MANILA – iProspect, the digital performance marketing agency from the Dentsu Aegis Network, has promoted Shayne Garcia to general manager, effective July 1. Succeeding her as digital director is Chinkey Llave.
Garcia, 30, told adobo that the promotion was flattering and at the same time challenging. “I’m very, very happy that I’ve been given this new role, a new challenge by the management,” said Garcia, who will be leading a team of 15.
Garcia said the group would continue to evangelize performance marketing, which it has been doing for the past couple of years. “Back then, it was still at the stage of justifying why digital should be part of your media plan,” she said, sharing that clients now appreciate digital, particularly how it can deliver key performance indicators beyond impressions and clicks.
According to Garcia, big data is one of the challenges. “For digital, not only do we have so many variables but through time of course we aggregate learnings from different types of data – whether it’s sales, media, marketing data, you put that together – it’s going to be a lot of staring at the numbers and finding, ‘What’s the story here?'” she said.
On the other hand, Garcia said iProspect is also known to visualize data. “We’ve actually invested in a lot of tools to help marketers, clients, understand all their data in a way that’s easy to look at,” she said.
Another challenge that comes with digital is being able to mentor people with different personalities and backgrounds, from the very creative to the very technical. “In digital, it’s a fusion of art and science. The thing is, we create digital content, and whether you like it or not you will know if they’re being read, you will know if they’re being clicked. All these data will actually tell the creative person, ‘You know what, you’re not creative at all,” she said.
iProspect aims to be their client’s partner by helping them see through these data points and identify which will really impact the business. “We have very very good relationships with creative agencies because we are very transparent. We share the data and we constantly give a heads up whenever we see the analytics of a certain execution. We share our analysis and as we move forward we actually determine principles for engaging creative content,” she said.
Garcia, who started out working in traditional media, observed that the main difference of digital media is its ever-changing nature. “In digital, it’s always a work in progress. So much as you want to put together principles or commandments – and commandments don’t change – but in digital it’s so hard. It has to change.”
Before joining iProspect, Garcia was a communications planning manager for MediaCom. Prior to that, she was a senior media strategist at Universal McCann, a digital strategist at Carat, and a senior research analyst at Starcom Mediavest Group.
She is also a lecturer at the College of Mass Communication, University of the Philippines, Diliman.
