defined, companies need transparency into what people are working on and a governance process that constantly assesses not only the expected value, timing and risk of the initiatives in the portfolio, but also its overall composition.

There’s no single mix that’s universally right.

Most established companies err on the side of overloading their innovation pipelines with relatively safe, short-term and incremental projects that have little chance of realising their growth targets or staying within their risk parameters. Some spread themselves thinly across too many projects instead of focusing on those with the highest potential for success and resourcing them to win.

3. Discover Innovation also requires actionable and differentiated insights – the kind that excite customers and bring new categories and markets into being. How do companies develop them? Genius is always an appealing approach, if you have or can get it. Fortunately, innovation yields to other approaches besides exceptional creativity.

The rest of us can look for insights by methodically and systematically scrutinising three areas: a valuable problem to solve, a technology that enables a solution, and a business model that generates money from it.

You could argue that nearly every successful innovation occurs at the intersection of these three elements.

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Companies that effectively collect, synthesise, and “collide” them stand the highest probability of success. “If you get the sweet spot of what the customer is struggling with, and at the same time get a deeper knowledge of the new technologies coming along and find a mechanism for how these two things can come together, then you are going to get good returns,” said Alcoa chairman and chief executive Klaus Kleinfeld.

The insight-discovery process, which extends beyond a company’s boundaries to include insight-generating partnerships, is the lifeblood of innovation. We won’t belabour the matter here, though, because it’s already the subject of countless articles and books.2 One thing we can add is that discovery is iterative, and the active use of prototypes can help companies continue to learn as they develop, test, validate and refine their innovations.

Moreover, we firmly believe that without a fully developed innovation system encompassing the other elements described in this article, large organisations probably won’t innovate successfully, no matter how effective their insight-generation process is.

4. Evolve Business-model innovations – which change the economics of the value chain, diversify profit streams and/or modify delivery models – have always been a vital part of a strong innovation portfolio. As smartphones and mobile apps threaten to upend old-line industries, businessmodel innovation has become all the more

urgent: established companies must reinvent their businesses before technology driven upstarts do. Why then do most innovation systems so squarely emphasise new products?

The reason, of course, is that most big companies are reluctant to risk tampering with their core business model until it’s visibly under threat. At that point, they can only hope it’s not too late.

Leading companies combat this troubling tendency in a number of ways. They up their game in market intelligence, the better, to separate signal from noise. They establish funding vehicles for new businesses that don’t fit into the current structure. They constantly re-evaluate their position in the value chain, carefully considering business models that might deliver value to priority groups of new customers. They sponsor pilot projects and experiments away from the core business to help combat narrow conceptions of what they are and do. And they stress-test newly emerging value propositions and operating models against countermoves by competitors.

Amazon does a particularly strong job extending itself into new business models by addressing the emerging needs of its customers and suppliers. In fact, it has included many of its suppliers in its customer base by offering them an increasingly wide range of services – from hosted computing to warehouse management.

5. Accelerate Virulent antibodies undermine innovation at many large companies. Cautious governance

processes make it easy for stifling bureaucracies in marketing, legal, IT and other functions to find reasons to halt or slow approvals. Too often, companies simply get in the way of their own attempts to innovate.

A surprising number of impressive innovations from companies were actually the fruit of their mavericks, who succeeded in bypassing their early approval processes.

Clearly, there’s a balance to be maintained: bureaucracy must be held in check, yet the rush to market should not undermine the crossfunctional collaboration, continuous learning cycles, and clear decision pathways that help enable innovation.

Are managers with the right knowledge, skills and experience making the crucial decisions in a timely manner, so that innovation continually moves through an organisation in a way that creates and maintains competitive advantage, without exposing a company to unnecessary risk?

Companies also thrive by testing their promising ideas with customers early in the process before internal forces impose modifications that blur the original value proposition. To end up with the innovation initially envisioned, it’s necessary to knock down the barriers that stand between a great idea and the end user.

Companies need a well-connected manager to take charge of a project and be responsible for the budget, time to market, and key specifications – a person who can say yes rather than no. In addition, the project team needs to be cross-functional in reality, not just on paper.

This means locating its members in a single place and ensuring they give the project a significant amount of their time (at least half) to support a culture that puts the innovation project’s success above the success of each function.

Cross-functional collaboration can help ensure end-user involvement throughout the development process. At many companies, marketing’s role is to champion the interests of end users as development teams evolve products and to help ensure the final result is what everyone first envisioned. But this responsibility is honoured more often in the breach than in the observance.

Other companies, meanwhile, rationalise that consumers don’t necessarily know what they want until it becomes available. This may be true, but customers can certainly say what they don’t like. And the more quickly and frequently a project team gets – and uses – feedback, the more quickly it gets a great end result.

6. Scale Some ideas such as luxury goods and many

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smartphone apps are destined for niche markets. Others, such as social networks, work at a global scale. Explicitly considering the appropriate magnitude and reach of a given idea is important to ensuring the right resources and risks are involved in pursuing it.

The seemingly safer option of scaling up over time can be a death sentence. Resources and capabilities must be marshalled to make sure a new product or service can be delivered quickly at the desired volume and quality.

Manufacturing facilities, suppliers, distributors and others must be prepared to execute a rapid and full rollout.

For example, when TomTom launched its first touch-screen navigational device in 2004, the product flew off the shelves. By 2006, TomTom’s line of portable navigation devices reached sales of about five million units a year, and by 2008, yearly volume had jumped to more than 12 million.

“That’s faster market penetration than mobile phones had,” said Harold Goddijn, TomTom’s CEO and co-founder. While TomTom’s initial accomplishment lay in combining a

not just with international partners – launching joint satellites with nations as diverse as Lithuania, Saudi Arabia and Sweden – but also with emerging companies such as SpaceX. High-performing innovators work hard to develop the ecosystems that help deliver these benefits. Indeed, they strive to become partners of choice, increasing the likelihood the best ideas and people will come their way.

