The Star Online: Business
The Star Online: Business |
- Iron ore sees worst month since October 2011
- Procter & Gamble wins Spikes Asia Advertiser of the Year award
- Can media agencies think?
| Iron ore sees worst month since October 2011 Posted: 31 Aug 2012 05:10 PM PDT SINGAPORE: Iron ore looks set to hit nearly three-year lows on Friday and to end August with its worst performance in 10 months as Chinese steel producers shun fresh cargoes in the face of waning demand. Iron ore has been hardest hit among industrial commodities by China's slowdown, losing 36% this year, as falling steel prices curbed demand from the biggest consumer of the raw material. Iron ore with 62% iron content, the industry benchmark, dropped 1.8% to US$88.70 per tonne on Thursday, the lowest since October 2009, according to data provider Steel Index. For the month, the steelmaking component has lost more than 24%, the most since it fell 31% last October. "This is all about destocking because I don't think we're seeing a massive collapse in end-user demand for steel. Everybody's just reducing their inventory of iron ore," said Graeme Train, analyst at Macquarie in Shanghai. Train estimated that smaller Chinese steel mills had dropped their iron ore inventories to about 17-18 days worth of consumption, versus 27-30 days over the past year. Train said the "absolute minimum" inventory would be 14 days, which is about the period it takes for cargo imported from, for example, Australia, to reach China. "So there's potential for the mills to destock further, so we could see prices go down to US$75-US$80," he said. Shanghai steel rebar futures have dropped about 17% this year, less than half the percentage loss for iron ore. Shanghai rebar is down nearly 10% this month, the steepest drop in almost a year, as losses extend to a fifth straight month. In the face of weak steel demand, most Chinese mills have kept their iron ore inventories low, with some opting to buy small lots from port stockpiles instead of ordering fresh, big cargoes. "I'm not getting any inquiries at all today," said a physical iron ore trader in Singapore, who thinks prices will only see support at around US$70. Brazil's Vale, the world's top iron ore miner, said it was surprised that prices fell below US$110 a tonne which it attributed to excess supply rather than weak demand. Jose Carlos Martins, who runs Vale's iron ore business, however, said the company's production costs were still well below current prices. "We are one of the most efficient producers," he said. "We will be the last to leave the market." - Reuters |
| Procter & Gamble wins Spikes Asia Advertiser of the Year award Posted: 31 Aug 2012 05:10 PM PDT The Spikes Asia Festival of Creativity, the annual regional creative advertising and communications event for Asia-Pacific, is presenting this year's Advertiser of the Year Award to Procter & Gamble (P&G) Asia. The Lions Festivals, which organises the event together with Campaign Asia Pacific publisher Haymarket, says in a statement that the award honours a brand that has set itself apart through the quality of its campaigns with consistently high creative communications while encouraging and nurturing innovative marketing techniques produced by their agencies across the Asia-Pacific region. "Since the launch of the Spikes Asia Festival four years ago, P&G Asia has won an astonishing number of Spikes Asia awards five gold, 11 silver and 11 bronze trophies across different disciplines design, digital, direct, integrated, media, outdoor and promo & activation with work produced by their agencies from across the region China, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia and the Philippines. "It's a testament of their commitment to engage their consumers by not only embracing but also expecting creativity in their product communications around Asia," says Terry Savage, chairman of Lions Festivals. Freddy Bharucha, P&G chief marketing officer for Asia, will be presented the award on Sept 18 in Singapore. Spikes Asia Festival, to be held from Sept 16 to 18 at Suntec Singapore, will feature 30 seminars as well as The Forum, a new stream of content offering attendees the chance to interact with speakers on specific themes such as The Creative Future of Media, Creativity in Mobile Advertising and Creativity in Branded Content and Entertainment. This year's speaker line-up includes BBDO Worldwide CEO and president Andrew Robertson, GroupM Global president Dominic Proctor, McCann Worldgroup chairman and CEO Nick Brien, Ogilvy & Mather worldwide chief creative officer Tham Khai Meng, Lowe Global Creative Council president Jose Miguel Sokoloff, and Cirque du Soleil creative director Lyn Heward. Last year's Spikes Asia was attended by more than 1,700 delegates. The Star is the official and exclusive Spikes Asia Festival of Creativity representative for Malaysia. |
| Posted: 31 Aug 2012 05:09 PM PDT ALTHOUGH many years have passed since the birth of media agencies (agencies that plan advertisers' media strategies), the debate continues on who creative or media agencies should be the primary communications partner for advertisers. M&C Saatchi Asia regional chief executive officer Chris Jaques last month posted in his blog a provocative commentary titled "Why Can't Media Agencies Think?" which had earlier been published in Campaign Asia Pacific in 2011. In it, he says that he doesn't believe "media agencies in their current form are capable of providing the creative brilliance on which business success depends." He backs his argument by pointing to the performance of media agencies at the 2011 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where out of the 81 winners of Media Lions, 66 were creative agencies and only 39 were media agencies. "So creative agencies massively outperformed media agencies in their own media awards," he notes. While Jaques says he believes media agencies should be the creative leaders of the future, currently "they are not able to generate "great ideas that can truly ignite consumer attitudes and behaviour, ideas that can truly transform a client's business." He cites several reasons for this, including the media agencies' past legacy and the kind of staff they attract, their primary purpose being to invest money wisely and effectively, their role within their holding companies that limits their freedom to offer expertise that is competitive to other group companies, and the way clients incentivise media agencies (mainly against measurable data and not creative originality). Jaques' views have many supporters, including Lowe Malaysia chairman Khairudin Rahim and DraftFCB Malaysia chief executive officer T. Renganathan (both are from creative agencies). Khairudin says Jaques voices what everyone from the creative agencies have been thinking and "the facts presented speak for themselves." "The reason why creative agencies consistently produce more high value ideas is their bias towards intuition versus