Insights & Monitoring

You meet somebody that catches your eye. It could be their smile, their style, or their personality; you may even be attracted to their conviction and passion for something. You ask for their number. You text them that night (because calling at this stage is kind of lame), you flirt and get to know each other. Is this person a wacko? Does s/he fit my values? First, a coffee date, then a dinner. A movie. Over time, along with consistent and quality effort, you are in a committed relationship and…

I was recently invited to speak to 50 over hotel PR executives in Jakarta at an event organized by Himpunan Humas Hotel (H3) Jakarta, an association for PR professionals in the hotel industry in Jakarta. Besides sharing best practices of press release writing, many questions were raised with regards to how the shift to digital media is changing the PR game. Here are four key takeaways from the sharing session: Listening The late author and PR exec Leonard Saffir once said, “The formulation of a PR strategy properly begins with listening, not talking.” Even in a digital world, getting…

By Niphon Goodyear One thing that weightlifting has taught me is to NEVER just show up. When it is time to train it’s time to go 100% and for press releases and life in general, you never just want to go through the motions. Go hard or go home. You don’t want to be that guy or girl who goes to the gym and mopes around in the corner doing an occasional set of curls whenever their friends stop replying to them on WeChat. You also don’t want to be…

Ads that play on women’s fears have long had their place in advertising history, and while we think the era of ridiculously sexist vintage ads are over,  sometimes they reincarnate in “subtler” forms such as in NIVEA Singapore’s deodorant ad where the video showed a woman facing disapproval by members of the public because of her darker arm pits, and positioned Nivea’s deodorant as the solution to this “social stigma”. This video was pulled after a few days facing outrage from AWARE Singapore and netizens. For marketers, there are two…

B2B marketing isn’t always understood, in fact sometimes not even amongst marketers themselves. As such, only 51% of marketing leaders found their efforts “somewhat effective”, according to a study jointly conducted by Forrester, Business Marketing Association, and the Online Marketing Institute. The goal for most marketers and businesses increasing their content-marketing budgets is of course to reach that “very effectively” level. The difficulty lies in the execution. According to Forrester VP, Laura Ramos, most businesses focus on talking about themselves rather than the issues their customers are facing. Businesses need…