• Creative
• Solid background in marketing
• Passionate

1. Logic vs Creative:

Logically way of thinking is important. If you don’t have a logic approach, you would find yourself facing lots of challenges with my team. To find talented/creative marketers in Vietnam is extremely hard. It is needed everywhere from coding, design, copy writing, etc…

There is a distinction between “blind” creativity (people who think their solution is “creative”) and real creativity. “Blind” creativity is when you try to find creative solution to a problem without even understanding the full aspects of the problem. People rush through the data gathering process and try to do brainstorming on a poorly done set of information, requirements or people without much life experience trying to do creative work in a totally unrelated field. I would say sometimes having a totally new pair of eyes looking at the same old problem might be good because that person is not hard-wired by the norms. I find it extremely rare in practice in our industry in Vietnam though.

Copy cat is so common now in digital marketing in Vietnam. I don’t mind copy cat really, but you need to do some work to make it your own, not just blindly copy someone else in the same market place. I often stress to my team that knowing what the competition doing is vitally important. However, you need to come up with better solution even if the client doesn’t need it because every day we need to do certain thing better than yesterday.

Having said this, while it takes time to find creative marketers, we would settle with people who have logical way of thinking.

2. Solid background in marketing

I can’t stress this enough. Digital marketing is a form of MARKETING so you must know some basic concepts of marketing. At least this is what we prefer in our team. Of course depending on your desired position/career you may not need to have a university degree in marketing to practice in Digital marketing well, however, some self learning is needed if you want to succeed.

This is particularly true in Vietnam while the majority of the money is being spent on traditional marketing. To help making the transition from traditional to digital, we need people that can speak both “languages”. Technical “mumbo jumbo” are non sense to traditional marketers.

Also, without any background in traditional marketing, you would find it hard to do a 360 degree plan.

Do you need marketing background if you are a designer? I would say YES. If you just want to be in an entry level designer forever who would do exactly what is told, then of course you don’t need marketing background. However, if you want to move up to senior levels, to think of a good design concept to fit the plan, you would need to understand consumer insights, competitors’ imagery, deep understanding of the requested products/services and their Unique selling points etc…

3. Passion

Passion dies with time.  Unfortunately this is true in life for most people and you can quote me on that later on. It’s not only because Digital marketing changes so fast that you need passion to keep up with it. Like Steve Jobs used to say “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

People who want to do just enough to earn a pay check, we don’t need them in our team! We want to partner with talented & passionate people who want to do great work.

Due to social and economical reasons, people with family and other responsibilities tend to be “less” passionate somehow. When you get older the fire burning so brightly during your youth seem to die out as well. I find this so painful if this is true generally in Vietnam. Because if passion is out, we have little hope for any kind of good work including Digital work. Without passion, there is no continuous self learning, which is essential in a global world. There won’t be any new innovation without passion unfortunately.

That’s all from me really. What do you think? Do you agree/disagree? Feel free to drop any comments below.

I have talked to a number of senior people in the industry and this post is as a result of those talks.

To answer this question in full, we need to look at the overall Marketing landscape in Vietnam.

1. Digital marketing is too new in Vietnam

Well traditional marketing is new in Vietnam, let alone digital marketing. The American war ended in 1975, the latest war with the Chinese ended in 1979 (less than 4 decades ago) and Vietnamese economy just opened up about 20 years ago. So you can see why I say that even traditional marketing is new in Vietnam as compared to other countries. Hence, the talent pool is small. Well, not only professional in marketing but professionals are needed everywhere in Vietnam in my humble opinion.

That’s the situation for traditional marketers so you could imagine the situation is even worse for Digital marketing.

Before going too far off the topic of this post, let’s go back to Digital Marketing. The internet started to get popular in Vietnam in 1998, only about 14 years ago. From the beginning it was largely played with by IT professionals, software engineers i.e. technical people. Technical people would think if using software to collect email addresses, to spam the inbox-es of their targets etc… without proper marketing strategy.

