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Sandwiches are so huge in the UK it’s almost cultural.

From sandwich bars to supermarkets and even pharmacies, when the clock strikes noon the entire country filters out to get their sandwich fix with every kind of bread, stuffing, and price available. Although a few years behind, Asian sandwich businesses have been steadily scratching away at the lunch time crowd; especially in Singapore and Hong Kong. More than anything, a 10 dollar sandwich no longer seems as inaccessible as it did a few years ago. We have food price inflation to thank for that!

Tanzy’s Sandwiches

Together with our partners at the Firestar Group, we’ve just launched Tanzy’s Well Stuffed Sandwiches; a proper old school sandwich bar serving juicy packed triangles at great prices. So the challenge is this – we are going to run a marketing campaign and a delivery mechanism based online; utilizing Twitter and Facebook to get people buyin’ them sandwiches!

The Digital Sandwich Challenge

Campaigns like this are becoming more and more standard in the West. Dunkin Donuts runs a popular lunch-time website, bakeries are now starting to tweet their fresh produce, and orders taken through Twitter is not unheard of. Is the Malaysian Market digitally mature enough for a sandwich store to successfully use Digital Media to boost sales and create a brand following? We think so.

So over the next 6 months we’ll be launching a series of funky tactical campaigns; we’ll write about how we do it, and publicize the results.

Why are we doing this? Aside from a lot of fun, we know that Malaysians are not digitally apathetic. There is still a widely held view amongst local brands that Malaysians are simply too uninterested and ‘digitally lazy’ to participate and share (a view that is already beginning to change), we beg to differ of course. The central premise is if we can make a sandwich store famous with Digital Media, then just about every SME out there can achieve the same goal.

Watch this space.

(and by the way if you want a sandwich in the meantime, come down to Phileo Promenade, Megan Avenue 1, off Ampang Park)

Check it out and enjoy!

And of course not to miss out on an opportunity for exposure, here’s Ro in action with our colours on the nose:

Our medium has been steadily gaining in popularity amongst local and international brands and we’ve seen a string of successful social media campaigns from big brands targeted directly at the Malaysian Market, so why then does Cinema advertising (!) score better than Digital?!

Figures from Nielsens Malaysia Adex

Malaysia has high internet penetration

The natural conclusion is that Malaysians simply aren’t using the internet like they are in Japan or Australia. Look at India for example where Digital’s ad share stands at 0.2%. It is low but understandable – Internet penetration is microscopic there. Compare that to Malaysia where 62% have the internet which is even more surprising when we found that Australia, with over 10 times more spent on digital advertising has a similar internet penetration rate.

Or Maybe Malaysians arnt really using internet in the right way? 2008 figures show 66% of internet users are active in social networking, spending over 181 minutes each visit on Facebook – a huge number and second only to South Korea in Asia.

The Ad-spend Paradox

And so it seems we have a paradox. How on earth can two countries with near identical internet usage figures have radically different ad spends? It gets even more confusing when you throw Singapore into the equation. With 95% internet penetration and as one of the first countries in the world to digitize after pipe-lining cable broadband into people’s homes as early as 1999, digital still hardly makes a blip on the graph with a dismal 1.3% share.

The figures are incredibly inaccurate.

The answer lies in the figures themselves. According to Nielsen’s results (and the basis of this blog post), the total internet ad spend is calculated on a basket of locally-based websites and their advertising earnings. It goes without saying that the local internet scene here is no where as large as some other countries and our experience shows a lot of Malaysian advertisers would rather spend their dollars on globally based websites targeted at Malaysian users. This absolutely explains the 0.6%, but also proves how inaccurate these results actually are and highlights a much deeper issue.

There’s just nowhere to advertise.

Malaysians simply don’t spend enough time on local based portals to justify the ad spend. The table below shows how bad the problem is. Advertisers are spoiled for choice in Japan & Australia whilst Malaysia only manages to muster one single local site in the top 15 (the other two are the Google default and a local bank).

A fragmented scene

The underground and word-of-mouth nature of Malaysia’s news and opinions has driven the ‘local scene’ to become incredibly fragmented with people relying on differing sources for information, namely blogs, rather than consolidators like news websites. In London if I wanted to catch up on the latest political gossip I may go to any of the major newspaper or broadcast websites, whereas in Malaysia I’ll have to go to 2 websites and at least 5 different blogs to get the same diversity and quality of information.

In Europe as in Australia free flowing news and information is out there for all to see; opinions can be openly discussed and accessed. In Malaysia, this is less so. The mainstream media is a lot less trusted and the internet heavily used as underground and independent source of information on issues the people are craving to see.

Malaysians also look to different parts of the world for their information and news depending on which cultural background the user is from. The appearance of numerous China-based websites further down the Alexa rankings shows how potentially difficult it could be to target that segment of the Malaysian population.

