Essence charts APAC growth

Essence has promoted Kyoko Matsushita to managing director of APAC, overseeing both the Tokyo and Singapore operations.In this role, she oversees the operations for both Essence’s Singapore and Tokyo offices.  Matshushita has experience working with brands like Sony and EA and agencies like Leo Burnett in London.The agency first opened its doors in Singapore in 2013.Since then, it has made several key hires. In October of 2014, it named Kunal Guha client and strategy director of Essence APAC, and in August 2014, James Foreman as associate director of analytics. Both executives are Singapore-based.Foreman is responsible for a variety of functions, from education and training, strategic planning, technical implementation and analysis of results, but remains focused on extracting meaningful insights from data to guide and inspire the client to greater heights.Foreman worked for 15 years in a variety of roles in the online travel industry, surviving the first dot-com crash and driving data-centric approaches for businesses in small start-ups and online behemoths, covering forecasting, revenue management, performance marketing and business improvements. He has held marketing and analytics roles at AAE Travel, Expedia, Holiday Extras and lastminute.com.Guha previously served as the marketing communications practice director of APAC for Hill & Knowlton Strategies.  He was also the regional director of Asia for PI Global and held several strategy and business growth roles for M&C Saatchi and Sapient.The agency also opened its Tokyo office in August 2014.