More Creative Directors, Less Creativity: What Does That Mean for the Ad Industry? | 2017 Annual Report

In 2017, the ad industry looked like a year in which creatives working outside the 4A agencies won wider attention through their "viral campaigns," with their influence reaching all the way up to clients. But beyond the buzzwords — "phenomenon-level," "reach," "going viral" — what else is worth examining?

After the four-minute-twelve-second ad The World Is Big, But Not Bigger Than a Plate of Tomatoes and Eggs went viral, Xu Jiayi kept asking herself, and her partner Jiang Pan, the same question: how on earth did people sit through the whole thing?

Late on the night of November 1, 2017, the video, placed in WeChat Moments, set off a wave of sharing and debate. The WeChat index for "tomatoes and eggs" jumped 6,809% the next day. According to data tracked by Newrank, at least 1,402 related articles appeared that day, eight of them passing 100,000 views. The ad told the story of a Chinese student abroad who had no idea how to cook tomatoes and eggs and called home across the ocean to ask his parents for the recipe.

Xu Jiayi came up through copywriting. When she writes ad scripts herself, she aims for "a hook in every single minute." She points to another long ad she had shot the month before for the client OPPO — Jay Chou's 20 Million Stories: The Longest Movie, also about six minutes — which she says she packed with hooks:

"…Jay Chou opens by saying 'there are only two kinds of pianos in the world' — a tease — and a celebrity is a draw in itself. Fans will keep watching. Then comes this otherworldly scene in a vast snowstorm that just makes you want to keep going…" That is why the explanation Jiang Pan first offered didn't satisfy Xu Jiayi. "She forced me to really analyze it. In the end I could only joke: 'They must be trying to show off that they studied abroad.'"

Jiang Pan and Xu Jiayi are a long-standing art director and copywriter team. In 2014 they founded the creative agency Yilei, having both worked as creative directors at 4A agencies. Yilei has only twelve people, and the industry usually files it under "independent agency" or "boutique local creative shop" — whatever the label, the point of contrast is always the large, group-run Western 4A agencies.

"All the talented people at the boutique creative shops — inside the system, they were either invisible or up against tremendous resistance," said Sun Erhei, chief creative officer for China at Havas Group, the world's sixth-largest advertising group. He told QDaily that five or ten years ago the industry might have looked up to 4A creative chiefs as the pinnacle, but "the times make the hero."

In December, Saatchi & Saatchi held an internal scoring session on Chinese creative advertising in 2017, meant to measure the firm's own work against the wider market. Chief creative officer Wu Fan ran the session, and all senior creative leaders and business development directors had to attend.

He Qiang, head of planning, was there too. He noticed that apart from Saatchi & Saatchi's own work, most of the chosen cases came from local boutique agencies — including Tomatoes and Eggs, made by Hangzhou agency Yoyo for China Merchants Bank's credit card, and The Late-Night Diner on the Great Wall, made by T&K for Tsingtao Beer. The two pieces that scored a high 8 out of 10 came from a 4A and a local shop respectively: Pxmart Zhongyuan Festival, by Ogilvy Taiwan for Pxmart, and How Does a Werewolf Get Through Mid-Autumn Festival?, by Yilei for Oppein. By He Qiang's rubric, an 8 meant a piece not only had inspiring creativity and polished execution, but could also shift people's entrenched assumptions to some degree.

If you had to sum up the ad industry in 2017, it looks like a year in which creatives working outside the 4A world drew more attention through their viral campaigns, with their influence reaching clients directly. In our reporting for this piece, Tomatoes and Eggs — that widely circulated campaign — drew reactions ranging from awe to admiration to reflection among other creatives. And quite a few of them got a client request in the days that followed: make me a "tomatoes and eggs."

The Most Ambitious People in the Ad Industry

On November 2, while many people scrolled through their WeChat Moments watching the debates the Tomatoes and Eggs ad had set off, ten founders of local boutique creative agencies were reciting a bilingual oath.

Li Sanshui, founder of W, read the Chinese half; Ma Chao, founder of Innokids, read the English. The venue was 1933 Old Millfun, a creative park on Shanghai's North Bund, and they were announcing the formation of an organization called the China Independent Agencies (CIA). The founding membership comprised fifteen local independent creative companies.

Four of the fifteen agencies were founded after 2016. The youngest, Shengmi Zucheng, was just three months old. Its founder, Shen Xiang, had been chief creative officer for Cheil OpenTide Greater China; a year earlier he had sat on the jury at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in France. Shen Xiang described the CIA as something like what the Singapore government did in building a hawker center — every stall distinct, one selling fish balls, one selling rice noodles.

These independent creative companies emerged in response to a new kind of creative demand from certain clients. Most of BAT's advertising projects, for instance, require individual pitches and are taken on purely as one-off projects, rather than through annual retainers.