That requires a systematic approach. First, these companies find out which partners they are already working with; surprisingly few companies know this.

Then they decide which networks – say, four or five of them – they ideally need to support their innovation strategies. This step helps them to narrow and focus their collaboration efforts and to manage the flow of possibilities from outside the company.

Strong innovators also regularly review their networks, extending and pruning them as appropriate and using sophisticated incentives and contractual structures to motivate highperforming business partners. Becoming a true partner of choice is, among other things, about

Smart collaboration with external partners, though, goes beyond merely sourcing new ideas and insights; it can involve sharing costs and finding faster routes to market. well-defined consumer problem with widely available technology components, rapid scaling was vital to the product’s continuing success.

“We doubled down on managing our cash, our operations, maintaining quality, all the parts of the iceberg no one sees. We were hugely well organised.”

7. Extend In the space of only a few years, companies in nearly every sector have conceded that innovation requires external collaborators. Flows of talent and knowledge increasingly transcend company and geographic boundaries.

Successful innovators achieve significant multiples for every dollar invested in innovation by accessing the skills and talents of others. In this way, they speed up innovation and uncover new ways to create value for their customers and ecosystem partners.

Smart collaboration with external partners, though, goes beyond merely sourcing new ideas and insights; it can involve sharing costs and finding faster routes to market.

Famously, the components of Apple’s first iPod were developed almost entirely outside the company; and by efficiently managing these external partnerships, Apple was able to move from initial concept to a marketable product in only nine months.

NASA’s Ames Research Centre teams up

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clarifying what a partnership can offer the junior member: brand, reach or access, perhaps. It is also about behaviour. Partners of choice are fair and transparent in their dealings.

Moreover, companies that make the most of external networks have a good idea of what’s most useful at which stages of the innovation process. In general, they cast a relatively wide net in the early going. But as they come closer to commercialising a new product or service, they become narrower and more specific in their sourcing, since by then the new offering’s design is relatively set.

8. Mobilise How do leading companies stimulate, encourage, support and reward innovative behaviour and thinking among the right groups of people? The best companies find ways to embed innovation into the fibres of their culture – from the core to the periphery.

They start back where we began: with aspirations that forge tight connections among innovation, strategy and performance. When a company sets financial targets for innovation and defines market spaces, minds become far more focused. As those aspirations come to life through individual projects across the company, innovation leaders clarify responsibilities using the appropriate incentives and rewards.

The Discovery Group, for example, is

upending the medical and life insurance industries in its native South Africa and also has operations in the UK, the US and China, among other locations. Innovation is a standard measure in the company’s semi-annual divisional scorecards – a process that helps mobilise the organisation and affects roughly 1,000 of the company’s business leaders.

“They are all required to innovate every year,” Discovery founder and CEO Adrian Gore said of the company’s business leaders. “They have no choice.”

Organisational changes may be necessary, not because structural silver bullets exist – we’ve looked hard for them and don’t think they do – but rather to promote collaboration, learning and experimentation.

Companies must help people to share ideas and knowledge freely, perhaps by locating teams working on different types of innovation in the same place, reviewing the structure of project teams to make sure they always have new blood, ensuring that lessons learned from success and failure are captured and assimilated, and recognising innovation efforts even when they fall short of success.

Internal collaboration and experimentation can take years to establish, particularly in large, mature companies with strong cultures and ways of working that, in other respects, may have served them well. Some companies set up “innovation garages” where small groups can work on important projects unconstrained by the normal working environment, while building new ways of working that can be scaled up and absorbed into the larger organisation.

NASA, for example, has 10 field centres. But the space agency relies on the Ames Research Centre in Silicon Valley to maintain what its former director, Dr Pete Worden, calls “the character of rebels” to function as “a laboratory that’s part of a much larger organisation”.

Big companies do not easily reinvent themselves as leading innovators. Too many fixed routines and cultural factors can get in the way. For those that do make the attempt, innovation excellence is often built in a multiyear effort that touches most, if not all, parts of the organisation.

Our experience and research suggest that any company looking to make this journey will maximise its probability of success by closely studying and appropriately assimilating the leading practices of high-performing innovators. Taken together, these form an essential operating system for innovation within a company’s organisational structure and culture.

This article was summarised from an article in McKinsey Quarterly

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BEHIND A BLANK SHEET OF PAPER IS YEARS OF TOIL AND SWEAT OF THOUSANDS OF FARMERS, AND A STRING OF BRANDING STIMULUS MEASURES, AS DOUBLE A SENIOR EXECUTIVE VICE-PRESIDENT THIRAWIT LEETAVORN TELLS JENNIFER CHAN.

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It’s not an easy job being a marketer in the paper business these days.

We’ve grown up in a city with free-flowing paper at every turn, a lowcost necessity that has become too pervasive, of which value continues to drop to a point that now, after thousands of years of evolving, we’re abandoning this age-old treasure in favour of the bewilderingly digital devices.

But for the past 10 years, Thirawit Leetavorn has remained at the helm of the Thailand-based paper manufacturer Double A as senior executive vice-president, bringing the local Thai brand into the international arena.

“We are the first paper business to actually brand paper,” he says proudly, as we meet at the Double A office at the heart of Tsim Sha Tsui.

“In my first discussion with our president, he asked if I can create a brand out of paper. And I said, why not?

“Everybody at that time bought paper based on pricing. But you can’t run a business that is driven purely by price and costing. You need to be able to add value to that particular business.”

Once in the liquor industry with the likes of Stolichnaya Vodka, Malibu, Kahlúa and Ballantine’s Scotch Whisky, Leetavorn jumped into the unfamiliar field of paper enticed by the charm of unknown challenges that lay ahead. From there, he took up the task to find eternal value in a blank sheet of paper.

“We started to export our products into the global market and to develop the brand from a local Thai company into a global name. I believe for any marketers this is challenging.”

