Back then, when there were no Borders, Basheer and Fully-Booked Stores, Mrs. Salta was heaven-sent to us creatives who didn’t have enough money to shop to Hongkong for hard-to-find advertising books.

Who could ever forget Mrs. Salta? Even our ad agency pantry girl knew her.

Mrs. Salta kept us updated with what’s going on in the advertising world outside of the country. She, too, was a mother, friend, generous lady who never ripped us off like a “five six” loan shark, you pay when you’re able.

Her routine was make visits to every ad agency in Manila, big and small, three times a week to offer the latest editions of the freshest imported ad books.

For “24 tear drops” (the Filipino colloquial term for 24-month payment scheme), one could have a credit line and crisp, just-off-the-press issues of hard-bound Art Directors Club, One Show, New York Festivals, glossy Communication Arts magazines and many more without having to pay the full amount in one blow.

I remember my first book bought from Mrs. Salta – an ADC Annual with former Manila agency CD Karl Steinbrenner on the cover.

Steinbrenner and another guy in suit were doing a handshake but their left hands were doing something else: holding a knife hidden behind their backs.

I was young and naïve in advertising then, not knowing how advertising ‘mad men’ lived ‘double lives.” Was that ominous? Hmmm … are advertising people real?

This question continues to linger in my mind even when I’ve put up my own business and placed other eggs discreetly in investment markets.

I remember a mad as Hitler MD of ours during a pitch. In his desperate move to win ‘pogi’ (handsome) points to the owners and CEO of the agency, including clients, he showed the competing ad agency’s media faux fas in the middle of the presentation and badmouthed it to death publicly.

I remember a credit-grabbing CD who would copy Neil French’s style of writing word-for-word. While we worked as slaves in that far away Southeast Asian country, she had a fabulous bungalow, a driver and access to everything she wanted, including a huge painting she hostaged me to do for her.

Another regional ECD made us toil for long hours while he always disappeared, spent his ‘free’ time in bars and reaped all the graces from the powers-that-be. His impeccable credentials sold everyone but his ideas were nothing but-second-rate rip offs they always made us snicker at the building’s fire exit door.

Karma finally caught up with him when an expensive jingle-study he commissioned with a cohort fell flat on his face. It sounded a poor version of a high profile Asian airline jingle he claimed he composed. He is now in the dumps.

In yet another foreign market, I witnessed a truly Asian ‘Mad Men’ version of racism, social hypocrisy, and counterculture.

A client services director, the strat planning head and MD were constantly after each other throats. Needless to say, the boardroom calisthenics and insults they smeared down their faces were worthy of Emmy trophies, minus the funny accent, of course.

Thanks to Mrs. Salta. Her books helped us uncover a dossier of ripped off ads that occasionally made their apparitions on our local media.

I became a victim of the most ruthless mudslingings after that even to this day by online terrorists. I laugh them off now because business is good.

I miss Mrs. Salta, the kind woman who opened pages of memorable events in my advertising career, even now that we have modern, huge bookstores.

I’ve interviewed many multinational agency network CEOs, marketing directors, regional ECDs, Burnett global chief creative officer Mark Tutsel and industry unknowns – all for free. One thing that I really learned from Mrs. Salta that I want to share with you is never engage with upstarts and douchebags. They are bad payers, bad for business and you’ll never be successful.

The news that  Asia Pacific Breweries is reviewing the global advertising arrangements for its Tiger beer brand is no surprise. To anyone in Asia who has seen one of the myriad of eclectic creative it’s a wonder they even bother with an agency as they clearly don’t seem to know what they want their brand to stand for and what they want to say about it.

This is partly due to the different number of creative tams having worked on the account which in turn has led to some puzzling if not downright bizarre sets of creative. A few examples over the last year alone…..

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The New Delhi edition of AdTech was held earlier this week. As I could not attend this year’s event, I did the next best thing – I scanned the tweet stream of the event. And picked up 20 tweets that told an interesting story.

Here are the tweets (edited to focus on their essence), and my views around them on what Digital marketers ought to do to make Digital work harder for their brands:

1. In a digital world, still critical to be true to the core value of the brand.

It must always about the brand and using Digital in a way that’s relevant to the audience, and smartly integrating the brand’s story and values into the interaction stream

2. “Users spend 1 out of every 5 minutes online on social networks.”

Little wonder then, brands must go where the audience is. The challenge is creating differentiation and going beyond the usual Promo-Like-Share-Win routine.

