The agency’s data driven marketing initiatives can be seen if one were to visit GroupM’s office at Menara Milenium in Bukit Damansara. For example, one of its media agencies Mindshare and its social media agency Vocanic are both equipped with the latest hi-tech screens displaying various real-time media information in the form of dynamic charts and infographics.

Elaborating this initiative, Girish says Mindshare’s “Loop Room” helps clients to look at the entire campaign data across all forms of media and to correlate it to sales. The Loop has two modes – “strategy” and “campaign”.

In “strategy mode”, he adds, The Loop enables collaborative decision making via the mixing of fast and slow data across different disciplines, including business planning, strategy, creative and communications planning.

Whereas in “campaign mode”, he says, Mindshare takes third party data feeds and combines them with the agency’s own tracking systems to provide instantly actionable insights. The Loop is also used to track competitors’ efforts in paid, owned and earned media as well as providing intelligence on trending and viral news, videos and pictures, hence enabling instant decision making by marketers.

As for Vocanic, Girish says its data initiatives which comes under Vocanic’s Mission Control enables brand owners to make informed decisions based on real time data from a socially connected enterprise platform.

This also allows marketers to optimise their campaigns by tweaking digital media spend, content or messaging based on actual social media conversations, he explains. “Our platform also allows brands to manage social customer service more effectively by providing real time insights of actual consumer engagement.

For example, one fast moving consumer goods brand saw an incremental 55 per cent jump in responding to social media inquiries/complaints through our platform,” he says.

Apart from this, the agency’s programmatic audience buying system known as Xaxis allows GroupM to target specific audiences online based on their online behaviour and areas of interest. This is done using Xaxis’ proprietary Data Management Platform (DMP) – Turbine. “We took a decision early on to develop our own DMP rather than depend on renting or buying the service from third-party DMPs.”

Early this week, the agency became the first media agency in the country to access more granular information on the viewing habits of Malaysians when it entered into an agreement to subscribe to the Dynamic Television Audience Measurement (DTAM) service, the new television currency for measuring the habits of Pay TV viewers. The agreement gives GroupM’s clients access to the system for their 2016 TV planning and buying requirements on Pay TV. The DTAM measurement system was launched in Malaysia last year and was available to media agencies on a free trial basis until the end of last year.

The system measures viewing behaviour using Return-Path-Data technology, first introduced by Kantar Media in Europe in 2005 and which has since been implemented in America, Africa, Europe and other parts of Asia Pacific.

In conclusion, Girish adds: “Marketing now operates in a data-rich environment. We are focused on harvesting this data to extract the most actionable insights for clients to enable real-time decision making. We are fortunate to have with us some key clients who have the vision and foresight to invest in such services in order to drive their competitive advantage.”