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#AOTYAwards MY 2021 spills: SCM ASIA's 'heartfelt' approach to clients' campaigns

#AOTYAwards MY 2021 spills: SCM ASIA's 'heartfelt' approach to clients' campaigns

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Founded in 2011, SCM ASIA is a corporate filmmaker from Malaysia that specialises in video content for website introductions, reception tv screens, promotional and marketing purposes. Among the list of brands the filmmaker has worked with include Saudi Oil Company, Telekom, Sunway Group, Marriot, HRDF, GSMA, Erricson, British American Tobacco, Samsung, Digi and Maxis, among others. Recently, SCM ASIA was also shortlisted as a finalist for Video / Production Company of the Year at A+M’s Agency of the Year Awards 2021. 

SCM ASIA's operation director, Ngeoh Jian Cong (pictured) told A+M  that the company believes in being an essential part of its client’s campaign success. As a result, the company tends to dive deep into the soul and emotion of the campaign, making it more effective in reaching clients' goals. "We aim to bring amazing stories to life without disregarding the client’s values and concepts. That’s what makes us different," he explained. 

Tell us about your agency and what makes it special?

Ngeoh: SCM ASIA is a filmmaking company with a great passion of delivering the client’s ideas through storytelling. Founded in 2011 with the former name Strangers Connection Media, we proceed on winning and been nominated for awards such as Wildlife Vaasa Film Festival 2018, WCPA Wildlife Conservation Award 2018, KLEFF Film Festival (twice - in 2019 & 2021), and A+M Agency of the Year Award - Video/Film Production Company of the Year 2021. SCM Asia's clients include Garena, Saudi Aramco, Top Glove, GSMA and many more.

Our versatility does not stop there. Three years ago, we gained confidence through those experiences and started to spread our wings by forming a division named TrueXR. This division is focusing more on exploring the storytelling art through extended reality (XR), augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, hologram capture, virtual production, and VR 3D filming. We utilise different technology to tell stories.

We believe in being an essential part of our client’s campaign success, that is why we dive deep to the soul and emotion of the campaign, thus it will be more effective in reaching the goal of the clients. We aim to bring amazing stories to life without disregarding the client’s values and concepts. That’s what makes us different.

What do you think is needed for agencies to succeed in today’s day and age?

Ngeoh: We started as just three young cowboys telling passionate contents, throughout the years (which is the big 10 this year). We adapt, learn, apply, relearn, and reapply. With the moving and changing trends and technology available in the market, being flexible and adaptive is a key. 

The aim is to be agile and innovative in producing contents. Keeping in touch with developing technologies like our new division creation TrueXR as well as observing the trends of the audiences.

Sometimes we just are required to be adaptable with our clients' situations. For instances one of the many occasion with our clients, we had to do a major add on as they are facing some challenges and requires some assistance to do more than just contents, from three videos into six videos, music composition, recording and merchandising for their campaign all this while it’s a tight deadline to meet our Raya Festival. But we love the challenge and keeping in mind to win the campaign together we gathered our resources and made it all happen. So when we are dealing with new challenges from any client taking a step back and identifying goals of the campaigns and breaking it down into smaller chunks are the most effective way to approach this. Always remembering our client’s success is our success, having a collaborative approach instead of a vendor.

How do you attract the right talent for your teams?

Ngeoh: To work efficiently, a team must be united in a singular aim although in their separated respective duties. We work on multiple projects at a time and the team will take on different roles based on their expertise. At times we let them explore different roles if they are interested in discovering and learning new things.

But the expectation and quality will not be compromised as I personally will look into every single output. So, although it is based on individual responsibilities we target to complete the story by diving deep into the campaign's objectives on a collective approach. We exhibit our core values and working culture publicly. New talents identify with us and engage for an application.  We are not a huge team but we are definitely lean and mean.

What do you think makes for great client-agency relationships today?

Ngeoh:

In client-agency relationships, communication is the most vital element followed by trust and transparency.

Both sides should have effective communication that works two ways. To constantly provide great values to the clients, their goals should be in the forefront of our mind. So we study our client’s audiences, values, aims and goals. We put aside a client versus vendor approach and put on a lets win this together approach. We don’t always say yes to every idea, nor do we say no to everything. But if the idea is justifiable and contributes to the success of the campaign it’s a sure go, mainly we are passionate about a story that can bring success to our client’s campaign objectives.

One of our values to maintain a good relationship with the clients, is being adaptable which means we will patiently study, understand, and professionally provide the best solutions regardless of the challenging situations that we may face from our clients of different industries. Sometimes it could be a logistical challenge, deadlines, assets and resources limitations. We adapt and creatively resolve it. On one of the many occasions, we were to cover a 10 episode documentary “Discovering Langkawi with Irshad Mubarak”. In order to be more effective, we moved our entire operations to Langkawi for 6 months to complete the production. In concurrent with other projects still ongoing, a different team and myself will travel back to KL and return again.  

What capabilities will you build on as we head into 2022?

Ngeoh: This pandemic is an eye opening situation where we can see how important it is to be kept up with the developing technologies. It teaches us to be adaptive to cope with it. In order to enhance our capabilities, we venture into new ways to create videos amid the pandemic. TrueXR had a great start, now it's on the right path to pave the route of new ways in making extended reality videos. We believe future media consumption will shift to immersive technology. Coming 2022, we will be offering cutting edge immersive technology solutions and services to help clients and brands to communicate to audiences.

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