ASIA-PACIFIC – SINGAPORE, APRI; 27, 2012: IPG Mediabrands launched Rally, a social marketing division across Asia to provide services in social marketing strategy, P2P communications, advocacy management, conversation planning and social commerce.
In the past few years, the region has seen a dramatic growth of social media and viral content, providing a perfect landscape to launch the new service. The offering, which exists in Malaysia since 2009, is being launched across hubs in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand.
Rally aims to strengthen a brand’s social strategy in the digital world. Social marketing strategy provides brands and businesses with a strategy to maximize the opportunities as well as minimize the threats while the P2P communications offering leverages the notion there is a lot of power in people’s hands and it’s important to manage a brands reputation. Rally also provides an advocacy management service, conversation planning offers clients a well development, strategically led plan to manage the online conversation and the social commerce arm of Rally aims to offer genuine monetization and sales attribution opportunities.
Prashant Kumar, president IPG Mediabrands, World Markets Asia said: "All marketing ultimately will be social. So, the challenge is not how to add some social on the marketing fringes, but how to redefine marketing and commerce around peer-to-peer networks. Rally is not just about community and crisis management; it’s everything about mainstream marketing – product innovation, communication, content, media and commerce. Its role pervades the entire demand chain and we hope to design campaigns around affinity networks and end-to-end crowd sourcing."
IPG Mediabrands hope Rally to be the first ‘earned media’ offering in an industry replete with ‘paid media’ agencies. Rally’s ambition is to deliver at least two-thirds of an integrated campaign’s media value via earned media. So far the majority of Rally’s campaigns are able to achieve that. IPG Mediabrands’ approach to managing conversations with brand communities has shown valid momentum in terms of brand love and the business impact, believing that if social numbers in many of the markets look as big as traditional numbers, it’s high time marketing investments follow the allocation patterns too. And towards that persuasion and influence must work hand-in-hand.
