The APAC region has become heaven for digital marketing firms due to highly enthusiastic user base waiting for new products like a bee searching for flower full of sweet nectar. Blessed with great diversity and innovation, APAC countries have popular social media apps like LINE from Japan and emerging e-commerce and payment systems from China. Most importantly, the users feel more comfortable with mobile phones and therefore an entire generation of users has ditched desktop computers. They are using smartphones for even for complex tasks such as editing videos and writing presentations which no one has thought before to be done on a mobile device. In terms of pricing and quality, a dollar spent in APAC gives much higher output as compared to Europe or the Northern American region.
These benefits are the prime motivator for companies to choose the APAC region for investing. However, the region has significantly faced some major obstacles in its early days of e-commerce. A social media expert from Bangkok and the Managing Director of Bamboo Labs—Pavel Hacker reveals more about those downfalls. Pavel explains that: in the beginning of e-commerce, there were serious problems with payments and delivery. These pitfalls forced innovators like Pavel to find new ways to stabilize the market. The major encouragement for him to establish the company was a huge gap between new digital agencies and offline advertising agencies. These companies were way apart from each other even they were working in the same sector of marketing. The sector required fully digitalized firms which can cover the latest digital platforms like smartphones. Therefore, observing such scenario, Pavel and team decided to cater to the need for such advertising agencies where personalities like Don Draper are combined with Elon Musk. They established Bamboo Labs and transformed the firm into an ideal example of a “fully digitalized company” in Thailand.
Bamboo Labs’ Focus
Presently, Bamboo Labs provides services like social media management and social ads, but mainly is creating content. Since its establishment, Bamboo has evolved its offerings with the emerging challenges. For upcoming changes like growing demand for video and animation formats, the company has expanded its service offerings to cover video production and motion graphics. Today, Pavel is happy about branding and positioning clients who are creating an online presence with the Bamboo Labs services. Considering the increasing dominance of e-commerce, Pavel expects that Bamboo Labs will work on more e-commerce related projects in 2019 and 2020.
Turning Challenges into Opportunities
Despite decent growth in the marketing industry, Pavel feels that there is still an ignorant view towards digital advertising. As compared to the offline marketing budget, companies’ online budget is quite low. According to Pavel, this distinction has increased due to the wrong perception of people which states that creating content is easy like snapping a random photo or uploading a TV commercial on YouTube.
In fact, the actual condition is the tremendous rise in mobile phone users. Even on Bangkok’s sky trains, 99% of commuters consistently engage with their mobile devices; messaging, playing games, using social media, and watching videos. We are talking about the “face down generation”. Therefore, handhelds like smartphones and tablets have become one of the biggest digital advertising platforms in the current date. Despite this huge opportunity in digital marketing, there is a lack of awareness amongst businesses. Therefore, Pavel and team have to convince their clients about the benefits of digital and mobile strategies for their business.
Aiming for the Future Growth
The Bamboo Labs team regularly interacts with clients on the aforementioned matter with an explanation that gives a complete idea of how the digital platforms have evolved and the excellent ways that can help their businesses from sales to recruitments. Pavel feels proud to see these efforts of his team members. Every individual at Bamboo Labs is working on creating and implementing the right strategies with frequent learning and improvements. This process has enabled the company to make right communications with clients and assist them achieve their goals.
Today, Bamboo Labs aims to focus on emerging trends like video, micro-KOLs, and e-commerce. Specifically, in e-commerce, the company sees the data processing, the connection of advertising and media buying to data, predictions, and BI as the future, and is looking for the best and optimal ways to deal with the complexities in these industries as they are all specialized industries that require specific talents hard to find, globally.
Company Culture, Forming a Bond between Team Members
According to Pavel, company culture is a crucial aspect of any firm. In the technology world where artificial intelligence is doing human work—emotional intelligence, teamwork, cooperation, and compassionate communication differentiates humans from AI. Therefore, to form a healthy bond between the team and company goals, Pavel always tries to know their problems, passions, hobbies, family which further helps the team to balance their personal and professional life while working together as dedicated employees, team members, and content producers.
The team of Bamboo Labs mainly consists of Thai millennials. Pavel has observed that these people, especially the new Thai generation are significantly more advanced than those 10 years before. Therefore, this forward generation has the capability to transform the industries and show a bright future for APAC.
Finally, while speaking about the digital marketing trends that tend to dominate the industry, Pavel predicts that the e-payment systems, marketing usage of navigation, and user-generated content and micro-influencers will dominate the indus
