Campaign's Spotlight HK: Highlights

Campaign’s Spotlight HK event is underway today (April 20, 2023) at Blueprint's Town Hall in Quarry Bay, Hong Kong. The event—featuring leading industry practitioners and senior marketers across retail, FMCG, food and beverage, transportation, and other services industries—is covering the changing face of digital marketing.  The reopening of China's market is creating new opportunities, but expectations throughout Asia are changing as channels of interaction, engagement and transactions must cater to physical, digital or hybrid forms making omnichannel strategies critical. 

Peek at the event agenda here. Speakers include Matthew Lam, Decathalon's head of branding and marketing; Meghan Sherrill, Shake Shack's APAC head of marketing and communications; Aisha Speirs, The Wall Street Journal's APAC creative director and executive editor of custom content; Alex Law, marketing director of Foodpanda Hong Kong and more. 

Throughout the day, Campaign’s editorial team will be noting highlights from panel sessions and relevant case studies here. Save this link and stay tuned for more. 

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OMNICHANNEL STRATEGY IN POST-COVID GREATER CHINA

“Greater China is our highest growth market and our second biggest outside the US. We currently have 33 Shake Shacks in Greater China and another 15 openings this year. We are also opening in smaller markets, but there is this new trend in China where brands are expanding for the sake of expanding. It’s like everyone’s caught in this competition, but no one knows why. We also see this a lot with other F&B brands in the country. We are not going to do that. We will ensure that we continue giving our guests meaningful, substantive experiences but not getting too far away from our core values.”

Meghan Sherrill, head of marketing and communications, Shake Shack, Asia-Pacific

BUILDING BRANDS FOR THE MODERN CONSUMER

“The words omni and omnichannel are huge. It’s not just about thinking of a store location but constantly finding ways to understand the needs and expectations of your consumers and then, from a brand and company perspective adapting to them. We look at our value proposition and how we can resonate to cater to those needs. Our offline business remains very strong because people like to come to a sports store to touch and feel things. So we have to evolve constantly; the conventional and pre-conceived ideas of touch points don’t apply to us.”

Matthew Lam, head of brand and marketing, Decathalon, Hong Kong

“Back in 2021, we launched our loyalty programme called Lalamove Rewards. This was the first delivery loyalty programme in Hong Kong launched across nine markets. So why did we launch this during the pandemic? It's because we were trying to build direct relationships with our customers; we wanted to talk to them; we wanted to have all the insights from our customers directly. Today we have more than one million members across Asia and Latin America, and revenues generated from members are over 40% more than non-members. That's really impressive."

Kristie Cheung, head of marketing communications, Lalamove

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ADDRESSING GROWING ONLINE FATIGUE WITH OFFLINE EXPERIENCES 

“At Pret, to focus on customer experience, we have created six key points of service. We have a budget allocated to every single shop that we call the 'Joy of Pret'. This allows shop members to give away whatever they want to any customer. So when you see a customer that is unhappy, upset, complaining, or just whiny about the weather, give them a coffee on the house, give lunch on the house, and give cookies. This keeps engagement and connection with our customers. And obviously, it's our way of saying thank you and see you again.”

Eric Lam, head of marketing,  Asia, Pret A Manger

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 WHAT IS AN IDENTITY STRATEGY AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

“How do I leverage my CRM and CDP and my first-party data? How do I make more decisions about media buying, and how do I continue to buy in an omni channel environment? Let's assume all these strategies that you're doing are wrong. The reason why I'm saying this is because it's going to entice us to think about how we can improve and do better. Now when we move into a topic, like leveraging our CDP, leveraging our CRMs, there's this whole aspect that we're talking about building our brand equity, building the brand message, building the case of our brands and value. What's forgotten about all that is that once we establish this, once we establish that CRM database, how do we actually execute against it? How do we find these audiences outside of our own CRM and CDP environment? That question has to be at the forefront of your strategy.”