With the help of university professors and environmental experts, the company has found the answer lies in the intrinsic root of paper – the trees.

“The key to success in the paper industry is ensuring the source of raw material. That’s where we started – by identifying sustainable sources of raw materials, where we can grow trees, and how we can incorporate farmers and farming communities to help us grow these trees.”

More and more consumers in Hong Kong are digging deeper into what they’re buying and how the products are manufactured, with heightened awareness on a wide range of environmental issues. Forest depletion is one of them.

Be they sincere or not, companies are responding to sustainability practices with some silver bullets, such as the increased use of recycling paper, and even the claims of a paperless office.

But winning the admiration from the public is never easy, particularly for paper manufacturers, a business that counts almost entirely on cutting down trees.

To date, Double A is doing business with 38 countries in Asia and 92 countries outside of Asia. With a pledge to convert what is supposed to be a non-environmental-friendly industry into a sustainable practice, Double A’s paper is produced from a range of 57 different natural specious of trees grown by more than one million contract farmers in Thailand, which can grow in arid land, flooded and shady areas.

According to the company, the trees produce 3.4 million tons of oxygen per year.

This, Leetavorn stresses, can achieve a win-win situation that benefits also the farmers. Farmers who join the programme can get 100 free tree samplings, and the company will acquire them after four years at a certain price.

“The land is of no economic value without growing trees. So we create a value for the farmers to enjoy additional income by growing the trees.

“If the farmers have to buy it then there’s a value attached; there’s a

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commitment to make it grow. We sell them the trees, and then they make the trees into a product which they can benefit from four years down the road.”

The company sells the trees to farmers for 10 cents each.

“The return is about 8%, which is better than putting our money in the bank today,” he says.

Drones are used to take the stock inventory of the trees. With a simple benchmark of height, the cameras can identify the age and condition of the trees. Not only does the company know the nature of the land, it also has to help the farmers identify the best specious of trees to grow under certain conditions.

“Engaging farmers is important because when you buy something, there’s a value attached to it.”

From an environmental standpoint, more people have come to realise that a sheet of paper costs far more than a penny; we may have become more cautious on consuming paper, but Leetavorn admits consumers have never paid enough attention on where it comes from.

That is a big issue to Leetavorn because having a meaningful brand story doesn’t guarantee a strong brand, until you find a way to let your customers know about it.

“TV advertising used to be the main media we used in the first three to four years after landing in Hong Kong. But not anymore.”

While the topical issue of environmental sustainability is too complex to be carried in a 30-second spot on television, or even in print or outdoor ads, its 400 retail stores in Hong Kong play a prominent role in carrying brand messages.

“We’ve got to a stage where the top-of-mind awareness level of our brand is quite high here.

“Sustaining that level of awareness doesn’t mean you have to continue to advertise; instead it is really about guaranteeing the availability in every store, to be available in a prime position, and in terms of display.

“Environmental issues are hard to put in an entertaining format to engage audiences on television. Instead, we used in-store promotional, display, even our packaging to allocate how our products are made,” he says, suggesting brands need to engage with consumers by increasing the product trail and a pleasing point-of-sales environment.

To that, part of the job of the local team is to maintain a healthy relationship with front-line staff in stores.

“Brand is nothing unless you have good people working for you. You can’t force a message onto the consumer. They have to be open to your messages and the enquiring mind to find out more. Educating consumers about our brand value is a long journey.”

But that’s not all.

The emergence of big-screen tablets such as iPads, Android devices and Kindles, the decreasing use of first-class mail, and the waning newspaper and magazine interest from the public, are all lighting a bonfire on the paper business globally.

The topical shift, sooner or later, will force players in the field to go the extra mile for survival. Double A, along with a handful of tech corporations which sell paper such as HP and Xerox, are competing for a shrinking market.

Still, he remains upbeat.

“Digital technology will obviously have an impact on paper consumption, but not dramatically. From what we’ve seen so far, the impact is really in terms of the behavioural usage of paper.

While the digital boom seems to be posing a potential threat to the paper business’ survival, Leetavorn believes the fate of a company in declining markets comes down to a strong brand.

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“Sustaining that level of awareness doesn’t mean you have to continue to advertise; instead it is really about guaranteeing the availability in every store, to be available in a prime position, and in terms of display”

This theory is evident in how many luxury labels survived the major financial crisis of 2008.

“When the economic bubble exploded at that time, everybody assumed luxury goods would die. But now we know they actually survived and thrived.

“When people are confronted with fixed amounts of money to spend … do I spend it on something that is cheaper, but not so sure in quality?

Or do I spend it on something that will surely deliver quality? I prefer quality because I am taking the risk otherwise.”

Paper won’t die. Perhaps what we’re undergoing is a change in form.

“Today you don’t see stacks of paper being given out because everybody refers to digital documents. But we do see an increasing demand in quality printing to cater to business needs from senior management. People print out documents which are important and in need for storage.

“In that sense, consumers no longer look for cheap paper; they’re looking for premium paper that they can keep and store.”

To put it into numbers, the company sold about 340,000 tons of paper in Asia last year. The biggest paper consumption market in Asia is Japan, with pro-capita paper consumption at about eight kilograms per person.

In more developed places such as Korea, it comes out at about six to seven kilograms, while Hong Kong is sitting at only four to five kilograms.

Surprisingly, the lowest pro-capita paper consumption in Asia is China, with Shanghai being the highest just equal to Hong Kong.

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The biggest impact on paper consumption has been the economic performance of the country, Leetavorn says.

“Office paper has consumed 15 million tons in the global market since 2008, it hasn’t declined since.

“There was a huge reduction on paper consumption at that time when the economic crisis struck across the world and a lot of banks, who are big clients for paper suppliers, went out of business. But after that, it became stable again.”

That being said, he notes that a more apparent slowdown on paper consumption does happen in certain professions such as manufacturing.

