CReATION: Beyond Interactive sets up Stateside 'Net practice in Asia with Grey Network

Cutting to the quick of Asia's Internet revolution is a claim today's Web shops make with seemingly careless abandon. Proving that cyber-success need not be a muddy puddle, one newcomer, Beyond Interactive, has pledged to deliver the hard and fast benchmarks for 'Net creative. Carving out standalone status from its parent, the Grey Advertising network, Beyond is shipping 'time-worn' advertising secrets from its stateside cousin, set up three years ago and snapped up by Grey in July last year. "Lots of Interactive agencies start-off with a traditional agency set-up - according to client's requests they have to pool their strengths just designing a website," Beyond Interactive general manager Kenny Wong told CReATION. "We're specialising in online advertising - we'll leave website developments and recommendations for ecommerce to Grey Interactive." Paring down the 'Net essentials, BI advocates knowledge management as the secret to campaign optimisation on the fly. "Achieving the best ROI for the client is very different from the CPM and brand equity model - CPM is just a tool to calculate, but it's not the objective," said Mr Wong. Focusing on what co-founder and Asia-Pacific CEO Viveca Chan termed "Beyond's edge" - knowledge management - local staffers have, for the last six months, been streaming to BI's Michigan headquarters to train. While hires of up to 60 fresh graduates a week are standard fodder in the US, Asia, she said, required a fresh - albeit US-influenced - approach. "You try to hire 60 (experienced) people out here and you can't get them - we're recruiting graduates and if they go through the training system, they come out experts in six months' time." According to Mr Wong, training, youth and the Internet are creative sparring partners that click. "These staffers have a vision of the Internet and when they're talking to a 40-year-old marketing director who rarely, if ever, surfs the 'Net, he listens to their advice," he said. Nevertheless, servicing Web creative, media planning, buying, optimisation and permission marketing entails more than expert staffers, especially when the clients themselves are in the dark. "We were in China two weeks ago and the level of understanding made us realise that we're going to have a tough job ahead of us," Ms Chan told CReATION. "Questions like, 'what's optimisation, what's ad serving, why do I need ad serving?' plague even sophisticated clients in Hong Kong - they just don't get it." Highlighting the "apples and oranges" divide between click-throughs and pageviews, Beyond Interactive was, she noted, a back-end operation. "We look at the cost-per-action and then work backwards - we know that how much money you spend can generate how many results, so we start off with a benchmark," she said. Banishing the mystique of "after the click-through", the shop is busy setting up its own third party ad serving. "Right now, ads are 'served' and clients have a report (on click-throughs), but they don't know what to do with it," said Mr Wong. Attracting Hong Kong portal client, 36.com, plus Volkswagen, in its soon-to-opened China office, BI is championing the SAR as its regional strategic hub. Opening its Beijing shop on April 17, Shanghai and Guangzhou are set to follow in quick succession, with London set for Q3. "Everyone will tell you they have global network just because they have their name on the door, but if it's not a global practice, it's not a global brand," said Ms Chan.

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