Profile - July'08

NEIL SAYS YOU DESERVE BETTER

In April 1997, upstart telco challenger M1 took just 30 days to take a 10% market share from SingTel following the liberalisation of the telcom sector. More than a decade later, CEO Neil Montefiore tells Marcus Chhan he's still up for the fight.

When M1 originally launched in Singapore in April 1997, after something of a false start - when freak winds derailed the launch ceremony at boat quay - the challenger entered the market on a platform of choice, where there was none.

Cut to 2008, a decade later and the battle is being fought on the field of content, and in particular football content. Last year Montefiore watched. He watched from the sidelines as rivals SingTel and StarHub went at it for the exclusive rights to show English Premiere League (EPL) football matches here. An estimated $250 million bid from StarHub would eventually send the champagne flowing StarHub's way and meant Singapore's leading pay-TV operator would broadcast EPL matches for the next three seasons as of July last year. It was a disappointment for SingTel, which had hoped to make EPL broadcast rights the crown jewel of its competing mioTV pay-TV service. The operator eventually consoled itself in March this year by winning the right to deny the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Cup for the 2009 to 2012 seasons to StarHub. Although StarHub reportedly did not bid for the broadcast rights. Will M1 now look to re-ignite familiar rivalries and battle on the content front? "Possibly," says Montefiore, but not for the hotly contested football content - perhaps he'll go for "Finnish fly-fishing", he jokes. Content may be king, but pricing it to please consumers can be a right royal pain. "Content is a tricky area... two players bid against each other for the EPL rights and the price goes up. Now the Champions League has moved over to another operator. I think it's very bad for consumers but how you address it I am not very sure, but obviously the marketing model isn't right," he says, adding current negotiation models hugely benefit the actual content owners.

However all may not be lost for consumers. The arrival of the next generation networks could address the situation with higher-speed broadband networks, making content sharing easier. "That's maybe two or three years away," Montefiore says. "It'll be five to ten before the content owners start to make deals directly with the consumer. One of the things we're thinking about is looking at content as a long tail and not even going for the four or five channels which people think are essential, but look at what appeals to a small group because there's enough of them out there," he says.

As M1 attempts to become a full-service provider Montefiore wants to keep the rebellious brand character. In 12 years the brand has gone through three advertising agencies before ending up with SingTel's former incumbent of 20 years Y&R Singapore in early 2008. The switch from TBWA\ to Y&R was rather abrupt considering the former had produced some good work for the brand. Locally at least, the agency helped M1 score the top accolade, as well as many laughs, for its "Free IDD Calls Indian Restaurant" TVC which won the local category of MediaCorp's Viewer's Choice 2007 survey. But Montefiore says it's important to refresh creative relationships to avoid going stale. So far the new gatekeepers for the M1 brand, Y&R, have continued the very human and good-humoured ambience of the campaign work. A recently launched integrated ad campaign themed "You Deserve Better", featuring TV and digital components, had Montefiore leading 40 company employees onto Orchard Road to collect feedback from shoppers and visitors. "We were looking to try and differentiate
ourselves a little bit. So we started off at Orchard Road but the bulk of the responses we got were done through the online site," he says. In response to the feedback, the company would later unveil two new tariff plans. M1 is using marketing to leverage on customer service as a differentiator for the brand which he says has been "quite hard" to do in the highly competitive telco market here. "In Singapore the networks are all of high quality so you can't really differentiate on the quality of service but we do try to do it on customer service - and the other is on the image perception of what M1 is about. So marketing is important to us," he says.

"I always think it's very difficult with marketing to be really sure of what value you get. It's an easy budget to cut during times of economic downturn. But marketing really does two things in my view. It can create awareness, and it can change perceptions. So if you get it right it works very well but quite often it doesn't work quite as well as you hoped it would with the money you put in," Montefiore says.

Since arriving in 1996, two years after Singapore announced liberalisation of the telcom sector, Montefiore's impact on marketing has been significant enough for the Institute of Advertising Singapore to confer him the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006 for "exceptional commitment and contributions to the advertising industry". M1 has certainly followed through on the promise of bringing choice to the Singapore telco category but Montefiore knows there are plenty of challenges ahead, like keeping it fresh in a me-too environment where it takes only months to replicate what any other operator is doing anywhere in the world. Branding is vital.

That postponement of the original M1 launch event at Boat Quay all those year's ago, due to damages sustained from freak winds was probably an omen that disruption would always be in the DNA of the brand.