“That paper format is translated into other formats in terms of scale and complexity. But eventually you still need a print prototype for a final check. So it’s just a different type of paper that is being used.”

Commercial and office paper are only the tip of the iceberg. Along the way to digitalisation are paper types that are suffering a worse decline, such as news and magazine print, two paper categories that are “already on death row” says Leetavorn.

When we walk out of the office, I ask of the tale behind the two big “A”s in the logo.

It has two meanings – first, it’s an abbreviation of “Advance Agro”, a mission the company started out with; the second goes to the Double A president, a man who used to be in engineering, and who strongly believes in earning good grades on tests and exams.

The iconic two “A”s are designed to mirror an advanced paper quantity. “So which one is true?” I repeatedly asked.

“Which one do you like?” he smirks.

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THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL MEDIA INTELLIGENCE Businesses will continue to have their pick of social media intelligence tools to choose from, but the key is selecting the right one. John Box of Meltwater writes. help its user find and profile that “needle in the haystack” that is important to the business.

The social media landscape needs a fresh perspective. Where are you getting yours?

In today’s social media-saturated world, relying solely on internal data is like driving a car while looking in the rear-view mirror. Internal data reflects the past, because by definition, it is historical; it can also be biased by an organisation’s internal staff or system limitations.

By also looking outside at the world around your business, you are looking ahead through the windshield to see what is coming, giving you a chance to respond, manage the situation and make timely informed decisions.

With social media continuing to grow, business strategies will be increasingly shaped by insights from online data, and getting valuable insights requires looking outside, beyond internal reporting systems, to data found outside the firewall.

Social media intelligence solutions, therefore, should have the ability to leverage the power of big data to process billions of online media documents to uncover and present what is happening outside the company in real-time.

By doing this, businesses can then extract and leverage relevant insights to manage their brands, understand the competition and stay on top of industry trends.

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The objective of an effective social media intelligence tool is to help measure performance, analyse trends, identify influencers and drive strategy within an organisation. The tool should have the abilities to: 1. Create a compelling and user-friendly interface that makes it easy to understand the world around your business.

2. Provide an engaging and efficient user experience with powerful data search tools that can uncover unique insights.

3. Give decision-makers access to real-time data and insights that enable them to stay connected and responsive to the market or influencers.

There is a persistent need for businesses to derive a specific set of industry insights from global media to support various business functions such as decision-making and risk assessment.

Consequently, social media intelligence tools should have the ability to generate highly focused and customised data analysis – the kind of precise, tangible insights gleaned from a broad data set. In other words, the tool should

A fresh perspective of what the future would look like Organisations nowadays are using social media intelligence tools for many cases that industry players did not expect. For example, firms in the mining industry are using such tools to analyse and assess infrastructure risk to their global operations. Pharmaceutical companies are using it to analyse public perception of chemical compounds to derive insights for product development. Specialised business services providers such as a security services firm are using these tools to identify and respond to events that represent new sales opportunities.

As organisations begin to explore and use new ways to retrieve and analyse data, the nextgeneration social media intelligence tool should be built from the ground up to serve a wide variety of user needs for global market insights and media analytics.

It needs to be highly customisable and interactive to create the type of user experience people are accustomed to with business intelligence (BI) tools. The product should also have the capacity to leverage best-in-class data science to add value, meaning and context to the media content as well as draw out important voices and influencers in the market.

Equally important, it needs to be built on modern, highly scalable big data technology to allow users to fully blend not only today’s media such as news, blogs, social media, but be flexible to add whole new classes of data easily in the future.

The marketplace is undergoing a big shift that will increasingly make traditional models less effective in delivering true value to an organisation. Businesses will continue to have their pick of social media intelligence tools to choose from, but the key is selecting the right one.

The writer is John Box, executive director of Meltwater’s Asia Pacific (APAC) division.

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HERE’S HOW GOOGLE’S MOBILEGEDDON WILL AFFECT YOUR BUSINESS If you haven’t invested in making your site mobile friendly, it’s bad news for you.

Noreen Ismail writes.

It’s Armageddon for mobile-ignorant brand culprits. Make sure you’re not one of them.

Google has announced its new mobilefocused algorithm, which will rank mobilefriendlier sites higher in searches.

Touted as “Mobilegeddon”, this has struck fear in many companies with either low quality mobile sites or no mobile sites at all, as their sites will appear lower in the searches. This will change the way its search engine recommends websites on smartphones and mobile devices.

Google now favours sites according to how mobile-friendly they are, affecting not only clicks, but the decisions people make based on searches. On the other hand, this is good news for brands that have chosen a mobile-first strategy in marketing for their brands. Websites that do not meet Google’s standard of mobilefriendliness will be demoted in their search results.

What this means for marketers This new algorithm puts pressure on businesses to improve their mobile sites to stay competitive.

The mobile sites will also have to adhere to Google’s criteria in order to appear higher in the searches, said online workplace Elance-oDesk.

The company offered data showing how companies are already doubling down on mobile since the announcement by Google.

• Globally, businesses spent 80% more per month hiring for responsive web design.

• Spend also increased for other mobilerelated skills, including Mobile UI Design

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• •

•

(87%) and WordPress Plugins (52%), which can be used to make websites more mobile-friendly.

In Singapore, there was a 97% increase in money businesses spent on Drupal, a popular content management system.

In Singapore, there was a 100% increase in the number of job posts requiring Bootstrap and a 47% increase in the number of posts requiring CSS, a web design programming language.

In Singapore, freelancers earned significantly more for jobs with web designrelated skills, including web design (up 95%), JavaScript (up 63%) and CSS (up 49%) – likely due to businesses updating their websites for the future of mobile.

*Based on compound monthly growth rate between January and March 2015.

Experts advise: Siddharth Surana, GM of digital and performance marketing for APAC at Havas Media International, said the move would be a complete shake-up of mobile search results.

