What is Twitter planning to do for media agency professionals in APAC?

According to a recent eMarketer report, more than 60% of agency professionals (surveyed) face challenges measuring return on investment on social media marketing, and more than 35% are challenged on tying social to business goals.

Based on this insight, Twitter, today, has flagged off its latest initiative #TweetToTheTop in APAC to help young talent from media agencies. Brand Equity spoke to Simon Brockman, head of global agencies, Asia Pacific, Twitter, to understand more about this:

What’s the strategy behind #TweetToTheTop initiative? Also, why APAC now?
We noticed that all agency professionals know of Twitter, but few understand how to use twitter effectively for themselves and their clients. There is a knowledge gap that we and our media agency partners recognized and felt that in the fast paced world where we live and breathe digital and social, it is important to join forces and level up the industry’s game.

With #TweetToTheTop, Twitter is partnering with 11 agencies from global and advertising networks including Dentsu, GroupM, IPG and Omnicom, to provide their young talent with exclusive access to Twitter’s arsenal of solutions and global advertising tech leaders and take them on a journey to the home of creativity – Cannes Lions 2018.

#TweetToTheTop is the first year-long media agency engagement program led by Twitter with our partners, dedicated to young media executives in five countries in Asia Pacific including: Singapore, Indonesia, India, the Philippines and Australia. Asia Pacific is the growth engine for Twitter and our agency partners. We are committed to developing industry talent in the region through win-win collaborations like #TweetToTheTop.

How are you going to call for entries? Is it a paid activity?
This is not a paid activity, it’s an investment by Twitter and our agency partners’ leadership teams in developing the next generation of leaders.
#TweetToTheTop is a year-long programme (August 2017 – July 2018) that will see rising stars in the digital media planning industry across APAC go head-to-head for the chance to attend Cannes 2018. These participants will be nominated by their agency leadership teams to be the first to receive exclusive access to Twitter experts, training and solutions.

What are your observations on the talent from media buying agencies in APAC?
APAC is a growth region for digital and beyond. There is a lot of opportunity for media agency talent to grow. We observe a willingness to learn and experiment.

What are the major challenges?
The agency landscape is fast-changing and extremely competitive. There is strong demand for agencies to come up with more innovative solutions.

As digital becomes more mainstream, it becomes even more critical for agencies to upskill creativity and help clients connect digital campaigns to business goals. Our initiative #TweetToTheTop is designed to ensure agencies meet their objective by staying ahead and learning new techniques each day.

Have you introduced anything similar in other markets?
This is a new programme. In terms of digital marketing education in general, we initiated a free online education program called Twitter Flight School in 2015 that is open to all marketers and agencies around the world to stay on top of the latest innovations on the platform and ideas to maximise campaign results. We continue to run this and update it regularly with new modules.

What are your expectations from this initiative?
Our goal is to create a win-win collaboration – helping agency partners upskill their talent in digital while improving the understanding of our platform. We see this as a triple win as it will also help lift the veil on best-practice work with Twitter, enabling better results for both agencies and brands.

We are confident that the #TweetToTheTop will translate into innovative brand campaigns which will, in turn, create new opportunities for brands to reach passionate and engaged audiences.

Any hints on the judging panel?
We will be working closely with the agencies’ leadership teams on the selection process through each phase of the programme.

Will you also be training these young guns?
Yes. At each phase along with access to Twitter’s arsenal of solutions, the participants will also be offered hands-on training sessions by Twitter marketing executives and hear from global advertising tech leaders including Jayanta Jenkins, Twitter’s award-winning global creative director, and Stacy Minero, Twitter’s global head of planning and creative agency development.

Source: https://goo.gl/oSLAzG