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.
