Understand Interactive Advertising Bureau Hong Kong and the Trend of Digital Marketing Industry 2018

Q&A with Cecilia Chan, Executive Director, IAB HK

Can you tell us about IAB HK and how is came about?

The IAB Hong Kong powered by HKDMA was established in October 2016. We are a not-for-profit association which aims to develop standards and best practices in digital marketing to shape the future of the profession for Hong Kong’s advertising and marketing community.

The founding members of IAB HK, comScore, Facebook, Google, Next Digital, Oath, Pixels and South China Morning Post, all share a common goal of seeing marketers embrace digital at a level unprecedented in Hong Kong’s advertising and marketing industry. PwC is a supporting partner to the association.

By working with its member companies, IAB HK is committed to talent development, education and cutting-edge research about the critical role of digital marketing.

Currently we have 80+ members of corporates/organisations.

What is the main focus of IAB HK for the digital marketing industry in 2018?

Helping organisations attract, develop and retain talent is our focus this year and we have the following implementation plans:

1. Forming a IAB HK Job Board – Talent acquisition is always a challenge for digital marketing organisations in Hong Kong. Powered by cpjobs.com, the Job Board provides a free, dedicated and centralised platform for our members to post digital marketing related job ads to reach the right talents. The IAB HK Job Board was launched in January 2018
2. Organising training and education sessions – IAB HK has arranged various breakfast meetings in the past to create a platform for its members to share experience and learn from each other. A full-day training was also held in 2017. To raise the overall standard and skill sets in our industry, IAB HK will continue to run 10 breakfast meetings, seminars, workshops in 2018 and will hold training courses in the second half of the year.
3. Experience sharing with talent from universities – We believe in-person sharing helps convey messages in a more convincing way. IAB HK is arranging industry sharing sessions with six tertiary education institutes, featuring young talent from our member companies, to share their experience and insights with the university students.
4. Offering IAB HK internship – To provide an enriched experience for young talent to interact with and learn from experienced digital marketers from key brands, IAB HK have recruited three interns from universities to support various functions within IAB HK.

What is the main challenge faced in the digital marketing industry?

Talent is always the hot topic in digital marketing industry in Hong Kong.

Digital marketing is both an art and a science. While creativity is the “art” part, big data usage is the “science”. Any talent that has both qualities is very valuable today. Unfortunately, a lot of these “art plus science” talents prefer to work in bigger and more exciting digital marketing markets like China or overseas but not in Hong Kong.

On top of that, digital marketing in Hong Kong is a very new industry with a mere 10 years of history behind it. There is an insufficient supply of related talent. We hear from some members that they are always hiring digital marketing talents. As business expands, they need new talents to join the team. But at the same time, the talent they have trained are being acquired by other companies. Talent demand and supply is never in equilibrium.

In 2018, what candidates will digital companies looking for the most? And what are the hottest job openings?

We expect great demand for talent in all aspects of digital marketing since technology evolves so quickly and companies are spending more on digital marketing. We believe the following types of digital marketing talents will be in high demand:

- Talents who embrace change and who are looking for an exciting work environment.
- Talents who are willing to open their minds and try new things.
- Talents who can “marry” data and creativity, who are able to analyse big data, dig out important elements and craft creative strategies that are key to digital marketing talents.

What do you think about job openings and market trends in the Digital Marketing Industry in 2018?

There is likely to be a strong demand for talents across a range of sectors of digital marketing as companies step up investment on it.

- Medium: Mobile advertising will be dominant - According to eMarkerter’s latest forecast, mobile advertising makes up almost half (49.2%) of all digital ad spend in 2017. It will continue to grow and by 2021 will represent 80.2% share of digital ad spend. Advertisement formats and content are also set to be tailored to the small screens of mobile devices to attract people’s attention.

- More and more personalised content – With the overwhelming amount of information from different digital platforms available locally and internationally, Hong Kong people continue to lose interest as a huge range of different information is pushed to them. People will be only have their interest stimulated and maintained by  content that matters to them.

- Marriage of data and creativity -  With so much data available and the need for personalised content, digital advertising or marketing will push the right content to the right target audience at the right time.

What role does cpjobs.com play and what value can it create in this collaboration?

The objective of our Job Board is to enable IAB HK members to have access to free and unlimited postings on the dedicated and centralised platform to gain better exposure and reach the targeted talents.

IAB HK Job Board is powered by cpjobs.com. We are excited to work with cpjobs.com to launch our Job Board to help members recruit talents in a hassle-free way. IAB HK members can showcase their job openings on our Job Board and on cpjobs.com for free. With cpjobs.com’s unique and award-winning job matching technology “Match Me Plus” and its data intelligence, we can be more effective in recruiting talents.

Have you any tips or wisdom for young talents who would like to start their career in the digital marketing industry?

Firstly, we suggest talents embrace change, open their minds and try new things. Secondly, focus on data analysis on top of their daily creative marketing life. Invest in analytic tools and study closely data obtained from all sources. Last but not least, we encourage talents to share more and learn more from others, including success and failures.

IAB HK Job Board’s URL: https://www.cpjobs.com/hk/association/iabhk