• TechinAsia has covered them a few times in the past 4 months:
  • Meet up: How CocCoc plans to take down Google in Vietnam.
  • CocCoc plans to spend 100 million to beat Google in Vietnam.
  • CocCoc another big vietnamese search engine
• Coc Coc was even talked about on CNN

Wada got attention when it was launched last year as well, you could refer to the link here. 

There are talks that Naver is going to bring its search engine to Vietnam soon. However the engine is still under development and not been launched yet.

So what we would talk about in this post besides what was already said about them?

First of all, building a search engine is hard! It is so hard that not many countries in the world has its own local search engines. You could refer to my post on search engine market share around the world Mar 2013.

Google has no competitor when it comes to English (at least for now) or French or Spanish or German etc…

Only in countries like China, Korea, Russia that we see strong local search engines (more market share than Google). So the fact that we have a few attempts at building a better local search engine in Vietnam is really encouraging! I would salute friends, teams behind Coccoc, Wada or Naver because they are trying to do something really really hard!

Secondly, let’s take a look at these Google’s challengers in Vietnam from an user point of view.

If Coc Coc or Wada or Naver want to gain the heart and mind of Vietnamese users, their search engines need to be much better than Google. Why? because Google has become a “verb” in Vietnamese, when people think about Search, they think of Google. It has become a regular habit. So if you want users to change their habit, your search engine probably needs to be 10 times better than Google.

Secondly, they would need a great “go to market” strategy that could be sustained over time. We know from history that Google founders wanted to develop a browser quite early on but Eric Schmidt advised them not to until after Google became a very powerful Global company in 2008 (10 years after the company was founded).

Google is heavily promoting Chrome in the world at the moment, including SouthEast Asia and Vietnam of course. On mobile front, the majority of Android devices have Chrome as the default browser.

And what is the default search engine on Chrome on desktop and mobile? It’s Google. Even with OS X, the default search engine on Safari is Google as well. So what Coc Coc or any other search engines need to do is either to convince users somehow to type in coccoc.vn everything they want to search for something, set coccoc.vn as their starting page every time they open a new tab/browser, tied up with PC manufacturer to have CocCoc pre set as the default search engine on their browsers etc…

Coc Coc did launch its own browser based on the same open source based as Google called chromium. The browser is called corom.vn (or Cờ Rôm +), which indicates that it is an “expansion” or add on to Chrome with more functions. 

Let’s see how Coc Coc and Wada perform vs Google. This is very crude way of doing this of course because to evaluate the quality, you need to run large sample size and have a rigorious methodology behind it.

1. Why do we use Search Engine?

Well this is a no brainer. Very few of us use Search Engine to have fun, the same way we listen to music or watch movies or playing games. We use Search Engine because we need to look for something, a piece of information, a solution, an address etc…

We express our intention/need at that time via search query (keyword). Search query could be short ( 1 word) or long (multiple words 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or more). In Vietnam, the search query could be in Vietnamese, or Vietnamese without diacritics, in English, French, a combination of both English and Vietnamese (like “thẻ visa card”). The content that we are looking for could be local content (in this context it means sites in Vietnamese) or could be International content (not limited to English, could be French, Italian).

I would assume that content in Vietnamese is the area Coccoc, Wada or Naver wants to excel vs Google, not the English, French or any other foreign language content because that would mean building a search engine to compete with Google globally, not just locally and well, that is just NOT the case here.

Ok so let’s go through some scenarios to see how Coccoc, Wada perform?

2. Navigational queries

Navigational queries are used to find a specific website. Sometimes people would forget the URL that they want to visit, or they don’t know and they want to find out.

It could be like: hsbc vietnam, lotte cinema, pizza hut le thanh ton, vnexpress, mead johnson vietnam, or even “Coc Coc”. For this type of queries, the first result (or top 3 results) is very important because users want to see what they are looking for immediately at the top of the page.

Let’s try and test out a few queries on the three search engines and see how the results are:

2.1 Case number 1 “hsbc vietnam”

This is the result from CocCoc

and this is the unpersonalized results from Google.

