With
an ongoing retainer partnership, the Christmas
Wonderland campaign was our fifth
campaign collaboration with Montagut within the span of the past 18
months on the Chinese market. Don’t get fooled — Christmas is an
increasingly significant event in the marketing calendars for most
brands in the Mainland and it’s getting harder and harder to stand
out among all the merry buzz.
But
Christmas wasn’t the sole reason that Montagut wanted to celebrate
with their fans in China. The second reason was the launch of
Montagut’s new
Winter 2020 collection
with one of the goals for the end of 2019 being to communicate the
arrival of the new garments and styles.
Our
solution to gracefully feature both new collection and holiday spirit
was a H5 WeChat game set in a French winter wonderland. Bespoke and
dreamy graphics combined with hooking tapping game mechanism made
this game an instant hit with Montagut’s existing followers as well
as nearly 10,000 new fans.
According
to
Candice Meyer,
Head of Brand Image & Communications Asia at
Montagut, “This campaign
was very fun and engaging. Beyond generating buzz and page views,
KRDS was smart to find the right mechanism to attract a very high
number of new fans”.
Miriam
Dabrowa, Senior Communication
Strategist at KRDS Greater China, said: “With
the new opportunities coming in 2020, and especially Montagut’s
140th Anniversary, we truly
can’t wait to create new exciting content together”.
Some
of the KRDS’ clients include Vivo, BNP Paribas, Hong Kong
Disneyland, Meiji, BreadTalk, Toast Box, Volkswagen, AIA, Unilever,
Sony, WWF, Grand Hyatt.
This week, Facebook launched a new mobile version of its Creator Studio tool, with a separate Creator Studio app to help better manage your Facebook Pages OTG. You’ll be able to manage and edit Page posts, view performance analytics and respond to messages – with the added capacity to manage multiple Facebook Pages through the app.
Facebook Tests New Format for Separate Facebook Stories Discovery Page
Facebook has continued its onward march with Facebook Stories by testing out a new format for its separate Stories discovery page, which can be accessed by tapping on the ‘See All Stories’ prompt underneath the main Facebook Stories bar.
Twitter Suspends a ‘Large Network’ of Fake Accounts Used to Match Phone Numbers to Users
Security researcher Ibrahim Balic found that a bug in Twitter’s Android app let him submit millions of phone numbers through an official API, which returned any associated user account.
The feature is intended to let friends look up your Twitter handle through your number, but obviously submitting millions of numbers goes “beyond its intended use case”.
Facebook Tests Easier Access to Chronological News Feed and Other Feed
The test provides three different variations of the News Feed in separate tabs, which would be accessible along the top of the feed list.
The three versions are:
Most Relevant – Which is the current, default algorithm-defined feed view.
Most Recent – Which would enable you to see the latest posts from the people and Pages you follow in reverse chronological order.
Already Seen – Which would enable you to go back over the posts you’re already viewed, which could be handy for finding that thing you saw a while back.
Facebook Testing New Color Highlighting for Links and Hashtags in Post Text
The tests show links, tags and hashtags to be in Facebook blue colour as opposed to the current black bold. This would help them stand out in the copy and grab the attention of the user.
These can be a game-changer by helping create value to the customer by showing them only relevant information and also to the marketer by giving them the best returns on investment and value to the brand through increased brand loyalty.
Volume: The volume of customer data for analysis, which is used to develop a personalized experience is huge.
Variety: The variety of data points that are unstructured and can be collected from many sources like social media posts, purchasing patterns, photos, and videos, etc helps create a persona for each customer.
Veracity: Thanks to AI algorithms, the data is becoming more reliable. It helps brands derive accurate insights and marketing plans from their strategy.
Velocity: The frequency with which brands can generate data and analyze it is critical for the success of personalization.
Facebook Will Shutter Audience Network for Mobile Sites
The decision may be in response to recent changes by companies like Google and Apple to limit audience tracking with third-party cookies amid growing concerns about privacy and brand safety.
Google Chrome is blocking intrusive ad formats within short-form videos from 5 August 2020. More specifically, the ad formats affected will be:
Long, non-skippable pre-roll ads or groups of ads longer than 31 seconds that appear before a video and that cannot be made to skip within the first five seconds
Mid-roll ads of any duration that appear in the middle of a video, interrupting the user’s experience
Image or text ads that appear on top of a playing video and are in the middle (⅓ of the video player window) or cover more than 20% of the video content
Instagram is Testing a New Trimming Tool for Instagram Stories Clips
Instagram is working on a new video trimming feature for Instagram Stories, which would make it easier to edit and upload your Stories clips within the app.
