Dialogue Record

S4 Capital was built to solve the issues that I witnessed in my previous agency life. While there are many amazing teams within the traditional networks, they tend to be put in competitive spaces that make it difficult for them to work together, because doing so is often to the detriment of their own incentives. Clients complain about this constantly for a variety of reasons. Commercially, it means they end up paying additional overhead as each team has their own margin targets. Operationally, they end up managing each agency separately, even if they’re from the same network, as there is a lack of cohesion across teams. And in general it means clients aren’t getting the best solutions, as each agency wants to sell only their offering. This means clients often don’t have access to the best team and talent within the network.

S4 Capital is guided by four core principles. First, we’re purely digital—because that’s where the growth is. Next, we are a data-driven business. Data drives the creation, production and distribution of content in a continuous loop. This allows us to create content with a big idea at its heart, but executed in a totally different way that allows for continuous optimization and relevance to audiences. Third, we go to market faster, better and more efficiently. This means having agility and understanding the ecosystem that we operate within very well. Fourth, we are built around a unitary structure with a single P&L. One of the biggest problems of the holding companies is the verticality of their structure, whereas we don’t have any silos that prevent you from crossing capabilities. 

Our vision is to change the work, who does the work and the impact of the work, to be the industry’s go-to player for innovative digital ideas. We wanted to build new, transformative outcomes for our clients and help them future-proof for a digital-first, newly virtualized world, for the upcoming Metaverse age. 

We do so by giving brands the flexibility to tap into capabilities and subject matter experts across the global network. That said, if our client chooses us to be their creative partner, they get instant access to all the resources, production capabilities, firepower, insights, talents and everything in a click! Our single P&L model empowers our team to really work collaboratively together.

You can say that we have embraced collaboration for the greater good！

In August this year, we merged Media.Monks, a world-class creative production company, and MightyHive, an award-winning data&digital media consultancy, and launched our unitary brand as Media.Monks. Along the way and still ongoing, we have integrated many other like-minded collaborators that can immediately expand our collective ability to disrupt the industry with our single P&L and API model for creativity!

Operating with a single P&L model lets our clients benefit from a single integrated company by accessing all its capabilities, which is more cost-efficient than paying separate silos with their own overheads and ending up with complicated billings.

The API structure is inspired by the APIs that connect digital tools and services. It breaks down the silos and boundaries of a conventional structure and offers seamless access to our global resources and best talents. It allows us to find the best fit for a client’s needs based on experience and skills, not geography, which makes it easy for us to deliver what we present to our clients without any delay in time or physical constraints. As  a true system for scale, the API model  combines disciplines, offices and capabilities globally while opening ownable space for our merger model and further growth.

For instance, we now have Cashmere in LA that specialises in identifying trends to create and execute campaigns that resonate and drive culture. Maverick Digital, a Salesforce consulting and implementation partner, enables companies to win more customers and build deeper connections. 

Then in China, we have merged with TOMORROW, which has a great reputation of knowing the China market and Chinese youth. All these companies add great value to our clients and enable them to tap into different capabilities in different countries easily. 

And it works well in every market—clients are happy about this too. Earlier this year, our Shanghai office did a film for Chinese smartphone brand Realme, called How Dare You. For this film, we came up with the creative idea and strategy with the Shanghai team, shot the film with the Singapore team, then handled post-production in the Buenos Aires office, without any delay in delivery or complex internal billing.

My relationship with China spans the past 2-3 decades. The pandemic has changed a lot of things, but one thing that has never changed is my passion, my feelings and my confidence in China. I would like to say China is one of the world’s safest countries in terms of public health and business stability, with strong capabilities in responding to major epidemics and emergencies, and is the best place for business as well. It’s really exciting to see how the market in China has grown in recent years, which also reinforces our commitment and investment to this market. 

Earlier this year, we merged with a hyper-local, award-winning creative agency TOMORROW, where the combination of TOMORROW’s creative and social capabilities with Media.Monks’ digital and production strength makes a lot of sense. Having established itself as a creative leader specialized in representing global brands to the Chinese youth, TOMORROW has added strong insight in youth marketing and creativity. Media.Monks China now integrates Creative and Production under one roof to offer Strategy and Creative, Film and Content, Experiential and Platform, Digital and Data services in China. 

Thanks to the single P&L model, we are able to offer brands in China closer access to our global wisdom, unitary structure and team of talents from different parts of the globe. For instance, globally Media.Monks has a great reputation of being a digital-first creative company. That said, Media.Monks always stay at the cutting edge of the digital landscape. In the past years, we partnered with our clients to explore and create exciting projects in virtual worlds, now considered Metaverse worlds, and are currently working on several Metaverse-related projects in China too. 

We recently launched our Making the Metaverse report in China. This report is authored by leadership from across our global team, not just in China, who have put their heads together to build a solid framework that explores the opportunities for brands in the metaverse. We believe the Metaverse is the new era of digital. It is not some future state of technology, it’s already here. This report is a profound yet accessible guidebook to understanding the opportunities within the Metaverse and the steps that brands should take to seize them.