3. Brands that use data for real time marketing will be the ones who will succeed.

And the ones who will be way ahead of competition are those that co-relate fast data (online behaviours) with slow data (sales data).

4. Realise even to succeed on earned media you need money.

Social Media maybe free, but Social Media Marketing is not. More so, in an increasingly cluttered Social space.

5. ”It’s not about having a strong fan base but about having a solid business case.”

Both are important, but without objectives beyond fan numbers, Digital will fail to deliver for a brand after a point.

6. From Paid, Owned, Earned (POE) to Participation, Utility, Contribution (PUC)

POE is about the Where, PUC is about the What. Together, they can make Digital work harder.

7. There’s more to Digital than Facebook.

And there’s more to Digital than Social Media, and Augmented Reality and QR codes.

8. Putting up billboards saying, ‘Follow us on Facebook’ is not a social strategy.

Well, it’s certainly a way to promote Social presence offline. But simply saying ‘Follow us’ is a weak way to do it. Digital can be more effectively integrated into offline.

9. I’m fed of listening to the speakers. Time to listen to the audience.

Hear, brands, hear! Social is getting crowded with too much brand speak, too little audience speak. Don’t crowd them with your chatter.

10. Communication via Social Media is often casual, so true ROI comes about when users are entered into a company’s CRM system

It’s possible to nurture users right in the Social stream, even before moving them to conventional CRM.

11. Social handle of a brand should be in-house, to have direct control and quick response.

For that to happen, businesses will need to become Social businesses, and every employee become a Social voice. It’s a good goal to shoot for.

12. Screenification! Gamification!

Don’t get caught up in buzzwords. Focus on being buzzworthy by becoming relevant to your audiences instead.

13. Tie everything to the big idea, always-on engagement, friends of fans.

Ideas are the primary drivers of engagement. And yes, having ideas that spread through the ripple effect of fans is the best, and most likely to create waves.

14. Listen. Engage. Inspire.

Too many brands focus on the Engage, and forget the other two. Without them, engagement will remain shallow at best.

15. Don’t forget about ‘the boring basics’.

The coolest ideas and innovations are grounded in sound fundamentals. Too often this is forgotten.

16. The medium doesn’t matter as long as the idea is simple and presented interestingly!

With Digital, often the idea is IN the medium. But leaving the medium to do all the work is a recipe for failure.

17. A recent study showed people socially follow brands they already like. Social doesn’t make you LIKE a brand but lets you express DISLIKE!

It does both. But simply having a Like button and a promotion around it will not create a real like beyond the action of a click.

18. Brands are now Publishers.

Not just publishers, but brands need to be curators of content, as it’s not the business of most brand to create content.

19. Brands need to understand that they have to get more creative while going on digital.

In an increasingly cluttered environment filled with sameness, creativity can be a differentiator. Marry it to relevance to one’s audience and it can become a winning combination.

20. Brands can depend on consumers for real-time distribution but it’s a difficult task nevertheless

If brands help consumers make content their own, and provide easy ways for them to share it, they can help with this distribution. But the primary responsibility to distribute content and messages will remain that of the brand.

Campaign Asia has been conducting a poll which asks the question “Will we see more business pitches in 2012?”

By far, the answer is Yes, more pitches than 2011.

Ad agencies continue to pitch and do speculative work to grow their businesses, some just to keep the lights on. Given the pressures on agency new business directors to generate revenue, what’s a new business person to do?

We like to raise the age-old question: To pitch or not to pitch?

Perhaps it is time for the industry at large to do something dramatic and take a firm stand on the issue. I only know but one agency that declined pitches when clients required to see creative work up front—that’s BBH when they first entered the Asian market. They insisted that clients buy into a strategy first. They had my utmost respect. Now I’m told that there methodology “varies from country to country and pitch to pitch”.

Understandable, I suppose, given what Chris Kyme of KymeChow in Hong Kong has to say about pitching. “Deciding not to pitch, can also go wrong if not handled properly. “Sorry, we don’t pitch” can come across as arrogant, which doesn’t work well in Asia.”

Very often we forget that conceiving a big idea for a brand and living with it long enough to believe in the idea takes time. In most pitch instances, What appears to be the case in most pitches, is that execution appears to be ahead of strategy since it’s what decides the conversation. People are throwing strategy to the wind.