Instagram Adds New Listings of ‘Least Interacted With’ and ‘Most Shown in Feed’ in Following Tab
Instagram has rolled out two new category listings within your ‘Following’ tab which will enable you to see which accounts get the most visibility in your feed, and which ones you rarely engage with.
TikTok Provides Option to Upload Content via Desktop
This could be handy for digital marketers looking to make use of the rising video app TikTok. Users can now upload TikTok videos via the desktop version of the app.
The half-life of a content piece is the time it takes for it to reach 50% of its overall expected engagement.
Twitter: 20 minutes
Twitter utilizes short-form content, simple “tweets” and small comments to relay information across users. So content spreads the fastest on this platform.
Facebook: 5 hours
While Facebook has over 2 billion active users daily, it has a large number of ways information can be relayed. For eg. pictures, videos, written content, stories, comments, shares, etc. Also, due to the traffic on Facebook, it takes a relatively long time for content to reach its half-life.
Instagram: 20 hours
Instagram is a lot slower in relaying content amongst its users. While its algorithm tries to boost pictures at all times, its main focus remains to be visually compelling and most of its user interface is filled with space-consuming pictures that increase the average half-life of any content shared on the platform.
LinkedIn: 24 hours
LinkedIn is for professionals, for the most part, and there isn’t a lot of traffic on the platform, so content pieces should have a low half-life. But on the other hand, LinkedIn is mostly used for job searching, profiling and lead generation. It doesn’t focus on boosting content on the feed but rather boosting companies on its job portal.
YouTube: 20 days
In the case of YouTube, such a long half-life is because of two reasons: 1. The high volume of traffic and 2. Even higher volume of videos. With a market as saturated as YouTube, videos are bound to take their time to reach their half-life.
Pinterest: 4 months
Pinterest is a huge platform cataloging millions of creatives and pictures, but the lack of social experience has only gotten it low traffic and a high bounce rate.
Blog post: 2 yrs
The only way blogs get traction organically is through SEO. But for any blog post, there may be 50 other blogs with the same keyword that may have the same content strength or may exist on a domain far older and stronger. SEO is a long-term strategy game that only gets better through testing, experience, and patience.
Instagram is Testing Emoji Reactions for Direct Messages
As with Twitter’s recently launched DM reactions tools, given the availability of similar response functionality on other messaging platforms, it makes sense for Instagram to move in-step, tapping into habitual messaging behavior in order to facilitate more engagement. It’s worth noting that Instagram also already has a ‘quick reactions’ emoji response process for Stories.
Instagram Officially Begins Testing of DMs in its Desktop Version
After being spotted in testing months ago, Instagram is now officially launching a test of direct message access in its desktop version and is going to slowly roll out to the public.
Instagram is Adding a New Way to Find and Share Stories that Mention Your Profile
Instagram has added a new Stories @ mention option, which highlights any Stories that mention your profile, and enables you to easily re-share them into your own Stories stream.
Google is Working on Chatbots Which Can Engage in a More Genuine, Human Conversation
Google has built a new chatbot model called Meena, which is trained on a 2.6 billion parameter end-to-end neural conversational model and can conduct conversations that are more sensible and specific than existing bots.
Facebook Reportedly Won’t Go Through With Whatsapp Ads
With Facebook dropping its plans to put up ads on WhatsApp, the latter will be focusing on building features for its business users. A large number of people use WhatsApp for their businesses. The company has been rolling out features that can aid small to medium scale companies and they are expected to stay on this path for now.
Wildlife Reserves Singapore has recently extended its partnership with KRDS Singapore for the third year since 2017to grow its presence on Facebook and Instagram.
KRDS Singapore is now its agency of record, managing social media needs across its 4 parks, Singapore Zoo, Night Safari, River Safari, and Jurong Bird Park. KRDS Singapore has won the business after a pitch process that started in March 2019.
On top of creating educational and awareness-driven content about animals, KRDS Singapore will also be responsible for consultation, conceptualising and executing campaigns throughout the period of appointment.
The goal for this renewal is to further engage with both locals and visitors with innovative and immersive content, and drive them further down the conversion funnel with detailed analytics.
Muhd Hidayat,
Account Director at KRDS, said:
“We are excited to continue on this remarkable journey with Wildlife Reserves Singapore, which started off 3 years ago. The team at Wildlife Reserves Singapore encourages innovation and we are confident that our digital expertise combined with progressive strategies will take it to greater heights.”
Singapore’s leading caterer, Neo Garden Catering has
been serving up delicious food since its inception in the early 90s. It has
become one of the trusted names in catering for their ability to offer
high-quality food to both large crowds & small gatherings. Neo Garden Catering has partnered with KRDS
Singapore for another year to grow their presence on Facebook and Instagram.
