FOCUS: AGENCY OF THE YEAR AWARDS 2000 - Record-setting efforts pay off for a rising media star in Vietnam

Category: Media Person of the Year Certificate of Excellence: Nguyen Thi To Uyen Agency: Leo Burnett/ M&T Vietnam In a country where advertising in general and media specifically is regarded as a social evil, 27-year-old senior media planner/buyer Nguyen Thi To Uyen has achieved a "mission impossible" throughout her four years with Leo Burnett/M&T Vietnam. Across a range of clients and media disciplines, Ms Nguyen managed to build client brands with breakthrough media plans that took both creative thinking and an amazing amount of tenacity to get through the communist bureaucracy. Her achievements include placing the first-ever newspaper advertisements within editorial pages in Vietnam for Tetley Tea and Abbott Labs; negotiating the first-ever sealed section in a magazine for the drug Diflucan; and obtaining the green light to use the Vietnamese flag in advertisements devised for Tiger Beer during the SEA Games and Tiger Cup 2000 events. Ms Nguyen also utilised all elements of above and below-the-line media in an initiative for Procter & Gamble's Rejoice Plus shampoo. The idea was to dramatise the convenience proposition, to create national awareness for the product and to add fun to the grand communication mix. The PR event saw 120 hairdressers offer free wash-and-blowdrying to as many people as possible in a single day, between 9am to 6pm. The event set a new Guinness World Record, the first ever for Vietnam. More than 18,000 people attended the event, which created national and international publicity, including a 30-minute television special. Another event for P&G - this time for Rejoice Anti-Dandruff/SuperSoft shampoo - was the "Sinkboy" campaign, using the product's "Sinkboy" personality to "ambush" consumers in locations, such as swimming pools, supermarkets and shopping centres. Lucky consumers then had their hair washed, courtesy of Sinkboy. Ms Nguyen's choice of media resulted in 2,000 participants over the 12-day campaign, at 11 different locations. Her media strategy included: - Two 30-second TVCs and eight-second teasers; - Non-TV media such as cinema and in-store monitor ads; - Street banners and other out-of-home media. In conjunction with the press kits Ms Nguyen compiled for the media, more than a dozen press articles with photographs were published, in addition to a four-minute slot broadcast on HTV. Another initiative was to use client Moet Hennessy as a sponsor for annual opera concerts in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City from 1996 to 1998. Hennessy invited famous musicians from around the world, such as Russian Mstislav Rostropovich, American Barbara Bonney and The Eroica Trio from Canada, to perform in Vietnam. The sell-out performances produced press coverage in more than 30 key publications, were promoted on radio and TV, and the recorded concerts received numerous repeat airings on Vietnam TV. Burnett/M&T's biggest client, Tiger Beer, was again sponsor for the famous Tiger Cup, which was played in Bangkok last month. The brief was simple: to generate awareness of the sponsorship announcement and to stir up excitement among the general public prior to the event. Ms Nguyen's media strategy incorporated traditional uses of media; however, the public relations element to this was much greater. These have included editorials in at least 40 newspapers reviewing the 1999 Tiger Cup, as well as for 2000; interviews with players plus a look behind the scenes; various 20-minute television programmes on HTV; numerous contests and fan participation such as the Million Baht Kick, photo contests and fans signing a giant good luck card. For Bao Minh CMG, Ho Chi Minh City's first life insurance joint venture, Ms Nguyen organised a press conference attended by 200 people, issuing press kits, invitations, venue decor, street banners, commemorative plaques and so on. Over the following two weeks, 23 press articles in major newspapers and magazines appeared in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. After the press launch, she organised street PR, with hundreds of CMG promoters supporting massive characters from the advertising all over the country. Eight months later, the street PR is still moving through rural Vietnam. As Burnett/M&T's submission stated, these are just a few examples of Ms Nguyen's achievements over and above her role of simply providing efficient and effective traditional media solutions.

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