In the fifth episode of AdTech | AlikeAudience, the Managing Partner of PHD Media, Lawrence Lo, CEO and co-founder of AlikeAudience, Bosco Lam, and the Director of The Brand Creatives, Jessica Lam discuss all about building successful teams, leadership, and fostering people-first cultures in the post-pandemic world.
Tune in below to listen to their interesting conversations about some of the recent developments and trends in the AdTech industry, including:
• The increasing number of companies becoming people-first;
• Importance of fostering company culture with the help of distinct values;
• Skill sets that are relevant while hiring employees and building teams;
• Employee retention strategies in the dawn of the pandemic;
• Adaptation techniques to a remote working setup.
Meet your host: Jessica Lam Hill Young
Jessica Lam: Welcome to the fifth episode of AlikeAudience’s AdTech podcast, where we discuss the latest AdTech trends and industry insights in a series of interviews with industry leaders. I’m Jessica, Director of the Brand Creatives, a boutique agency creating thought leadership content for tech companies, and I’m hosting the podcast today.
Guests for the Episode: Lawrence Lo and Bosco Lam
Jessica Lam: We’ve invited Lawrence Lo, the Managing Partner at PHD media, a premier media planning agency, and Bosco Lam, CEO of AlikeAudience, to share with us their insights on how they lead and build successful teams and foster their company culture, especially during a pandemic.
Experience and accomplishments
Jessica Lam: Let’s jump right in. Lawrence, can you share with me your background? What’s your current role? And what’s your experience in the industry?
Lawrence Lo: First of all, thank you so much for inviting me here on a lovely Friday morning to your office. Beautiful, great to be here.
I’m the regional managing partner for PHD, and I manage the HSBC business for Asia Pacific. I’ve also done stints at companies such as Marriott, where I helped them with their e-commerce strategy for Asia. And then TransUnion, which is a credit bureau here in Hong Kong, and various other roles within agencies in the past. One thing I might share as well, which really helps kind of put everything into perspective, is I’m a CrossFit enthusiast. I quite like fitness, and it really helps kind of guide me in whatever I do both kind of professionally and for my own personal.
Bosco Lam on AlikeAudience and AdTech
Jessica Lam: That’s amazing. And what about you, Bosco?
Bosco Lam: I’m Bosco. I’m the CEO and a co-founder of AlikeAudience. So we have been around for six, almost seven years now since we founded the company. And we’re very excited for these episodes because we would invite friends, and industry connections to join us to give some thoughtful sharing about what is the latest trend.
And I think this episode is unique because we are actually having some more general topics about in the post-pandemic what is evolving in industry, and culture and leadership. So thanks again, Lawrence for being on the podcast this episode.
Importance of culture and values in team building
Jessica Lam: Talking about culture, I think it’s interesting that Lawrence, you have a big company with a lot of people, and then Bosco, you have more of a startup. So I want to know what’s the difference when it comes to building teams and what are your values when it comes to empowering teams?
Increasing number of companies becoming people-first
Lawrence Lo: Yeah, sure. I’ve done a lot of observations in my career. There are different types of companies, there’s companies that focus on customers first, right. And that’s probably where we hear that old phrase, the customer’s always right and probably grew up with a lot of that.
There are also companies that focus on shareholder value. You can kind of see their quarterly reports, where their focuses are. But I think increasingly, companies are starting to be people-first. Especially for agencies, our product is our people, right? They are a representation of what we do. They build relationships with our customers. If they do great work, then our customers, our clients are happy and then of course that reflects itself in the financial performance.
I think being a people focused company is probably really important these days. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, people-first just really simply, it’s a company that cares about its employees, and wants to help them succeed in whatever they do. That’s the simple explanation.
Jessica Lam: I really like how you frame that. In the old days, it was customers first, and then it was shareholders, and now we’re coming into a generation where it’s about employees. What about you, Bosco? Are there any differences between startups and smaller teams?
Startups aren’t defined by the number of employees
Bosco Lam: Well, first of all, I think I’ll put it in this way: startups shouldn’t be defined as like the number of years that the company started, nor the number of people in the company. So I think my definition for a startup is just a temporary organization where you keep searching for problems, and you are obsessed with your customers, what are the pain points, and in this transition, you are building up a solution that fits into that market needs, right? So you’re building product-market fit.
So I would define a startup as this mindset, rather than counting the number of people or counting by the number of years that we’ve founded a company, even though we’ll put startups in corporations, right, you can have multiple startups, or you name it as an innovative department within a company. So that would be your driving factors of what is the latest problem in the market, and how you would keep being innovative.
