Agency Acceleration Day, APAC: Many reasons to be optimistic

We were delighted to have partnered with The Drum for this year’s Agency Acceleration Day APAC in Singapore. Our North Asia Partner Chris Beaumont, shares his key insights, on the scaling challenges for businesses in APAC, what makes agencies in the region attractive, and key industry trends in APAC.

Globally, agency networks are in a transition period, where traditional players are looking to change legacy structures and legacy thinking to become more agile and provide a better, more personalised service to its clients.

To achieve this in the smaller and hugely diverse markets across APAC, holding companies are reducing complexity, doing away with unnecessary regional levels of management, and focussing on local knowledge and a physical presence to meet clients’ needs and respond to changes in their local markets.

As a result, local agencies are increasingly becoming particularly attractive acquisition targets for large networks who are often up against more nimble competitors.

Redder Asia for example, a leading integrated Creative, Digital and PR agency in Vietnam, was acquired by Dentsu in April this year. Its primary draw was that it’s a “dynamic local agency with strong creative & digital capabilities which support [Dentsu’s] ambition to build new local and international client relationships”, said Sanjay Bhasin, CEO of Dentsu Aegis Network Indochina. CG Results International advised Redder Asia on this transaction.

Key themes from the day and APAC industry trends:

Technology and increasingly digitally driven consumers, are propelling the level of creativity demanded of marketing agencies

Coined ‘Imagineering’; agencies are tasked with finding new ways to delight the consumer with enhanced personal experiences

eCommerce is rapidly growing as a competitive space for brands and a new channel for marketing and advertising but there is a concern that brand communications could become too transactional

Concerns of fragmentation and the need for coherent brand messages remain crucial, but again technology helps to provide a holistic narrative that can be managed anywhere on the customer journey.

With so much optimism in the region and greater brand bandwidth for new technologies, such as extended reality, the outlook in APAC is extremely positive.

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