Bates CHI&Partners Singapore grows planning team

Bates CHI&Partners Singapore has appointed Beau Encarnacion as senior planner. Encarnacion will be reporting to managing director Christina Chong (pictured) and regional strategy and planning director, Arvind Srivastava. As senior planner, he will be responsible for helping to build social, digital and through-the-line engagement planning capabilities.With more than five years of brand and digital planning experience in both Manila and Singapore, Encarnacion was most recently a digital strategist with branding agency FutureBrand where he was hired to champion digital brand strategy for clients’ integrated rebranding projects. Encarnacion joined Futurebrand Singapore in 2013 as its first and only digital and social media strategist to develop digital products and methodologies for their clients across Southeast Asia.Prior to Futurebrand, he was a senior digital planner with MRM Manila from 2012 to 2013. During his tenure at MRM, he was also involved in developing social media strategy for MRM’s Singapore office."The time I spent working on digital and social media campaigns has taught me that you need a hefty amount of balls to deal with so much change and uncertainty - which seems to be the only constant in the work that we do because of the way technology is rewiring people. Companies who get that are behaving more like start-ups, building a culture that emboldens people to innovate and learn by doing,” Encarnacion said.“Encarnacion is a great addition to the Bates CHI family. His experience in instigating critical change in social, digital and through-the-line environments is just the injection of new thinking we need to define our offering,” said Chong.