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Isentia shifts focus to data-driven content strategy after closing King Content

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By Shawn Lim, Reporter, Asia Pacific

August 15, 2017 | 5 min read

Isentia is turning its attention towards adopting a data-driven content strategy for clients, after announcing that it will be discontinuing the King Content brand and closing offices in Hong Kong and New York, two years after investing $37.8m in the content marketing agency.

Asia Pacific

Isentia is turning their attention towards adopting a data-driven content strategy for their clients.

In a conference call with The Drum on Tuesday, David Liu (chief executive, Asia), Richard Spencer (chief marketing officer) and Jason Lee (commercial director) shared that the media intelligence group will continue to invest in technology that will help them uncover data intelligence and predict new trends in order to formulate data-driven content strategy, which they claimed are what their clients are looking for now.

“From an account management point of view, we can sit with our clients and take them through inside research and strategy,” said Spencer.

“We can also manage them appropriately with our resources, and what clients are getting when they transact with Isentia is the same high level as regardless of whatever organisation they are working with because we are all part of this new business that is focused on real data intelligence, how genuine are our data we gather, whether from media, social media or other platform.

“The other big thing is the huge investment we are making in technology on an annual basis, which allows us to gather data more effectively and how we need to drive best practices with technology and ingest data from a wide number of countries, picking up to 18 languages at one time.

“We effectively moving the business model from its media monitoring roots through to media intelligence and into data intelligence in real terms, ultimately from our perspective, how we move from data intelligence through to predictive analysis, telling our clients what is happening next, instead of what is happening today.”

Liu noted that while most of Isentia’s clients are still primarily looking at media monitoring, reports and data interpretation, more and more clients are starting to look at the data analytics and data interpretation part of its data, which is one of the key reasons for the new approach.

“We also realised that in Asia more and more clients are more focused in getting the online and social views,” said Liu.

“We have grown very well in Southeast Asia and for markets in North Asia like China and Taiwan, we are actually seeing growth in the insights business.

“We are also now providing some strategy on the content part, something that we have been seeing some clients requesting for. Overall in Asia, the mainstream media monitoring, there is still a huge demand, especially for SEA.”

While media monitoring will still be the bread and butter of Isentia’s offerings, Lee believes that it is the right time for the company to tap into this area of content marketing as they expect to see growth in the future.

“Traditionally, the business in Singapore has been pretty strong in social insight and intelligence, on top of our base products like media monitoring,” said Lee.

“With that sort of footprints within the market, we are seeing a lot of opportunities locally and globally that we can tap on. Increasingly, we are seeing a lot of clients coming to us for a strategic approach for their assets like print, online and broadcast to social media

“At times, we are adopting a data-based strategic approach where we advise clients on how to formulate a strategy when they market their products. That’s where we expect to see growth in the coming years.

Spencer also revealed that the company will be pushing out new initiatives in the next 12 months and will continue to spend around 10% of its yearly revenue on investments for its offerings.

“We are keen to bring our integrated offerings together going forward and over the next 12 months to help our clients solve their problems and maximise their opportunities,” shared Spencer.

“We have rebranded the whole organisation to put all our different businesses under the one Isentia brand, effectively move to a monolithic brand structure, that allows us to have all the products that Isentia have to offer, regardless of where they come from, organically or acquisitively.

“Roughly, we spent between seven to 10 percent on our revenue every year on investments like technology. We do that through 60 people in our development hubs in Sydney and Singapore.”

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