An earlier generation of creative directors could spend many years at a single agency. But today, making creative director means arriving at the most precarious moment of your career.

"Twenty years ago, creative director was already an extremely powerful title; one rung above it, executive creative director, was basically the top of the creative department," explained Ma Xiaobo, partner and executive creative director at Shengjiia. "But internet companies came along and needed to poach talent from traditional firms, so they inflated titles and salaries. On the 4A side there was never any such thing as a GCD [group creative director] or an ACD [associate creative director] — but because executive creative director was nearly impossible to climb past, companies kept stacking new titles to give people a career ladder. At the group level they also created the chief creative officer role… it's inflation, plain and simple."

At the same time, some people grew unable to stomach the slow pace of large organizations and the caution of global clients, and struck out on their own. Take T&K, which launched in 2013 with the slogan "the upgraded Chinese 4A." Co-founder Yang Yexin had been a group creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi. He said in an interview: "4A agencies have to guarantee roughly 15% profit on every project, or they start cutting corners. Good creative ends up held hostage by the margin."

This cohort of founders also includes former JWT chief creative officer Chen Guohui, former DDB Shanghai executive creative director Fan Yaowei, and former Ogilvy Shanghai group creative director Xiong Chao, among others.

They all understood the limits of doing creative work inside a 4A. Jiang Pan says that when Yilei screens client briefs, "money can come second, but the opportunity has to be interesting" — a work-first philosophy that gives the company room to be stubborn. Not long ago, on an alcohol brand, they watched an idea they had developed clear every level of the client's organization, only to die at the global CEO. They walked away from the contract rather than grind through revisions.

As one of the CIA's four co-founders, Li Sanshui poured real ambition into the oath: to carry "Chinese creativity onto the international stage," to "make all relationships equal," and even, in a post-event interview, to "imagine a future where a mark appears on Chinese creative work: CIA, stamped on all the highest-caliber independent Chinese creative output…"

But he is also clear-eyed about how easily small creative companies can slide into being "execution vendors and production units." Wrestling with the same problem, Jiang Pan has been thinking about 2018: beyond the "phenomenon-level, viral, high-reach" work, she plans to set up a distribution arm and bring in-house the promotion work the company currently hands off to social media agencies. It would let them push their own work harder — and capture some of the media-placement revenue.

Xu Jiayi adds: "Distribution has ideas in it too. When we promoted our client Yi Er San, we bought Ma Weiwei and Xiao Xiao — debaters from U Can U BB — to argue the two sides. Ma Weiwei said women should rely on their abilities, not on what they wear; Xiao Xiao said women should rely on looking good. Just two simple Weibo posts, and incredibly effective."

The ad Yilei made for Yi Er San: My Secret Weapon at Work

To Ad People, Is BAT an Opportunity or a Threat?

"About eight months of talks, running through June 2017 — every senior Taobao exec worth meeting, I'd met." Zhao Yuanyuan formally moved to Hangzhou last August.

Zhao Yuanyuan is the kind of person who, once he starts talking, won't stop unless interrupted. He has built a modest name in the ad world, and every post on his eponymous personal WeChat official account breaks ten thousand views. When he arrived at Ogilvy Shanghai in 2013, he ran a newly formed unit called Content Kitchen; it eventually became social@ogilvy, producing work like "Who Can Represent KFC" and "Little Sheep's Journey of Flavor." Before his move, Zhao Yuanyuan's title was senior creative director at social@ogilvy.

By Zhao Yuanyuan's account, Alibaba went on a concentrated hiring spree for advertising and marketing talent in the second half of 2016. In fact BAT had started poaching creative talent much earlier — Alibaba's CMO Dong Benhong had been CEO of VML IM2.0. And for the countless internet startups springing up in this period, the ad industry had trained a whole generation of marketing talent.

But Zhao Yuanyuan did not end up in Taobao's marketing department. His title at Taobao was "Taobao Consumer Innovation and Upgrade," overseeing the "Taobao Xinxuan" business launched in June 2017 — think of it as another NetEase Yanxuan. His job was to build brand equity around the unbranded goods made by the hundreds of contracted factories supplying Taobao Xinxuan.

After fifteen years in advertising, Zhao Yuanyuan says one reason for the move was wanting to "get his hands on a product" — including "what exactly is big data?" and "can things that generate buzz actually convert to sales?"

The holding groups have been wrestling with the same questions. They all struck deals with BAT in 2017, the two biggest being Publicis's partnership with Alibaba and the Dentsu Aegis Network's global strategic cooperation with Tencent. In Ogilvy's sweeping global overhaul last year — the "One Ogilvy" strategy — the concrete steps included moving all creative staff onto one floor and launching an "expert group," with dedicated people assigned to interface with "data-holding companies" and try to turn that data into creative.

