OMD solidified its APAC leadership in 2023 by prioritising digital transformation and capitalising on the “Fast Forward” strategy.As a part of their transformation efforts, they also established India as a hub with nearly 2,000 employees to service the agency network’s regional and global data and analytics requirements.

In an exclusive interaction with Storyboard18, Charlotte Lee, CEO, OMD Asia Pacific talks about the agency’s key focus areas, data solutions, harnessing AI, hiring and retaining talent and more.

Edited excerpts

OMD achieved significant regional leadership in APAC during 2023. Can you elaborate on some key strategies that contributed to this success, and how you plan to leverage them in 2024?

2023 saw us focus on the second year of our global “Fast. Forward” strategy – a plan that recognises, amongst many factors, consumers are more distracted than ever, and attention is scarce in a media ecosystem that is increasingly fragmented and volatile.

As India continues on its own digital transformation with the rise of tech and digital penetration, it is proving to be a critical market for the success of our strategy, which has many component parts. That said, the strategy at its heart offers a clear focus on digital transformation alongside a shift towards new marketing models around commerce and content and their increasing influence in the broader communications mix.

OMD APAC is prioritising our creative media practice that will bring behavioural insights closer to cultural insights to ensure maximum relevance and meaningful experiences for brands and consumers. While the focus in recent years has been on driving conversion outcomes and moving towards performance outcomes, we also recognise the need to bring brands back to the forefront and reinforce their place in culture. Clients are clearly feeling the effects of a focus towards lower-funnel objectives with brand equities declining globally. Again, the Indian market is critical for this initiative and we have already seen some great work for our clients in this area.

Partnerships are integral to our business and success has many contributors. Hence, we have evolved Agency as a Platform – a model that is core to the business strategy of our parent company Omnicom Media Group (OMG) and its agencies – and leant into working alongside our Omnicom partners to offer more comprehensive and bespoke service solutions for clients.

For example, the Omnicom acquisition of Flywheel in 2023 is a crucial addition of firepower for OMD in the region and especially for India as the world’s fastest-growing major, yet arguably still untapped, ecommerce market.

From a product standpoint, our digital leadership is powered by Omni, Omnicom’s marketing orchestration operating system that keeps data at the core of everything we do, from planning through to execution and optimisation.

Last but not the least, we’ve worked on a new model of connection and collaboration initiatives. Through this model, we bring together the strength we have across our local markets and drive collective success. The diversity and innovation culture of the region offers many opportunities to collectively share and grow best practices.

Can you share some specific examples of ‘business transformation’ and ‘connected culture’ initiatives that OMD is implementing to accelerate growth in 2024?

We have kept a close eye on advancements across Commerce and Data. With APAC’s ecommerce penetration rate forecasted to grow to 35% by 2026 and Retail Media predicted to capture 25 percent of total global ad spend by 2030, advances in commerce will be transformative and critical to the future success of clients and agencies.

We released a new vertical application – Omni Commerce – that comprises an ecosystem of tools, technology, data, and partnerships to enable always-on insight, activation, optimisation, and attribution across the entire commerce landscape. The application is powered by a fusion of Omnicom’s proprietary data; data from our global retail media partners such as Amazon, Walmart, Tesco, and Lazada amongst others; data vendors and, where available, clients’ own data to offer a single, customisable view of the commerce journey.

As part of our transformation efforts, we established India as a hub with nearly 2,000 employees to service the agency network’s regional and global data and analytics requirements. Meanwhile, we also doubled down on new data strategies that can augment clients first-party capabilities with exclusive data partnerships, ahead of the demise of traditional signals like third-party cookies.

We are helping our clients reimagine their first-party data ambitions and how they are utilising tech and cloud to deliver on their business ambitions. Central to this is the pioneering work on data clean rooms that we have done in India in the automotive category, and bespoke analytics solutions and investment planning delivered via our Omni Auto ROI Vault.

Furthermore, within APAC, we expanded our relationship with FlyBuys, Australia’s largest loyalty platform, in 2023 to offer transactional data for nearly two thirds of households.

How will OMD leverage the collective success of its APAC markets to further strengthen the network in the region?

We develop and define best practices and innovation opportunities from the markets up to the network as opposed to simply a top-down flow. This is done by focusing on creating collaboration models around key areas of specialism such as digital, strategy and client leadership as well as category and consumer. The process ensures we offer a consistent suite of capabilities across the region and deliver the same standard of excellence for our clients as well as the ability to grow together.

