MediaMonks on Shanghai Plans and Singapore Success

Digital production agency MediaMonks has revealed its plans to set up shop in Shanghai in the coming year. The award-winning studio has offices in Amsterdam, London, New York and Singapore and has eyes on the growing – and maturing – Chinese market.

The decision to expand into mainland China springboards off the back of MediaMonks’ fruitful experiences in Singapore, says co-founder and CEO Victor Knaap.

“Eighteen months ago, when I visited Singapore with our work and showed our case studies to all the major agencies here they said, ‘I love it but it’s never going to happen here. We are focusing on getting the production done as cheaply as possible and locally. How on earth can you compete with that?’ But we bring a different game to the local production agencies. We don’t pick up every little job that comes through; we focus on the stuff that makes a difference. One and a half years later and we’re in the middle of the biggest job we’ve ever done and it comes from Singapore. They really want to push the boundaries with a big interactive film piece with a nicely crafted design. It’s got a big, technical build behind it. Things have changed in the space of a year and a half,” explains Victor, who predicts a similar trajectory in Shanghai, where the market is maturing and growing more attuned to the need for quality production.

“Everything changes here incredibly fast, and I have a bit of the same feeling about what happened in Shanghai,” continues Victor. “When I first went over, people said, ‘that work is not around here but we want to make it’ so we want to spend six to nine months investigating that and helping them and sending people there from Singapore to see if we can push work out there.”

One thing that’s really got the team excited is the sheer diversity of the region – strong markets each with their own platforms or digital culture means that it’s been imperative to really get granular when it comes to understanding the different countries that make up the region.

“In Europe you have one place that does the work and you don’t really interact with local markets. Here you really can’t work without interacting with local markets – and not just because they are so strong and so big but also because they’re so diverse. You have to understand their networks, their culture, their heritage,” says Executive Producer Bas Muller, who is leading the team in Singapore. “You need to do a bit more travel as well.”

From mobile adoption in Indonesia to Japanese attention to detail and craft and China’s traditional fast-churn, high volume approach to digital (although that’s changing), the team have been getting to grips with the characteristics of the various markets. South Korea is another country that’s been inspiring the MediaMonks team for a long time – COO Wesley Ter Haar recalls being blown away by Korean digital work in the 90s, when the government had just launched its initiative to connect the whole country to broadband. “For me it’s a country that’s very savvy when it comes to digital. It’s very similar to Sweden– they were connected to broadband first and that led to a very digitally savvy, digitally native society that produced some amazing work. I think Korea is similar. I remember our team looking at some Korean projects on very bad bandwidth years ago in Holland, waiting ten minutes for it to download, but when you saw it was amazing. They were able to experiment with different types of technologies.”

One of the keys to producing work that’s not only highly crafted but relevant to local Asian markets has been to hire local talent. At the moment Bas is the only Dutchman working out of Singapore and his team includes people from Korea, Malaysia, Mainland China and Singapore. Finding great talent is always a challenge, but in a region as diverse and, well, massive as Asia-Pacific sourcing just the right people can be tricky. While there is an abundance of highly advanced, digitally-literate and highly educated people to work with, finding those with the ability to think creatively has been tougher.

“Our company needs to see quality. It needs the top one per cent in every class,” says Victor. “It’s difficult any way to get good people, but especially here where production is not sexy, it just needs to be done as quickly as possible. That’s not the best ground to start on. But the ambition level is high. We recently hired a Malaysian girl with a very good eye for detail and who understands concepting. We are a technological company, but the idea comes first. That’s our job. It’s not that we are an IT company and we build the technology and throw an idea in. That way you get a mismatch between idea and execution.”

But things are changing quickly – MediaMonks are working with the Singaporean government to train local talent and have a policy of bringing new staff back to Amsterdam for an immersion in the MediaMonks philosophy. “We’re working with the government, we’re working with schools to train people. And now that people know that we’re here we’re getting more people looking for jobs and we’re seeing some really great talent come by,” says Bas.