Mateo Eaton and Fer Wang, his business partner in three-year-old production house Smedly Smartwrite, joined the GroupM agency unit as Shanghai-based managing director and business director respectively. Bessie Lee, GroupM China CEO, said: "We see great potential in developing branded content for pretty much all the major consumer touch points."
Lee said the senior hires reflected MindShare's investment in expanding its branded content business, which has operated in China for the past seven years. "In the past seven years we focused on TV stations or TV production houses, but TV in China is very complicated, not only because of fragmentation but there are also many layers.
"For any branded content project to be successful, you need a syndication list of 20 to 30 channels; this needs expertise and takes a lot of work."
Lee pointed to Moto Yule Xian Chan, one of China's top TV series, in which MindShare secured title sponsorship for Motorola as a success story for the agency in 2005. The deal saw the show's producers create an episode-within-an- episode to place Motorola products in the hands of the cast of the series, which aired five days a week.
"We would like to get into the area of advertiser-funded programming, and this requires the kind of expertise we have just hired," she said.
Eaton, who arrived in China in 1997, launched the content company after selling a travel show to Dragon TV. He said the company, which also worked on Merchant Ivory's 2004 The White Countess production, developed content ideas based on insights culled from chat room conversations.