I think culture is really the fundamental definition. Because in the end, people are unique, right? How you create a team that is agile enough, who share a similar culture and a mission, even within PHD or even within AlikeAudience. That is how I see culture. And that is how I see startups. Even Lawrence could do a startup within PHD.
Values make up the culture of an organization
Lawrence Lo: Yeah, I really like that explanation. Because you’re right. You know, PHD is a fairly large advertising agency. But a lot of times, the team itself, which is kind of like a small team within the wider company, depends on culture. In my previous experience in TransUnion, where we actually met and did some work there, I was tasked to build out a consumer division, which was very different from the traditional B2B business for TransUnion. So we had our own culture, it was almost necessary to build quickly and try to get private, you know, our product out to the market.
One thing I will add on culture, and I think it’s important as your organization grows. You kind of need to also define how can you define your culture, I guess is a good way to put it. And that comes down to your values, right? So every company is different. But when you think about it, like as a media agency, there’s many media agencies, lots of competitors, we roughly do the same thing, right?
So what sets us apart, it’s how we do it, the values that our people embrace. For example, like PHD we have five values that we’d like our people to embody. They’re courageous, curious, open, creative and collaborative. And so, that helps us understand what if these are the types of values that we want to promote within our people. Then we can start structuring our kind of, well, you can call it like a retention strategy or employee program, we call it employee experience, and we structure our employee experience to help kind of bring those values out. Because then we know when they’re representing PHD and talking to our clients, that hopefully, some of that value comes through. And that sets us apart from other competitors.
Jessica Lam: I’m just interested as well. Could you give a little more concrete examples of how you translate values into actual programs for employees? So is it like initiatives? Or is it just in everything you do?
How do we implement values?
Lawrence Lo: Totally. A real, real simple one. It’s because we have lots of programs, actually, they started last year because of the pandemic. But PHD as organization is like doubling down on our employee experience efforts. But a really easy one is let’s say you want to run an employee of the month program, where you show recognition to some of your great employees for the great work that they’re doing. You can structure nominations around these values so, therefore, you’re not only promoting people that are doing great work but aligning them to your values. But as time goes on, people understand the values more, and then so they portray them more. So it’s kind of like this feedback cycle. It doesn’t happen overnight. But that could be like one simple execution.
Jessica Lam: Interesting. So what about you, Bosco? Would you like to talk a little bit about values at AlikeAudience?
Innovation and impact drives AlikeAudience
Bosco Lam: So speaking about our values, I think the most important one is about innovation and impact. And a lot of people would see, from a solution perspective, oh you have a quick solution, so you’re innovative enough, you are creating impact in the industry.
However, I think our company spent actually more time discussing the problems than spending time on solutions. Don’t get me wrong, I think we actually spent a lot of time on the solution. But I want to stress about understanding the problems more. Is the problem big enough or valuable enough to be solved? How many people are actually benefiting from getting a solution because of this problem?
So it is actually a formula by the delta of your impact times the number of people being impacted. So this is the overall impact on the industry, right. So we actually see how big is the problem, then it will deduce how big the opportunity is and further down is how many people will pay for these opportunities or pay for the solution to this problem.
Always start with the problem and think of solutions
Bosco Lam: So we always start with a problem. And I think this is in the DNA of AlikeAudience. A lot of clients, they come to us, they want a, b, and c; it is standard for account managers to fulfill their needs. Okay, so I have to deliver a, b and c. But I would have my team ask another question. Before we deliver that, A, B, and C is actually more of what is the problem, right? How are you solving this at this moment? We may have something other than A, B, and C, maybe something D that the clients have never thought of. So this is in our DNA, always asking the clients, what is your problem? How do you solve it at the moment before we actually deal it for A, B, and C.
Jessica Lam: So sort of like training a team to think of solutions from the clients and train them to have that kind of mindset, right?
Bosco Lam: Yeah. Because if we start with saying, okay, I have A, B and C, and we settle with this, it is very, like a salesy pitch. But we want to actually think in their boots about what is the exact problems. So what we want is to partner with our clients first, to think on their side, what they really need, rather than selling A, B and C; oh, by the way, we have D. It is more like a flip side. So we start with problems.
Lawrence Lo: Easier said than done. It’s kind of like a mix. The science is very cool, but the art of being able to do that eloquently. That’s easier said than done, but absolutely.