Banner advertising (one of the most popular form of online advertising in Vietnam) only started to go mainstream after VnExpress gained popularity in 2003-2004. VnExpress just celebrated its 10th birthday this year. Some of us can remember the time where pop ups were everywhere and you often saw banners that said “you were the lucky winner of some mysterious prizes, CLICK here to learn more!” Those times were largely over in Vietnam just a few years back.

2. Lack of education courses

The number of reliable Digital marketing courses in Vietnam is quite limited. No mainstream university offers courses in Digital Marketing i believe.

And while there is demand from the market place for learning, the number of lecturers who not only understand but also practice Digital marketing before is small. Those highly skilled professionals are busy working for their own companies/projects that they have little time left for teaching. Let’s face it, not all professionals could teach well so you can do the math. While you come to the number of true professionals who can teach/embark knowledge well, you would be terrified that it is so small.

Besides, not everyone is willing to share his/her “trade secrets” when they teach. It may be a culture thing or one of pure economic reasons. I don’t mean to be judging and i would do the same if i were in their shoes i guess.

Out of those who attend courses in Digital marketing, many of them do not have any background in marketing. (I myself didn’t major in marketing in university; however i am lucky enough to learn on the job and from online sources). “Students” are largely from the IT crowd/web designer/flash designer/coder. Many of them (certainly not All) lack the marketing understanding to make a Digital marketing successful.

Those with traditional marketing mindset think of Digital marketing as something too complicated, too technical, “not to the point”, doesn’t make much sense etc… Those with IT background don’t often think about marketing while doing their job unfortunately.

3. No authority figures

Just like any new industries, there is urgent need for guidelines, case studies, best practices in Vietnam. They are vital so that marketers from client side can base upon to judge the performance of their campaigns, planner/creative people from agencies can learn/upgrade their skill.

In Vietnam, there are no Clear authority figure and many people/organizations just choose to follow/publish/claim practices/ideas that suit their economical means. It’s the same situation as trying to raise a child and no one is teaching the child things for his/her own development/sake but rather “care givers” are trying to persuade the child to “buy” his/her solution. Because of those “education”, the child would start to eat/drink/learn all kind of “funny” things, start to get confused of conflicting messages.

IAB Vietnam is going nowhere and almost dead at this point. I don’t see any other organizations found with the mission of helping Digital marketing in Vietnam grow.

4. Slow economic progress

Vietnam economy has experienced great difficulties for the past a few year and expected to slow down in 2012 as well. In tough economic time, naturally marketing budget is being cut. While it’s true that some marketers would start looking for newer solution because traditional media is too expensive, many will just play safe. It has been the case where all the money is allocated elsewhere then what left over is allocated for digital media. While digital marketing can help you save cost if done correctly, it doesn’t mean that you can achieve great results with limited or “no money”.

The only way to solve this dilemma is for digital marketer to show the Return of their activities to claim a bigger share of the pie.

Well enough from me i guess. As always it’s more important to spend time/efforts thinking about how to make things happen rather than stating why it doesn’t work. Please feel free to share your ideas on how we can help shaping digital marketing landscape in Vietnam.

Well i am known for being naive and wishful thinking but well i will post this article anyway.

I am looking for a proactive person to join our team.Being pro active means you are willing to go the extra miles and be responsible to your work. From “7th habit of highly effective people”proactive people are resourceful and use their own initiative to find solutions and not just reporting problems. It’s not the question of why this issue can NOT be solved, it’s the question of how to solve this issue in the most efficient and effective way, knowing our limitations and other constrains.

Great at web programming (PHP is preferred) is a must of course. We are looking for a senior person with at least 3 or more years of experiences. You are free to choose your own staff/whom you want to be in your development team. We are not in a cost cutting phase in any sense, however, we need to justify your proposal with good planning and reasoning. It’s pretty much like a start-up experience where you have an idea and you want to build a team to work on it. Initially, you may need to work on everything because you haven’t found anyone to join your team so minor programming tasks are often there. Since this role is rather senior, management skill/team building skill is a plus.

