Vietnam's Edge Marketing adds two appointments

It has named Akhil Malhotra as the client service director and Tina Do as the strategic planner.

A Masters graduate in Consumer Psychology, Do has more than 10 years of experience in strategic consumer planning.

Patrick Pitcher, group Edge chairman, said, “With our focus on consumer and data driven insights to create ideas that provide the best solutions for our clients, we are thrilled to recruit Tina to our organisation. She will ensure we have an even deeper understanding of what consumers really want and will help us remain agile to the ever-changing ways they make decisions.”

Meanwhile, Malhotra was most recently with Cowan Vietnam and Red Brand Builders.

Pitcher noted that clients in Southeast Asia are demanding agencies to provide greater levels of sophistication and leadership to understand their business needs and provide the best possible solutions.

David Appleton, group president at Edge, noted that the agency has been making significant change to its organisational structure recently, to better integrate its service capabilities and provide more value to its clients.

“These appointments are a critical step in that direction of putting the consumer and the client at the centre of our focus,” he added.

Edge is a communications agency specialising in digital, data and direct response marketing with subsidiaries in Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore, with clients including Diageo, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Mead Johnson, Citibank and Samsung.

It recruited former Mastercard marketing executive Natalie Lockwood as vice-president of business development in March, to lead the agency's growth.

Her appointment followed several other key announcements, including the appointment of Dr. Amitava Biswas, former McKinsey consultant, as group Edge director of strategy and optimisation; Phan Thi Hong Le who joined from BBDO and AC Nielsen as director of loyalty programmes; Jeff Cooper as chief data architect and Vo Minh Trung who was promoted to optimisation manager after having managed the group’s IT infrastructure.