Life a pitch for advertising agencies

I think it was Singapore’s advertising guru Rod Pullen who said it first: “Life is a pitch.” He’s right, in more ways than one. When it comes to pitching for new business with full guns blazing, the cost to agencies is high both financially and professionally. We are our own worst enemy.

Across Asia, advertisers are asking for and getting, market and competitive analyses, positioning statements, media and advertising strategies, media budget recommendations, as well as complete creative campaigns, all for free.

So why do ad agencies put up with it? Surely common business sense dictates the practice should stop. It’s not good for the potential client, the agency, or for the agency’s existing clients. You would never consider asking a prospective surgeon for a free probe into your heart or your brain, or a lawyer or an accountant for free counsel. We all know there would be a bill to pay. Yet agencies are willing participants.

“We bent over backwards to win a pitch”, said Chris Kyme reflecting on his previous experiences in a big 4As agency, “including revising creative work before being assigned, to promising the earth in terms of servicing. And that told the clients that, once the relationship commenced, they could treat us how they wanted as we were desperate for their business.  It sent the wrong message and nearly always went wrong from there”.

I wonder, if every agency demanded to be paid to pitch or to produce spec creative, would it become the industry norm? Of course, that assumes that there are no (and never will be) agencies out there who are desperate for work.

On the surface, the idea of pitching looks good.

‘Spec’ presentations help the client assess how the agency can perform within its specific business arena. But consider these other negatives. Often, the agency that is handed the business is the agency that spent the most time and money on a free presentation. Or the agency which is most desperate for the business.

Every hour that goes into these presentations is one hour removed from doing the work for present clients who pay the agency’s salaries and overheads. And just how fair is that?

Chasing an account that you hope could change your whole business may cost you your present one. To undermine existing client relationships further, remember the cost of the presentation has to be met from somewhere. Most often, it gets charged as a new business expense, which increases the agency’s overhead. And who pays for the agency’s overheads? The existing clients of course.

While most agencies pitch and do spec work for free, five year-old hot-shop Droga5 now only pitches new business if they get paid. Reason? They know they win 60-70% of the time when they are paid, versus only 20% (the average for other strong agencies) when they’re not.

Droga5 is more selective and only pitches if they believe they have a greater than 50% chance of winning. But how much do you charge a client for pitching?  I believe you should charge just enough to make the client take you seriously. I also believe that clients should expect to pay at least a nominal fee for spec creative.  After all,  if you give away your agency’s product, you’re saying it has no value, and what does that say to your creative team?

Admittedly, the agency which elects to join the free product sweepstakes may, once in a while, win the big one, but the relationship has begun under a cloud. In effect, the agency has deliberately chosen to begin an important and hopefully long-term relationship by surrendering its bargaining power.

Are agencies giving away their intellectual property for free?

How on earth can ad agencies expect to attain the level of respect that other service professionals regularly garner if we persist in both giving our product away and expecting our existing clients to pick up the tab?

Sure, the Internet is here and new creative opportunities abound because of it. But it’s also caused some problems for the ad agency. Given what can be done at breakneck speed on the computer, many clients expect everything faster and cheaper. I continue to hear ad agency executives complain that they aren’t given enough time to produce great work:  “Deadlines are crazy, the budgets are insufficient and the briefs from clients are not worth the paper they are printed on”.

Some clients might be less than honorable and have been known to steal your thinking (from pitch work),” added Mr. Kyme. “But it’s a small world and word gets around. I prefer the pitch process to happen via discussion and relationship building. But it’s up to each agency. When you’re running a big shop, and it’s Cathay, who would say “no” to that huge account? You’d go flat out!”

Perhaps if ad agencies spent less time chasing the elusive prize account, and realize the potential in current client business, they’d produce better work for them. I continue to believe that judging an agency on the work it has done for other clients is a more accurate measure of the agency’s potential. For certain, clients would place more value on an industry that valued itself enough, not to give away its intellectual property for free.

In their effort to maintain excellent relationships, most advertisers in Asia believe it is important to evaluate their agencies regularly, and to make efforts to repair problems before resorting to parting company.

Choosing the “right” ad agency: The process

Sometimes client-agency relationships do come to an end. Clients may be faced with a requirement for a new agency, an additional agency, or a different type of agency. When rifts in the relationship appears and simply cannot be healed, clients will call competitive pitches.

However, pitches sometimes do require a huge amount of time and money to be invested,  and quite often, these are misapplied to the pitch process by both client and agency. If the process is faulty, it can lead to unproductive solutions that have to be undone at further expense and disruption to the brand.