If you are just looking for an 8-hour job, this position is not for you. The ideal candidate should have a burning desire to do great work, create exceptional products and don’t mind working hard to achieve it. Attention to detail will also be a key because no one will have time to double-check your work, trying to figure out loose ends due to sloppy coding. I am after a long-term partner that can be with us for at least 18 months. So if you have any other plan after 1 year, this is not for you also.

If you want to stop your current job and start your own business because you have an idea, we may be a good fit for you because we can give all of support you need from a secure monthly income to support yourself/family, a nice place to work with joyful people around while you can run like building your own start-up. Entrepreneur spirit and a Can do attitude is what we are looking for really.

Attitude is a particularly big with me. If you have an Ownership mentality, you will work very well with me. I don’t care much about red tape or tradition, i am after simplicity, efficiency and values to prospective customers, users etc…. You can ask any questions that you want, debates & argument are welcome. However, once we decide on certain things all parties need to move in that direction. We decide based on mutual consensus and logical approach.

As for the real day-to-day work that you will be doing, It will be a mixture of supporting other part of the businesses and working on a couple of special projects. We have quite a lot of client’s projects to work on.

Special projects will be slightly complicated and fascinating. They are not rocket science but they do need certain research into marketing and finance. Familiar with different API feeds or being able to build one will give you a head start.

Am i asking for too much? Well may be yes. But i believe we can offer something in return for a good partner. Our culture is very friendly and open. Change is the only constant and we are after long-term benefits, not short-term quick fix. We are not pressure by day-to-day monetary issue hence we can afford to take a long-term view. This can be extremely valuable during the current economic crisis in Vietnam. While the base salary would be enough for you to have a comfortable life, you won’t get rich with your salary, or at least not the level of richness that we are after. We follow a Give and Take model and try to be as reasonable and fair to every team member as we can, including yourself.

So if you are interested and not being discourage by all the constraints/disadvantages from above, email me at singaporesem@gmail.com or just leave your comment here and i will contact you.

Have a nice weekend ahead,

Chandler

To start off, we discussed WHY we needed to provide measurement/reports for Online activities. It sounded like a silly question I knew but we wanted to make sure the type of reports we gave fulfilled basic requirements by marketers.

As we know, digital marketing still has a very limited budget as compared to traditional marketing despite the fact that people spend more and more time online. So we want to understand if reporting is one of the reasons why people don’t use digital marketing.

The questions I asked my students were:

• Do you receive a report after booking a PR or an ads on Print?
• Do you receive a report after using billboard?
• Do you receive a report after running a TV ads?
• If you do, what type of information is often in the report?
• Is it about how your ads appears? whether they appear in the right format and for the correct amount of time?
• Some screenshots/media clipping may be?

We ended up with the conclusions for the Vietnam market:

• People don’t really care about reports for OFFLINE channels
• Publishers/traditional media owners often care about how the ads appear and THAT IS ALL
• Reporting if any is often to show screenshots/photographs
• Only for some big companies they use third-party services like Ac Nielsen or TNS to give ESTIMATED data on how many people they can reach, cost per reach, whether the ad is shown to the right target audience etc…
• During planning stage, AC Nielsen or TNS data are used if the target audience is well-defined in terms of gender, age group, income class, location etc…

So you can see with very little REPORTING (as compared to Online), traditional media can still command a very VERY big percentage of the marketing budget (close to 97% on average).

For online marketing we have reporting on:

• Impressions
• Click
• Click through rate
• Cost per Click
• Time on Site
• Bounce Rate
• Pageview
• Traffic sources
• Keywords
• Conversion
• Conversion rate
• etc…

So what is wrong with the current reporting format for Digital marketing? Are Digital marketers trying to make them sound sophisticated yet not providing simple numbers that Offline/Traditional Marketers need to SPEND their money?

