Ensembling winning ideas
Media agency finds great success in merging context and content
FOR an agency that was assumed to be just another content department inside a media agency, Ensemble Worldwide’s recent coveted Agency of the Year win at the Malaysian Effie Awards for the second year in a row is a strong validation of its differentiated offering.
Established in 2015, Ensemble is a creative agency of IPG Mediabrands Malaysia and was built on the premise that context and content need to live together to serve brands that have very different expectations from advertising; an agency where storytelling, behavioural analytics and predictive sciences co-exist.
This belief has proven to be immensely successful with Ensemble having built a strong clientele with Maxis, Shell, KFC, Nippon Paint, Sime Darby Property, J&J and Traveloka among others.
So what makes Ensemble tick and what lies behind its success?
A unique culture for one. According to Ensemble managing director Amit Sutha the agency likes to work with clients who are searching for partners.
“We like to think of ourselves as an agency of creative marketers. In order to be partners, we immerse ourselves in our clients’ businesses, and to an outsider, it may sometimes be hard to tell the agency from the client at discussions. This approach seems to have worked well as we have not lost any client over the last 24 months.”
In an era where agencies struggle to gain new business, Ensemble’s method of adding clients to their roster may seem rather unconventional. The agency has pitched for only two new clients this year, but gained a plethora of new clients through references as well as winning connected businesses from existing clients.
He notes: “The majority of our new clients started by awarding us small projects to try us out. From these projects, they then awarded us bigger parts of their businesses. The quality of the work and the continuous building of existing relationships take precedence over chasing new clients, and we believe in growing our business by growing theirs.”
The agency’s executive creative director Chan Woei Hern says Ensemble sees strategy, creativity, digital and media as disciplines rather than departments.
“We have had our business director craft a big idea, a strategic planner write copy for the campaign and our head of art provide strategic direction,” Chan explains.
The way the agency thinks can be best explained by the work done with clients. The Agency of the Year award which Ensemble won was for its campaign collaborations with Maxis, Nippon Paint and Shell.
One of the most successful partnerships by Ensemble was with Maxis where the agency crafted unusual ideas targeting unconventional audiences. The silver-haired generation, for instance, is one of the fastest growing consumer segments, yet it was often ignored.
Ensemble co-created the “Tech it Easy” initiative, a smartphone starter kit made especially for older parents. Each kit came with a large screen smartphone, madefor-seniors app guides, senior-friendly mobile accessories, and took it further with smartphone classes for seniors at Maxis centres.
This was one of 2017’s big successes with higher customer revenue, greater penetration of smartphones among the target segment, and double-digit growth in brand preference.
Ensemble executive business director Sean Wong says: “In marketing, we often go after the obvious target audience, making the millennials our default segment. However, more often than not, the business opportunity lies in truly understanding the data of each client’s category. By prioritising the diverse sub-segments, we ensure the clients’ limited resources are deployed optimally, including measuring key brand indicators for learning.”
For Nippon Paint, the challenge was to stand out despite a limited budget. Spray paint is a niche yet competitive category, hence it was important to be highly targeted and minimise wastage. The agency conducted an analytical exercise on Google trends and Facebook insights to find three specific communities that were the lowest hanging fruit for the product – parents with kids, bikers (lightweight) and cosplayers.
The team then gleaned real-time insights from these communities and created digital content in line with these learnings. The data also pointed to a small but powerful list of on-ground events run by these communities, and the brand invested in reaching out to the customers at these events.
“Strategising the path to purchase has been the holy grail for advertising, but the availability of data now means that we can predict the consumer’s journey to sale. With that we can make advertising a lot more accountable, going from being an awareness building tool to a sales generating machine, ensuring the return on investment of marketing spends stays healthy,” says Wong.
For Shell, the Ensemble team took on a brief for the Select retail store with the objective to drive footfall into the store, as most Shell customers pumped fuel and went on their way without actually entering the store.
The team identified the humble bottle of water as the product most consumers walked in to the store for. So to improve traffic into the Select store, the Ensemble design team, in collaboration with Boey, a renowned Malaysian comic artist, turned the bottles into limited edition collectables.