As you could see from the two screenshots, Coc Coc assumes that I am looking for the location of HSBC Vietnam, hence presenting me with lots of location data up front and then the official HSBC website in Vietnam. Search result from Coc Coc (as you could see my note on the picture), has the title the same as the meta title taken from HSBC code, and the description from one of the latest news.

For Google, for UN-personalized search results, they don’t assume that I am looking for HSBC branch location and presents me 6 sitelinks from: Personal banking, online banking, exchange rate, interest rate, contact information and loan.

Personally I would prefer the result from Google in this case because I am not looking for HSBC branch locations based on my query “hsbc vietnam“. I am looking for HSBC official site.

If you notice, I stress quite a bit on the Un-personalized search results, it is because since a long time ago, Google has been customized organic search results based on individual. Yes, you read it right, the organic search result that you see on Google while you search is different from mine, even though we both do not sign in to Google accounts (Gmail or any other services). The search result is customized based on your location, your past search history, your sharing on Google plus, and other signals. You could read more about it here. With Google Now, Google promises right information, at the right time, before you even ask for it. But let’s not go there yet, it’s beyond the scope of this post.

It would be very hard to compare Coc Coc or Wada with Google personalized Search for for the remaining of this post, I will solely focus on Un-Personalized Search results.

As for Wada, while I type in my keyword, besides auto complete being accurate in this case (just like Google and Coc Coc), Wada offer the HSBC Vietnam URL even before I type Enter. It’s better than Coc Coc from the auto complete point of view, but still a very very far behind Google Instant from my point of view.

Also, I don’t like number 2 and number 3 search results from Wada because they are just bad. I am not looking for information about HSBC from some weird website like news.vn or do I want to download an app about HSBC from appstore.vn??? Sorry I may be paranoid with security but I am not going to download an internet banking app from a place like appstore.vn or even Google Play. So presenting me the results like that are just bad. 

With navigational queries, I don’t really care about any results below the fold so I am not commenting further on results from 4 until 10 from each search engines. While they are important no doubt, it’s just that this post will be very long if I do so.

2.2 Case number 2 “Pizza hut le thanh ton”

The result from Google is quite optimal with the map, the official site on top 1 position.

Below is the result from CocCoc.vn for “pizza hut le thanh ton”

And this is from Wada.vn:

In this scenario, it is clear that Google offers the best results with both map on top, the official site is at the top position as well. CocCoc comes in the second place from my point of view because while it has the result from CocCoc map service to compensate for the official site being at the number 5 position. Wada is the worst, it does not show me any map on top position and the official site is at number 6 position.

If you ask why I use Vietnamese without the diacritics, my answer would be from the search volume on Google, more often than not, users in Vietnamese search without the diacritics. Of course this is not 100% of the time.

2.3 Case number 3 “vnexpress” as the keyword

The results from Google, CocCoc and Wada are below:

Again, Google fares very well in this example with vnexpress.net is the first result together with 6 sitelinks, deep linking into the site. I really like the title and the description provided by Google for each sub section within VnExpress site.

Wada.vn is not bad with the top result being the official vnexpress.net site with reasonable title and description.

CocCoc is the worst in this case with the description that is very very “weird” to say the least. I don’t think this description is a good description of what Vnexpress is about:

“Sau một thời gian “hết sức cố gắng” cùng rất nhiều lời tư vấn từ bác sỹ tâm lý, tôi đã “được” mất trinh, sex với tôi là một cực hình. Tôi không thích sex với anh, tôi sợ … © Copyright 1997-2013 VnExpress.net, All rights reserved”. It is basically a comment from user or something like “after a long period of trying and with lots of advices from doctors, I lost my virginity, sex is like torture to me. I don’t like sex etc…”

3. Informational queries

With informational queries, the information itself is the goal, and no interaction beyond clicking and reading is required. It could contribute to transactional queries but it’s not it.

For example, I could try to search for “the weather tomorrow in Ha Noi”, “how to roast a chicken”, “why my baby is crying in the middle of the night”, “what to do when you are expecting a baby”, “what to prepare if you want to travel by yourself to Australia”, “address of the Karaoke place”, “things to do in Sapa”, “latest movies by Jason Stratham”, “when a certain celebrity was born” etc,… As you can see, informational queries do cover a wide range.

