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| By Dennis D. Estopace |
| Reporter |
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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 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 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. |
http://www.businessmirror.com.ph/05302007/companies02.html
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