Johnnie Leung, director of business development, The Trade Desk

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NAVIGATING THE MARKETING DATA MAZE

“Content is almost 90% of our marketing engine. Our real estate experts create lots of insights, reports and research every day. As marketers, we somehow should go back to very basic items.  Where do our audience consume this content? How do they consume the content? When do they consume the content?  I think the most important thing I am doing now is really zoom in these basic data back to back to drive our marketing strategies.”

Cecilia Chan, marketing director, Asia, Colliers

“Currently, we're at about 98% rely just on first-party data, and by summer, will be 100%. And those investments really mean that they're also developing similar to, can we say, proprietary tools that will serve our clients so we have a suite of tools, everything from insight, which gives us about 820 different audience segments that we can get very, very specific or we can apply broadly. That works even from a creative standpoint that helps us to sell in new ways to tell stories for our clients and open up new channels for them to people that they might not have thought of or are interested in looking at. ”

Aisha Speirs, creative director & executive editor, The Wall Street Journal Custom Content, APAC

“Traditionally, you would rely on your data team of scientists to actually process the data, read sequels and come up with correlations. But now with new technology, we can now use the same machine learning or AI to come up with those initial insights. I'm not saying they will do 100% of the job. They'll only be able to give you the initial perspective of where the opportunities are, then it's upto you to tap into those data to find out and verify that information.”

Kevin Tsang, VP and head of distribution & marketing, Blue

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EXPLORING THE INTERSECTION OF QUALITY AND ATTENTION 

"The industry is starting to pick up on the necessity of attention and how it drives media efficiency. At DoubleVerify, as early as 2021, we were looking at attention metrics to determine a digital ad’s exposure and engagement with the consumer. The first step you can take to fully reap the benefits of attention metrics is to have a solid foundation of media quality.  Quality – making sure an ad is seen by a human being in a brand-suitable environment in the intended geography – becomes the baseline. At DV, we call this the Authentic Ad. We see proof of this in the APAC market. In our 2022 annual Global Insights Report, which provides an in-depth market-by-market analysis, we saw brand suitability violations in our region decline by 31% compared to the year prior. Once our APAC clients focused on tightening up their brand suitability and viewability strategies, they saw media quality improve."

Jeremey Chang, business director, DoubleVerify

"Traditionally, the advertising industry has used viewability to measure whether an ad is viewed or not. However, viewability data may not fully reflect the actual attention of human beings, such as scroll speed and time spent on a page are not taken into account. The reason is that according to industry standards, an ad is counted as viewable if at least 50% of its area is visible for at least one second—for example, display ads. To measure meaningful attention, we need a more comprehensive approach that takes into consideration factors such as the ad environment, user engagement, publisher context, format etc."

Louis Ng, head of programmatic, Havas Media Hong Kong

“Attention measurement is an increasingly effective way to holistically analyse the interaction of an audience with the ad and to better measure the impact of the creative and its format. From a brand perspective, attention depends on the content and the quality of the content. At Foodpanda, we introduced our mascot Pau-Pau, an unmissable pink panda, for our 10th anniversary. The panda is our differentiating aspect, and it also gives us more room to talk about our brand story, content, and how we engage and interact with our customers.”

Alex Law, marketing director, Foodpanda Hong Kong

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INNOVATION SPOTLIGHT: DEVELOPMENT IN AI FOR THE MARKETING WORLD (TOOL OR THREAT)

"Let me break down the main points to help you understand how to use generative AI effectively. Firstly, it's essential to recognize that generative AI is a tool, much like PowerPoint or any other tool used in our daily lives. Therefore, we must use generative AI solutions optimally, taking into account the technical aspects. If your organization is interested in using generative AI to create articles, there are specific steps you need to follow. Firstly, it's crucial to have a process in place to protect assets and privacy. This process should include reviewing the article and ensuring the quality of the output. By doing this, you can ensure that the output is correct and meets your organization's standards. In summary, to use generative AI effectively, it's important to view it as a tool, use it optimally, and follow a process to ensure quality output."

David Daoud, co-founder, Sam-Bot.ai