3.1 “How to roast a chicken” case

The Vietnamese phrase for that is “cách làm món gà nướng”. Below is the result from Google.

from CocCoc

and from Wada.vn

From the above screenshots, for CocCoc, it starts with a particular restaurant and then follows up by video clips from other video sources. Wada has few good results from position 1 to 3, but then it shows a very weird “hot news” result, which is not related to the keyword at all.

Update 1: What surprising is that when I do another search for the same keyword “cách làm món gà nướng” on CocCoc.vn a couple of days later, the search result is completely different. Below is the result from CocCoc 4 days after the above screenshot was taken:

The results are significantly better compared to 4 days ago. At least, It doesn’t start with a non related restaurant and then a bunch of videos. I don’t think I would want to see two results from the same domain tapchiamthuc.vn though.

Search for the same keyword “cách làm món gà nướng” on wada.vn a couple of days later showed the same results.

3.2 Case 2 “why baby is crying in the middle of the night?”

Ok this is a very long tailed phase. In Vietnamese, it is “tại sao em bé khóc vào buổi đêm”.

Here are the results from Google, CocCoc and Wada respectively:

As you could see from the screenshots, Google results are significantly better than both CocCoc and Wada. Results from CocCoc and Wada are not really related to the query. Wada even has the case of no title on the very first result.

Could this be that CocCoc and Wada have trouble with long tailed Vietnamese keywords? I would leave this to other teams to research more on this.

4. Transactional queries:

These are queries with which users intends to do something like sign up for an account, buy something online, reserve for a table etc…

4.1 Case 1 “hotel room booking in Da Nang”

If we could follow the same process as per other cases, we could see that Google result for “dat phong khach san da nang” is significantly better than CocCoc and Wada.

I would prefer CocCoc not showing the results from Map for this type of query if the results are not good enough. The map makes it looks like there are only three hotels in Danang, they are not the top hotels also.

You could clearly see that the results from Wada for this case is not good. Many of them are not that related to the query in this case in my opinion.

You could try other cases for different keywords like “order pizza in district 7” or “flowers deliver in Ho Chi Minh” or “credit card application form” and have your own conclusions for the cases of transactional queries.

5. Summary

After the four types of queries, at this point I have to say that Google results are still the best in comparison to CocCoc and Wada. This is for un-personalized search results from Google only. With personalized search results, the experience on Google could significantly improve due to the results are being customised to suit each individual searcher. Google has other advanced options like search for articles from news sites only, from forum only, blog only; or we could search based on file type, search within a specific duration, change the default location from one city to another to show better results.

CocCoc and Wada would have a long way to go to compete with Google, taking into consideration the search result quality, distribution channel, branding, user behaviour, signal from social networks etc… I would try to keep this post updated from time to time to see how each search engine performs.

Feel free to drop any comments/thoughts you may have

Thanks,

Chandler

The book author got me when he mentioned that only 7% of word of mouth actually happens via online channel, the rest happens via offline. It’s true that technology helps us to share things at an unprecedented speed and reach. However Facebook, You Tube or Twitter, they are just technologies, not strategies so unless people want to talk/ share about something, you can’t engineer virality just based on the platform alone.

I am actually surprised at first to learn that 50% of all You Tube videos have fewer than five hundred views.

The author argued about the role of the so called “influencers” (the messenger) vs the message (creative idea) in creating virality, of the inherent nature of the message (something funny/cuteness?) etc…

I would not want to spoil your leisure of reading through this wonderful book. So rather than going into too much details, I would list down some of the examples highlighted in this book:

• One of the most watched branded You Tube Channel of all time: http://www.youtube.com/blendtec. If you are a marketing director, would you want people to enjoy watching your TVC (yes the TVC) more than 500M times over the years and continue to do so since 2007?
• The Story of “Please Don’t Tell” bar in New York that never advertised but quickly became one of the most sought out drink reservation in New York since 2007.
• “Snapple facts” : why it is to contagious?
• The story of Rue La La
• New York City Department of Health anti soda campaign
• Why Cheerios get more word of mouth than Disney World?

There are many other examples and tips from the book that you need to read them to understand. The good thing about this though is that the author used data to back up his theory, use examples to illustrate his point, which is brilliant.