Hiring trends over the years
Jessica Lam: So you mentioned innovation as one of your core values. When it comes to the industry now, especially in media planning, and ad-buying, there are a lot of changes. How do you navigate around finding talent and new skills, the ones that can cope with these changes, especially with the rise of web3 and all these new technologies? Is it difficult to find people?
Lawrence Lo: It’s kind of always changing. This reminds me of when I first got to Hong Kong, it was like 15-16 years ago. I think at the time, websites were just getting put up. So we were looking for talent that knew how to do digital marketing. Fast forward 10-15 years, we’re currently in this space of data and analytics where companies are, we now understand the value of data, and now we’re trying to figure out how to handle it and manage it, explore it properly, and utilize it right for whatever benefits. And then yeah, now everyone’s talking about web3 because of blockchain, crypto and NFTs. There are web3 agencies popping up. Many people say it’s coming, some people say it’s not here yet. No one knows, but it feels eerily similar to when websites first came about in the 2000s. Weathering the .com.
Finding the right balance of skills and experience
Lawrence Lo: Sorry I digress. But, finding talent has always been kind of an issue. But I think if you know the skill sets you require, they don’t have to have hands-on experience like no one’s going to have two to three years of experience in web3 right now. But they could have kind of a parallel experience that’s applicable to the type of jobs, right? So, if we look at what’s to come in web3 and the media planning space, we see a lot of potential in decentralized media supply chains, which will probably require a lot of the same skills we use today. But then what do we really need? Maybe we just need someone that’s a little bit more curious so that they go and explore these new kinds of media environments and whatnot. But yeah, it’s not easy because it’s always changing. That’s for sure.
Jessica Lam: That’s optimistic when you put it that way; it makes finding new people fit these new jobs much easier than committing, like you said, having someone with specific experience in blockchain, right. What about you, Bosco? I know you’re very interested in blockchain technology and all that. So do you have any comments on hiring people in this industry?
Does passion play a more important role?
Bosco Lam: Well, actually, I don’t weigh as much on the skill set, I mean, the hard skills as the person’s passion, during my hiring process. The point I want to bring up is actually the skills, the differences of the hard skills among people are actually very minimal. What you said all these skill sets are learnable.
Imagine like, five years ago, when everyone thinks that was the year of mobile in the AdTech industry, and if you are very talented in building the SDK, but then this skill is widely applicable right now that it is old. I wouldn’t say it would become obsolete, but people may learn these skills down the road.
What I value is about the person’s passion, or how they are devoted in this problem, to think about, or actually how good they understand the problem is, because I think the variance between people is actually the passion, what they wish, right. And this is how we want to find the right fit of candidates, that alignment, what exactly AlikeAudience would need, rather than on hard skills. We believe that the person will be able to pick up the hard skills. So that’s why we weigh more on the people’s passion, how devoted they are in the existing problem.
Fueling chemistry between teams
Lawrence Lo: Yeah, I have to agree with you there actually. If we’re hiring on behalf of our clients, we do have to include a certain set of hard skills. And then the degree of how much can it be always 100% depending on what our client request. But if I had free rein of hiring people, I think, yeah, I think passion. And like, for whatever job they’re doing or the industry. That means that you are passionate to work, right.
And I think chemistry is important, too, because if you’re going to bring someone into your team, work together for eight hours a day, five days a week, I think chemistry is quite important. You’re right. Those are probably like the two things that I ultimately end up looking at. But yeah, because we work for our clients, we do have filters that they need to pass. But yeah.
Collective growth vs individual
Bosco Lam: I think that it’s interesting when we look at our generations, right? Twenty years ago, it was kind of a one-way browsing behavior, like what you have on the internet, you’re reading all that information. Not until 10 years ago, 15 years ago, there were social media, people could just pick up their phone, and they would post whatever, like a short video clip, or just like, put a statement on Twitter. So it is more like people are able to have a more equal power to share.
When you look at blockchain, it actually gives more power to individual consumers, how they process data, how they own their own datasets and bring it to the chain and so on. I would see this momentum as liberty for more people to access and contribute and also to own, to have a stake in this whole ecosystem. I think it’s too early to really give a definition of web3, but I’m interested to look at how we bring this new technology and to solve some global problems.
Impact of the pandemic on the workforce
Jessica Lam: It’s very interesting to hear whether it’s for a global company or, I mean, obviously, both of your companies are global. But no matter the industry or the size, that passion is super important to adapt and culture fit are important to adapt to these industry trends. So tracking back as well, you said that a lot of these programs you had come up with pandemic? I’m interested to hear how the pandemic has impacted the workforce in terms of retention, hiring, or any advice you have to give?