I remember a client in Singapore once telling me, “Choosing an ad agency is like looking for a wife in a bar.  Often times, the agency that makes the best presentation is not the best long-term partner. The values that first attract you may not be the ones last. And what you see may not be what you get”.

To produce a win/win for all parties and make the pitch process a successful and sensible one, the following outlines several key principles which should be followed.

1. Before the pitch process begins try to make the relationship work before resorting to a pitch. Make it a priority to deal fairly with the incumbent agency, and if at all possible, avoid full creative pitch, which can be costly and time-consuming for both parties.

2. Be realistic. The client should consider what the company’s presence will mean on the agency’s client roster and what it will mean to the agency. Will the company be the smallest account in the shop? The largest? Neither is ideal. Is this agency staffed to handle the account? More important, are they really committed to doing great work on the business?

3. To start the pitch process, the client should form a multidiscipline decision-making team. The team should make it very clear to the pitching agencies as to the communications objectives, the agency’s specific role, scope and budget, and to the established firm and realistic timetable.

4. When it comes to briefing and selecting the agencies, the client should write a clear, concise and well thought out brief. Most importantly, the client must ensure that the criteria for evaluation/decision-making at each stage of the process is clear and agreed by all parties in advance, to take an agency from its consideration list, to its long list, and to its short list.

5. In managing the pitch process, both client and agency need to be open about the issue of pitch fees and expenses and both need to respect the established rules of the pitch. Of key importance, as noted by Chris Kyme, is “chemistry”. The client should hold several meetings to get to know the agencies.

6. Know what it will be like to work with the ad agency day-to-day. Many agencies have a new business team whose sole purpose is to get into and win competitive pitches. Once the account is in the door, they have no involvement in the day-to-day running of the account. They just move on to the next courtship leaving the client in the hands of  ‘junior’ members of the agency.  It is recommended that you ask who will manage the account day-to-day.

7. If an advertisers work isn’t as good as it could be, they should not expect a simple change of ad agencies to solve it. It takes teamwork to create bad advertising. When a relationship with an ad agency fails, it is a time for reflection. If the problem is the work and your organization changed the work, it shares responsibility with the people who created it. If the problem is in day-to-day working relationships, try to assess whether your company’s people have contributed to it. It is key for the advertiser to determine who can say ‘yes’ and who can say ‘no’, and reduce the number of people in the decision chain accordingly. Above all, the client should try to make the ad agency relationship collaborative and keep the number of team members small.

I’m not a believer in premarital creative.

8. If the ad agency can solve a client’s problems after just a few hours contemplation, it’s probably just luck. Or it’s not really a strong, strategic solution. Most likely it’s just charmingly seductive flashy stuff. Advertising that looks good but is based on an imperfect understanding of the market is destructive. To understand a marketing problem some research may be required to gain an in-depth understanding of the marketplace. From that comes a positioning statement, and from that, on-target advertising.

9. Making the decision on which agency is best for the advertiser, is not an easy process. The client needs to be formal when it comes to scoring and evaluating the pitches. It is also recommended that clients conduct pro forma contract discussions to manage expectations, and avoid embarrassment after the pitches. And most importantly, clients should offer the losing agencies a debrief.

10. After the pitching takes place, the advertiser should manage all the pitches with sensitivity, and treat documents with respect and absolute confidentiality. Remember to be scrupulous on issues of intellectual property and manage the transition and hand-over process with care.

The big question is this:

Will you look forward to talking with the selected agency every day? Hopefully,  If you follow the guidelines noted above, hopefully you will avoid the many pitfalls of ad agency selection.

Mike Fromowitz
OCTANE

There’s no doubting the potential of mobile in Asia. The numbers keep rolling in. Forbes just reported the findings of the latest Cisco Visual Networking Index report, and the numbers are truly impressive. Monthly global mobile traffic is estimated to exceed 10 exabytes by 2016. (An Exabyte is one million terabytes.) Hard as it is to imagine that amount, forty percent of that amount of traffic will come from Asia.

Mobile data usage in Asia is set to explode. There was 205,624 terabytes of mobile data traffic per month in 2011 – but according to the estimates, that volume will grow to 4,322,879 terabytes per month in 2016. That’s approximately 21 times the 2011 figure, which works out to a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 84% projected over a five-year span. This growth is likely to be driven by those Asian nations whose populations are avid users of mobile communications: primarily Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and China, but other nations (such as the Philippines and India) are not too far behind, and may in fact overtake them in the years to come. China alone is set to account for over 10% of the world’s mobile data traffic by 2016.

