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Background
Kah Yan started out her career path in client servicing in a boutique digital agency, where she was exposed to all aspects of digital marketing, growing her interest in paid media over time. She eventually moved to a paid digital media role, bringing in her experience in strategy and campaign planning. Her expertise and operational skills has led to executions and planning for multiple verticals, namely in the property, FMCG, banking and telecommunications industries. And she has assisted in winning several pitches, helping the agency grow its business. In just over 2 years of experience in paid digital media, she has grown from a junior to assistant manager through her capabilities and her ambition to be one of the best.

What’s Special about You & Key Achievements
MATURE & INDEPENDENT – BRINGING MORE TO THE TABLE With Kah Yan’s previous experiences, she has become more mature and independent in her working ways. Despite the role’s expectations, she brings more to the table than just what is required. She consistently takes the lead in accounts where she works closely together with planners and the digital team in discussions, ideations and proposing solutions to improve the client’s businesses, even though at times, the matter does not necessarily fall within her domain. One of Kah Yan’s most prominent work is proposing the SEM campaign restructuring for her main account, after noticing that the previous campaigns were not performing at its full potential with ineffective keywords buying and bad ad copies. The restructuring includes better keyword buys with the right keyword match to ensure no cannibalizing and SKAGs keyword grouping to ensure that each individual keyword groups have ad copies that are drafted accordingly. The result of the initiative was 61.25% and 125.9% increase in CTR for 2 different products, and 14% lower in CPA. FIGHTING FOR WHAT’S RIGHT FOR THE CLIENT One of Kah Yan’s biggest beliefs is to do the right thing, even though it may not be what the client is asking for. She understands that as an agency, her role is to help achieve the client’s business objective – however at times, instructions given by the client for campaigns stops them from achieving their goal. The challenge here was the campaign was for a new proxy brand that has no awareness in the market, and the client wanted a commitment of 1000 sign-ups in 3 months with no budget allocation for top funnel campaigns to drive awareness. Instead of just listening and executing as per the request, Kah Yan voiced out and fought for campaign phasing so that retrieved first party data from the top funnel campaign can be leveraged for the lower funnel campaign objective. She also led the change in creatives and communications for the ads to motivate users to complete the 5-step sign-up journey. The approach she suggested and acted on resulted in 197.8% higher sign ups and 66% lower in CPA as compared to the KPI. DRIVING REPORT AUTOMATION Prior to this, all reports were done manually which was extremely time consuming. She has taken the initiative to do research on third party tools and introduced Adveronix to the team. In addition to the use of Datastudio, she has built remarkable live dashboards for all her accounts and decreased reporting load by 30%. She became one of the champions in driving report automation in the team and has guided her team members to learning these capabilities.

Leadership Skills
LEADING THE WAY IN FAME As a senior in the team, Kah Yan has shown great leadership skills amongst her peers, accounts, and personal development. She bagged the silver in the 2021 Young Spikes Competition for the integrated category and participated in internal agency Young Lions Asia 2022. She has proved her leadership skills in these 2 competitions through leading & guiding her teammates in building strategy, ideation and working on decks. Knowing her teammates had minimal experience in such activities, she guided them, ensuring their opinion was heard and credited for. WELL RESPECTED MENTOR Respected for her input and experience, Kah Yan’s teammates go to her for issues they face, including optimization and campaign setups. She works together with them to solve the problems, guiding them on why such issues happened. Media teams also reach out to her for opinions on new brands or pitches being handled. She is known for her mentoring skills, having experience mentoring a few junior performance specialists, ranging from basic digital channels, optimizations to even project management. SOLUTIONS DRIVEN WITH ACTION When issues arise in her accounts relating to vendors or third-party tools, she quickly takes action to reach out to necessary persons-in-charge, looking for solutions so issues are solved quickly.

Background
A business enthusiast through and through, Leon Tan found his calling in performance marketing 2 years ago when he discovered a newfound love for data and performance algorithms. As an individual, he has always built his life’s philosophy on the motto of “Always learning, always growing” and believes that stagnancy is the first sign of regress.

What’s Special about You & Key Achievements
DISCERNING & ALERT IN PROPOSING CAMPAIGN CHANGES & IMPROVEMENTS One of Leon’s core strengths is his discernment in proposing changes and improvements to campaigns, based on priority, feasibility and impactful ways that yield clear results. An outstanding example can be taken from Digi’s Business Penjana lead generation campaign which Leon took the lead in. Initially, the main challenge was to keep our Cost Per Lead (CPL) in line with Digi’s business KPIs. However, due to the nature of the client’s business in the Telco industry, too frequent changes were deployed, easily adding up to hundreds of ads, and campaign inefficiencies. Leon took the initiative to deep dive into campaign data and addressed that this very strategy is not efficient for the client’s intended business goals as it resulted in the system having to re-enter the learning phase again and again. Leon then proceeded to propose a few structural changes to the campaigns such as: 1. Introduction of cost caps 2. Target audience changes 3. Automated rules Each of these implementation changes were then deployed across numerous weeks. Based on the new recommendations, Leon managed to ensure that the client achieved 2 things – mainly to ensure that our CPLs did not exceed our KPIs, and secondly, we even managed to lower overall campaign CPLs. Apart from that, the suggestion to introduce additional audiences such as website visitors & lookalike audiences and affinity audiences with targeting expansion with audience overlap exclusions has allowed us to identify further areas of opportunity to lower our CPLs by 29% versus before implementation changes. For the automated rule, Leon suggested to the client that when a specific Ad meets a certain criterion, in this case when ‘Impr>1000, CPL>RM70’ and ‘Cost>RM70, Leads<1’ the rule will automatically pause the Ad. Two weeks after this was implemented, we saw a 30% drop in CPL. Furthermore, we aimed to ensure that our leads remain unique (not duplicated) across the various audiences we were testing out by using the audience overlap tool & excluding intersected audiences, and this has lowered lead duplication of around 20% down to less than 10%. PROACTIVE & CREATIVE IN APPROACH Another one of Leon’s core strengths is in his attitude towards being perceptive and open to changes. At this moment, he is the main driver behind the client’s Search portfolio across all of the client’s business verticals and therefore, he spends a huge proportion of his time running data segmentation, performance reviews and developing creative and world class ad copy writing. In one of the search campaign launches, Leon took the initiative to spice up the way ad copies were being written and took a more youthful approach in one of his write ups regarding savings, where he wrote descriptions on ‘Keeping your kidney’. With this change in copy refresh, we saw an overall 9% increase in CTR, averaging about 57%.

