Singapore & Malaysia Updates

The last two weeks have been pretty hectic. I was in Singapore, Malacca and now KL, doing 16 meetings in between. Besides clients, I also touched base with a couple of industry players that are important for my plans.

The key players I spoke to included:
- Chris Tang (Bain & Mercer)
- Leonard Tan (Purpleclick)
- John Millward (iMail Global)
- Jan Barendse (Adbank)
- Patrick Grove (Catcha)
- Harmandar Singh a.k.a. Ham (Adoi Magazine)
- Josh Lim (Advertlets)
- Lim CS (Increseo)

Heck, I even managed to squeeze in a game of futsal and played against Vijandren a.k.a. Vijay - Mr. Lowyat.net himself!

I was trying to understand how the local creative/media agencies work and the situation with online marketing - Ham gave me a quick overview, the problems and why he thought online advertising hasn’t taken off. I also picked up two advertising books over the weekend to help with my understanding.

In addition, I plan to create an advertiser education campaign/community in Singapore, a regional integrated online marketing agency for SMEs and a self-serve ad network in Malaysia. Some of the local boys have already being working on something similar, with slight differences in terms of business model.

Looks like I’ll be spending the next week consolidating all the information and head back to the drawing board to fine-tune my grand plans.

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