Doing it this way, he makes everything easy to understand, at the same time convince people easier.

Give the book a try and let me know what you think?

Chandler

Quick note before we jump in: All of the materials for this post are 100% from Luma Partners. While I have known about Luma Partners for a while now, it was Chris Elkin from Red who suggested that I should write something on this topic to follow my “Welcome to the agency world in Vietnam (part 1)“. Thank you Chris!

1. What is LUMAscape?

LUMA partners (who provides strategic advice to companies at the intersection of media and technology) is the company who advises on deals like: Admeld acquired by Google, Tumri acquired by Collective, interclick acquired by Yahoo etc…

With their extensive experience, they provided to us all something really extraordinary: different global ecosystem/ landscape of Display Advertising, Search, Video, Mobile, Social, Commerce, Gaming, Digital Capital and even Strategic buyer.

2. How valuable is LUMAscape?

Well,  to founders/strategic buyers, these LUMAscapes are extremely valuable.

First of all, they provide the overall picture of who are the big players on global scale in certain area of Digital marketing & technology like Display Advertising or Mobile etc…

Secondly, if you are a founder and you ever wonder what your exit strategy should be, who should be the potential buyer of your company or which company you should buy or which area of business you should go into, these LUMAscapes are great starting points.

LUMA partners helped in putting companies into different roles in the whole ecosystem, you could see/position your company in a way that avoids unnecessary competition and at the same time provide strategic values to your would-be acquirer.

3. Let’s look at Display LUMAscape for example

The first thing you notice is between marketers on the left hand side and consumers on the right hand side, there are many different layers/companies in between. Each company plays certain role for example,  we would have the big agency groups, then their specialist trading desks, then retargeting technology companies, ad server, DSP, Exchange, media planning and attribution, ad network, data supplier, SSP, etc…

Companies within the same group compete directly, while companies from different groups complement each other because they need each other to work more efficiently, fulfilling different roles in the ecosystem. While Google is known to many as a search engine or the creator of Android OS, their presence along the chain of Display Advertising is extremely prominent. They play key roles across the whole Display Advertising ecosystem, creating values and at the same time, making them one of the biggest players (if not the biggest) in this field.

The same could be said about Search ecosystem in which Google dominates.

4. What technologies should I use for my social media marketing?

Well this question or many questions like this could be answered easily if you look at the Social LUMAscape.

We have social media management technologies, social intelligence, blogging platform, social scoring etc… Most of what you are looking for are there. LUMA partners already divided different companies into different groups based on their functions in the ecosystem.

Of course, the categorisation above is not 110% correct because companies change their focus from time to time, new companies are born etc…. However I trust that for the right target audience (founders, strategic buyers, M&A specialists, product manager, etc…) you would find these materials extremely useful.

Anyway, I decided to put the excel file which includes names of all companies in these LUMAscape here so that everyone could benefit. Feel free to download and hopefully it could be useful to you.

Thanks,

Chandler

I would encourage you to spend about 10 minutes to read it through. I think the central idea is that there is a vast difference between metrics and KPIs.

Simply put KPIs are those that have a direct impact on your bottom line and metrics are those that are helpful in diagnosing tactical challenges (some metrics not even helpful at all).

1. “Marketers that did not use data to do their digital jobs”

Avinash’s comment on this is: this group should be fired immediately.

Well I have to say I agree with Avinash but if we do this, we probably will fire a “not too small” percentage of Specialists working in the industry in Vietnam. However be extremely careful about Data puke i.e. too much data without any actual insights.

2. Real time data is life changing

For me, I don’t hear this discussion a lot in Vietnam. The place that I hear this discussion more often than others could be crisis management. In dealing with crisis, I think real-time or close to real-time data is important. The rest is NO.

However in the market we do hear discussion about more and more and more data being put on the reports and people asking for reports at the frequency that makes absolutely no sense from the optimization point of view.

Avinash talked about Right Time data analysis and I think this is something that could only be fixed with the help from both agency and client. I am a big believer in presenting short and insightful reports with less than 15 slides, or even 10 slides.