facts. Great thinking and great ideas comes from people who use their intuition more than common logic," he says. "They look at the same thing as everyone else and then think something different. It is intuition that makes for the greatest persuasion, things that touch hearts, alter perceptions and move people. "Creative leaders of the past, present and future will always be from those who think laterally. These type of talent will reside in organisations that value and reward imagination more than efficiency." Renganathan says creative agencies like DraftFCB are media agnostic. "We think in terms of ideas and not medium and therefore I believe we do come up with best ideas." He suggests turning back the clock to where the industry was before the birth of media agencies. "It's ideas first always and not where to place the message. Media agencies can be the creative leaders if they can combine the data, tools and analytics with the creative idea and message. But currently and to a large extent, creative souls do not thrive in a numbers environment. Creativity and innovation comes from people who can think laterally and the use of intuition." Heads of media agencies have a different view. Omnicom Media Group managing director Andreas Vogiatzakis says the client has separated the "functions" media and creative in order to drive efficiencies. "And that is good (albeit the fact those escalating media price wars are eroding our values and this needs to be changed)," he replies in an email. "A debate in order to propagate an us versus them' mentality is not healthy. What exactly are the motives? Our industry is going through constant change, and we are experiencing a paradigm shift on a daily basis across the world. Complaining about each other won't do us any good unless it is constructive. We need to work towards fulfilling the client's needs and make our industry the best there is. "At OMD and PHD (the agencies under Omnicom Media), we always put the client business first this is our business! This stipulates a close working relationship with our creative agency partners, so we can both, together, bring value to our clients." On Jaques' comment that "It's great thinking and great ideas that build great brands not great data and terrific tools," Vogiatzakis says: "It is the old, simple story ... you can do great advertising, but if you have a bad media plan/placement, no one will see your ad. Or, you can have bad creative, and a great media plan, and that will be the fastest way to kill the brand! So you must have great creative and great media. One without the other won't work." He says it is not about domination, but about co-creation. "Critically, our goal in (advertising) life should not be about a creative idea for the sake of creativity, but a creative idea with high relevancy to the objectives of the brand. Creativity for the sake of creativity has no place here; otherwise we can all go and become artists, not advertising/marketing professionals." IPG Mediabrands president (Asia World Markets) and CEO (Malaysia) Prashant Kumar says that great thinking requires great imagination plus great engineering. "It needs both art and science. Data brings objectivity and scalability to marketing decisions. Tools are a way to simplify handling of data," he says. "As per Chris' reasoning, Einstein was not a great thinker. Nor was da Vinci. They both studied too much data!" On the performance of media firms versus creative agencies at Cannes Lions, Vogiatzakis says he doesn't think this is a tally war. "Success is measured in how a campaign builds business. Success is measured when the client retains the agency due to the results it brings," he says. He adds: "I have no issue of co-ownership on awards. We together co-create. Nothing works in isolation." Kumar, meanwhile, notes that most submissions for Cannes Media Lions are from creative agencies. "Ideas are the main currency for creative agencies. So they run huge award machines with massive budgets for awards. Clients expect more than media ideas from media agencies. So they are less aggressive in this area. Also media agencies tend to have much fewer done-for-awards cases. While there is no doubt that media agencies can get better overall on ideation, they tend to get less credit usually than they should." On the topic of incentivisation, Vogiatzakis expresses doubt that clients incentivise creative agencies based on "creative originality" either. "How would you judge so unless quite subjectively? The reason most incentivisation is based on measurable data/results is precisely that: measurable and quantifiable results. In fact, many of our clients incentivise us and the creative agency based on sales data." On Jaques' comment that media agencies should be the creative leaders of the future but they're currently not capable, Kumar says: "Creative leadership is what clients would normally expect from creative agencies today, which due to their strengths in crafting skills are better placed in general. However I believe creativity should be open-sourced. Great ideas should be allowed to originate from anywhere in the marketing ecosystem. As that happens more, media agencies will invest to deepen their skills in this area." Summing up, Kumar says media agencies are better at "thinking" where creative agencies are better at "feeling", though there are exceptions on both sides. "Or to put it another way, media agencies are better at left brain thinking typically, while creative agencies typically bring right brain thinking. Together they make a whole brain team that creates great marketing ideas." StarBizWeek emailed Jaques to get his response to the diverse views generated by his blog posting. In his reply, he writes: "The fact is, media agencies now control more than 95% of a client's budget, and the fees paid to creative agencies are getting smaller and smaller. So media agencies are being required to provide broader-based expertise than they have had to deliver in the past. "They may have developed the research, data and software but they haven't yet developed the talent, the culture, nor the skills necessary to fulfill the needs that clients now have of them." He blames the holding companies. "By separating their creative agencies from their media agencies, they have created a structure that benefits their own business, at the expense of their clients' needs. It's nonsense. I've never once met a senior client who wanted their media and creative agencies to be separated. Both provide different, complementary talents, skills and perspectives. They should be working together, as one. "The sooner someone has the guts to consolidate media and creative capabilities back into one integrated agency model, they will have clients rushing to their doors. I believe that this is the real issue, to be honest." |
| You are subscribed to email updates from The Star Online: Business To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
0 ulasan:
Catat Ulasan