“Brands who have not made their websites mobile friendly will see a drop in their mobile search ranking especially for non-brand driven search queries over the next few weeks when this algorithm rolls out,” he said.

He added that Google had already made

announcements earlier in February this year, allowing businesses enough time to work on a mobile-friendly site.

“If visitors on the website are important to a business then it’s not about optimising for mobile search, but about giving the best user experience possible. We see this as a long pending move that will force mobile laggards to think about the user.”

Luke Janich, regional director of iProspect Singapore, said having a mobile-friendly site would have benefited the brand or company anyway.

“If brands/companies have a mobile-friendly site (responsive, adaptable or subdomain), then they are mobile friendly and will benefit from the update. Sites that are not mobile-friendly may lose rankings and traffic. If there are also issues with performance on the site, brands will suffer ranking losses,” he said.

“Mobile growth in the region is on the rise, with significant traffic coming from mobile devices.

“We have seen the growth of mobile traffic across many brands we work with. Searches will continue to be conducted on mobile devices, and moving forward on smartphones increasing the use of mobile devices in the region.

“Going mobile cannot be ignored any longer – brands need to make the investment before their competition gain the premium position.”

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APAC CEOS NEED TO UP THEIR SOCIAL MEDIA GAME, HERE’S WHY Asia’s CEOs are still way behind in the social media game, compared to counterparts in other regions. Rezwana Manjur writes.

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Research released from global public relations firm Weber Shandwick found 80% of the chief executive officers from the world’s top companies are now engaged online and via social media. Yet, APAC CEOs are way behind their US and Europe counterparts.

In fact, APAC CEOs have not experienced any growth in their online sociability at all since 2012. In the report, “Socialising Your CEO III: From Marginal to Mainstream”, US-based CEOs are surpassing their peers with 94% of them being socially active online. Meanwhile, European CEOs have made great leaps in sociability over the past few years and are catching up with US-based CEOs.

“The proliferation of sources, the unpredictability of news cycles and the explosion of new, highly visual media formats can be a challenge to any company, but it’s also a massive opportunity to engage and connect.”

Chris Perry - global president of digital, Weber Shandwick.

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So why are APAC CEOs not taking to social media?

It could be due to the Asian culture, explained Tyler Kim, Weber Shandwick’s head of corporate and crisis in Asia Pacific.

Despite there being several social mediasavvy CEOs in Asia Pacific, it appears they are not prevalent enough.

Kim added that CEOs within Asia Pacific were likely to be conservative in line with their tradition and culture. The fragmented social media landscape and multitude of social platforms in Asia may be contributing to the confusion.

“Nonetheless, there is great opportunity, as is being witnessed in the US and Europe, for the CEO to be more open and accessible and carefully align their persona with the brand they represent,” Kim said.

Chris Perry, global president of digital at Weber Shandwick, added that CEOs can help enhance and strengthen the reputation of their companies by taking an active and visible role in creating and sharing branded content through their company sites and social media.

“The proliferation of sources, the unpredictability of news cycles and the explosion of new, highly visual media formats can be a challenge to any company, but it’s also a massive opportunity to engage and connect,” Perry said.

The rise in usage of multiple channels drives CEO sociability Weber Shandwick’s report also found that today CEOs from the world’s top companies are visible on their company website (68%), company YouTube channel (38%) and social networks (28%). Meanwhile, globally, the rate of CEOs using LinkedIn has nearly quadrupled since 2012, making LinkedIn the most popular social network for top executives in 2014.

Twitter has also contributed to the growth in social network use. It now appears that CEOs are more confident about how to use Twitter without causing alarm and reputational harm. While being social was once considered risky, explained Leslie Gaines-Ross, Weber Shandwick’s chief reputation strategist, it is now clear that having an online engagement strategy that extends through multiple channels is a “reputational imperative for business leaders today”.

In fact, CEOs who embrace online communications have an opportunity to tell their company story and connect with broader networks of stakeholders more than ever before. Communicating online is the norm for today’s CEOs rather than the practice of a select few.

Additionally, CEOs are realising they need to use various channels of engagement to communicate with a diverse stakeholder set.

One form of communication no longer suffices under today’s demand for transparency and engagement.

So, how do you get your CEO to become socially active?

Weber Shandwick has outlined five key ways to help companies optimise their online storytelling to help bolster their reputations.

Socialise the executive bench: Sociability starts below the CEO level. As we see from assessing the sociability of the most powerful women in business, sociability begins before taking the top job. Those executives who have the social know-how when they step up to CEO will have an advantage over the competition and may even have brighter career prospects.

Choose platforms wisely: Find the right social vehicle for CEOs, especially those who are hesitant to be social. CEO sociability is inevitable, so they need to embrace it in some form.

Listen closely: For those CEOs still hesitant to embrace social media, listening and watching should be the first step. Monitoring the online conversation is a way to gather data on stakeholders and gauge what is being said about their companies.

Embrace a media company mindset: Take hold of the trend in narrating the company story and use the company website as a media platform to publish content. Feature the CEO regularly, even if it is footage from a speaking engagement or a snippet from a town hall meeting.

Socialise the CEO’s biography: The CEO’s biography or profile on the company website is a central place to show off a CEO’s assets. If the CEO has social networks, link to these profiles from the CEO’s biography.

In “Socialising Your CEO III: From Marginal to Mainstream”, Weber Shandwick researched the online activities of CEOs from the top 50 companies in the 2014 Fortune Global 500 rankings, including 17 CEOs from the US, 19 from Europe, 11 from Asia Pacific (APAC) and three from Latin America (LatAm).

The firm audited a range of sites and platforms to see how those CEOs are engaging socially and compared these results to its 2010 and 2012 findings.

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IS THE FACE OF WOMEN’S FASHION AND BEAUTY EVOLVING? The collective earnings of women globally are expected to go up to US$18 trillion in five years. It’s no secret that marketers have identified this valuable target group, but are their methods changing? Marketing explores the issue in this report.