2018’s goal was to promote Neo Garden Catering as the one-stop caterer that truly empowers its customers with the experience of a personalised unique celebration for every occasion. One of the biggest highlights of 2018 was Neo Garden Catering’s Chinese New Year Game Microsite that ran for a period of 20 days. The microsite was designed to provide individuals to have his or her fortune read ahead of the Lunar New Year. Fans could then go on to redeem gift vouchers and a chance to participate in the Grand Lucky Draw (Grand Prize of $888). Over 1,500 people had their fortune read and 800 vouchers were out!
The goal for this renewal is to enable fans to create
new memories and celebrate important milestones, with Neo Garden Catering
playing an integral role towards these celebrations.
The content on social will focus strongly on
micro-moments – moments when users celebrate and drive conversations.
The agency will also be developing an
Instagram-focused content strategy and explore different types of Instagram
Stories and interactive formats to weave an engaging brand story.
Amantha Koh, Assistant Marketing
Manager at Neo Garden Catering, said:
“Working
with KRDS Singapore has been a great experience and rebranding of our Facebook
has been a success. The team has also been very up to date with the latest
trends and often updating us on their new features, innovation and ideas. We
are looking forward to working with KRDS again.
Muhd Hidayat,
Account Director at KRDS, said:
“It gives us
immense pleasure to partner with the No.1 caterer in Singapore once again and
be a part of their journey. We look forward to bringing our comprehensive
digital knowledge to help Neo Garden Catering build a strong community on
social and to establish the brand as the go-to caterer for any events and
occasions.”
Amadeus is a leading technology company in the travel industry. As part of their extensive portfolio of IT solutions for travel players, they launched a business travel solution tailored and perfected for the Middle East and Africa region.
Changing how the world travels, is Amadeus mission statement. So offering an online booking tool for companies to manage business travel, including the specifics of our region made perfect sense.
The solution is called Amadeus Online Corporate Traveller. It is basically an online travel booking portal dedicated to business travels. It is accessible on desktop and mobile, that acts as an online self-booking tool) and also offers an expense management module.
Delphine Delebarre, AmadeusMarketing Manager for Middle East and Africa:
“We were looking for a digital marketing agency to build an impactful campaign to raise awareness about our corporate travel online solution and encourage our target audience (corporations in the Middle East) to request a free demo. When I met KRDS, I liked their humble but professional approach and the fact they already had expertise with other travel players. Our collaboration was seamless, fully transparent and based on regular communication. They are professionals and we really benefited from their expertise.”
KRDS Middle East and Amadeus join hands for an interactive online activation tailor-made for the Middle East and Africa region to make business travel booking niftier. Amadeus is a leading technology company that is a powerhouse for making travel simpler. It is a key player in the technology sector. Amadeus help connect over 1.6 billion people a year to local travel providers in over 190 countries.
So when Amadeus launched Amadeus Online Corporate Traveller, they worked in collaboration with KRDS Middle East to promote the tool across the Middle East and Africa.
The campaign was meant to create an appetite, a sense of awareness and not just to create leads, which ultimately ended up happening thanks to a tool that acts as a holistic approach upheld by a Facebook & LinkedIn campaign to manage and redefine business travel in the region, and showcase added values of Amadeus Online Corporate Traveller for businesses, such as control business travel costs, facilitated multi level approval process, and quick implementation as per companies travel policies.
KRDS, conceptualized a tailor-made content approach and an ad strategy staying in line with Amadeus needs, hence a globalized content video came to light from KRDS to seek as well as enable awareness for the right target audience. Apart from the global video, 4 other shorter videos were produced by KRDS for a specific target segment and the approach was to create a unique experience. The Self-Booking system (Amadeus Online Corporate Traveller) was not only for the business travelers across the region but also suited for the Procurement and IT departments.
Below is a message from the General Manager of KRDS Middle East, Mr. Leonard Guillermin-Hazan who shares his thoughts on the campaign that ran for 1 month under his supervision:
“Amadeus has been at the forefront of innovation when it comes to travel technology. We’re pleased to have joined with such a name like Amadeus to uphold one of their newest tools. We at KRDS trust our social media capability and mobile-first approach will benefit the company reach many new consumers and lead to more business conversions.”
KRDS Singapore recently welcomed 5 senior hires to the China and Singapore offices to lead and grow different departments in their respective markets.
Joining the Senior Account Management team, we have Ken Tham (pictured first from right) who has over 6 years of experience working with both B2C and B2B brands such as P&G, Porsche, Spotify, Airbnb, Boeing, Montblanc, and HPE. Before this, Ken was an Account Manager at Ketchum where he managed up to 7 to 9 team members for both social, digital and PR work.
