Malaysian Media Awards Winners Showcase

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.”