Leadership Skills
Leon is also a passionate leader, and his leadership skills shone through even brighter in his participation in the 2022 Young Lions for Asia competition held internally within the agency. In this competition, he led his team into the most fruitful brainstorming session and came up with great and wild ideas that eventually made it into the top 7 finalists in the entire Asia, beating out 24 other finalists. The idea later went on to win the Most Ambitious Idea of the competition. A true force to be reckoned with, and in the words of Leon’s major client, “Leon is a stellar rising star. He is our one to watch, and our one to keep.”

Background
Steady, reliable, team-player. Three words to describe Parvin as a person. Having started out in performance 5 years ago, Parvin has grown from a junior performance executive into an Assistant Manager in Performance and has raked in numerous accolades from the performance campaigns under his belt. From leading E-commerce campaigns for multiple clients over the years such as Huawei, Fonterra, L’oreal and more, Parvin brings a wealth of knowledge and invaluable experiences to the table. Some of his recent accolades includes Silver Award for Best Use of an E-commerce Platform for a previous client and in his current role, he leads performance for one of our major clients and won Gold for Best in E-Commerce Marketing Campaign for KFC.

What’s Special about You & Key Achievements
DRIVING THE KFC ONLINE BUSINESS THROUGH KEEN RECOMMENDATIONS For KFC, the Covid-19 epidemic has accelerated consumer behaviour that leant towards Online Food Delivery. With lockdowns in place, consumers were engaging with Online Food Delivery more than ever – be it Direct-to-Consumer, or Platform-to-Consumer. However, with the incredible surge in demand for online food delivery, comes the surge in competition as well. Old and new players are becoming more active in the delivery and ad space. With more players vying for the same piece of the pie, KFC’s cost per acquisition also increased by 85% during the pandemic. The task was for KFC to continuously grow their own Delivery platform in the most efficient manner possible. Therefore, creating a pressing need for performance to drive as many transactions as we possibly could via the KFC app. Parvin did a deep-dive of all campaign data, and came up with best in class performance recommendations such as: 1. Evaluation of the effectiveness of audience targeting: To identify audiences who spend 10 seconds or longer on the offers page outperforming audiences who added to cart but did not purchase in terms of cost and scale. Therefore, retargeting strategies were tweaked in order to address this learning. 2. Optimize on mobile device bid adjustment to ensure KFC is being competitive enough as 90% of the KFC traffic comes from mobile. 3. Draft and experiment for tROAS & tCPA bid strategy to identify which bid strategy drives better efficiency. 4. Raising bids on certain high performing ad sets that allowed the campaign to spend more whilst improving cost efficiency during certain Limited Time promo campaigns. As a result, cost per acquisition decreased by 45% and conversion volume increased by 53% compared to prior months’ performance. TESTIMONIAL: “Parvin is a true champion. We know we can depend on him to provide insightful campaign analysis and effective next steps that consistently help improve campaign performance. He works well with the team, and is always willing to support in building the planners’ knowledge-base on a technical front. His contributions to the KFC account during the particularly tricky pandemic period have given proven results time and time again.” Clarice Lee, Business Director – KFC, Universal McCann PLATFORM GURU TO THE MAX In addition, being one of the most experienced performance specialists in the team, Parvin has been exposed to numerous platforms on Google and single-handedly managed campaigns via App engagements (purchases and menu views), Performance Max (leveraging on different Limited Time offer creatives, App Install campaigns and Search Engine Marketing.

Leadership Skills
As one of the more seasoned specialists in the team, Parvin has led numerous internal training sessions within the organisation and has taken the lead in grooming new joiners in his area of expertise – primarily Google suite of ads, Google Analytics and Google Datastudio. He also takes the lead when it comes to client pitches and has fronted technical presentations, playing a key role in helping the agency secure core client wins. Parvin is a true asset to the agency and is a force to be reckoned with within the Performance space. TESTIMONIAL: “Parvin represents the new breed of young professional, well-versed with performance and e-commerce. He is highly reliable, strategic, structured, independent and a very easy-going person to work with. You will find Parvin to be a great asset to have in a strong performance team, and a leader with very keen sense in grooming and teaching the new generation!” Cindy Eliza Vaz, Head of Digital, Universal McCann