We recently spoke with Mark Krebs, Chief Product Officer for Publicis Media Exchange, part of our Inside the Jury Room series, which offers insight directly from judges of the Festival of Media APAC Awards.
In the conversation, Mark shared his perspective on the key opportunities shaping media across the Asia Pacific region, the shift in media’s role from driving awareness to influencing real consumer behaviour, and how brands are using AI in smarter ways to deliver meaningful impact.
What do you see as the biggest opportunity for media in the Asia Pacific region over the next 12 months?
Connecting to culture and fandoms, particularly due to massive global events like Winter Olympics and Fifa World Cup.
How has the role of media evolved in shaping consumer behaviour in recent years?
Media has increasingly become a gateway into a broader conversation about data. The ability to link media and creative decisions to both the ‘first principles’ of effective advertising coming from marketing sciences, but also at a client dataset level to link decisions across OESP channels.
How are brands leveraging AI in smarter ways to create more impactful campaigns?
Related to above, our Groupe is helping clients to centralise data within datalakes so that AI can be used to better draw effectiveness observations across large datasets. From a media perspective this is helping clients optimise campaigns based on more rounded, holistic datasets (including elements like BLS, site traffic or other business KPI proxies) vs simply optimising on media delivery metrics alone.
Which campaigns or brands do you think have set new benchmarks recently in the APAC media industry?
I worked for a few years on the Visa APAC account (shoutout to the Visa team!) and I’ve been really impressed with their recent bold choices around partnerships and sponsorships across APAC across interesting verticals like fashion and music.
What excites you most about this year’s Festival of Media APAC Awards entries?
Seeing unexpected and creative use of more traditional media channels. Many of these channels are still pound for pound the most effective even in APAC and I feel aren’t as often considered in the mix by younger media planners chasing younger demos on briefs (more based on perception than reality).