3. All you need to do is to fix the bounce rate

Yup bounce rate is a popular KPI amongst marketers in Vietnam. We have the tendency to put the bounce rate of say 50% as a KPI. This is NOT right.

First of all, looking at the bounce rate as a whole, on average across all sections of the site, across all traffic sources, campaigns, landing pages does NOT help to do anything. Because if you simply ask, my bounce rate is at 70% so what? what should be your next action? Generic bounce rate for the entire site generally (yes GENERALLY only, not always) is NOT an actionable insight. Segmentation is the key.

I strongly advise those who find yourselves in this scenario to read another post about bounce rate.

Not only it is not a very meaningful metric while looking at from an aggregate level, it is NOT a KPI. It is a metric that could help you to optimize your KPIs, but it is a helpful metric at best so don’t get obsessed over it.

4. Number of likes represents social awesomeness

Well so far I think the majority understand that we need to look at the number of like AND talking about that number (or ratio of the total number of fans), actual average interaction by post to measure our social media success, not just the number of likes so I guess the local market is pretty savvy from that angle.

One thing to note those is that we often look at Talking about That figure at a point in time, not the trend. And while we want to compare ourselves with competition, not many tools allow you to look back too far away in the past so the competitive data is NOT always available. There are many different tools that provide competitor intelligence for social media like:  Social bakers, Meltwater, Alterian SM2, Brandtology etc… For a more complete list, please refer to my other post about free chapter on Digital Analytics: Free Offsite Tools & Paid Offsite Tools.

However the use of monitoring tools is still very limited so evaluating the value of social media is questionable because it’s hard to quantify EARNED Media without tools.

5. #1 Search Results Ranking = SEO success

Well this happens almost 100% of the time locally when it comes to SEO KPI. There are many reasons for this, one is the lack of visibility on the current traffic coming from organic/natural search. Another is that not many marketing managers/SEO agencies understand SEO at this level. And even if they understand, I don’t think we do a good job of explaining to clients about keyword research, generic words vs specific words, their potential traffic value yet, let alone talking about other stuff.

Avinash recommended a few metrics and I think visit from organic branded/unbranded terms would be the easiest to look at from the client point of view and we should be able to use it as one of the KPIs. Conversion number like the “number of sign up or call” could be something that are tracked/optimized over time (not putting in as KPIs from the start) unless you have previous data to back it up.

Customer life time value is tempting to look at. However, not many companies locally here could understand it, appreciate it or could calculate it.

6. Reduce my CPC, reduce my CPC now

I think we somewhat moved past this already in Vietnam. Advertisers understand that clicks should not be the final KPI, they look at visits and other factors.

However more often than not, we do not walk our talk, not many campaigns have proper tracking in place i.e. tracking that shows correct data, tracking that has been tested. I bet that only about 10% of the campaigns in Vietnam have tracking code tested & debugged before going live. To many people the idea of testing Google Analytics code or any type of tracking code before running the campaign is still a foreign concept. So more often than not, we find ourselves in the situation where we have to figure out what goes wrong after building/receiving the first monthly report.

7. Page views. Give me more page views, more and more and more!

This is still very common in Vietnam. People still think that more pageviews mean deeper engagement!

Pageview in general does not mean much. In some cases, more pageview even mean your navigation sucks and people have to click around and around to find what they want. So I think again focusing on the end game, the bottom line first and then see how pageview fits into that picture.

It would be better to look at top content vs content that you want people to read, see how many pageviews those pages receive etc…

Looking at top content can yield another powerful insight: whether the content that you want people to read receive any attention at all!

8. Impressions. Go, get me some impressions, stat!

To be honest I have to say unless you are using tracking tool that track across channels including post impression, post click, please do not care about impression “that much”. Online impression means very little unless you CAN tie them back to your bottom line. An ad impression does not mean someone look at your message once, not at all. It simply means the ad server display the ad on the screen once, that’s it.

To illustrate this point, I often ask people if they read VnExpress, Vietnamnet, Ngoisao or other popular news sites in Vietnam. The answer is probably yes. However if I ask them what banner do they remember seeing on those sites? the answer is often no one, no brand unless they click on it or engage with the banner in some ways. For myself I have ad block installed on Chrome and Safari, except firefox because from time to time, I want to check out to see who is advertising because I am in the marketing business.

