Unearthing #4: AdEasy with CEO and Co-Founder Melissa Sim
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AdEasy is an online marketplace for offline advertising based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Identifying a gap in the offline advertising space, advertising veterans and friends Melissa Sim and Therine Goh set off to build an online solution to disrupt the otherwise traditional and time consuming process of buying ads - all with just a few clicks. We sat down for a chat with CEO and Co-Founder Melissa Sim as we unearthed her advertising origins, how she approaches branding and marketing her advertising solution and her learnings as a startup founder.
Her advertising beginnings
Tell us about your career pre-AdEasy and what led you to found AdEasy.
I’ve spent my entire career in the advertising and media industry before starting AdEasy in 2017. With a diploma in advertising & marketing from IACT, I started my career with various media owners - selling out-of-home ad spaces and radio airtime before moving on to join a media agency. It really helped having the experience from both sides as media owner and agency when I started a boutique digital creative agency, known as Bloc 48, with my current co-founder, Therine. Therine is also a veteran in the industry – having managed several global brands in marketing roles, rounding out the perspective we needed from the client side.
AdEasy came about during an Alliance Bank SME Innovation Challenge in 2013 - our first concept validation was selected as one of 13 finalists out of over 200 participants. We continued exploring ways to simplify and automate the concept of a media booking platform, and those years we spent testing and analysing was the solid foundation we needed to get AdEasy going. It was a 4-year long journey to turn our concept into a working platform and AdEasy was officially launched in May 2017.
Today, AdEasy helps advertisers discover, compare and book offline ad space, empowering businesses to launch campaigns in just a few clicks. AdEasy has an extensive inventory of over 18 media types which includes print, radio, television, cinema, out-of-home media, premium online publishers in Malaysia. The company has facilitated 115 ad campaigns worth over RM7 million for 55 brands. With goals to revolutionise the advertising and media industry, AdEasy aims to expand into neighbouring markets in Southeast Asia in the near future to build a strong advertising ecosystem.
Pandemic + lockdowns = major cuts on ad spend
There’s no question that the pandemic greatly affected all industries across the board, especially advertising. Since then, you have designed special packages, formed collaborations with media partners to offer a wider range of advertising options to your users and conceptualised new products - one of which is the media advertising subscription plan AdEasy PLUS. How effective have your newest initiatives that was borne out of the pandemic been to your business growth (this can be in terms of revenue, new users, repeat buys, basket size, etc.)?
We had this subscription business idea since 2015 when the concept of subscription boxes was trending in the US. However, we knew that it was not the right time for us to launch it. However when the pandemic happened, it gave us a lot of time to reflect and observe how people interacted with goods and services during this difficult time. We are actually still in our experimental phase for AdEasy PLUS. Learning, observing and collecting feedback from our subscribers. The reception and interest in AdEasy PLUS has been positive. Since we launched this programme in April, we now have the majority of our subscribers opting for a longer term subscription plan since that offers the best value. In a sense, we can say that advertisers still believe in the importance of setting aside a marketing budget and a subscription model like this helps them plan ahead and have better visibility and control over their own spend.
What have been some of the more interesting and unexpected learnings that you’ve uncovered about your users thanks (or no thanks) to the pandemic?
2020 was a year of listening and learning - that down time we took to reconnect with our users helped to identify their actual pain points and needs. What we learned was that a few of our assumptions about what our users would want in terms of features or processes were actually not very important to them. Therefore, we de-prioritised those and decided to focus on what they wanted instead. Those learnings saved us a lot of time and resources.
Kudos on launching your pro-bono #AdEasyJagaSME initiative last year! How many SMEs ended up listing on the site. How many eventually went on to become a user?
Thank you for your kind words! Our passion is to help homegrown brands like ourselves, and the intention was to look out for each other however we could. Out of the 126 SMEs who listed with the JagaSME initiative, 19 of them eventually started using AdEasy as an advertiser (a conversion rate of 15%).
How open were your media partners towards providing free ad space as part of your #AdEasyJagaSME initiative?
Our partners have always been supportive of us. So it wasn’t difficult to get them on board with this initiative.