All traditional marketers care about when choosing channels  in Vietnam are:

• Brand awareness
• Reach (in ESTIMATED absolute value)
• Reach (in percentage)
• Are there any third-party validation to these claims i.e. AC Nielsen or TNS?

Why Digital marketing does NOT give just these numbers and save ourselves tone of hard work?

Of course, traditional media and Digital media are two different things so the measurement should be different. However, one question that brand manager may ask is what this 50,000 clicks that my agency is proposing really MEANS? Does that mean my brand awareness would increase from 10% to 14%? If I spend $10,000 on Digital media, can i have 30% reach for my target audience???

From a traditional marketers: Traditionally, over the years, i have planned my marketing media this way and now this so-called “new digital marketing” comes along and they use all kind of jargons that i don’t understand at all! More importantly, if they claim that they can give more accurate reporting, why they can NOT answer the simple questions I asked like brand awareness or REACH?

I hope by now you would have an idea of what I am trying to discuss here.

The real issue here i believe is EDUCATION, a new Paradigm shift and “new technology”. It’s not that for Digital marketing, we can NOT give the same set of numbers that Offline world is using. Companies like comScore uses the same PANEL approach/same measurement methodology as TNS or AC Nielsen and they give exactly the same set of numbers that AC Nielsen or TNS. The only thing is that we either don’t know, don’t care or don’t have the money to use services of companies like comScore.

Besides, we as digital marketers need to go one step further and explain what does these jargons (click, bounce rate) that we often use for Online world really MEAN in marketing TERMS. This is where the issue of lacking professional Digital marketers comes in.

Online marketing is too new in Vietnam. From the beginning of the Internet in Vietnam, people who were exposed to it/liked it were mostly IT professionals with little or no background of marketing. When we talk about website, source code, time on site, traffic source, URL builder, conversion etc… marketers often refer to them as too TECHNICAL. My IT team would take care of that….

However, the issue here is that IT department does NOT do Marketing. It’s just not within their job scope. They don’t really care about reach, or brand awareness or know the effect of offline campaigns with Online initiatives. They are NOT involved in the marketing plan. They are not involved in the review stage after the plan is run as well! So well you can see the dilemma here.

Companies in Vietnam are struggling to hire professional Digital marketers in general, let alone specialties like SEM, SEO, Social Media etc… This leads to a very hesitant approach towards Online marketing.

Since today discussion is about Measurement so i don’t want to go too far off topic.

Feel free to drop any comments you may have here.

Have a great weekend!

Chandler

A lot of information about Singapore was covered in this publication. It’s a mater of what you need because it is a 124 page long publication. Going through the table of content you can see the followings:

• Climate and Air Quality
• Demography
• Labour and Productivity
• National Income and Balance of Payments
• Business Expectations
• Business Formation and Cessation
• Manufacturing
• Construction and Real Estate
• Services
• External Trade
• Transport and Communications
• Tourism
• Finance
• Public Finance
• Prices
• Health
• Community Services
• Culture and Recreation
• Miscellaneous

I haven’t seen this level of Publicly available data for a while. It has everything, including government balance sheet, the number of Singapore citizens going to cinemas, the amount of money in circulation etc…. Many, many other countries could learn from Singapore i would say.

Making decision based on guess-work or worse yet Fault data could be damaging. And here we have Singapore, a country/a city showing the whole world how transparent they can be and how data driven their culture is. Or at least, their government is.

If you want to have a complete view, please download the full report here Monthly digest of statistics Singapore Mar 2011.

What I will do is to include a few interesting figures.

1. 74% of Singapore residents are Chinese

In June 2010, Singapore Residents were at 3.7717 millions, in which 3.2307 millions were Singaporeans and 541,000 Permanent Residents.

Singaporean Chinese are about 2.7940 millions or 74%, followed by Malays (13%), Indians (9%) and other groups.