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THE FASHION AND BEAUTY WORLD’S NEW ‘IT’ GIRLS? Is the fashion and marketing world, generally obsessed with the young, finally evolving?

Rezwana Manjur writes.

"Sexy has no expiration date."

The fashion world has found a new look for its “It” girls, and they are not your typical Taylor Swift look-a-likes.

In recent years, we are seeing more and more brands bringing on board an older demographic to front their ad campaigns.

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This trend made its mark when American Apparel used the then 62-year-old Jacky O’Shaughnessy as an underwear model to promote its lingerie line. An image of O’Shaughnessy, who began modelling for the clothing giant in 2011, barely clothed in a see-through lace bandeau bra

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and kickers, was posted on the brand’s Facebook page and Instagram account. The caption boldly read: “Sexy has no expiration date.”

When launched, the ad resulted in split views from the public. But being American Apparel, it was no surprise the brand would make such a bold move in its marketing campaigns.

However, soon after, the fashion and marketing world saw more conservative brands such as Céline, Marc Jacobs, Kate Spade, L’Oréal and others follow suit and embrace the silver generation. Earlier this year, we saw the cosmetic brand YSL Beauté in Hong Kong putting 80-yearold actress Helena Law Lan at the centre of its campaign.

This then begs the question: Is the fashion and marketing world, generally obsessed with the young, finally evolving? Or is this another flash in the pan trend?

In a conversation with Marketing, Cynthia Erland, SVP of marketing at American Apparel, said that when the team first launched the campaign with O’Shaughnessy fronting it, its thoughts simply revolved around the fact she embodied qualities that resonated with the ideal American Apparel woman.

“She is confident, sexy and smart, and age is not a factor. We didn’t even think twice about it when we cast her,” she said. She added that ultimately this trend picked up because consumers were the ones acknowledging this trend and really admiring the strength of these women through the ads.

When Marketing initially wrote the article on O’Shaughnessy being the face of the campaign, consumers seemed rather split on the decision.

Erland, however, stated that as the campaign progressed the reactions were “very positive” and benefited the brand by breaking down age barriers.

As for the younger demographic, she added, rather than alienate them, using O’Shaughnessy as the face of the campaign resulted in also empowering the young generation – showing them that age is just a number.

“American Apparel is proud to be one of the first pioneers in hiring women of all ages and beauty. There is an importance and a void to portray a woman’s beauty at any age. We feel that beauty lies more in the spirit of the woman than age,” she said.

J. Walter Thompson’s Marie Stafford, European director of The Innovation Group, added the over-50s audience was a force to be reckoned with because they wielded unprecedented financial power and account for 48% of all consumer spending.

“The benefits of featuring older women in such campaigns are manifold. They should be a marketer’s dream,” she said.

Recently, J. Walter Thompson London also published a report on the “The Elastic Generation” – to describe the potential energy of 50 to 69-year-olds and their knack of stretching preconceived notions of ageing.

According to the survey of British consumers aged 50-69, 65% agreed the fashion industry ignored people of their age.

“This presents an enormous opportunity for fashion and beauty brands – one to which they are only now slowly waking up to,” Stafford said.

Like Erland, Stafford agreed that younger consumers were far from being put off and, in fact, might be attracted to the authenticity that comes with experience. The research also found this age group were at

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American Apparel's bold feature of 62 year-old Jacky O'Shaughnessy.

the peak of self-confidence with 82% less concerned about what others think of them, now that they were older.

“They have found their own style; their fashion and beauty choices are at their most individual, unfettered by passing trends and public opinion. Almost 90% believe style is not defined by age, and over twothirds feel more confident than ever about their own style. This makes their endorsement of any brand a stronger statement than at any other age,” Stafford said.

A WORD OF CAUTION Owen Dowling, head of planning for Social@Ogilvy Asia Pacific, added that when executed poorly, the marketing world could expect many faux pas from these campaigns.

“What we’re seeing now in fashion culture is a generation of new beauty codes that will take time to filter down into mainstream culture and advertising,” he said.

“And when they do filter down, there will be hideous mistakes.

There’s a big difference between insightful communications intended to make older women feel something, and ones that beam down a symbolic version of them.”

Executing a campaign using an older woman should not be done for the sake of it. There needs to be an actual purpose.

He added that if brands do make ads in a patronising way where a product is somehow saving a woman’s life, or the ad projects a glib lifestyle way, then the brand can expect not to reap any benefits from using this demographic.

He also said that some brands likened using the older demographic to a “torture test” – because if it works for their generation, youths might feel as though it would work for them; much like how fabric conditioners are marketed as being soft using baby’s comfort as a proof point even though a large part of their target base are adults.

“However, brands need to remember that people are people and they can evaluate what you are selling without having to see their own mug in the visuals,” he said.

“Despite this year’s edgy fashion visuals, despite the fact we are told we live in a world where marketing feedback should be influencing product design, very few brands are going to take the risk to change a flagship product to feel older. Rejuvenation is the normal narrative of a brand. Not happy maturity.”

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CASE STUDY

FINDING OUT WHAT WOMEN REALLY WANT

“When you make women happy, you make everyone happy” – Why She Buys, Bridget Brennan.

This was the mantra that inspired NBCUniversal International Networks to embark on a strategically unique four-year study to better understand the motivations, attitudes and aspirations that defined content consumption habits of women across four Southeast Asian territories: Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines.

The ground-breaking research uncovered how brands could communicate to women with content that engaged and connected with them.

This analysis was the key to understanding the complexity of the modern Asian woman who is keeping up with expectations as a wife, a mother or a daughter, while having opportunities in education and her career, but not sacrificing her sense of style … or the latest handbag.

This involved a combined total of nearly 10,000 online interviews, 30 focus groups and 20 ethnographic one-on-one interviews among female pay-TV viewers aged 20 to 44.