Are there specific types of users that you’ve attracted to your platform? Why have these users found your platform valuable to their business?
Our platform is useful for anyone who wants to be able to launch their ad campaigns from non-marketing savvy people right up to marketers in a SME or a startup. Most find our platform really useful and easy to use because what would usually take them around 2 weeks in order for them to get a media proposal, they can now get it all done in less than an hour via AdEasy. Plus, all of our rates are directly from the media companies as they are the ones who have their own user login to self manage all of their own media profiles and ad spaces. Just like how a merchant on any e-commerce platform has full control over their own online store.
I read that you initially came up with the idea in 2013 but only launched the fourth iteration of your website in 2017. Your first three website versions were outsourced to developers from India and Russia that didn’t work out. What were some of the learnings that came out of that exercise? Was it an expensive lesson to learn?
Absolutely! Our advice to any aspiring tech entrepreneur, please ensure you have a CTO as one of the co-founders. This will save you a lot of time and money.
Let’s talk about growth trajectory. What are your business targets for 2021 and how far along are you?
Our goal is to expand into a couple of markets in Southeast Asia by the end of the year.
AdEasy’s approach towards branding and marketing themselves
As an advertising platform, how have you approached branding your business?
We were very clear with what we stood for as a brand which is to create an honest and simple to use platform where we strip away all the complexities which made it less accessible for SMEs. We pride ourselves on always having our user’s best interests first.
How much of your advertising efforts goes towards online and offline channels?
In the early days, we spent most of our efforts in public relations, SEO and word of mouth. We are now in our fourth year, and we feel that it’s a good time to invest more in both offline and online advertising.
What marketing channels have proven most effective for the space that you’re in? And least effective?
Marketing for B2B can be really challenging. Over the years, we feel that conducting workshops and participating in SME events prove to be least effective for us. This is due to a few factors such as for most SME events, majority of the people are there for merchandise (we learned that there are professional events attendees who hop from one event to another for free food and freebies, no kidding) or were trying to sell us something like insurance or investment plans.
What really worked for us were mostly radio interviews on BFM, DOOH (digital-out-of-home) and transit ads. We managed to get a lot of awareness from there. We also found that the most effective way for us to get a quality prospect is through Google Search. As a B2B, it is best to attract people who are actually looking for a solution to their problems. The conversion rate is a lot higher than us trying to sell something to someone who has no need for our solution.
In your opinion, how important is branding for your business especially in the early days as a startup?
In my personal opinion, investing in brand-building should be a priority from day one. When I say this, I’m not talking about you having to spend a ton of money on advertising. I’m talking about you creating a consistent brand for people to recognise and remember you by. Many startups fail to invest their time in creating a brand guide in the beginning, which is understandable as we have many hats to wear as founders in the early stage of the business. So there will be a lot to think about. They tend to leave it to the ad hoc freelance designers to decide for them. The key takeaway I would like to emphasise is that every piece of content or message you put out there should be consistent. The look and feel of your visuals, tonality of your message must be consistent. That is how you can slowly but surely build your brand. Of course, there are many other factors which contribute to building a brand, as the brand identity is beyond the logo, slogan and visual designs. It is also the culture and people on your team who play a huge role as well. Do they represent and embody your brand values? I can go on and on, there’s just really a lot to think about. I would recommend this book “This Won’t Scale”. There are a lot of useful lessons from this book which most startups can learn from about product and marketing.
What the offline advertising space looks like in Malaysia
In an article you did with The Edge, you mention that startups who start out as pure online advertisers will reach a point whereby the effectiveness flatlines and they start looking into offline advertising. What does that point typically look like?
Choosing the right ad space is pretty much about us figuring out what our target audience does and the types of media they consume on a daily basis. Being online is just one of the many things that we all consume every day and like it or not, we still live in the real world. I like to use this analogy whenever explaining why doing too much of the same thing will result in us reaching a plateau. Imagine a series of empty glasses representing different types of media, like social media, online marketing, TV, radio, billboards and the list goes on. You have a jug of water in hand representing your advertising spend. If you keep pouring water into the social media and online marketing glass only, eventually it will overflow. It just can’t take in more water.