9. Demographics and psychographics. That is all I need! Don’t care for intent!

The title says it all, doesn’t it?

Avinash argued that intent beats demographics and psychographics every single time and I have to agree with him. To me I don’t care if you are 25 or 52 years old, as long as you come to my site, want to buy/use certain products/services, your visit has much more value than a random 30 years old who happen to be in my target audience.

Search and Content have strong intent and that’s probably why search engine marketing is getting so popular worldwide and contextual advertising is super powerful as well.

In Vietnam I don’t think search engine marketing or contextual advertising are appreciated much in comparison to other types of online marketing.

That’s it from me. Tell us what you think? Do you agree/disagree?

Cheers,

Chandler

Note: My comments (if any) about these agencies are strictly coming from my limited understandings and may not be the true reflection. Feel free to drop any comments and I will try to address the concerns.

Digital agencies in Vietnam fall under a couple of big segments.

Please note that the below categorization is far from correct because majority of the agencies claim that they are doing everything and they are all full service agencies. Also agency could change from time to time as well. The purpose of me putting a list together so that you could have a broader view of the agency world in Vietnam.

1. Big agency group

1.1 WPP group

WPP group has a strong presence in Vietnam, if not the strongest presence among international agency groups in Vietnam. With 23 offices under the group in Ho Chi Minh alone, WPP group does cover a lot of ground. However, they don’t own 100% of these agencies I guess. Many of the agencies below are not Digital agencies but since it belongs to WPP, I just put them here for reference.

The below are from WPP’s own website:

• Asatsu – DK
• Bates
• G2
• Grey
• GroupM
• JWT
• Kantar Media
• Kantar Worldpanel
• Maxus
• MEC
• MediaCom
• Millward Brown Vietnam
• Mindshare
• Ogilvy & Mather
• Ogilvy Public Relations
• OgilvyAction
• OgilvyOne Worldwide (Who Digital team)
• TNS
• TNS Media
• Who Digital
• Wunderman
• Xaxis
• Y&R

6 offices in Hanoi:

• JWT-G
• Landor Associates
• Ogilvy & Mather
• Ogilvy Public Relations
• Smart Media
• TNS

From Digital capabilities point of view, in my 2 cent, only OgilvyOne (essentially Who Digital team) and GroupM have some digital capabilities in-house. While GroupM mostly do media planning and buying, limited Search Engine Marketing work, OgilvyOne mostly do strategy & production work & Social Media.

From my limited knowledge, Y&R and Wunderman handle Coca cola and Nokia accounts. However these clients normally just adapt regional campaigns to Vietnam. Nokia is going downhill fast so we haven’t seen much buzz from their online initiatives this year 2013.

1.2 Omnicom Group

Until 2013, Omnicom didn’t have a strong presence in Vietnam I guess. However it seems that starting this year, 2013, Vietnam has received more focus from Omnicom Media and the digital team is having more specialists compared to previous years.

• Focus Asia
• OMD Vietnam
• XPR-Campaigns Group
• PHD Vietnam (TNHH quảng cáo Phương Cách (Method Advertising)
• BBDO
• DDB
• TBWA: Biz\Tequila, Focus, TBWA\Vietnam, Vira
• OMG

1.3 Publicis Group

There are five offices in Vietnam, all in Ho Chi Minh city according to the Group website:

• ZenithOptimedia Vietnam
• Starcom MediaVest Vietnam
• Publicis Vietnam
• Saatchi & Saatchi Vietnam
• Leo Burnett Worldwide
• Vivaki Vietnam
• Performics. This would be the main Digital arm for Publicis Group in Vietnam.

From what I heard while Performics doesn’t have a big team, they handle some of the bigger digital account in Vietnam and their capability in Search Engine Marketing is quite good. They are one of the few agencies in Vietnam using Marine I guess. They outsourced Social media, production and other work to other agencies.

