AOY Insights: How iProspect Taiwan bagged top honours by rewriting the script on transformation

AOY Insights is a series celebrating some of the top wins from Campaign Asia-Pacific's Agency of the Year awards. Join us as we take a closer look at the entries that struck gold this year.

Category: Taiwan Media Agency of the Year (Gold)

Narratives around transformation usually flow in one direction — a firm that was steeped in traditional ways of doing business, embracing digital media. However, the script played out differently for iProspect Taiwan which disrupted the status quo by transforming from a purely digital and performance-focused media expert into a full funnel agency. With 31% of overall media spend in Taiwan accounted for by traditional media, which is still on a growth trajectory, it was a prudent move for the agency.

The transition was challenging considering the average employee age at the agency was 28 years, and the staff had minimal experience on traditional media. The team avoided getting bogged down in the minutiae of price wars, by adopting a future focused strategy centred around innovation and underpinned by data and AI. The agency used the turbulent period of 2023 with looming threats of budget cuts and client uncertainties to reinvent the pillars of the media agency business: people, product, data, and creativity.

At a more workaday level, iProspect initiated the iP Internal MediaWorks Contest, a hands-on workshop that aimed to bring together diverse talents from different departments to apply the Intersection Planning framework to real-world case studies. Participating in this exercise fast-tracked the team’s familiarity and comfort with strategic planning, real-time problem-solving, and full-funnel expertise.

Powering the evolution at iProspect Taiwan is a highly sophisticated consumer data platform — the only system of its kind in the country that integrates 117 publishers and data from Chungwa Telecom the largest telco in Taiwan. This has given iProspect unprecedented insights into consumer behaviour and purchase habits.

These factors aided iProspect in its embrace of full-funnel strategies encompassing integrated planning, e-commerce, SEO, and creative data utilisation.

The approach also reflects in the scale and ambition of the work, particularly in the beauty category. Only 34% of the 8 million strong market for beauty in Taiwan was connected to a leading client in the category. Using the clients’ first party data, iProspect put in place a consumer map of Taiwan’s beauty enthusiasts for the brand, creating identities — for instance, confidence aspirers or nature and safety lovers. Using Dentsu Wonder, a homegrown AI tool, iProspect could determine 22 product categories from the client’s portfolio that were the most appropriate to these personas. Hyper-targeted advertising that tapped into the unmet needs of these consumer groups resulted in impressive growth and an increase in order value.

For another case in the beauty space, iProspect focused on the allure of strong brand storytelling paired with appropriate and relevant media exposure as crucial factors in bringing back interest in the category following a pandemic-induced slump. The agency worked on a full funnel marketing effectiveness analytics platform that helped the client measure the impact of its branding investments on actual sales, both in physical stores and ecommerce. The brand was thus able to gauge the contribution of every dollar spent on positive business results. The agency also tied its remuneration to sales, with 25% of its service fee dependent on brand performance. By taking this often discussed but seldom implemented approach, iProspect not just delivered results that were above the category norm but retained the account without a pitch.

iProspect has been leveraging its skills in the beauty category to build it out into a practice with the creation of the Beauty Expert task force which blends performance-driven strategies with high impact awareness solutions. The Dentsu solution centre now collaborates with leading mastheads among beauty publishers further increasing the impact of Dentsu Beauty ID.

Taken in tandem, these strategies and approaches have had an impressive impact on the agency’s growth trajectory — with 33 new wins and being named the highest growth media agency over a three-year period by RECMA, with an over 25% increase in revenue. Its data-powered transformation leaves iProspect well placed to navigate a hybrid future where digital has its primacy, but where legacy media still has a role and relevance.