Archives




2022 | |

Work It, Girl: The Rising Spark of Media

Advertiser: -
Brand: -
Creative Agency: -
Credits: Priya Karthik - Executive, Media Planning, iProspect Malaysia

Background
Proud of her humble beginnings, Priya was always self determined and developed a “can do” attitude at a tender age, when she realized that she cannot change her circumstances till she is challenged to change it herself. Witnessing countless setbacks and failures from childhood, Priya was always sure about one thing that education and learning was everything that she needed to succeed and pursue her dream. With her warm altruistic personality profile, she was nominated as one of the 8 leaders for the first cohort of Future Leadership programme. It is notable that she stood by her decision to be part of the initiative to drive a happy work culture, thus creating and facilitating a healthy work environment in the agency. As a media planner, servicing Levi’s Malaysia and Singapore, she has shown immense desire to lead, be the change in every step taken and transcend the boundaries. As much as her favourite phrase is “I love my job too much”, her other love lies deeply in fine arts. On the balancing act, Priya is a seasoned classical dancer for 20 years, having performed for numerous charity drives. Holding on to her passion for fine arts, she has now expanded her wings to Odissi and Ballet as she believes one should never stop learning.

What’s Special about You & Key Achievements
When Priya was onboarded to the Levi’s account, a significant change that she brought to the account internally is her kind, understanding and eagerness to learn personality. Turning to her biggest strength is her ability to stay resilient despite the challenges she endures at work and how she intercepts challenges with full optimism, always. During the first few weeks of onboarding into the account, despite having little knowledge on media planning, she stayed resilient, actively listened and absorbed feedbacks. In simple terms, there is no turning back when it comes to Priya, everything is entirely henceforth. Gillian Chan the Director of Client Leadership quotes Priya is someone who you can always count on as she has this incredible attitude of taking the ‘IM’ out of ‘Impossible’ and turns it into ‘PRO’ at solving ‘PROblems’! As she progressed over the months, she was assigned the responsibility of handling Dockers along major brand launches under Levi’s such as Levi’s 501 Originals, Levi’s EOSS, Holiday and Levi’s Ramadan, where she applied media planning strategy and learnings which resulted to positive campaign delivery and success. Above all, she was always able to see the positive side of people and encourage teammates to maintain staying calm and composed during critical situations, a commendable act. For instance, during incidents such as major campaign overspends or underspends or even when conflicts occur within multiple parties, she resolves them with notable patience and admirable tact. She respects everyone without prejudice, takes initiatives to enhance relationship among colleagues thus elevating the spirits of those around her. Aside from her day to day task, she also dedicates her time in many of the initiatives parked under the Future Leadership Program, inclusive of executing a fireside chat with aspiring women leaders from the industry and initiating a buddy onboarding program.

Leadership Skills
As a potential leader, Priya believes in bringing forward a compassionate, empathetic yet thoughtful approach to her leadership style as she believes “you don’t have to be in a position of influence, to influence”. In addition, Priya’s relational skills are exceptional – her deep listening, effective assertion, and self awareness are the skills to influence the system around her in an authentic way, with which she explores many opportunities to overcome daily challenges. A very good example is when leading campaigns, she has showed excellent leadership style, internally. As a result, many adored her working style that they gained trust and respect for her. Moving on, when she was onboarded to lead the Singapore Levi’s account, there was an immediate significant change in a healthy work culture among agencies which has led to increase in productivity and trust among multiple parties. Upon onboarding, she promptly connected with all agencies to understand their concerns and ways to accelerate the account’s performance. Therefore, within days, she was able to collate their feedbacks. Notwithstanding, Priya has audited the account and identify gaps and quickly suggested ways to move forward as a capable media planner. Therefore, internally there was an instant relieve on the account progress. A positive one. Everyone saw her as a strong aspiring gatekeeper with immense dedication to transform the account and accelerate the progress. Witnessing the recent change that happened to the Singapore account, Tony the Client Director from Singapore quoted “There was a moment when we needed her to step into a vacated role and she took it without questioning, picked up the gaps with gusto, explaining the moving pieces that has been sidelined, and has given the role and account a new life!” Priya an effective assertive leader, believes in honesty and transparency in expressing her opinions and feelings. This makes her a natural leader.

