Malaysian Media Awards Winners Showcase





2022 | |

Being Precisely Human

Advertiser: -
Brand: -
Creative Agency: -
Credits: Neal Pravin Joseph - Associate Director, Strategy, Mindshare Group a division of WPP Marketing Communications (M) Sdn Bhd

Background
Pravin embodies a passion for science and numbers, and crafts compelling solutions in addressing clients’ business challenges. As the agency’s Strategy Planning Associate Director, deep-diving into data and analytics is his key to unlocking innovative solutions to wow potential and existing clients. Pravin takes a multidisciplinary perspective – thanks to a career journey encompassing creative agency, digital agency and brand consulting. On pitches, his data-driven holistic approach and creative thinking has ensured the agency does not merely propose media solutions, but well thought-through total marketing solutions, with a powerfully-differentiated idea at the core of the thinking.

What’s Special about You & Key Achievements
As a media rookie, with no formal digital or eCommerce experience, Pravin was told that there was no way he would make it in media. Fast forward to today, with only 3 years of media experience, Pravin has proved his naysayers wrong. He managed to transform himself into a coveted hybrid planner with a commercial mindset who not only understands his client’s business challenges but uses innovative technology and data to deliver tangible business results via three key strategies: STRATEGY1: LASER FOCUS ON CLIENTS SEEKING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AND E- COMMERCE SOLUTIONS – SimeDarbyProperty: Pravin blended established planning skills with brave new world techniques to design and deliver a highly nuanced system of creative assets that could be dynamically tailored and served to property buying audiences in real-time. He developed a mapping tool which drilled deep into data to understand relevant triggers and touchpoints, property preferences, features that resonated with each audience set. The campaign managed to drive high quality leads with 73% of leads leading to sales conversion – a first for SDP. – Pravin explored the realm of E-Commerce and approached unifi to see how TM could position them as an enabler to help out SME’s during the pandemic. This new assignment broke the agency out of the traditional media mould for TM and brought us into the space of consulting and E-Commerce. Pravin successfully launched [email protected], an e-commerce market place that brought together 198k buyers to over 2,000 sellers. STRATEGY2: CONSULTING POWERED BY PRECISE INTELLIGENCE Through numerous explorative conversations with prospective clients, he identified opportunities to diversify our revenue stream by providing consultancy services. One such example was with Magnum 4D, a number forecasting company, operating in a highly regulated environment. The challenge was that Magnum primarily depended on sales from walk-in customers. It was therefore difficult to prove marketing effectiveness. As part of their internal transformation journey, Pravin was tasked with providing market sizing and insights into Magnum4D existing and new customers. Leveraging on attribution modeling he ingested three disparate sets of data (Client 1st party data, marketing performance data and footfall data) and ensured there was no loss to audience measurement from the time someone engaged with any form of communication to the time someone walked into a Magnum outlet and bought a lottery ticket. This was a first of its kind solution for both the client and agency. STRATEGY3: PRECISELY UNDERSTANDING THE Malay SME – the underserved market. Pravin identified key SME’s which were in the process of digitalization, that would benefit from our consultancy services. He then deployed a test and learn approach so that he could fine tune the way the agency worked with SME’s. He worked with PTTI, a tuition centre located in Bangi, to strategize its survival during Covid-19 and transform it from an offline-to-online tuition center, setting PTTI on a growth trajectory. Pravin’s Key Achievement’s in 2021- March2022: • Led 15 pitches • 100% pitch conversion • Delivered RM56mill in new business • 16 local awards (10 MediaSpecialistAwards, 6 DAwards) • 1 regional award (2021 CampaignAsia SEANewBizTeam) • Built a proprietary audience precision framework developed for the agency Group • Built sales packages for SMEs • Created IdeaLab – a community of young talents who develop test and learn solutions • Custodian of Agency Happiness Survey since 2020 • Created a new media space – turning festive gift hampers into an awareness channel for struggling single mothers (refer to supporting documents)

Leadership Skills
Building Precisely Human Culture. Pravin believes that the biggest issue plaguing the media industry is high attrition. Today, talents habitually hop between agencies and clients. So, it’s difficult to retain people with the right spirit to service a client’s business. Especially one that requires media talents to live and breathe the brand. This insight pushed Pravin to focus on agency talent wellbeing. Which led him to develop and implement MAGIC (an award-winning performance tool) that automated the agency team’s planning and reporting duties in real-time. This enabled the team to cut down manual day to day reporting, so they could focus on their personal growth by learning and experimenting interesting work in media. Hence Pravin created idea lab – a community of young talents who develop test and learn solutions.