Generally there are more female residents compared to male residents (1.9106 millions females vs 1.8611 million males). Indians are the only big ethnic group in which there are more males than females (180,300 males vs 167,800 females) in Singapore.

As for marriage, inter-ethnic contributed 3,550 cases in the total of 20,230 for 2010 or 17.5%. The rest was marriages of the same ethnic groups.

2. Finance services enjoy the highest monthly income in Singapore 2010

As you can see from the graph above, professionals working in financial service industry enjoy the highest average monthly income in Q4 2010, followed by information and communications. Hotels and restaurants pay the least per employee monthly during the same period last year.

If we look at the year on year monthly income,

Community, social & personal saw the biggest jump in terms of percentage for monthly salary increase (11.28%). Real estate & Leasing services saw a -6.7% decrease during the same period. This is the only industry in which there was a decrease from 2009 to 2010.

Looking closer at the quarter to quarter monthly income, we can see a very big spike for Financial services.

While we see an uplift from Q3 2009 to Q4 2009 and Q3 2010 vs Q4 2010, the spike in Q1 2010 could be distributed to bonuses giving out by Financial services companies. A 34% increase for financial services industry between Q4 2009 and Q1 2010 marked the highest increase in terms of percentage as compared to other industries.

The graph below shows the difference between average monthly income in Q4 2009 vs Q1 2010 for various industries in Singapore.

3. Singapore attracted 11.6 million tourists in 2010

It is really a major achievement if you compare that figure with only about 5 million visitors to Vietnam in 2010, 24.6 millions visitors for Malaysia ( Singaporeans made up 13 millions or 50% of that total number) etc…

Before going too deep into the numbers, let’s just hold one moment and see if Tourism boards of SouthEast Asia countries have websites to promote their respective countries:

• Singapore tourism board: Your Singapore
• Malaysia tourism board: Tourism Malaysia
• Thailand tourism board: Tourism Thailand
• Indonesia Ministry of culture and Tourism: Visit Indonesia
• The Philippines: Department of Tourism
• Vietnam: Vietnam Tourism official site

Just look at these websites, you probably can make your own conclusion on how great tourism in a country would be.

Coming back to Singapore, nearly 75% of all tourists to Singapore in 2010 were from Asia.

Looking further into Asia, Asean contributed 55.6% of all tourists.

The above graphs and figures only cover Singapore tourist numbers, Singapore statistics department even went further and looked at the total number of total number of air passenger arrivals by country of embarkation.

That number was a whopping 20.5 millions air passenger arrivals in Singapore in 2010. This number i assume include passengers coming to Singapore to work and other purposes.

SouthEast Asia was still the main source with 43%.

Air passenger departures by country of disembarkation amounted to 20.437264 million in 2010 vs arrivals of 20.486452 millions in 2010. So about  49,188 people (20,486,452 minus 20,473,264) stayed in Singapore after arriving at the airport in 2010.

Singapore population increased by 89,100 in 2010. Singapore residents increased by 37,800 and non residents increased by 51,300.

4. 20,321,100 attendances at cinemas in Singapore in 2010

If we divide the total attendances to total population, people who stay in Singapore go to the cinema on average 4 times per year.

We only recorded 7,163,669 attendances at swimming pools in Singapore in 2010 and 1,823,321 attendances at gymnasium.

In terms of bookings, badminton courts were booked 401,390 times in 2010 (refer to sports facilities provided by SSC), followed by Tennis 115,900 times, table-tennis 61,081 times. Overall however, Singapore residents seem to go to the swimming pool, gymnasium or other sports less in 2010 compared to 2009. Jogging is impossible to count so we don’t have anything to say there.

As mentioned earlier, there are lots of information available in the original report and it’s not my intention to restate everything here.

It’s recommended that you download the report and have a read yourself.

Feel free to drop any questions you may have.

Have a nice weekend everyone,

Chandler