APPIES FESTIVAL 2025 KEYNOTE SPEAKER CONFIRMED!

From Shanghai to KL, D Sriram shares his wisdom with Malaysia’s marketing industry.

Sriram has seen it all. He’s worked in agencies, with media specialists, helped drive startups, earned a pilot’s licence and speaks fluent Mandarin.

His career highlights include being CEO of Aegis Media China, AsiaPac CEO of Starcom Mediavest Group, CEO of Group IMD China, COO of Vpon Inc Taiwan, MD and Chairman of Ebiquity Shanghai and more. He started and sold China’s first (and still only) cloud-based advertising delivery service, building a network with over 200 broadcasters and 10 clients in 24 months.

Sriram is now Co-founder and Managing Partner of boutique management consulting Searchlight Management Consultancy handling Business Strategy & Analytics.

Sriram was a founding member of Bandwidth Singapore. In his spare time, he is a musician and songwriter – playing guitar, harmonica and vocals – and an avid fan of online word puzzles and Scrabble.

His career spans 18 years in ad agencies, 7 years running ad-tech startups, 8 years in consulting, and he has managed businesses across India, China and South-East Asia.

Today, he is the Business Advisor’s business advisor. Based in Shanghai, he will travel to KL for the Opening Keynote Address at the APPIES 2025 Conference & Festival on July 9 & 10.

How did you learn to speak Mandarin so well?

It’s mostly about having the environment in which I get to use the language regularly. I started learning at a time when I lived in Hong Kong and was going to mainland China pretty much every week – but because I kept going back to an English / Cantonese speaking environment I wasn’t getting to use it much.

It was only after I moved to Shanghai that I was surrounded by Mandarin and it became second nature to me. I also periodically challenged myself – at one point, after taking 6 weeks of intensive classes (4 hours a day, 5 days a week), I took on a gig training a local agency in advertising strategy, all to be delivered in Mandarin, with all my training material also in Chinese.

At another point, when I set up a cloud-based ad-delivery system in China. I was on the road to TV stations explaining how the system worked – in Mandarin. All of that forced me to think in Chinese, learn new industry-specific words and so on.

So, it’s really just that – being surrounded by the language really helped.

I will say that I have several (non-Chinese) friends whose level of Mandarin mastery far exceeds mine. In fact, there’s one guy who reads old classic Chinese literature (Dream of Red Mansions type of stuff) in traditional Chinese, with characters that are rarely seen today. He’s been in China since he was in college, so it just goes to show, the more time you spend in the environment, the more you learn the language.

You’ve straddled corporate leadership and entrepreneurial ventures. Which path taught you more about failure?

This is a question with so many layers to it. What is failure, or if you want to examine the flip side, what is success?

A lot of corporate leadership jobs are about not rocking the boat and delivering incrementally better results, like 5% revenue growth or a 10 point improvement in profit. Success in that context is about hitting your numbers, getting a raise and a promotion, winning more business than you lose, stuff like that.

Startups are looking to establish a model that didn’t exist before. Success there is measured by the smallest things, and yet they are the biggest things. Getting your first customer who actually uses your product the way it’s meant to be used is a huge validation that your business idea makes sense. That is success.

Getting to the point where the business is generating enough revenue and cashflow to cover its costs – that’s success. And of course, when you manage to scale it and eventually sell it, that is success too, but often that part is slightly bittersweet, because it means your startup is now someone else’s company and it won’t be run the way you wanted to run it any more.

By the same token, when you run a startup and it struggles for a long time to get its first customer, that is a different kind of failure from losing a pitch or a client. Struggling to get customers usually means that you’ve got something wrong, the core of your business model doesn’t work.

On the one hand, at that moment it’s a huge, crushing disappointment. On the other hand, at least for me, it put me in a more analytical mode and even now, over 15 years since I failed at my first startup, I can go back and think about the experience philosophically, learn something new from it or remind myself of something I’ve already learned and not be too gutted at everything that happened then.

Running a startup, the sense of achievement comes from the moment of validation, when people start using your solution.  That’s a very permanent feeling in some ways – it transcends money and titles. That sense of creating a business from nothing, if you do it once you can never be happy in a corporate job again.

In an age of data and AI, does creativity still have a seat at the table—or is it just dressing on the deck?

I think all of us in advertising owe an apology to the rest of the world. We’ve tried to usurp the word “creativity” and define it entirely in the context of creating advertising copy.

Real creativity lies in things like inventing the concept of Uber or AirBnb. When it’s done, everyone can look back at it and say “that’s really simple, why didn’t I think of leveraging everyone’s cars or property like that?”

Real creativity lies in writing a marvelous story  like “The Lord of the Rings” or “The Handmaids Tale” or going on stage and keeping an audience amused with extempore humor or writing a song that other people enjoy listening to.

Occasionally, someone in advertising will do something that is truly worth celebrating as a creative, new way to look at a situation that ultimately drives consumers to a brand.