2022 | |

Taking Charge and Driving Change

Advertiser: -
Brand: -
Creative Agency: -
Credits: Hong Kah Yan - Assistant Performance Marketing Manager, Reprise

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.

2022 | |

The Story of Grit and Tenacity

Advertiser: -
Brand: -
Creative Agency: -
Credits: Shawn Siew - Senior Communication Manager, Mediacompete Sdn Bhd

Background
Stories of grit are usually told through an athlete overcoming adversity to win a championship (think Nadal), or of a famous movie star defying odds to rise to stardom (think Eye of the Tiger and Sylvester Stallone) but hardly within the work context. Thus it brings me (Saurabh Chandrashekhar – MD of Mediacom) great pleasure to be writing this entry for Shawn Siew. In a span of 6 years, this young man has defied odds to progress from a young intern who couldn’t present in English to a Regional Manager who now leads 5 planner, handling some of the biggest account across Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam!

What’s Special about You & Key Achievements
With a chip on his shoulder, Shawn never settled for status quo at work; he consistently pushed beyond the normal four corners of a square, a trait which is highlight commendable for someone his age. Hence his work speak for itself as follows: 1. Defying Lockdown to Catapult Pantene to the No.1 Hair Treatment Brand in Malaysia During a period of uncertainty during lockdowns, Shawn leveraged the heightened captive audience on digital by partnering with Watsons and Nuffnang to orchestrate Pantene’s First Virtual Home Salon which hosted multiple hair care contents which Malaysians were able to interact with from their home. And trial packs was seeded amongst more than 30 local talents to ensure grassroot awareness took place. At the end, the campaign propelled Pantene to the #1 brand market value share at the back of a monster share of sales coming from hair treatment! 2. Creating Bayer’s and Malaysia’s First Hyperlocalised Vaccination Mobile Reminder Campaign drive awareness of vaccination in support of Redoxon’s partnership with MOH, Shawn designed a hyperlocalised mobile campaign to ensure maximum localisation. All yellow and red zones were geofenced with customized messaging where all banners were made to dynamically change daily based on the status of a particular region, delivering a more precise communication! Vaccination registration increased by 10 mil while vaccination rate increased 50% during this period! And the Redoxon’s new product searches drove +153% search increased and +40% traffic vs. P6M 3. Berocca Turbocharged Malaysian to Beat Sluggishness at Home During Pandemic As working from home gradually became attritional and taxing for Malaysians, Shawn along the creative team was the brainchild of the campaign’s big idea of turning Sloth to a Boss, all through the usage of Berocca. He was sharp to see TikTok monthly usage was consistently growing and leveraged the opportunity to launch the campaign on TikTok using their Branded Filter & Hashtag Challenge! Campaign caught wind and the brand benefited! Penetration grew by 12% while sales grew by 35% against the same period last year!

Leadership Skills
As Shawn raised through the rank he also began to find his footing within the larger ecosystem of the company as a homegrown leader, quickly making him one of the young and respected figure within the company. And below are the top three key scenario to which I’ve had the chance to see his leadership skills shine the brightest: 1. The Backbone behind MediaCom Achieving one of the best TRR Scoring (Client Rating) for Fonterra and Bayer Shawn was introduced to these two accounts to bring stability and experience to the table. And one year after, driven by his tenacity, positivity and experimental mindset, I’m proud to acknowledge to announce that client ratings are now at an all time high for the past 5 years with both side of client expressing words of praise for him. 2. Taking the Bayer Malaysia Account to New Heights in Terms of Media Innovation Never one to settle for status quo, he led Bayer’s first forey into TikTok for both the biggest brand within Bayer (Berocca&Redoxon) on top of being instrumental in securing one their key partnership with KKM to help drive a vaccination campaign done by Redoxon! His flair eventually paid dues as Bayer won big in the recent awards with (i)-Gold in Best Use of Mobile for Redoxon and (ii)-Silver in Best Use of Social Media for Berocca 3. Aggresively Growing the Agency Business Portfolio Shawn is also a pivotal member of the agency SUPER PITCH Team! Leading his team through 8 different pitches, and winning 4 of them; translating to a conversion rate of 50%. These new businesses and clientele includes an e-hailing giant G16a, key airline players in Asia, key banking players in Malaysia and many local conglomerate, which in totally brought in more than RM25mil worth of business yearly! As Shawn’s record speaks for itself. this entry concludes with reiterating how Shawn has come a long way from his day 1 as an intern in the industry to the upcoming leader he is in within the company today; a driven young man with a burning desire to succeed. Definitely an individual well deserving of this award!

2022 | |

Always learning, always growing

Advertiser: -
Brand: -
Creative Agency: -
Credits: Leon Tan Ben Lee - Performance Marketing Executive, Reprise

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.”

2022 | |

Gamechanger in Innovation Towards Transformation

Advertiser: -
Brand: -
Creative Agency: -
Credits: Winnie Chen - Partner, Head of Product & Growth

Background
Winnie is the real tangible example of what happens when passion meets grit. She has played a game changer role in multiple role across organizations not just transforming the businesses but also the people she has worked with. She is the glue that binds passionate people within high performance teams. She leads SPG for the agency group – Strategy, Product and Growth. This has been able to give her the perfect platform to exercise her strategy and people leadership skills. Clients come to her for trusted advice and that makes her an invaluable contributor to the marketing industry. Her ability to switch between long term future-proof Digital Transformation discussions, to strategic thinking in Comms Planning, to brainstorming innovations with partners for client campaigns, to managing daily operational problem-solving scenarios, to leading almost all new business pitches for the agency is one of her key strengths. In less than a year with the agency, Winnie led a number of initiatives from hard business KPIs to softer people metrics. – Launching agency-wide products across E-Commerce and Influencer Marketing between just 2 internal stakeholders – Leading >10 new business pitches with some key Global and regional wins and successfully retained 5 non-competitive key account renewals amidst high team attrition – Streamlining and growing agency’s tools and capabilities previously managed by multiple or no stakeholders

What’s Special about You & Key Achievements
Winnie loves building new things, perfect recipe for her role in Product & Growth. While the industry focuses on short term tactical wins through incremental optimisation, she believes in growth planning for disruptions in a sustainable tomorrow. Balancing the art of Marketing with the science of data and insights, she accelerated development of the agency’s product roadmap: – Accelerating local adoption of Global products across gaming, digital transformation identity solutions, attention economy and sustainability offerings – Build and launch total E-Commerce offering with products from Marketplace Optimisation to LiveCommerce solutions to help start, scale and grow client’s E-Commerce stream accelerated with the Covid pandemic – Solving client’s perpetual challenges of data-driven insights in selection and measurement of influencer engagement combining both art and science of working with KOLs – Drive client conversations to unlock potential for Digital and Data transformation in preparation for the cookie-less future, unlocking new projects beyond the Media scope, and building a strong pipeline to achieve scale to soon launch a new CXM Consulting business pillar Not being put down by the challenges of the pandemic years, she has truly revolutionised businesses when agility and perseverance was most needed. Winnie has managed to achieve key wins in under a year with the agency: – Product – launched >5 local products in 6 months expanding local expertise and capabilities for existing and new clients – Profit – secured >5 client projects beyond Media buying scope in Strategy & Consulting, diversifying revenue opportunities for the agency network – Profile – Led and secured 2 new business wins in Q1 2022 thus far, one Global and one regional worth >RM20m in billings

Leadership Skills
Winnie is highly passionate and thrives in perfecting her craft. She’s a ringleader when taking on #1 roles in bringing order to chaos, and delivers results in the #2 seat when operationalizing big visions of the organization. As an INFJ personality, she has high EQ to unlock motivators in people internally and externally: – People Management She dedicates 1on1 time with each team members regularly to listen and discuss goals, challenges and more. This led to some restructure for better casting of people to the accounts they work on. This proved rewarding with improved employee satisfaction scores, improved individual performance ratings, off-cycle promotions and unprecedented bonus for >60% of the team members this year, the first in 4 years! – Extreme Ownership Winnie believes in leadership by example and never shies from rolling up her sleeves to work alongside her team. In many of the pitches she led, she guides the team with precise directions and examples, builds slides in pitch decks way into the night and weekends with the team, and even help coach individuals in pitch strategies and presentations. This resulted in key Global and Regional wins that she led personally, worth >RM20m in billings in the past 3 months alone. – Coaching One of her direct reports in Strategy completed her probation period in half the time, with a “Very Strong” performance rating. She’s due for an unprecedented increment and is now enrolled in a Next Gen Leadership program to fast track her growth.