Shu Qi Lee (pictured second from right)from Hashmeta has joined as a Senior Account Manager in the Singapore office. She served as Account Manager and subsequently, Senior Account Manager, in Hashmeta. She has managed a few regional brands and has helped grow their digital presence. Some of them were Bosch Home Appliances Asia Pacific, TÜV Rheinland Asia & Africa, DaVinci Gourmet Asia, Tramontina South Asia and NTUC LearningHub. Shu led and won the pitch for the DaVinci Gourmet Asia social media account and spearheaded lead generation campaigns for her ex- clients, DaVinci Gourmet and NTUC LearningHub, through an effective mix of content and visual strategy, media planning & buying and gamification solutions, and results achieved exceeded the clients’ expectations. She also successfully streamlined and improved workflow and processes within the agency for better team performance and client satisfaction.
Yoganand Raju (pictured third from right) will lead the KRDS Design Team to grow their
creative capabilities.
As a Creative Director at Rubecon Communications more than 6 years, he led creatives for the key accounts of the agency and worked closely with the client and the internal teams to deliver the best creative solutions for the brand. Yoga was managing teams across the department from copywriters to brand managers and other stakeholders to ensure a seamless flow of creative deliverables that are maintained at industry standards. He ensured the studio personnel are brought up to speed with the latest updates of Adobe CC and worked on design and strategy for new client pitches. He also collaborated with an array of talents such as photographers, illustrators, retouching artist etc from the country and overseas to produce the best creative solutions for the brand.
Some of the key brands that he handled were Amazon.in, Nippon Paint India, Hatsun dairy products, Arun Icecreams, Ibaco, Oyalo Pizza, The Times of India, Beverly Hills Polo Club, SPI Cinemas, Dalmia Bharath Cements, Schwarzkopf Professional, Star Health Insurance, TVS, Sundram Fasteners.
Mia Kuang (pictured fourth from right) will head the Community Management Team in Shanghai. Previously from MSLGROUP China, she worked with global brands like IKEA, P&G Pampers, Melco Resorts & Entertainment. Her expertise includes social media (WeChat) management and digital strategy planning. Mia led a team to maintain WeChat accounts for IKEA (3 million+ followers) and successfully attracted about 1 million+ followers in a year. She supported ‘Make Room for Life’ Campaign for IKEA, which won the Work of Excellence of MSL Global Awards; and also successfully helped her team to win new businesses including Philips, Lexington Home Brands and Rothy’s.
Miriam Dabrowa (pictured fifth from right) joined as a Senior Digital Strategist for Shanghai. Miriam was employed at We Are Social as a Global Team Project Manager and has helped Chinese brands create a global impact in the digital world. In particular, she worked on a successful campaign for Vivo Mobile during the FIFA World Cup, she helped win for her agency the award for Mumbrella Best Localisation of Global Strategy for the campaign “Inspiring Bonding Moments” for TCL. She also was largely responsible for the growth of the JAC Motors global accounts for more than 2 years.
Commenting on the rapid expansion Preetham
Venkky, Director at KRDS Asia said:
“We are excited about growing the KRDS
family across the various countries we are in. With these new strategic senior
hires, we’re confident of delivering more exciting and innovative campaigns to
existing clients and partnering with new brands. We’re confident that 2019 will
prove to be another fruitful year for KRDS
Omron is a trusted name in Healthcare. It has been providing technologically advanced medical monitoring equipment over the past 40 years. Over the past years, they have been recognized for their smart healthcare devices. The trusted brand has renewed its contract with KRDS Singapore for the fourth year in a row since its initial signing in 2015. The renewal arose after KRDS has enabled the brand to amplify their overall reach and engagement in 2018.
The goal for 2019 is to position Omron as the go-to-brand for Healthcare at home. The brand has exciting products in the pipeline which will be a great addition to their current roster of smart devices. The agency will be customizing content to suit the brand’s new positioning. The focus for this year is on video content as they’ve proven to perform better on Facebook. KRDS will be creating more innovative and immersive content for Singapore and Malaysia on Facebook by making use of all the features the platform has to offer.
Commenting on the renewal Preetham Venkky, Director at KRDS Asia said: “We are humbled and stoked to be working with Omron for another exciting year. 2018 has been a wonderful year where we’ve learnt and grown from each other’s expertise. We’re excited to explore new content formats and visual styles to tell the brand’s story on Facebook. We’re hopeful that we’ll continue to build our relationship with Omron and reach new heights together.
Tang Pei Yi, Assistant Marketing Manager at OMRON HEALTHCARE SINGAPORE PTE LTD, said: “We value the long-term relationship with KRDS as our Facebook agency for the past four years. KRDS has demonstrated strong capabilities in producing quality and relevant content to engage our target audience. What is more important is that KRDS provided much professionalism to ensure the work is produced in a timely manner and input for effective audience targeting and reach out. We look forward to another great year of collaboration with KRDS!”