These figures make it clear that Asia is going to catch up to the rest of the world in terms of mobile data usage, and if anything, mobile data traffic will be the figure to watch in Asia. But what will all these mobile users be doing with all that data?

Extrapolating from current mobile activity, it seems logical to assume that much of the activity will be the same as what that powers the Internet, only this time on the mobile platform. Email will remain a communication constant, as are various instant messaging or chat options. Users have come to depend on the ‘net for quick, reliable access to information, whether it is through search, or through local review/recommendation platforms. Mobile additionally enables access as location-aware search that can deliver contextually appropriate information. Mobile is also becoming a platform for social media activity, with the human instinct to connect to other people being the driver of this movement. And of course, entertainment (primarily in the form of games) is another function that fills the mobile space.

Beyond that, however, the sky’s the limit. Any other answer would be pure speculation, and the truth is that it is impossible to predict with any certainty what new technology or functionality will arise to take advantage of the vast amounts of mobile data that will be used. The only certainty is the incredible potential inherent in the mobile platform – and it will indeed be interesting to see how people will take advantage of it.

An alternative view of the "There's Nothing Like..." campaign

As Australian Tourism numbers  keep plummeting, both domestic and international, the Australian Tourism Body needs to be inventive and creative in their marketing.

What better way to do this than use their brand to work with one of the coolest travel brands on the globe, Lonely Planet, to leverage their content in a mutually beneficial partnership marketing campaign.

To accentuate the “only in Australia” selling point as part of the “There’s Nothing Like Australia” campaign Tourism Australia are utilizing Lonely Planet’s unique content to promote visiting Australia.

Lonely Planet have produced five video vignettes, starring travel writer John Vlahides, in which he explores Australia and interacts with locals and uncovers the best “only Australia” experiences. These videos showcase the Great Barrier Reef, Sydney and the Blue Mountains, Tasmania’s Bruny Island, South Australia’s Kangaroo Island and Uluru (which you may still know as Ayers Rock).

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I’ve forgotten all about Pinterest, till I was reminded of this site a few weeks ago.

I’ve heard about this social media site almost a year ago. Because I work in the digital industry, it’s my job to learn about new, up and rising players in the market. When it comes to social however, I adopt an attitude of “wait-and-see”, i.e. when will my social connections ”refer” or “introduce” this site back to me.  I feel that this gives me a sense of where the “ground-swell” originates. Not the most scientific approach, but some instant feedback that I allow myself.

Pinterest first appeared on my social radar about a month ago, when I noted a girlfriend via Facebook, she has just joined “Pinterest”. I reacted by getting an invite from Pinterest and started following her, and some other friends I subsequently found also “Pinterest”-ed. Now I too, have followers. And recently, I have noticed an influx of social chatter and articles talking about Pinterest. I guess the site has hit critical mass.

It’s a simple proposition, Pinterest allows you to organize images into boards for specific categories. When you “pin” something new, your followers will see it. They can like, comment or re-pin to their own boards. You get to share or showcase topics of interest to you.

As a consumer, I get my few minutes of ”fun browsing”, and possibly some engagement with my connections. In my opinion, jury is still out if this site could sustain interest, no pun intended, or has advertising value to marketers, or commercial value unto itself. As a business, it is remunerated via sending user traffic to merchants’ or retailers’ sites. Whether this would evolve to other forms of revenue models would be an interesting one to watch.

For now, I have more questions than answers:

1. At which stage of consumer decision journey does a social media site such as this play in?

2. What is the consumer’s mindset when they are on this site, the “what’s in it for me” question?

3. Pinterest on mobile – what’s the potential there?

4. Relevance of this product in the context of the brands and the markets these brands operate in.

I don’t have the answers, yet. Shall wait and see.

EA Sports and Man City form a synergistic brand partnership that makes sense to the fans

Sponsorship is not partnership and a good example of this is the kind of brand partners and sponsors that the two in the English Premiership work with and how they do it.

Manchester City are not only top of the premiership they are leading the way in innovative commercial partnerships. Where Manchester United merely go after brand partners that have the most money no matter what the relevance (AON/DHL both being b2b brands marketing themselves to mass consumers through ManU sponsorship for example) Manchester City have taken a more creative approach.

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