CREATION: Decipher brings back "commercial reality"

The Lowe Group's Decipher rang in the New Year with the opening of its first Hong Kong office. While the management consultancy firm names corporate giants HSBC and Unilever among clients, its entry into the Hong Kong market was on a relatively small scale. The company launched its operations with just three members of staff, including Decipher managing director Nigel Wally and case manager Richard Ambrose. According to Mr Wally, Decipher is here to bring "commercial reality" back into the Internet and technology. Decipher, he explained, was all about numbers. The company's strategy is to work with clients interested in researching and forming a business model before huge sums of money are spent on making the company digital-savvy. The company markets itself as "an independent and objective source of intelligence on ecommerce via the Internet, digital TV and new mobile technologies". Mr Wally criticised competitors Web Connection and Icon Medialab, which he said "offered you advice, but what they were doing in reality was to convince you to build a big website and a big contract to integrate your ecommerce system". "Unlike the big players in this new media world, the ones you see doing everything, we are highly specialised in commercial analysis and consumer analysis on the ecommerce side, based on detailed understanding of the dynamics of different business sectors," Mr Wally said. "We turn all this technical jargon and Internet babble back into good old fashioned business talk and commercial rationale. And our starting point for any digital initiative whether it's Internet, mobile or interactive TV, is the numbers, so we take a very different approach to traditional players like Icon Media Labs, Web Connection and others." While industry analysts argue that it could be years before we see anything substantial come out of interactive TV, Decipher, according to Mr Wally, is here for the planning stage. "If you are a great big tanker of a company, it would take more to turn your business model, so you would really need to start to do your thinking now. No one suggests that big companies should throw lots of money into the interactive TV side, however, there is an awful lot of consumer thinking to be done to plan for the next three to 15 years," said Mr Wally. Decipher is to initially work with multinational corporations that are also its clients in the UK, including GM, Unilever and HSBC. The company will also seek partnerships with regional players. "We get a sense that there is a bubbling up of change on the TV market in Hong Kong. It's getting full of opportunities for interactive players ... We will be working with TV companies here to develop iTV and broadband content." Decipher also expects to play a role in the development of Hong Kong's CyberPort. Established two years ago in the UK, Decipher has guided companies in the integration of technology into traditional business models.

Sign In

Trouble signing in?

Reset Password: Click here

Contact Customer Support at

Customerservice@campaignasia.com