Adapting to the remote working setup
Lawrence Lo: Yeah, great, great, great question. So interesting story. When the pandemic first started, I was trying to move back to Los Angeles. I actually worked there for two years. And so you know, not only was I in the new market, running a new team, we were running CRM operations for a really large entertainment company. But we had to learn to do so remotely, because we were all in lockdown. So everyone was working from home. So yeah, we definitely I think, by now, two plus years later, I think we all picked up a few more skills, learning how to use new software platforms, etc. So that was probably like the first round.
Really easier one to get through, how do we work remotely with the team and accomplish our objectives? And then the company said, yes, we can work remotely. Now that’s when things get really interesting because it means that companies can work remotely. I think a lot has changed. I mean we’re becoming more kind of like flexi work, it reminds me of a quote I read like 10-15 years ago, on the internet, but it was something like work is an activity, not a place. And I don’t know how many companies actually believed that before but they sure do now. So yeah, I mean we’re doing flexi work now, it’s definitely impacted us.
The impact of uncertainty on the workforce
The problem is and I think a lot of companies are facing this today. After two years of learning how to work in this new world of uncertainty, things are starting to be more clear, and more people are starting to make life changes, whether it be moving places within companies, maybe changing careers, it’s definitely putting a little bit of a talent crunch in our industry. And so that’s probably why our company is now doubling down our efforts in our employee experience area, really kind of sharpening that retention strategy, because you know, our people are services.
Jessica Lam: And have you found that it’s working, or are you still experimenting with what works? Do you have any advice on what has worked so far in the last few years?
Lawrence Lo: Absolutely not. No, I mean, not that it’s not working, or bad. I think that the days are still early. I think the great resignation just happened sometime during last year. So I’d say maybe the second half of 2021. So I think a lot of the effects that we’re feeling are probably going to happen now, early 2022. So I guess we’ll see what, how it shakes out.
AlikeAudience moved 100% remote
Jessica Lam: And Bosco, I know you have transferred almost entirely to remote working and even your office, right. Could you talk more about that?
Bosco Lam: Yeah, sure. So I would call AlikeAudience has adopted fully remote in early 2021. And we gave up our office. So basically, everyone just worked from home. But still, we provide some perks if they need to access a co-working space, this is still an option for our employees.
The birth of a new hiring ecosystem
Bosco Lam: I think there’s a massive change in the workforce. So imagine like, everyone can work remotely, meaning that some tech giants may hire globally as they wish. And the same for the employee. Right now, they are not limited by the employers or any job opportunities within their home. But they can actually apply to overseas even they still work at home, right? So it is actually a new, I would say, hiring ecosystem. Or I should say it is actually a new momentum that employees can look for jobs worldwide, and also as an employer, so you can look for talents worldwide. So in particular, industry digital-first. So as long as you have access to internet, then you’re able to perform. Yes, good and bad.
The gap in localization requirements
Bosco Lam: I still see some limitations in it because I actually spent six months in London. Actually I had planned for three months only, but due to some issue, I can’t move back to Hong Kong. But now I’m back in Hong Kong and in between I spent two weeks in Bangkok.
At the end of the day AdTech, MediaTech is about people as we’ve first discussed. If you don’t really know the local culture, the types of consumers, brands, and localized contents, who are the publishers, you will still find a gap in between delivering AdTech business to cater to the client’s problem. So actually, we spoke with a couple of clients, they would like to deliver international campaigns, their specific practice in the US. But when it comes to the Far East, in APAC, even like Australia and Japan, they need a lot of localization.
And if you have someone, let’s say, in the US trying to think what the local team would need in Hong Kong, there could be some gap in between. So we may still need some people on the ground who really get to know what is the weather, what is the local hype, or what will be the buzzword within that location.
Interesting sharing when I was in London, I spoke with a couple of friends, that they are actually going back to the office, they spent two months already in Portugal during the pandemic, and now they are moving back to London. And they see even like for local British, there’s this totally new vibe in your working space, and people actually moving back in town. They spent a year already renting a big flat in a countryside, now they have to trim down the home size and move back to the city.
New generations create new cultures
Bosco Lam: So the other day, we actually talked about the new fresh graduates. Imagine they spent two of the last few years studying remotely. So imagine we as students, back then, we really enjoyed social time with our friends, to building our lifelong friends since the college, but now this generation, they’re coming on to work, and they actually spent two years back then at home, it will be a new type of culture that they will bring into the company. And we’re interested, and we actually looking forward to how to adopt this as well.
Jessica Lam: Enter the Metaverse.
