Ed's Letter - Nov07

Round 1, fight!

The spirit of the competition is one which doesn't leave any industry, not least the advertising, marketing and media business. And this past month has seen its fair share of triumphs, failures, and even a couple of knock outs!

For a start, Mark Burnett Productions' The Contender, the first international reality series produced for the global market and filmed in Singapore, is being filmed at a secret location as I type this. I had the privilege of attending the filming of two of the Muay Thai fights and it was almost immediately apparent how easy it was to transition from the initial apprehension of watching men beat each other up to appreciating their sportsmanship and respect for the game to all out cheering and jeering and getting caught up in the action.

The best part was meeting co-executive producer for Mark Burnett Productions, Scot Cru, and hearing first hand a Hollywood perspective on what goes into marketing and producing worldwide a hit (pun intended) series. Look out for the interview in the upcoming December edition.

Closer to home, agencies (and one production house) took the competition from clients' meeting rooms onto the literal pitch - at The Cage to be specific - shredding each other to bits to win the inaugural Institute of Advertising Singapore ACTIVE Challenge. The industry-only five-a-side football tournament saw TBWA walk away as the champions but what was also noteworthy was the effort put into the participation. Every agency turned up in matching jerseys, and some even rented buses to ferry their entire cheering squad, with banners and booze to boot.

A key point to note about the Challenge was that the credit for the win not only goes to the eight or so brave souls who took to the pitch, but goes to the agency as an entity and stays with it for the entire year before moving on to a new home with the next winning shop. Staff may come and go but the spirit of the agency lives on.

And talking about staff movements, it was timely for me to meet with the chief creative officer for Saatchi & Saatchi in NE Asia and Greater China, Peter Soh, at the recent Engage 2007 conference by Leo Burnett. Soh was one of the early Singapore creatives who found China a more fertile market for the Singapore brand of creativity and moved there about eight years ago. And the person who introduced us happened to be another Singapore creative heavyweight, Ng Tian It, who himself leaves town for Lowe China on 22 October.

Local advertising and marketing chiefs often bemoan the lack of talent here, but seems to have difficulty valuing and rewarding the pool of talented individuals already here. It seems like a catch-22 situation, really, fighting to attract and grow new talent takes the focus away from the problem of departing talent, which is salt in the shortage of talent wound.

What seems to also be facing a downturn, is the average issue readership of regional magazine titles, as measured by Synovate's regular PAX survey. On page 35, I posed the question to Synovate's Steve Garton and he said the impact of digital media is really larger than some marketers allow themselves to believe but publishers should not worry because they are building strong audiences online and if those numbers are combined with print readership figures, we'd be able to see that overall readership remains "steady".

If that's true, publishers will be facing the happy problem of learning how to successfully monetise their online properties in the battle for more dollars. As we can see, so far the mix of paid and advertising-sponsored content has been the topic of a few discussions in the media world and there's not one method which can apply for everyone. Different strokes for different folks.

So whether you're a media property owner, an agency, or a client marketer, make sure you keep those boxing gloves well maintained because the fight's not over. It's only just beginning. Cheers to fair play.

Debbie Cai

editor