1.4 Interpublic

• Draftfcb
• initiative: media services, communication planning
• Lowe + Partners: Advertising, CRM/Direct. Lowe outsourced the majority of their digital work out, they play the role of the brand agency and project management only.
• UM – Curiosity works: media services, communication planning

1.5 Havas

• MPG Vietnam
• Mai Thanh company

1.6 Aegis

Globally, the agency has five brands under the group namely:

• Carat
• iProspect
• Isobar
• Posterscope
• Vizeum

As for presence in Vietnam, from my limited understandings there aren’t much activities at this point. While this may change in the future, the coverage is less than desirable compared to GroupM or Vivaki.

1.7 Dentsu

Dentsu has Dentsu Alpha, Dentsu Media and Dentsu Vietnam. If I am not mistaken, Dentsu combined all Digital specialists from the three offices to one department not too long ago. However they still outsource majority of the digital work out like Social media marketing, production, search engine marketing etc.. and mostly do media planning in-house.

Dentsu completed their acquisition of Ageis globally not too long ago as well so it’s unclear what would be Dentsu’s strategy for Digital marketing in Vietnam.

Update 27Apr 2013: There is one feedback from someone at Dentsu that the three Dentsu teams have their own digital teams, not combining all teams into one. What do you think?

1.8 Other Japanese/Korean agencies

There are Hakuhodo, Chuo Senko or Asatsu DK, Daiko Vietnam. However I don’t think they do a lot of digital work in-house also.

CyberAgents, Mediba and a few other companies set up their rep offices and invested in a few local agencies.

2. Local agencies, ad networks in Vietnam

2.1 Media agency

• Dat Viet Media
• TKL
• ADT
• Golden Media
• Goldsun Group
• Mekong communication: through their official partnership with Cheil Wordwide, I guess you could consider them strongly related. Mekong has partnership with other companies like Emerald and DNA as well but I haven’t heard any official announcement, just rumor from the street.
• FS communication
• TV Plus
• 5i Media
• Youth Advertising
• 365 Days Advertising

2.2 Ad Network

• Innity
• Admax
• Ambient
• Ad micro
• Pixel
• Moore

2.3 Search Engine Marketing agencies

These are Google Small and Medium Business (SMB) partners:

• Clever Ads
• VCCorp – Ad micro
• Nova Ads

For Google certified partners, you could find them using Google Partner Search

There are so many Google Certified Partners in Vietnam now so I won’t list down any names here.

It is important to note that Google welcomes any agencies who want to be Google certified partners as long as they have at least one employee who is a current Google Qualified Individual and the media spend for 3 consecutive months with Google is more than US $10k.

If you want to find out who is Google qualified individuals in Vietna, please use this link. You could search for qualified individual from each country and based on different certifications (search advertising, Display advertising, reporting and analysis, Google Analytics qualified individual etc…)

2.4 Search Engine Optimization agency

I am reluctant to put together this list because from my limited experience I don’t think our capability in this area is strong in Vietnam.

Anyway, I put some names here based on reader’s comments:

• manseo (previously known as lamseo)
• Vinalink
• Thietkeweb

2.5 Social media / PR agencies

• Click Media: it is known for a while now that Click Media and Sofresh are well under way to be acquired by GroupM. It makes sense because Unilever represents a big part of GroupM/Mindshare media business in Vietnam and Click Media and Sofresh are doing Social media + Production work for Unilever as well.
• King Bee Media
• E Brand
• AVC Edelman
• Le & Associates
• OhYeah Communications

Update 1: added in OhYeah Communications

2.6 Production

• Sofresh:  it is known for a while now that Click Media and Sofresh are well under way to be acquired by GroupM. It makes sense because Unilever represents a big part of GroupM/Mindshare media business in Vietnam and Click Media and Sofresh are doing Social media + Production work for Unilever as well.

It would be interesting, however, to see over time whether the relationship and status of the core Sofresh team would be like Who Digital and OgilvyOne. There are not that many people from the core Who Digital team at OgilvyOne after 2 years from what I heard.

• Glass Egg
• Sutrix Media
• Time Universal
• Splash Interactive
• Media Gurus
• HD Digital
• April Digital
• Itsy Bits Mobile Application

Update 30 Apr 2013: add in Itsy Bits Mobile Application based on comment from reader.

