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The advertising industry prides itself on being brand builders. Building successful brands is supposed to be the essence of what we do. But in recent years the ad industry has been guilty of cheapening some of the most important brands it controls – its own. I am going to be picking on WPP because it is the biggest offender. But to some degree the same can probably be said about each of the major holding companies. WPP is the owner of some of the most famous and worthy brands in the history of the ad business: JWT, Ogilvy, Y&R and Grey. It has been systematically dismantling the value in these brands. Today they are splinters of what they were.

Digital Media

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Vice creative agency, Virtue, has formally launched in Asia Pacific region with the opening of offices in Singapore and Seoul. It will be led by Aaron Pearce, former client services director at Octagon in Singapore. Together with a new office in Sydney, the Virtue operations in Singapore and Seoul will operate across Asia Pacific. On his LinkedIn profile, Pearce says: “Rather than try and fix the agency model, we’ve planted a jungle on its grave. Our DIY punk roots, empathy, and irreverent sense of style breeds work that’s as important as it is attractive.” In a statement announcing the launch, Pearce, in his new role as managing director for Virtue, Asia Pacific, said: “The first things we ask our clients is who they want to reach, and what they want to stand for and everything after that point is crafting.

Digital Media

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Twitter has revealed plans to strengthen its video content in Asia Pacific after striking more than 50 deals with publishers and broadcasters covering sports, entertainment and news. The move will bring to the platform “hundreds of hours” of live streaming and video highlights, the social media firm said. Among the new content includes UEFA Champions …

Digital Media

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When you come to bat in a baseball game the first principle is to hit the ball. What happens after you hit the ball is out of your control. Where the ball happens to land and what the defence does is secondary. First you have to hit the ball. If you can’t hit the ball the rest is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how strong you are, or how fast you run, or how beautiful your swing is. If you can’t hit the ball, you are useless. In advertising there is also a first principle. The first principle of advertising is to attract someone’s attention. If your ad doesn’t attract someone’s attention, everything else is moot. It doesn’t matter how lovely it is, how wonderfully it is written, how strategically brilliant it is, or how precisely it is targeted. If nobody notices it, it is a complete waste and utterly worthless.

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Adtech firm AnyMind Group has acquired the Kong-Kong headquartered trade desk Acqua Media, in a bid to spread its geographical reach and widen its service offering. Acqua Media is said to work for more than 250 publishers across Hong Kong, Taiwan, China and Australia “generating an average 8.3 billion monthly impressions”. AnyMind Group is headquartered in Singapore and was previously known as AdAsia Holdings. The announcement: AnyMind Group, an AI solutions provider across the advertising, marketing and human resource industries, has today announced the full acquisition of Acqua Media, a Hong Kong-based publisher trading desk, with a presence in Beijing and Sydney. This is the company’s second acquisition, providing expanded geographical span and revenue opportunities. Founded in 2013, Acqua Media provides programmatic selling strategy and ad monetization services for premium web publishers and app developers. Acqua Media serves over 252 publishers across Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China and Australia, generating an average 8.3B monthly impressions. Ben Chien, founder of Acqua Media will join AnyMind Group as General Manager of Hong Kong and Regional Director, Publisher Engagement for AdAsia Holdings in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan and Australia. Having previously held roles at CommercialAsia.com, PCCW, SAS and Yahoo, Chien will join the management team of AnyMind Group and lead AdAsia Holdings’ sell-side business for the region. “Having grown Acqua Media to an emerging powerhouse, I am excited for even more growth for our current and future clients across Asia. They now have the ability for business discovery – harnessing artificial intelligence to find out and act on areas of revenue generation that were not readily or easily apparent previously,” said Chien. Current clients of Acqua Media will now have access to the AdAsia Digital Platform for Publishers and the AdAsia Premium Marketplace. Launched in October 2017, the platform provides online media owners with a solution that leverages on machine learning and artificial intelligence to consolidate, recommend and optimize multiple advertiser demand sources and minimum bid prices for an online advertisement space. Publishers can also leverage on the additional traffic brought through the AdAsia Premium Marketplace – unique demand inventory from direct clients, transacting through direct and private marketplace deals. Currently, AdAsia Holdings is powering four billion monthly impressions across 560 publishers in Asia through display, native and video advertising. “Similar to the FourM acquisition, Acqua Media provides us with established market share in the Hong Kong and Taiwan markets, along with Beijing and Sydney. We’re looking to empower the growth of existing Acqua Media clients and future publishers through the AdAsia Digital Platform for Publishers and AdAsia Premium Marketplace – and at the same time, look to drive our growth to monetizing 30B monthly impressions by the end of 2019, ” said Kosuke Sogo, CEO and co-founder of AnyMind Group.

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The marketing communications holding companies, like the industrial conglomerates that preceded them, were created through M&A transactions and run as decentralised financial holdings. In this business model, acquired agencies and businesses are expected to improve their financial performance by growing revenues, profits and profit margins. The holding companies make additional acquisitions, using their ever-increasing stock …

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Ridesharing service Uber has launched legal action in the US against its mobile agency Fetch, alleging fraud on the part of the Dentsu-owned company. According to the lawsuit – reported overnight by the Wall Street Journal – the UK-based agency’s remuneration was partly based on each new download of the Uber app. Uber alleges that the agency …

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The Australian Open, Asian football, and local esports tournaments will have live Twitter streams available as part a range of deals announced by the social media service at a conference in Singapore this morning. Coupled with the live streaming deals, Twitter has launched an in-stream video advertising service which will be rolled out across the Asia-Pacific region. “APAC …

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Marketers in the Asia-Pacific region are the only ones in the world to rank content marketing as their number one priority for 2017, a new study has found. A global report by NewBase (formerly known as Publicitas), revealed that nearly 60 per cent of APAC marketers and agency bosses believed content marketing to be a main priority for …

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