Mandai Wildlife Group

Damon Wee is the Vice President, Digital Marketing at Mandai Wildlife Group. He has more than 20 years of experience in demand creation and lead generation in the Attractions and hospitality space. He oversees the MarTech development to futureproof marketing technology layer for growth and scale 

1. In your opinion, how has the Digital Marketing landscape evolved over the years? What are some of the advantages of the current technological evolution?

Digital Marketing landscape has evolved significantly over the past few years with brands investing more into scaling up their internal capabilities and channeling their marketing spend towards digital. With troves of online learning materials available, self-help learning is also now possible for the motivated employee, mostly at low to no-cost. Tools are also available for digital marketers to leverage on to improve marketing efficiency and know-how and be able to understand their audience and competitors better.

2. What according to you are some of the challenges plaguing the Digital Marketing landscape and how can they be effectively mitigated?

The global smartphone penetration stands at over 80 per cent, and this number is expected to continue rising. In Singapore, our mobile penetration is at 134 per cent (as at December 2021), which probably is one of the highest in the world. The mobile phone has fast become an indispensable part of our lives. With consumers inevitably consuming majority of their content on mobile and even making purchases, it’s no wonder that marketing teams are also putting more resources in this space. At the same time, Mobile operating system providers have been bolstering their privacy and safety features, in such a way that it is increasingly difficult to correctly and accurately target the consumers based on their usage and browsing behaviors. Consumers now have a choice of determining if they want to be tracked and with Google’s impending move to limit apps’ ability to use the unique identifier on Android devices (called Advertising ID), consumers in the digital space will gradually over time move to “private mode”. The good news is brands still have time to react before the full impact will be felt as the Android privacy roadmap is still a good two years away.

  Establishing a data practice is key to surviving in the digital world. It helps businesses make informed decisions while at the same time, allow better engagement with their known audiences  

Brands now have the opportunity to start working on their known user base and start to look at engaging this segment of known users. Over time, this will be important to mitigate the privacy challenges that will be prolife rating the digital ecosystem. Digital ads budget can be relooked at over time to be partially redeployed to engage known audiences rather than digitally chase down new buyers.

3. Which are a few technological trends influencing Digital Marketing today? What are some of the best practices businesses should adopt today to steer ahead of competitors?

Establishing a data practice to me is key to surviving in the digital world. It helps businesses make informed decisions while at the same time, allow better engagement with their known audiences. A good example is Amazon. Unknown to most, Amazon is now the third-biggest digital advertising company (behind Google and Facebook), with $31 billion in ad revenue in 2021. And a key reason to their success is because they are tracking their known shopper groups very efficiently, such that the droves of shoppers on Amazon are targeted with very personalized offers, and generally less affected by changes in privacy rule that has plagued other advertising providers such as Facebook. Having an identity management tool is critical to tracking the digital footprints of the customer efficiently and effectively.

Most brands are generally not adtech providers, but the setting up of a data practice would go a long way to making your product and content relevant to your audience. Over here at Mandai Wildlife Group, while we are relatively young in embarking on this journey, we have made positive inroads in establishing our own data practice to improve paid media efficiency, establishing a centralized view of our members spend and visit behavior and acquiring a known marketable user base that we can engage and retarget with more personalised offers over time.

4. Do you have any advice for industry veterans or budding entrepreneurs from the Digital Marketing space?

For companies who can afford or are spending significant budgets outsourcing their work to agencies, it will be beneficial to start looking at insourcing or hybrid models by building your internal capabilities. Talent recruitment and development is extremely important yet challenging in the digital space, where competition for talent is increasingly competitive. At Mandai Wildlife Group, we are seeing the benefits of insourcing some of the functions, which has allowed us to scale and do much more for the same dollar investment.

For budding entrepreneurs, always start with your target audience problem statement in mind and work backwards to look at what you need in term of customer acquisition, product build and subsequently what type of team that you hope to build to make your company successful in the long-run.