Bates CHI&Partners
Report by David Mayo (left)
Chief executive officer, Asia
and
Johnny Hornby (right)
Chief executive officer
T
he Asia partnership was launched in 2013 with nine offices in seven markets, built around the principles of collaboration and open-source. It is a joint venture between Bates, one of Asia’s best-known advertising agencies, and The & Partnership, one of the UK’s most respected independent agencies.
Our focus in 2015 was on growing new client relationships, attracting talent with new skills, developing new partnerships, developing our product and further building our unique open-source positioning in the Asia market. In 2015, we had successes across all of these areas.
In 2015, we began working with new clients such as VW, Asia Breweries, Fiat, Standard Chartered, Kimberly-Clark, Pearson and Sephora among many others, whilst we deepened our relationships with Pizza Hut, AIA, Nestlé and F&N.
Most of the people who joined us in 2015 came from leading digital and creative agencies, bringing with them new skills in social, content, media, programatic, data and digital. Our annual ‘Employee Acid Test’ recorded some of the highest loyalty scores in the region.
We launched partnerships with Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Squeem, King Content and Sparkline and, in turn, drove deeper engagements between our clients and their customers.
Creative highlights included work for Martell where we worked with the client’s R&D team to put holograms in bottles, Myanmar’s most famous advertising campaign of 2015 for Ooredoo, and the Gold Effie-winning campaign for Taiwan Noodle, which stole the heart of the nation.
We also forged new relationships with SMU, Miami Ad School, Falmouth UK, AMEs and Lasalle. In Myanmar we partnered with Phandeeyar and Facebook to bring new skills to this breakout market. We continued our work with The Marketing Society, Warc, Cannes Lions, IAS and Portfolio Night.
In 2015, we published a collection of six original essays, The 6 Pillars of Collaboration, aimed at driving the industry debate on collaboration and this formed the basis of our first ever WPP Atticus thought leadership submission, which was developed and submitted from our office in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Most of the people who joined us in 2015 came from leading digital and creative agencies, bringing with them new skills in social, content, media, programatic, data and digital
In 2016, we will continue to drive the industry discussion in Asia about horizontality and collaboration. From this we hope to build our reputation, our product and our portfolio of skills as we continue to deliver our Five Year Plan.