Blogs to the rescue.

But where Malaysia truly shines are its blogs. Blogger.com & Wordpress.com are both simply gateways to thousands of independent blogs each with their own opinion followings and thought leaders. In order to really target Malaysians you have to get on the blogs and it’s quite telling that two of Malaysia’s largest advertising networks are focused around the blogsphere.

We’re proud to announce our signing on to produce the Magnum Ice cream digital campaign for Singapore. Working in collaboration with SinKid, the 2009 campaign will build on the international Eva Mendez-fronted ‘World’s Pleasure Authority‘ campaign with an additional twist. The Singapore microsite will get people to submit candid photos enjoying a Magnum IceCream in any of the 10 Magnum Pleasure categories (visual, social, psychological, listening, eating hearing, and winning) to win a prize. People will be able to share their photo on Twitter and Facebook to win entry to the exclusive Magnum Party held in late August.

We’ll be unravelling details as the campaign progresses, it’s all kicking off soon!

These questions can leave even the big ad agencies head-scratching and for every well executed digital campaign there are dozens left wanting with even the best budgets, creatives, and intentions behind them. This blog post sets out some principles for the ultimate campaign.

1. Think Engagement, not impressions

Digital Media is massively engaging. It’s function is not to give people an impression of your brand, rather to let them play with it, interact with it, share it, and talk about it. The online environment rewards creativity and great ideas, it doesn’t reward pushing your message under people’s noses.

It may sound obvious, but people will only engage and talk about something they like.

Two simple examples

1. Ausoina Yo Ilevo brackets – the engaging microsite

Ausonia’s microsite gets people to upload their photograph and select which brackets they’d like. It’s a simple idea (and definately done before), but incredibly engaging and fun.

2: Vodaphone myukhols – the viral campaign

A website with info on your awesome new mobile roaming rates won’t get you far, but a microsite getting people to share their next holiday location has been incredibly successful for Vodaphone.

2. Look beyond the humble web banner

Read this Study showing web users eye patterns

We’re constantly barraged by website owners claiming that putting your banner on their site will yield so many hundreds of thousands of impressions every month and likewise there’s an impression out there that the more money you through at online above-the-line advertising, the higher your ROI will be.

The web’s engaging nature means people are reading the content and engaging with the message, they’re not looking at the blinking banner at the corner.

And that’s the problem with banner advertising. It’s impression-based nature turns internet users off because they’re not there to be barraged with your message (the dot com bubble in the 90’s taught us that). Instead, web users pick and choose their media. It’s news, content, games, videos, and friends that I choose to interact with – not what you tell me to.

3. Don’t hold back

We’ve found that agencies and clients alike have a profound fear of the unknown with the internet. And it’s true; it does have risks that can far outstrip any other platform out there. Misjudge an on-the-ground campaign and you won’t get any ROI, but misjudge a massively viral online campaign and you can shift an entire demographic from loving you to hating you. Instantly.

That’s perhaps a bit extreme, but it has happened in the past. The ‘get out of jail free’ card has always been to play it safe by taking digital further away from the strategic core, rationalizing that if the message goes down badly online at least it’s not high profile enough to make a huge dent. What a way to destroy a perfectly good campaign and that thinking misses the point of the internet.

Digital Media has revolutionized communication from the traditional ‘this is who we are, read it’ approach used in the mainstream to people creating their own content about you, comparing you with other brands, and exchanging their opinions instantly and virally in unprecedented volumes. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of searches, blog posts, tweets, and facebook posts made every day. Do a quick search on Twitter for any major brand and you’ll see thousands of people exchanging their experiences and thoughts about it.

Whether you like it or not, chances are people are already talking about you. The internet gives you the opportunity to be a part of that dialogue; avoid engaging with consumers at your peril.

4. Work with the mainstream

Engagement, the holy grail of advertising and the key benefit of the online environment is only the final step of a large pyramid. It’s the icing on the cake that converts impressions into the done-deal but you still need to drive people to engage. The hits have to come from somewhere, and internet advertising is only a part of the picture. Despite the enormous internet penetration growth in asia, it’ll be a while before the internet overtakes the mainstream for above-the-line advertising.

Take a quick look at all the successful digital campaigns out there and one thing is apparent; digital forms a hugely important part of their campaigns-at-large with mainstream media used to generate the much needed impressions.

The diagram below from our What We Do section shows the relationship clearly:

On-the-ground campaigns help to seed the idea, concept, or message with consumers. In the online environment those impressions are converted into engagements which in turn are converted into conversations, chatter, and mass sharing that build brand value or sell more products.

Conclusion

What is a brand? It’s not what you say it is, It’s what your customers say it is.Brands are defined by individuals not companies. When enough individuals have the same, or approximately the same, feeling about a product or service it becomes a brand.

- Marty Neumeier

And that my friends, is digital media.