2.7 Market Research

• Cimigo
• comScore
• Kantar Media
• TNS
• Effective Measure (they no longer have anyone based in Vietnam)
• AC Nelsen

2.8 Brand Strategy

• Left Brain Connector
• Red Brand Builder
• Phibious
• Purple Asia
• Ambrand
• Ambrosia Vietnam
• Brandtalk
• WildFire Collaborative

Update 1: Move Purple Asia from Production to Brand Strategy based on feedback from Matt Millard.

Update 30Apr2013: added in Ambrand, Ambrosia Vietnam, Brandtalk Vietnam

Update 02 May 2013: added in WildFire Collaborative.

2.9 Mobile marketing

• Gapit
• Idee
• Viet guys
• Mobile Solution Services MSS
• VHT
• So Smart (part of Goldsun Focus Media)
• Fibo sms

2.10 Integrated agency (doing a bit of everything)

• Notch: many people from Notch left and set up a couple of agencies (DNA, Echo etc…)
• Golden Digital: from what I heard, Tony Truong, which was one of the founding members of Golden Digital left the company not too long ago.
• Quo Global
• Climaxi (update 02May 2013, moved from Production category to Integrated Agency)
• IO Media: the majority of the previous core team left to join other agencies
• Cheil Vietnam: through their partnership with Mekong Communication I guess these two companies are strongly linked.
• Buzz Digital
• eBrand
• Edge Marketing
• River Orchid
• IDM Vietnam
• FPT Media
• Maro Media
• Ringier
• StormEye Creative
• Vietbuzz Ad
• D Square
• IMS (Integrated Marketing Solution)
• Emerald
• G2 Asia Pacific
• etc…

Update 29 Apr 2013: Moved Emerald from Social Media/PR agency to Integrated agency

Update 30 Apr 2013: added in G2 Asia Pacific which has a Vietnam Office.

2.10 Outsourcing agencies

• Pyramid consulting
• Studio 60

Some personal observations about digital agencies in Vietnam:

“Jack of all trades, master of none”. This is the common problem with the majority of Digital agencies in Vietnam.

Everyone is saying they are offering full digital services from strategy, creative to execution, from Search engine marketing to Email marketing to Social Media etc… However, the plain cold truth is that we do not have enough specialists in Vietnam for so many firms to offer everything in-house. It does not make business sense to have every thing in-house as well because the overall budget is often quite small.

This generalist approach from the agency is partly because big clients often want to work with a few contacts and ideally only one or two firms.

Agency could differentiate itself by becoming a specialist in a particular service,  going after certain verticals, only working with other agencies as a sub contracts and many other ways.

It is important to take note of the client segment (SME, MNC, local clients) that an agency serves i.e. how many percent of its clients are small and medium businesses and how many percent are MNCs/big local brands.

Agencies who serve SMEs (small and medium enterprises) or SMBs (small and medium businesses) are not sufficiently equipped to work with MNCs or big local brands. The business development or the Director of the agency may paint very appealing pictures. However they are not the one who carry out the execution. SME world and MNC world are miles apart.

The nature of SME agencies is that under normal circumstances they only employ relatively junior employees due to the fact that SMEs’ concerns, budget, decision-making, working culture are not that sophisticated. SMEs do not often work with complex marketing plan that involves multiple channels (offline and online) or having their own creative agency, pr agency etc…Brand guideline and the like are not often discussed with SME clients. Then it is not the same level working with MNCs and local big brands.

English fluency is another major concern facing “specialists” from SME agencies and even bigger agencies. Next would be communication skill and I am talking about the basic communication skill so that both parties would be able to understand each other in English.

Another point worth mentioning is the difference between working with government-owned firms, private ownership firms and foreign firms in Vietnam. While relationship plays an important role everywhere in Vietnam, with government-owned firms, that is even more prominent. The sales cycle for government-owned firms is hence very long.

Working culture in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh is very different from each other as well. Generally sales cycle in Ha Noi is longer compared to Ho Chi Minh. The majority of MNCs are in Ho Chi Minh so they set the working scene in Ho Chi Minh as compared to government-owned firms setting the scene in Hanoi.

That’s enough from me for today. Do you think some other names need to be in this list? Message me.

Cheers,

Chandler