KUALA LUMPUR — GroupM Malaysia recently tied up with Kantar Media for the subscription of the UK-based research company’s service to measure the habits of pay-TV viewers in the country. GroupM Malaysia is also investing heavily in data technology to put the agency on stronger footing amid fierce competition among ad agencies in the area of data-driven marketing.
“Data helps us to understand customers’ history and behaviour patterns more effectively,” GroupM Malaysia CEO Girish Menon recently told StarBizWeek. “This enables us to have a sharper insight and facilitates marketers to deliver the right message to consumers at the right time and in the right context for a particular brand. For us, data is the future and this allows GroupM to have a competitive advantage over its counterparts in the ad industry as it helps in formulating better decisions for our clients, i.e. marketers and advertisers. This investment is an integral part of our business growth initiative.”
Elaborating on this initiative, Girish says Mindshare (one of its media agencies) has a “Loop Room” that helps clients to look at the entire campaign data across all forms of media and to correlate it to sales. The Loop has two modes: “strategy” and “campaign.” In “strategy mode,” The Loop enables collaborative decision making via the mixing of fast and slow data across different disciplines, including business planning, strategy, creative, and communications planning.
In “campaign mode,” Girish notes, Mindshare takes third party data feeds and combines them with the agency’s own tracking systems to provide instantly actionable insights. The Loop is also used to track competitors’ efforts in paid, owned, and earned media as well as providing intelligence on trending and viral news, videos and pictures, hence enabling instant decision making by marketers.
For Vocanic, their social media agency, Girish says its data initiatives which comes under Vocanic’s Mission Control enables brand owners to make informed decisions based on real time data from a socially connected enterprise platform. This also allows marketers to optimise their campaigns by tweaking digital media spend, content or messaging based on actual social media conversations, he explains. “Our platform also allows brands to manage social customer service more effectively by providing real time insights of actual consumer engagement.
Both Mindshare and Vocanic are equipped with the latest hi-tech screens displaying various real-time media information in the form of dynamic charts and infographics.
Early this week, the agency became the first media agency in Malaysia to access more granular information on the viewing habits of Malaysians when it entered into an agreement to subscribe to the Dynamic Television Audience Measurement (DTAM) service, the new television currency for measuring the habits of Pay TV viewers. The agreement gives GroupM’s clients access to the system for their 2016 TV planning and buying requirements on Pay TV. The DTAM measurement system was launched in Malaysia last year and was available to media agencies on a free trial basis until the end of last year.
“Marketing now operates in a data-rich environment,” Girish says. “We are focused on harvesting this data to extract the most actionable insights for clients to enable real-time decision making. We are fortunate to have with us some key clients who have the vision and foresight to invest in such services in order to drive their competitive advantage.”
