40 under 40 2020: Bening Rara, Ogilvy

Bening Rara

Planning director
Ogilvy
Indonesia

Bening Rara is of the belief that travel and venturing outside of the industry aids her to become a more holistic planner. So she left the agency world to become an education facilitator and to gain real-world experiences. During this time, she spoke with parents and youths from different areas in Indonesia, who helped build her interest in human behaviour. Fast forward 10 years, and Rara is now attributed with mining insights for multiple pitch wins and award-winning campaigns at one of WPP’s largest networks.

One of the greatest aspects of Rara’s work is her ability to look past middle-class yuppies or large economic hubs and look where few agency folk do—suburban and rural youth. For Pop Mie, one of Indonesia’s biggest instant noodle brands, she integrated TikTok as a medium to reach this often-overlooked group, and as a result, broke the record of highest engagement of social campaigns in Indonesia in the food category. Altogether, she is instrumental in adding revenues worth US$500,000 to the agency’s topline in the last year.

Beyond her everyday tasks, Rara authors a weekly newsletter to inform top clients about rural, grassroots opportunities which serve as enablers for campaign and product development. She also initiated the Free Book Adoption program in 2015 to increase literacy rate in Indonesia, distributing books to 48 small cities in Indonesia, and managing to reach out to 2,312 people.

Rara believes that building relevance for mega brands means addressing the ‘many Indonesias’, and it’s this belief that signals her success as a purposeful planner. We often hear the word ‘human-centered’ being thrown about liberally in the industry, but Rara genuinely epitomises the term.