It’ll come to a point where no matter how much money you invest in one thing, you have already oversaturated your reach to the target audience available to you in that one glass. I’ve heard many marketers saying that after focusing on online marketing only for a long time, they felt that no matter how much money they spend, the return on investment (ROI) is not as effective anymore and in fact has gotten more expensive for them to acquire new customers.
Should companies explore offline advertising in the early days? How early is too early?
To be honest, we actually discourage startups of less than 3 years to consider offline marketing. Why 3 years is because based on our observation, in the first 3 years of a startup or any business, we understand that during this period, you’re still trying to get the product and market fit right. But of course, some savvy entrepreneurs may get it done in a shorter period of time. In fact, we have turned away startups and advised them to leverage the newness of their startup by approaching publishers for features (or they can use a PR agency for this) and to focus on online marketing as they have yet to exhaust this option while maintaining some marketing spend on online marketing to generate leads. That was when we only offered offline advertising spaces. I know it’s silly to turn away a sale but we don’t believe in selling something for the sake of selling. We always believe in ‘heart’ selling not hard selling.
Ever since the pandemic happened, we have opened up the online advertising category to offer online advertising spaces as well. We are happy to be able to serve those who are in the early stages of their business with online advertising spaces and help evolve their advertising strategy over time into offline when they are ready for it.
Does offline advertising work for all kinds of businesses?
I truly believe that it does. It’s just a matter of us defining our advertising objectives, target audience and messaging. Finding the right ad space is just one third of the formula for a successful advertising campaign. The other two thirds are creating the right visual and messaging to capture your audience’s attention; and is your product something your target audience wants?
There are a lot of misconceptions where people tend to pit offline and online advertising against each other. Reality is, online advertising is just one part of the marketing toolbox. Online is great for lead generation and user engagement. Offline is great for building your brand equity and presence. So it’s a matter of us understanding the different types of media and what it’s best used for. Then putting them together to create an effective campaign.
What are some of the latest trends that you see startups and SMEs doing in the offline advertising space?
The most recent trend would be DOOH (digital-out-of-home) and radio. It’s no surprise that these two offline media were the highest searched mediums on AdEasy. The DOOH is a great way for businesses to create a huge visual impact and to build brand credibility at a low production cost. As for radio, it’s the most cost-efficient way to reach the masses and because of the nature of this medium - it creates a top-of-mind recall. I’m sure you can remember a lot of earworm jingles and radio ads. I started my radio career when Yusuf Taiyoob just started advertising on radio for the first time. When I first heard the radio ad, I remembered all of us at the radio station were puzzled and clueless what Yusuf Taiyoob is about. Today, they are a household brand and we know it’s the Ramadan period when we hear those legendary whispers. It still is my favourite radio ad to date.
What are your predictions for the offline advertising industry in the next 12 months?
Last year, the print industry took a huge hit, especially for magazines. For those who managed to pivot, they have transformed themselves into becoming an online publisher. I believe that the newspapers will follow suit and move towards being solely online soon.
Cinema was a rising star back in the day before COVID-19. I believe that if the cinema operators are able to withstand the pandemic till the end of this year, cinema advertising will come back strong again when life can resume as normal.
Lastly, we will see more immersive advertising and also the rise of ad spend in in-gaming advertising.
As a platform that solves the inefficiencies of offline advertising, what becomes of sales reps? Will their roles change?
The large media companies have in fact consolidated their advertising inventories and allowed their sales reps to sell all inventories. Back in the day, it was segmented to radio sales, TV sales, OOH sales, etc. Now it’s one sales team and they sell everything.
AdEasy’s goal is to automate day-to-day tasks which consume the media sales reps time. Instead of having them spend so much time on follow ups, reporting and unnecessary paperwork; they should focus on being more strategic and act as a consultant to their clients. We’re not here to replace the sales reps, we’re here to make life easier for them and promote efficiency. Inefficiencies have cost businesses a lot of money. So we’re here to help everyone win. The sales reps win because they can work a lot more efficiently, the media companies win because they get to reduce cost wastage which results in higher profit, and advertisers win because they can get their ad spaces booked without having to spend weeks or months to put things together.
