SINGAPORE — Global marketing agency VMLY&R has affirmed its focus to continued growth across Asia Pacific by elevating Camellia Tan to Chief Network Growth Officer, VMLY&R Asia. Based in Singapore, Tan reports directly to Yi-Chung Tay, Chief Executive Officer VMLY&R Asia.
In this newly-created role, Camellia Tan is responsible for the planning, design and execution of VMLY&R’s growth strategy for Asia, focusing on new and existing markets against key network client opportunities. Tan is tasked with ensuring the company is prepared to operationally support core and new clients’ business – to achieve growth targets by building, buying, partnering for, and integrating capabilities.
Camellia Tan has played an instrumental role in network development since joining Y&R in 2010, then VML in 2013. She grew the network’s Caltex remit, from just regional brand AOR to becoming integrated lead agency, including driving digital transformation covering data, marketing automation and experience design. Tan helped to integrate WPP’s foremost commerce agency Geometry into VMLY&R by bringing complementary capabilities together and creating market-leading offerings for shared clients – including subscription commerce, data-driven marketing, and service design.
VMLY&R Asia has already seen a considerable growth trajectory over the past three years, with revenues having doubled and headcount having increased three-fold. This growth has been driven by integrating teams across deep capabilities in Brand Experience, Customer Experience (CX), Technology and Commerce, underpinned by a strong culture of open-ness, innovation and creativity. Recent examples include the evolution of VMLY&R Commerce, widening remits for major regional clients, the expansion of Experience, Technology and Commerce capabilities, plus significant additions of entrepreneurial businesses such as ClickMedia and The Glitch, which were highly successful WPP acquisitions in Vietnam and India.
VMLY&R’s CX innovation & collaboration with clients includes the transformation of MediaCorp’s Newsroom, by creating an open public citizen platform for news reporting and employing AI to analyse trends and detect fake news. The platform also enabled greater collaboration and resource-sharing among 8 leading publishers by streamlining all CMS into one Acquia platform, a single source of truth for content and assets. All in just 18 months, made possible by a robust yet versatile Design System, lean testing, and a highly collaborative agile team.
For IDFC First Bank, VMLY&R leveraged the power of Adobe marketing cloud to constantly learn more about consumers as they engaged, then providing highly personalized experiences to them. The VMLY&R team implemented tech-enabled analysing browsing, behavioral and transactional data of website users, to personalize their experience based on 100s of associated attributes. The system also enables continuous improvements on user experience design based on real time flow of performance data.
Commenting on the appointment, Yi-Chung Tay, Chief Executive Officer, VMLY&R Asia said, “VMLY&R has enjoyed robust growth over the last three years because of our relentless focus on integrating, building out and acquiring market-leading capabilities to meet our clients’ business needs, and by having a great culture for like-minded innovators and marketers to collaborate and grow together. With Camy having been in the thick of this growth, she’s the ideal choice to maintain this momentum, continuing our focus on growth and our ever-expanding capabilities.”
Added Camellia Tan, Chief Network Growth Officer, VMLY&R Asia, “Growing and building the VMLY&R network has always been close to my heart. Whether it’s helping to grow clients’ businesses or ramping up capabilities through integration or right-fit acquisition, I look forward to building on our current momentum to help drive the agency’s continued expansion and relevance.”
