AMID the challenging media landscape, media communications agency GroupM Malaysia is striving to put the agency on a stronger footing.
Its chief executive officer Chanchal Chakrabarty shares his views on the agency’s competitive strength, strategies, and the outlook for the media industry in 2024. Below are the excerpts of the interview.
StarBiz: As part of the world’s largest advertising company of London-based WPP PLC, what is GroupM Malaysia’s competitive strength compared with other media agencies in the country?
Chanchal: Our vision is what sets us apart from others: “To be responsible for shaping the next era of media where advertising works better for people”.
We bring this vision to life by our “People-First and Tech” approach which brings together the best of human intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI), left and right brains perfectly complementing each other.
StarBiz: Could you elaborate further on the above approach and the initiatives the agency has put in place to achieve this vision?This is achieved by our immense focus on the learning and development of our talents, and our investments in creating pioneering tech solutions to provide an edge to our client’s business.
Our talents are our assets and we invest heavily in developing and upskilling both their soft and hard skills.
We map the training needs gaps of our talents in conversation with them and their managers, then create customised learning and development programmes for them. The programmes include right from technical certifications, developing masterclasses to upskill them in this ever-evolving media landscape to soft skill development programmes on personal leadership, business leadership, coaching and mentoring programmes.
There is also a unique “Design Your MBA” programme that we run every year for identified future leaders.
We have also partnered with many universities and colleges, and we run our internship programme and our media-masters (management trainee) programme with them.
As market leaders, this is our strategic effort to expand and develop the talent pool for the media industry and it has paid dividends to us as well as to our industry.
StarBiz: As for GroupM Malaysia’s investments in pioneering tech solutions?Our investments in creating pioneering tech solutions is to provide an edge to our client’s business.
The latest in this are our Advance TV technology, Advance out-of-home (OOH) technology, and Growth Platform.
Advance TV technology provides a one-stop linear TV, connected TV and streaming services and over-the-top planning and activation down to postcode level where even different messages can be served to different audiences.
This is a pioneering capability for Malaysian clients which combines the precision of digital with the scale and brand safety of television.
Advance OOH technology, which has for the first time ever made possible with audience targeting based on geo-locations and interests (for example, Millennials who have purchased beer recently or female high-end department store shopper etc.), which can also dynamically serve ads based on interest, location, time etc.
Growth Platform is another pioneering tech, providing cross-channel planning, optimisation and measurement capability with geo-location targeting.
Built for a cookieless future, it combines first party data with privacy compliant third party data to create audience profiles and geo-based media plans.
Proprietary AI-optimisation engine maximises media investments through budget redistribution to minimise wastage and measures effectiveness through unified reporting against business outcomes.
StarBiz: In the wake of the challenging business environment, What is the outlook of the media industry for this year? Any growth drivers for the industry for 2024?The first half of the year can be called patchy at best, with a good start to the year with the Chinese New Year celebrations but a very muted one during Ramadan and Hari Raya celebrations.
The continued boycott has had a profound impact on certain advertisers and categories of businesses.
All these impacted many livelihoods through job losses as well as many of the impacted advertisers reducing their media spends.
Although one of the fastest growing media platforms, influencers also got significantly impacted as many of them stopped taking commercial projects of the brands in the boycott list.
Local advertisers and government as well as government-linked clients have been spending well and have been fuelling the growth of the media industry.
But what needs to be closely monitored is how the targeted diesel subsidy impacts inflation and consumer sentiments as well as how the impact of geo-political risks like the Israel-Palestine and Russia-Ukraine wars, any other potential regional or global escalations and the United States outcome pan out.
Typically, the first to get impacted by inflation are also the small and medium enterprises which constitute over 97% of businesses in Malaysia.
They can very quickly move from being one of the growth drivers to being a the drop’s major contributors.
The media industry outlook is closely linked to the consumer sentiments and economic impacts of the rest of the factors mentioned.
However, the step taken by the government in providing access to funds in the Employees’ Provident Fund Account 3 could be a source of ‘disposable’ income or liquidity for many.
And this could spur spending on travel, food and beverage and enhance overall domestic consumption in the economy.