Also, we emphasise creating greater flexibility and fluidity in our talent deployment. This can take the form of mobility initiatives that allow our colleagues to experience and learn from markets across the world as well as more operational accessibility of talent from across APAC to deliver for local market needs. With the Agency as a Platform model in play as well, we can actively tap the region’s best and most appropriate talent for client projects and challenges.

Can you share some details on OMD’s plans to maintain and advance its leadership in digital, data, and tech solutions for clients?

OMD APAC is helping our clients adopt future-facing solutions with generative AI or privacy-safe technologies while concurrently building customisable solutions that will help them today, ensuring a seamless transition to future-ready products. Among the list of strategic initiatives that help us remain ahead of the curve include Omni, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Future Signals, Connected TV (CTV), and proprietary influencer and governance tools.

Omni, Omnicom’s marketing orchestration operating system, is key in delivering stellar work for our clients. It is an open and flexible platform that can adapt to client and industry needs as they emerge, offering a suite of proprietary and partner tools, insight and data solutions with client ownership and privacy built deep into the operating system.

At the centre of our Omni strategy is unlocking capabilities in the world of AI, powered by Omni Assist. Omni Assist was developed last year through a market- first, exclusive partnership with Microsoft and OpenAI. It uses access to OpenAI’s GPT models through Microsoft Azure to power end-to-end campaign management, strategy planning, content development and delivery, audience and media activation, measurement and optimisation. We also have market-first partnerships with Google and Amazon, among others.

We will continue to invest in Omni and strengthen the relationships we have with our partners locally and regionally. Specifically, to continue to evolve our local market applications and differentiators with locally relevant partnerships for India; incorporating AI; and the broader governance and workflow solutions.

In a competitive talent market, how is OMD attracting and retaining the talent?

People, being our greatest assets, have always been our biggest focus. We are now competing for talent at all levels not just within the media and advertising industries but also with technology companies, start-ups, publishers, consultants as well as in- housed teams within clients. We champion a culture of open collaboration without archaic hierarchical norms, allowing our people to collaborate more seamlessly across functions and markets at all levels. This results in greater motivation and learning for our people while producing work that takes in network learning.

What are your plans in the creative ecosystem? Can you elaborate on OMD’s plans in the space and how it will benefit clients?

Globally, we are driving a creative media agenda that sees us developing capabilities to unlock disruptive and innovative media experiences that drive “Brand Heat” – increased salience, buzz and relevancy. Specifically, we are looking at how we can elevate our activations, media partnerships, sponsorship and integration strategies to create more potent and impactful connections with audiences. In all the turbulence and upheaval of the Covid-era, one post-pandemic trend we followed saw brand equity declining across all categories across the globe. This is mostly due to the short-term transactional requirements of the time and the need for clients to focus on immediacy and rapid returns.

As we move forward we need to balance the performance agenda of clients with support for their brands and long-term growth potential. The challenge here is that traditional channels of brand building are transforming with the pace and pattern of media consumption shifting rapidly, the ecosystem is getting ever more complex and media costs are rising.

What are the ‘growth markets’ OMD is focusing on in 2024? And what are the strategies that you are employing to capitalise on their potential?

The opportunities for growth are significant across the entirety of APAC. With major shifts in population growth, the expansion of the middle classes and rapid advancements in tech penetration offering advertisers opportunities to drive both volume and value growth across their portfolios.

For OMD specifically, our current footprint gives us multiple markets to consider but we must start unsurprisingly with the two key territories of India and China as major growth markets.

Few markets match India for its expansion and pace of growth and we see a tremendous opportunity for us to expand our scale in that market. India is important to us not only because of its ongoing growth as a critical market for clients, but also significantly powering the delivery of our global data and analytics solutions. The country is also consistently and increasingly demonstrating its potential for media creativity and effectiveness.

Just recently, Omnicom announced the formation of an Advertising Services group in India in recognition of its creative potential and also that while it is currently the eighth largest advertising market in the world, there are only upsides in national and commercial growth in the short- to medium-term. In fact, we see our operations as nearly tripling within the next few years.

China for its obvious scale but also its leadership in innovation, in many areas representing the cutting edge of new marketing models, especially around ecommerce.

As with the whole APAC region, the diversity and pace of change in both these markets require a high degree of localised strategies for growth but in both markets we have seen great progress following a focus on our leadership and specialist talent, which ultimately sits at the heart of all our growth strategies.

Nonetheless, APAC’s growth potential is considerable and dynamic. So, alongside the strategies outlined above, we also focus on our ability for connection, shared learnings and innovation from across the entire region. Our journey of innovation and the creation of bespoke solutions for our clients ultimately starts and ends with our people.