Rodney Louis Vincent Contributor/Jakarta
How many top bosses do you know who present junior managers with reading lists of history, current affairs and literature, and then hold discussion groups to make sure the reading gets done.
Miles Young thinks as much like a professor as he does like the chairman of one of the largest advertising and marketing companies in Asia.
A family tragedy while completing his last year at Oxford University put Young on a career path he never dreamed of. The death of his mother, who battled diabetes all her life, resulted in Young signing up to meet recruiters visiting his university at the very last minute. The only slot left was with an advertising firm.
The well-respected ad professional whose supposed trademark is colorful shirts finds defining "Asia" far more than a semantic issue, especially in coordinating a 7,000-plus Asian creative network that stretches from India to Japan. Young has spent close to 21 years with the network.
Being the driving force of Ogilvy and Mather Asia (O&M), Young spends 75 percent of his life traveling with a particular focus on building a strong commercial business in Asia. Under Young's leadership, O&M has become the dominant advertising network in the region.
The chairman of Ogilvy and Mather Asia speaks his mind:
Your focus has been on growing Asia's big five media communications markets, mainly China, Japan, India, Taiwan and Korea.
My personal focus has been on growth in Japan, China, India, Korea, excluding Taiwan. Though this doesn't mean to say our agency's focus is only on these markets. Tim Isaac looks after the southern part of Asia. In the future, I think there will be two huge dynamic economies in Asia -- China and India.
Japan is relatively becoming less important due to cultural structural reasons. It's a country that has found difficult to globalize. Japan had its chance during the '70s and '80s to embrace Asia, but it never did and behaved in a hostile way. I do think it will increasingly be known as the Switzerland-ization of Japan. Korea is a very dynamic market, but it's limited by its size.
Among those, you've got two monsters which are the largest and the second largest countries in the world. China's had all the publicity recently. Business there is much more rooted and we're pretty much ahead, with a workforce of 900 people, partly from being first in brand, having extremely skillful Chinese management and treating China as an opportunity instead of a place to service multinational clients. To build our strength in depth, 50 percent of the business is local and the local agencies we've acquired are operating outside of the big three cities. India is also rising and multinationals are recognizing that it's not just a one-horse race.
Does Indonesia have the potential to compete with these markets, in the near future?
Indonesia is now an important market for us. We're growing very nicely. It's a question of critical mass, the speed of economic development, when and how fast. Indonesia has China's characteristics 10 to 15 years ago, possessing an active, developing, assertive middle class with rising living standards and an appetite for consumer well-being. Vietnam is somewhere behind and has the disadvantage of the rigid bureaucratic communist government. In that perspective, Indonesia's got everything going for it. Some multinationals are still not sure how business-friendly Indonesia is and that is an impediment which holds back foreign investment.
How does a less sophisticated market like Indonesia take itself to the next level?
It's a developing market and I don't think there's one single answer. If I compare the business to what it was eight years ago, there's just no comparison. Eight years ago, Indonesia advertisements were small and slightly primitive. In my view, Ogilvy can now stand up against any agency. I was recently having a conversation with someone and we were commenting on how the production has improved beyond recognition over two years, and that's because foreign directors came in and worked with local production companies, which improves the whole quality cycle. The talent pool is huge but the skill pool is minute and it needs to be grown. Many clients want new concepts from the institution and that has to grow professionally in parallel. Thailand would be an example, wouldn't it? Twenty years ago, it was probably in a similar position and it's in the first world market today.
The writer is the editor of ADOI Magazine, an English publication about advertising and marketing.