#AOTYAwards 2021 spills: How Vicinity Studio packs a punch despite being a young team

Vicinity Studio is a content production agency based in Singapore and founded in 2017. Focused on building spatially conscious interpersonal relationships between individuals, Vicinity Studio specialises in advertising, branded content and corporate videos, animated video production, illustration, and graphic design, as well as corporate and event photography. Among the list of brands, Vicinity Studio has worked with include Changi Airport Group, Hasbro, Meiji, and BOSCH. It was also ranked as a finalist for the Video/Production Company of the Year category at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE's Agency of the Year Awards 2021.

Founder and managing director of Vicinity Studio, Kevin Ng (pictured), told MARKETING-INTERACTIVE that the agency's focus on community has always been the backbone of its identity, and he is proud to say that Vicinity Studio has never wavered in this over the years.

This interview is done as part of MARKETING-INTERACTIVE’s winners' and finalists’ interview series for AOTY Awards 2021. To find out more about the awards, click here.

Tell us what this achievement mean for you?

Ng: For us at Vicinity Studio, we are glad to even have the opportunity to be shortlisted as one of the finalists, taking into consideration that most of the participants for this award were much more established and bigger in scale than us. As a young company, we are always striving to improve ourselves, and we aim to create an enjoyable and seamless experience for our clients. We are glad to even have this opportunity to be recognised for the efforts we have put in since 2017.

What makes you proudest about being part of your agency?

Ng: I guess we are an agency run by young people, with young people. I am currently 26 years old, and the medium age in the company is 26. I am glad to be part of a young team and it allows us to focus more on the social impact we create with our campaigns.

Our focus on community has always been the backbone of our agency’s identity, and I am proud to say that we have never wavered in this over the years. While our scale of operations expands and we get higher profile companies in our clientele, we still care heavily about non-profit and community projects, always making sure we are serving the world around us.

What are some of the initiatives you have in place to ensure your staff feel proud to be associated with your agency?

Ng: To us, working together in an agency would be to build trust. After all, the more trust we have as a team, the more challenges we can overcome. We tend to have initiatives to build openness and trust, hoping to build a tribalism culture and to find our commonalities. From there, when problems arrive, it helps us to overcome them easily and to feel proud when we achieve together.

How are you attracting talent to your agency?

Ng: We hope to attract talents by providing an experience of effective feedback. We aim to focus on feedback that provides a solution, with empathy. With that mindset, it allows me and new talents to grow ourselves, expanding our own Johari window, and evolving ourselves, to be better at what we do. It requires regular practice of asking for and receiving good quality feedback. Since our age group isn’t that wide too, it’s been our main form of attraction. It works, at least for us.

What are your hopes for the Singapore advertising scene in 2021?

Ng: We hope that more would challenge the things we hear and go against the briefs that were set. After all, advertising is to solve problems. Not just purely executing your job. Think about why we are doing this.