Her journey into entrepreneurship
How does working for others differ from working for yourself? What have been some of the highs and lows of being an entrepreneur?
To me, the only pros of working for someone is income stability. Working for myself comes with a whole lot of stress, anxiety and challenges. Every now and then, I will ask myself the same question, “Why am I doing this? If I maintained working for someone else - I would easily be able to earn a whole lot more.” Unfortunately or fortunately for me, money was never the key motivator to do anything at all. It was in the satisfaction of seeing ideas come to life which inspires me, and the adrenaline of overcoming any adversities fuels me. I always tell people that being a business owner is 80% crazy stress, but the 20% of those magical moments is what makes it all so worth it. Also, the perk of working for yourself is you get to make your own set of rules and build a team with our ideal culture - we ensured that our team members didn’t have to endure the unnecessary unhealthy work cultures we both had to endure during our working life prior to starting out on our own.
As female founders, what challenges have you faced? Be it leadership, sentiment among the male-dominant tech landscape, getting funding.
Being a founder comes with all the same challenges and responsibilities as most startup founders face. At the same time, being a female founder does pose its own unnecessary obstacles. Such as indirect sexual harassment that we felt we had to put up with even though we didn’t have to. In my own experience attending startup events, I do notice that I’m usually one of the two females in a room of ten - there is still a way to go in terms of gender parity. In terms of leadership, our team is pretty much diverse and balanced between male to female ratio.
What leadership ethos do you live by?
Be humble, be transparent, have a clear vision, and get shit done.
Treat others the way you want to be treated. I believe in inspiring others to do something rather than to use fear to get results.
Lead by example - if I can do it, so can you. Meaning, there are no tasks too small for me, nothing is beneath me. If I have the bandwidth to help the team with anything, for example like prepping for an event, I’ll be sure to be there to pack the goodie bags or even help them move things for the set up. I don’t like the culture of bosses or managers who can’t get their hands dirty.
How have you kept your team motivated throughout the pandemic? What have been some of your learnings?
Be transparent, open and maintain very clear communication. In times of uncertainty, it is important to let our team know what is going on in the company and what they can expect. This is so that we can be sure to maintain our team member’s confidence in our leadership, and eliminate any doubts or fears. We even celebrated festivities and birthdays virtually. Just to maintain some sort of social connection with everyone.
What we have learned was how powerful it is for a leader to be able to be vulnerable with the team. We were so anxious about the future of our company during the first MCO. Where most companies had to let people go, we tried our best to not let anyone go. So, we basically shared our options with the team and to our surprise, our team was very kind to us. The outcome was that we managed to keep everyone and we sailed through the waves together.
Making decisions is part and parcel of the gig but as business leaders, the stakes are much higher especially when it comes to dealing with people. How do you work together as a duo to make decisions and fend off things like decision fatigue?
Therine and I have weekly management huddles where we will share issues and update each other on what we have been working on. When it comes to decision making, we tend to involve our key team members whom we are grooming into leadership roles. What we do is when one person has something to discuss, the person would send out a meeting agenda with the topic to be discussed. Those invited to the meeting will have to already prepare their own thoughts and the meeting is really just for us to all align on our final outcome on the decision to be made. That way, we will be able to put many brilliant minds at work and have already explored many different possible scenarios.
As non-tech founders running a tech startup, what advise would you give other non-tech founders?
Simple, get a CTO as a co-founder. It’s a must!
Balancing work and play
Outside of work, what do you enjoy doing during your down time?
Alright, I’m going to share this interesting life I lead now - I believe it would be similar to most people. Cooking leftover meals, watching something on Netflix, reading, and spending time with my dog and family. I was a lot more adventurous before the lockdown life. I would travel a lot, be out at social gatherings, and I love outdoor activities especially paintball and CrossFit.
What are your personal and professional goals for 2021?
To expand AdEasy outside of Malaysia, read 24 books, lead a healthier lifestyle and to spend more time with my family.
What gets you out of bed in the morning?
Breakfast. Yeah, I need to eat when I wake up!
Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
Creating an exciting and purposeful lifestyle for the aging population.
For more information on AdEasy, check out their website here. To stay up to date, follow AdEasy on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.