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OMNICOM
Group Inc. is closely monitoring customer relationship
management as a revenue source, said its Asia-Pacific
head, who flew to Manila to look at business potentials
in the country.
Michael
Birkin, the Omnicom Asia-Pacific chairman and chief
executive and vice chairman said customer relationship
management, or CRM as spoken by industry professionals,
has “indeed been catching up on advertising for some
time now.”
Within
CRM is a number of individual businesses, like classic
customer relations, database management, brand
activation and field marketing, according to Birkin, who
said that these sub-businesses “are seeing growth.”
Birkin
told BusinessMirror that the Group’s advertising mix was
higher at $4.866 billion but only at a single-digit
growth of six percent.
In the
first quarter of this year, Omnicom’s CRM business also
posted a 14.2-percent growth to $1.016 billion compared
with a 10.6-percent growth in advertising at $1.225
billion.
The
Group offers CRM along with traditional media
advertising, public relations (PR) and specialty
communications under major subsidiary agencies. These
reflect on a strong push for business to understand
customers, Birkin said. He added that Omnicom as a
creative agency only provides services based on a
client’s need.
“We
don’t say this segment is not making revenue so we focus
on that. There is no special focus on one over the
other,” Birkin said.
Birkin
also took note of the potentials the texting feature of
cellular phones in the country may offer CRM. The
bottomline, he said, is how would to monetize such media
for advertising.
Birkin
said the company sent its executives here to explore
fresh contacts for possible investments. The Group just
last year opened its Asia-Pacific base in Shanghai,
China.
The
Omnicom chief honcho added that despite an upsurge in
mobile technology, “at the end of the day, we ask
ourselves, how could we put a [number] on this media?”
After
the Internet, mobile technology has been at the
periscope of advertising agencies like Ominicom, closely
scrutinizing the medium.
Still,
Birkin noted that other traditional media like print and
television would remain “extremely important to
Omnicom.”
He said
that the dynamics vary where print media does well, “but
we believe it still remains the best way of browsing for
information even if the Internet is good at searching
for information.”
“Print
media is going to remain a vital part [of] advertising
but you have to strike a balance between that and the
online market,” Birkin added. |