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“With this research, we now know how the Southeast Asian highheeled warrior engages with content, her preferred formats and the various themes that resonate,” says Christine Fellowes, managing director of Universal Networks International Asia Pacific.

“This information means clients can connect more deeply with female consumers and drive even more measurable business outcomes through strategic advertising and sponsorships.”

The first phase was in 2011 with the goal of understanding the Asian woman’s deepest psychological motivations in relation to her self-concept, aspirations and her evolving roles and lifestyles. Ipsos’ Censydiam methodology was used to uncover her motivations to help understand what she wanted and why she wanted it.

In 2013, the company launched phase two, setting out to provide unique data on Asian women’s usage and attitudes towards key consumer categories such as banking and finance, beauty products, personal care, luxury products, cars, travel and consumer electronics.

The findings uncovered five distinct segments of women based

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on their motivations, attitudes and aspirations: ambitious trailblazers, organised peacekeepers, spontaneous passionistas, loyal heartwarmers and optimistic social-siders. The research data identified the benefits of targeting a distinct audience based on factors that were more sophisticated than demographics.

The third phase of the study was launched in April 2015 with the aim of uncovering how to reach and communicate with women in Southeast Asia, while determining which communication methods and content themes worked best for each market and for the five segments of women identified in phase two.

“Through our research we know what women like to watch and we are able to identify how bespoke content can communicate to women most effectively,” Fellowes says.

“With data from high-heeled warriors, NBCUniversal takes a targeted approach to its programming, marketing and creative strategies to speak to female pay-TV consumers in Asia.”

The study revealed that DIVA and E! emerged as the top two entertainment channels female pay-TV viewers associated with when it came to major consumer categories – from fashion and fragrance to beauty and luxury products.

It also revealed that women in Southeast Asia are queens of the multi-screens, with a high percentage using their smartphones, laptops or tablets while watching TV. One of the most popular multiscreen activities was to source for more information about the TV show they were watching.

Video – whether in the form of TV programmes, short-form mobile

vignettes or online clips – emerged as one of the top performers among all marketing strategies to reach women. A majority of women in Southeast Asia prefer to watch videos about brands than read texts or still photos.

They also notice when companies speak to them and feel more connected with brands through videos. In terms of non-local content, TV shows from the US still prove to be the most popular, despite the emergence of content from the likes of Taiwan, Korea and Latin America.

DIVA, E! and Universal Channel feature many personalities – celebrities or on-screen characters – that women look up to such as Jessica Pearson and Rachel Zane from DIVA’s Suits; Olivia Benson from Universal Channel’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit; as well as Angelina Jolie, who has been profiled on numerous E! specials.

Other fascinating insights on content consumption habits include how women prefer brands to speak to them, such as focusing on how a brand has improved its products rather than comparing itself to competitors.

Self-improvement triumphs over competitiveness, with a preference leaning towards how one can improve themselves than how they can win or do better than others. Self-improvement also extends to their loved ones: women are more likely to inform friends and relatives about products that help or improve their lives in some way or make a difference to the world.

When it comes to presentation, simplicity is queen: clean-looking, beautiful and easy to use products are a winner for women, who are generally more interested in knowing what a product does for them than how it works.

Through the development of simple, yet sophisticated and highvalue bespoke creative content for clients to connect to audiences, NBCUniversal is the only entertainment network that comprehensively commits and remains relevant to the contemporary Asian woman and savvy marketers.

Leading women’s channel DIVA, pop culture powerhouse E! and global flagship brand Universal Channel are the top TV channels for female audiences.

To find out more on how your brand can better connect, engage and communicate with women, contact us at info.asia@nbcuni.com

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CAREERS

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CAREER PATH Sara Cheok Manager, Asia Pacific Event, affinity and sponsorship Rolls-Royce Motor Cars First job? I started out in events

marketing.

First job in advertising/ marketing? I have been working

in marketing for 15 years. I started out in events marketing. I also set up my own company which dealt with flooring and interior decorating before going back full-time into marketing.

Best job? I think the best

decision I ever made was joining BMW. It gave me the opportunity to refine my marketing skills and it let me define myself in the marketing event organising field.

I have conceived, planned and executed multi-million dollar events such as BMW World to great success. And out of this Rolls-Royce has been the next step in deepening my marketing experience and stepping up to bigger opportunities in my career.

Perks of your current job?

This job has given me the opportunity to engage with a variety of people and interact with different cultures, just by the fact that within the APAC region, we oversee 15 countries and 25 dealerships.

Worst job? None.

Marketing professionals you admire? One of my mentors

really had an impact on the way I would like to grow in my career.

He could envision concepts and ideas seemingly out of nothing.

He was happy to let his team members achieve their potential, yet was still there playing the advisory role. It allowed me the freedom to develop in the field of marketing and encouraged me to do more than I thought I could.

Best career advice you’ve been given? Do not take

anything for granted. What might even seem commonplace, when placed together with something else, would give you a completely new idea.

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JOB SHUFFLE Digital and mobile marketing agency Amobee appointed Carl Nawagamuwa as VP of APAC. He will be responsible for developing and expanding partnerships in Southeast Asia to further drive the adoption of Amobee’s technology driven solutions, including Amobee’s brand intelligence product. The brand intelligence enables marketers to efficiently activate media by leveraging proprietary data and insights to deliver powerful results.

Communications and engagement consultancy MSLGROUP appointed Wendy Loh as director of the corporate practice in Singapore. She reports to Kelvin Yeo, managing director of MSLGROUP in Singapore. In this new role, she will oversee the development of communications strategies across various sectors in a broad range of industries throughout Singapore and the region. She will implement best practices from pillars within the MSLGROUP network of corporate reputation and brand citizenship.

Sony Pictures Television (SPT) Networks Asia appointed Virginia Lim as its vice-president of content and marketing. Lim is based in Singapore and reports to Hui Keng Ang, senior vice-president and general manager for SPT Networks. Lim will oversee a consolidated Asian and English content portfolio, which includes general entertainment channels AXN and ONE, as well as Animax, Sony Channel, beTV and GEM Asia.