Since our merger with TOMORROW in January this year, we kept the staff retention rate high, grew the team by 300%, and grew the business by 350%, and won a pitch every 8 days. 

In the recently revealed 2021 Campaign Asia Agency of the Year list of award winners, our China team won 4 categories, including the Gold award for 2 of them. It shows our model is working.

It's exciting to see the phenomenal success of Chinese brands and their ambition to go abroad to further the success globally. In our China office, we are actually working with Midea, Huawei, Honor, realme, Oppo and Nio as their digital & creative partners to explore the global market.

Our unitary brand, API structure and single P&L model truly enable us to help world-leading brands adopt a multi-local approach. With the presence of 57 talent hubs in 33 countries and 7,000+ employees of over 50 nationalities, our team comprises locals that come from different cultures, backgrounds and communities. This means local and global mindsets intersect and bridge together data, technology and creativity to deliver hyper-local relevance for our clients, regardless of an increasingly disconnected geopolitical landscape. That said, once clients choose any of our offices as creative partners, clients actually get access to all of our wisdom, presence, resources, insights and powers from within the global network. And with the breadth of our business offerings and the add-ons from the specialist companies that we merged with, clients would get access to everything that they need in a click.

Being a digital-first and diverse team of the best digital talent, we are able to anticipate and build towards changes in the technology landscape as they happen. We have the capabilities to help brands adapt to their every digital need, from creative concepting to coding to everything in between. 

For instance, we collaborated with NIO to announce their European expansion through an immersive, virtual press conference. We combined live Q&As with pre-recorded presentations celebrating the electric carmaker’s arrival in Norway—the country that boasts the world’s highest market share for electric vehicles. The virtual format enabled stakeholders and journalists around the world to participate in the launch. Handling everything from script to stream, we developed the creative concept, art direction and live event production from scratch. There are more cases to share.

While the Metaverse has been quite a buzzword these days, Media.Monks has been crafting the building blocks of the metaverse for the better part of ten years. They can be extended reality experiences that support larger campaigns, brand activations inside video games, prototyping virtual fashion designs and so on. Our strong understanding and methodology around the tech, as well as close our partnership with leading metaverse platforms and developers, make us a trusted partner. Our agile, maker first approach to virtualisation enables us to deliver large scale transformation with much greater efficiency and a shorter path to value.

I believe every successful business person has their own unique philosophy and approach, and it varies case by case. So I won’t talk much about the business, but I really feel proud of my team and how fast, healthy and organically we grow through a humanized, social-responsible and caring way. 

Not only are we digital-first in our business, we are people-first when it comes to our employees. With people being at the main asset of everything that drives us, it’s only right that they are treated right. So in our company, we have a delicate team to come up with complex benefit plans that work best for our staff.

For our employees’ wellbeing, we offer the best-in-class insurance to help them with taking care of themselves physically and mentally. To support them through life events, we’ve implemented fully paid long-term leave plans for new parents. For instance, in China normally the paternity leave is around 10days, but we offer at least 90 days of fully-paid paternity leave for our employees. On top of that, new parents have the option of requesting flexible work arrangements when they return from their leave with job protection being assured.

We’ve also rolled out a hybrid-remote work model where employees choose the days they’d like to return to the office and anywhere in the world for up to 28 days.

We also have exciting initiatives to advance our employees in a brighter career path. We always provide a diversified variety of training programs internally and externally with 3rd parties, like Linkedin. Most recently, we are launching our first internal creative award, Young.Monks, to incubate and celebrate the creativity of our young creatives. Our employees can seek out lots of growth opportunities in whatever ‘lanes’ or job roles they want to evolve in. By working with a global team of the best talents, there’s plenty of opportunities for our people to network and produce global work outside the region they live in. There are also no local restrictions, or we try to minimise it, on where they choose to work, so our employees are also as diverse as it can get.

Giving back to society is one of the core values in our company culture. That also attracts talents who share the same values to join us. We try to bring in zero-emissions targets with our business goals. We aim to work with partners, from clients to suppliers, who move towards the same sustainability goals as we do. This way, we amplify each others’ efforts and impact. We want to build a sustainable and inclusive organisation and our endeavour is to become B Corp Certified. We launched a series of ‘Sustainable Production’ goals that focus on our work for and with clients, and ‘Zero Impact Workspaces’ goals that concentrate on our own operations. Earlier this year, we launched the S4Capital forest. Tree-Nation planted enough trees for all S4 employees to capture their average annual emissions. To date, we have planted 264,554 trees and have already exceeded our 2020 carbon emissions in offsets and are well toward our goal to become a carbon neutral workplace by 2024. And, we’ll offer clients the opportunity to offset the emissions caused by the production of their digital solution in our S4 forest as well. 

Doing good to our people and society helps us to bond with employees, connect with communities, and ultimately attract people and clients who share our values.

When I first visited China 30 years ago, many global brands were trying to get into the market. To win a market, you always have to understand it first and respect it. Understanding the market, its culture, people and society is always a good starting point for brands. And that is still the case, and it’s even more crucial in the fast-changing context of China.

I would like to share with you these key factors: