Malaysian Media Awards Winners Showcase

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.