Alexander Mann Solutions, provider of talent acquisition and management services, enhanced its leadership team in the Asia Pacific and Middle East region with the appointment of Caleb Baker as managing director for Asia Pacific and Emerging Markets. Based in Hong Kong, he is responsible for leading the teams in Asia Pacific and Emerging Markets to provide the best human resources solutions to clients.

TV productions company Imagine Group Entertainment appointed Patrick Schult as its director of business development.

He joins Imagine Group from Media-Stable, where he served as the founder and CEO. He is based in Singapore and reports to Riaz Mehta, president and founder of Imagine Group Entertainment.

Before joining the team at MediaStable, he was at FremantleMedia and held the role of CEO of FremantleMedia Asia.

Vikram Sakhuja, group strategy officer of GroupM Worldwide and previously global CEO of Maxus, joined the Madison Media Group as equity partner and group CEO. In his new role, he will also manage the OOH division of Madison World. Meanwhile, Gautam Kiyawat, current CEO of Madison Media Group, will relocate to Singapore. Sakhuja was replaced as global CEO at Maxus in October 2014 by Lindsay Pattison.

FutureBrand promoted Australian lead Richard Curtis to the role of chief executive officer of Australia

and Southeast Asia. Adding to his responsibility for FutureBrand’s growth in Australia, he will now also lead the company’s growth in Southeast Asia. He will be supporting a range of key client relationships, including General Motors, Lend Lease, Nestlé and Unilever. Singapore will continue to function as its regional hub.

Axiata Group appointed Dian Siswarini, who was deputy chief executive officer, to president and director of the group’s Indonesian unit, PT XL Axiata Tbk. Before the role of deputy CEO, she was Axiata’s group chief of marketing and operation officer where her primary goal was to aid in the development of all of Axiata’s operations. She has worked across both the technology and ops verticals.

International multimedia business FOX International Channels (FIC) expanded Michael Dick’s role as vice-president of acquisitions.

From overseeing Hong Kong and the Southeast Asia markets, he will cover all of Asia Pacific and the Middle East.

BBDO and Proximity Thailand has made senior promotions in its creative team. The agency promoted Anuwat Nitipanont and Chalit Manuyakorn as joint executive creative directors. Both will report directly to Suthisak Sucharittanonta, chairman and chief creative officer, and Somkiat Larptanunchaiwong, chief executive officer. Nitipanont and Manuyakorn were previously creative directors at the agency and will now take on expanded management responsibilities for the creative department.

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LAST WORD

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6 SIGNS YOUR AGENCY’S WEBSITE IS GIVING EVERYONE A HEADACHE Is your site just a pretty face? asks Andrew Davy. high levels of creativity. In an attempt to show off their out-of-the-box techniques, agency websites too often become over-designed, as though over-excited creatives were given far too much free rein.

Here are some of the common examples that impact my experience as a user and which could ultimately lose me as a client: Just a pretty face This website may look good, but that’s where it ends. Far too little focus is on functionality and the attempt at originality renders the navigation confusing so nothing is where you would expect.

Mindless mover Animations can be exciting, but only when they actually add to the experience. Unnecessary movements and a clear case of flash fever make the user nauseous and ready to return to looking at the calming face of the Google homepage.

Don’t be a pill: Your site needs to get to the point.

I sit staring at a blank screen as giant blobs slowly descend, swirling around before deciding to settle down into the focal point of the website I had entered. My mind has already drifted and I soon forget why I came here to begin with.

The icons posing as navigation tools don’t seem to want to help and some of them lead to static images where any shred of relevance is lost on me. Minutes later I’m navigating another web world where everything is so minimalist I can’t decipher what they’re actually selling. The mouse drifts confusedly around the page. My head hurts. I need coffee.

The shortcomings of agency websites are nothing new, yet this is a struggle I regularly encounter when researching for many of our corporate events. It has me wondering – why are so many agency websites so poorly made?

Paul Cookson, CEO of the ad agency Ad Army, which specialises in web design, claims that: “Great web design without functionality is like a sports car with no engine.”

This seems blindingly obvious to me. A company’s website is the first point of contact for the majority of potential customers and first impressions are everything. Almost always, the difference between whether I buy something online or not comes down to how intuitive the website experience is.

I may not be a designer, but as a user I know that I crave the feeling of being in control. As soon as uneasiness creeps in and content crowds me, I get lost and I jump to the exit button.

More often than not people find themselves on agency websites simply for bites of information – a brief company history, portfolio of work and key contacts. Why are these often so hard to find at first glance?

The challenge for agencies trying to stand out with their website design is to achieve a balance between being functional and showcasing

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Barely there This website takes minimalism to a new level of pointless, being so minimalist that there isn’t anything useful on it.

Overly wordy This agency website simply has too much to say. Yes the internet is flooded with images and clever uses of typography can be refreshing, but if I’m overwhelmed with copy that is difficult to navigate and lacks contrast, I’ve already stopped reading and I won’t be coming back.

Lag, lag, lag Agency websites that try to add too many graphics, videos and icons every time I want to click, had better be worth my attention. Frankly, I’d rather not watch a video or wait 30 seconds every time I access a new section of the site. Testing the patience of potential clients is never a good strategy.

Playing it safe Having said all this, form and individuality is still important. This is the chance for an agency to really express itself without the constant pressure and frustration of a client on its back. Some agency websites are so staid that they become stale and un-engaging. This is no time to resemble characterless template WordPress sites – bring out the big guns and show us what you’ve got!

I don’t believe there’s a single solution to getting the balance right, but in this digital climate it’s an agency’s duty to constantly reassess ITS web design so it addresses both form and function.

Agency folks, by all means display creativity, but please stop giving me headaches every time I click on your site!

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