“We love collaborating with independent content creators... to have the opportunity to turn water bottles into a canvas to tell a story with Boey? That was really exciting.” says Chan Woei Hern. The team designed six unique wraps for the water bottle, with learnings from design thinking and product design.
Time capsules
These were like time capsules that were inspired from historical moments, and evoked nostalgia for Malaysia’s history, alongside Shell’s history in Malaysia over the last 125 years. These “Boey water2go bottles” doubled the traffic into the store.
Looking ahead, 2018 is a year when the advertising industry has to do more and speak less about the analytics-technology content mix. So what does the year have in store for Ensemble, and what are its plans to stay ahead of competition?
“There are many opportunities to learn and experiment... whether it is deep emotional analytics where unstructured qualitative consumer data will be mined for magic or it is the currently unexplored space of predicting a consumer’s journey to purchase,” Amit adds.
Clearly as data availability brings marketing, sales and strategy closer together, there will be new and bigger challenges. Only time will tell what the future holds, but for now, Ensemble has certainly made the right moves.
Another agency which showed its mettle at the Effies was Isobar Malaysia where it won one gold, three silver awards and Brand of the Year for its client Mudah.my.
There were only two gold Effies given out this year – Isobar’s campaign “Ho Ee Ki” for Mudah.my won one of it. Earlier this year, at the Kancil Awards, the same campaigns for Mudah.my won Isobar the prestigious Golden Kancil.
On the win, Isobar managing director Ben Chew says: “This year, out of 157 case submissions, only 36 were shortlisted as finalists, with 21 awards eventually given out, so Isobar’s win is even sweeter. I think the team did tremendously well against such stringent standards.”
One of the key reasons Isobar has a very successful run with Mudah.my is because the agency has a great collaborative partnership not just internally between its different teams, but also with its client.
“The strategy, client servicing and creative teams sat down to work out all the different angles; how we’d address the customer, working out the challenge and figuring a solution. We had three tissue sessions with the client and they were very involved and had strong input throughout the whole process, especially in the areas that required knowledge of their product and market dynamics. And the fact that I’ve worked together with Andrew Pinto for more than 10 years – so we are not just clients but friends – helped as well. That’s the best formula.”
Pinto is Mudah.my head of marketing.
To a question on the agency’s focus on entertainment-based ideas, Chew says it was a conscious decision to develop such ideas for Isobar’s festive campaigns with Mudah.my.
Given its exponential growth, he knew videos like YouTube and Instagram were doing well in the digital space. But for it to work, the videos needed to be very creative with a strong storytelling element to draw consumers in, Chew notes. “‘Great story that moves people, moves businesses” he stresses.
Touching on the ‘Ho Ee Ki’ (Let it go) video campaign and the turning of content into culture, Isobar executive creative director Liew Sanyen explains:
“If buying old items on Mudah. my was inauspicious, we turned ‘selling with Mudah.my’ an auspicious act you could do every Chinese New Year. We succeeded in making the phrase ‘Ho Ee Ki’ hugely popular among the Chinese community and rallied our consumers to understand, share and participate in the ritual of Ho Ee Ki. People loved the video so much, they demanded for a karaoke version!.”
A campaign well entrenched in the cultural context is always more than advertising – it is advertising that creates a stream of business fortune, Liew notes.
With the campaign, he says the agency was able to establish a yearly property that could be used to engage the Chinese community to transact on Mudah.my every Chinese New Year.
“If Alibaba’s Singles’ day is for buying, ‘Ho Ee Ki’ would be the first ever flagship property dedicated to selling,” he adds.
On how Mudah.my was successful in utilising data to validate the agency’s strategy and creative direction, Pinto says while the Ho Ee Ki campaign was creative in nature, it was backed by insights and data from multiple sources.
“Our internal data showed there was a drop in visits and listings among the Chinese community in the weeks leading up to Chinese New Year, indicating lower relevance. External research revealed that this was because of the taboo of buying second-hand items during this auspicious period.
“We then shifted our focus on getting the Chinese community to list and sell their unused items instead. The “aha” moment was when we uncovered the deep cultural insight among the Chinese community (especially the Hokkien community) that ‘you need to let go of clutter to welcome in greater prosperity’. And that inspired our campaign,’’ he says.