Remote vs localized hiring
Lawrence Lo: These young graduates are going to come into the workforce and they’re like, they completely know how to work remotely, like they’ll be way more comfortable than any of us were because we had to adapt. Right. But then in the reverse, I guess, like you mentioned, like a lot of places you need localization, talent, then that people have to work in the market, or maybe physically, yeah, these young graduates might have a hard time adjusting to that, which is a really interesting kind of dynamic to see in the next few years.
But what happens, if I had to guess, right, I would say, companies will probably need to figure out what roles can be remote, because then you’ll have your hiring partners there. And what roles have to be kind of on the ground, in-person. So there might be more clarity around that. Whereas probably in the past, obviously, that was typical, be regional or geographically bound. So yeah, that’s really interesting.
New ways of retaining employees
Bosco Lam: And also the perks on how you retain talents right. In the past, you have a nice big office, fancy office facilities, you have rooms for games or gatherings, but right now, what we treasure may be the flexibility on the work time, right? We may have to do with our kids at home, or families at home. We may not need the fancy office, but we may need a proper setup at home like internet, more powerful computers or some other products that allow them to access the gym, and so on and so forth to help them to cope with the work from home environments.
Jessica Lam: I was talking to some of my friends who manage teams, they said that people who come into the office, even though it’s empty, are the single ones. So they are bored, they have nothing to do. So they just go to the office and say, Hey, I like working space, like the people who come in consistently all day, all night. It’s especially with the pandemic are the single ones. So it could be a bit of a drawback. People do miss the interaction in office as well, right.
Actionable advice for employee retention and leadership
Jessica Lam: So let’s wrap up this last question. I would love to end with a little concrete advice or actionables for other business owners or agency owners who might be listening to the podcast, especially when it comes to topics like leadership and retention to which you could advice.
Understanding the needs of employees
Lawrence Lo: Yeah, I mean, this has been a really great discussion. I think we’ve covered a ton of topics on various things in terms of like working in the pandemic, how do you grow teams, build your teams, how you hire, companies’ culture, based on everything I heard today, it pretty much confirms for me that companies need to be people first.
Again, that definition is really simple. You know, how do you care about your people? And how do you help them succeed? Right. And so like your last point in terms of people working from home, whether there are new needs, like maybe a fitness subsidy, so that they can get some exercise, right, maybe it’s I’m looking into some sort of mental health program for a lot of people dealing with, I guess what we call that Zoom fatigue, or work from home fatigue or social isolation, right? And that’s why people come into the office because they want to socialize.
I think just understanding what are the needs of our people? And then not just from that element, but also in their career? What are their needs? How do we create challenging roles that are achievable for our people, but then eventually make our customers happy, and while our company is starting to performance, right, so yeah, I think people first is definitely the way to go.
Jessica Lam: Thank you. That’s a great summary. And what about you?
Instigating creativity in teams
Bosco Lam: I think as a leader, especially in this AdTech MarTech industry, I think we should demonstrate the problems to our team and let them think, and let them come up with a solution rather than having a leader to pitch a solution to the team and let them execute. Because oftentimes, we found that the creativity actually lies between the teams that they would come up with something interesting.
Let me give you an example, we always talk about how data can be applied in programmatic advertising. We always want to present what is the existing problems like the tracking issue, the trust, privacy issues, and actually the young team came up with some interesting ideas, because they really know what the touch points that they need touch on, no matter on social media, Instagram, Tik Tok, or how they browse the internet, how they interact, even like, how they spend the time on Discord, games, different counsels, right?
So maybe my skills will be obsolete when time flies, go on, I won’t deny on that. But it is always important for us to be crystal clear on the problems that we’re solving and explain this problem, why it’s important to team and they would come up with something interesting, for sure.
Jessica Lam: Thank you. That’s also another great perspective. So kind of letting the team to have more creativity solving the solutions and coming up with the solutions, right.
Lawrence Lo: Empowering teams. That’s great. That’s perfect. That’s exactly what the workforce today wants. And sometimes today is now sitting right in front of you in your office, how do you empower yourself? That’s a great point, yes.
Subscribe and Stay tuned!
Jessica Lam: Thank you so much, Bosco and Lawrence for coming in and offering these inspiring insights on leadership. Let’s conclude here and thank you for tuning in to our listeners. For more podcast episodes from AlikeAudience, hit the subscribe button. Don’t forget to leave us a review and tag us on social. Transcripts will be uploaded on our website’s podcast page, and for more information about AlikeAudience, please visit our website at www.alikeaudience.com.