So, first of all, advertising does not have a monopoly on creativity and the vast majority of “Creative” work is done mostly to impress award juries and industry peers – it doesn’t necessarily impact consumers and the fortunes of a brand

Secondly, look at how the landscape has changed. It’s no longer about one massive brand campaign that gets launched on mass media and everyone sees it and starts talking about it. Brands today are fighting lots of small battles – on social media feeds, in TikTok, in ecommerce storefronts.

It’s not about one massive campaign any more, it’s about hundreds and thousands of micro-moments where a brand gets to interact with a consumer, being able to come up with contextually tweaked messages that are still consistent with an overarching theme and messaging strategy. That’s where I believe AI will shine – it’s not quite there yet but it can get there.

Truly creative people in advertising will always have value. They are the ones who take the time to develop a proper platform for a brand, built around a powerful insight. The hacks, on the other hand, will start to find it harder to stay employed. We need to raise the bar and reward creativity that really builds a brand, not those that just get a chuckle from the jury.

Having worked in so many cultures, what’s the most underrated virtue in doing business across borders?

Perhaps the biggest virtue is to go in assuming that the people you meet fundamentally mean well. In different cultures, there are different codes of behavior – someone might say or do something that you interpret as cold or rude or unwelcoming, but that wasn’t their intention at all.

A sense of humor helps. I remember being in a meeting in China (long ago, before smartphones) when there was a client who had 4 different phones on him and at any given moment, at least one was ringing. He’d keep nodding to say “carry on with the presentation” but he was constantly on the phone.

I excused myself to go to the bathroom, called him on one of his phones from there (I only had one of his numbers) and asked if he’d be able to concentrate better if I did this on the phone. He let out a huge guffaw, apologized and told me to come back and he’d pay attention. He turned off all his phones, listened to our presentation and eventually did do some business with us.

And possibly the third thing (I apologize, I know you only wanted one) is making an effort to speak someone else’s language. I speak Mandarin, of course, but I always had a few words in whatever other language was relevant in a meeting- it’s just a small gesture and I find it often lowers some unseen barriers and makes it easier for the other person to feel comfortable with me – and you only do business with people you’re comfortable with.

Trust, technology, or timing—which one really decides whether a bold idea survives in Asia?

Timing. Timing is everything. There are so many people in Asia who tried different versions of ride hailing apps – none of those worked until Uber came along. That was partly to do with smartphone technology but a lot to do with consumers evolving to the point where they could consider such models.

After three decades in Asia’s media landscape, what’s one illusion marketers still cling to when entering China?

The main one, I think, is that they can understand China by applying a framework from the rest of the world to it. For example, many marketers think of it as “The world has Google, China has Baidu…the world has Facebook, China has Wechat…the world has Amazon, China has Ali….

That’s completely the wrong way to go about it. Unlike Google and Facebook, Ali and Tencent are not dependent on advertising space for revenue – they own an advertising ecosystem to drive consumers to other parts of their business. They make most of their revenue from ecommerce or content. That shapes the digital ecosystem in China to put consumers first in a way that we don’t see elsewhere.

The way social media work here is also very different. Tiktok and Douyin are owned by the same company but Tiktok doesn’t have all of the functionality of Douyin and is not built so strongly around driving live commerce and ecommerce the way it is in China.

And lastly, because of how late the China market opened up (late 1980’s) and how quickly ecommerce became prominent here, brands and brand building here had a relatively short time on stage. Consumers in China are more brand agnostic and far more driven by functional benefits than consumers anywhere. I’d done a Linkedin video on that topic a few weeks ago.

If you were a 28-year-old marketer in 2025, what industry ‘truth’ would you challenge first—and why?

The thing that I’d challenge (but I’m not sure if today’s 28 year old marketers would really appreciate this) is that marketing is seen almost entirely as a tactical, transaction driven, revenue building function. I see ads for CMOs that say they need to be experts in SEM or social media or whatever and I think – that’s not a CMO’s job.

If you go back to the 4P’s of marketing, it encompasses product, price, place (distribution) and promotion (which is really advertising, consumer communications, all of that). Most marketing jobs today are focused only on the 4^th P but if you look at it properly, it is a very strategic business function that should get to define “What business are we in” types of questions as well.

If taxi companies had a real marketer working there, Uber would have been invented inside a taxi or car rental company. AirBnB would have been invented inside a hotel or hospitality company. The fact that they got disrupted is a function of their definition of marketing being nothing more than a function that drives revenue for existing products. If they’d been studying consumers and constantly exploring ways in which to identify and address changing consumer needs, they may not have been disrupted.

Don’t miss Sriram at the opening of the APPIES Marketing Festival on July 9 with his topic: The Times they are a-changing. What that means for marketers.

More details here https://appies.com.my or call Ruby on 03-7726 2588 for seats. HRDC Claimable.