Less than six months in, Zhao Yuanyuan hadn't answered all his questions. But he felt he had learned a lot: he visited more than fifty factories, traveling two or three times a month at minimum. "Turns out all enamel pots are made by factories in Langfang, Hebei…" He says he now understands why so many ads are built on emotional storytelling. "After visiting all those factories, I finally understood how severe product commoditization really is — the only way out is through emotion." And what excited him: "Having handled these products, I'd already worked out who might use them and what story they could tell."

He has also grown fluent on the "big-data product-selection logic." "You run Taobao's backend to see what sells. Say you want to develop a pillow — consumers care about no odors, so you develop a latex pillow with no odors. Then you layer on brand attributes: source it from Thailand, has some celebrity slept on one?… Before, I'd only 'heard of' big data. Now I've learned to use it to sell products."

Liu Liang, chief content marketing director at BBDO Shanghai, believes that even now there is no real mechanism by which tech platforms and ad agencies can use platform data to design creative. The mechanism he has in mind is not the "buying and selling traffic" relationship between media agencies and BAT: "That's simple — they hand the client a rate card. But where does the creative go? You have to start from the new openings the media give you and rethink creative from the ground up."

In practice, that means ad agencies need to update their strategy tools, build ties to media platforms, add data specialists, and learn how to hand these data oligarchs a "clear objective."

Liu Liang comes from a strategy background. When he interviewed at BBDO a year ago, he asked outright to be "content marketing director." The title — which had not existed at the company — has since grown into a small in-house social marketing unit. If it rings a bell, the unit's most widely shared work in 2017 was probably the McDonald's college-entrance-exam campaign. Asked what else he was especially proud of this year, Liu Liang said that getting one piece "out there for everyone to see is already remarkable."

"All the marketing activities that are hard to standardize and deeply tied to new media can actually bypass the media agency's budget — that's where I think creative agencies have a future," Liu Liang said.

Seen from the talent market, BAT's threat to ad agencies may be even greater than its monopoly on data. Yang Jianping, creative director at Leo Burnett, has noticed lately that a cohort of young people finish their internship and head straight to BAT, where starting salaries run higher. "But the ones who stay are the ones who truly love making ads."

"Nobody Is Short of Business"

2017 brought the ad industry no shortage of bad news: Procter & Gamble, the world's largest advertiser, cut its marketing budget to its lowest point since 2006; Unilever said it would halve its global creative-agency roster in 2018 while cutting overall spend by 30%; and WPP Group CEO Martin Sorrell, after a third straight downgrade to the year's revenue forecast, told the BBC that "advertising is entering the same new normal as the other big global economies: low growth, low inflation, limited pricing power."

But for the independent agencies, it is a new market.

"Right now almost everyone has plenty of business. The more a company grew up on the internet, the more it actually needs traditional media to build its influence," said Ma Xiaobo. NetEase Cloud Music's The Power of Music, Didi's Everything Starts with a Ride, Ele.me's Hungry? Then You Want It, Xianyu's Don't Let Me Sit Idle… In 2017, every few weeks brought another internet company releasing a brand film.

The Power of Music for NetEase Cloud Music brought in the team of Hu Xiangyun, the renowned creative out of Ogilvy Taiwan.

Many of the independent agencies that have emerged in recent years got their start with internet clients. Yilei's earliest client was Alibaba; internet companies once made up 70% of its revenue. But now traditional clients account for half. "Companies in traditional industries have also started to let their guard down and embrace open-ended marketing. They spend no less than internet companies, and sometimes they give more time. We're increasingly glad to work with them."

The wave of consumption upgrading, brands' push to skew younger, and the relentless churn of new products have all released a sense of vast commercial opportunity across the industry. "In recent years client demand for creative has diversified, reaching a stage that calls for different, more distinctive voices. So smaller agencies are getting no fewer opportunities than big ones." Liu Yang is founder and CEO of Amber, a local creative agency, and also vice president of Leo Digital. But for him Amber — with a creative department of eighty — is stuck in an awkward middle, too big to be a boutique.

Amber's main clients now include Adidas, DIESEL, Coca-Cola, Siemens, and Meilianhe Group. What Liu Yang has been mulling lately is how to "stretch Amber's business logic and develop in both directions" — because the moment you "can't find something new, the business immediately falls into a fiercely competitive environment."

Liu Yang's favorite ad campaign of the past year is a bit unusual: a WeChat official-account post for a new product from Yangshengtang — a birch-sap face mask — headlined Nongfu Spring Crosses Into Skincare, Disrupting the Market With a Moisturizing Product That Contains Not a Single Drop of Water.

Part of what made it good, he says, was the business insight it offered. "I don't think this face mask will sell for long — they'll launch a new product soon. A beverage that sells for a hundred-plus years is getting rarer and rarer. Products iterate faster, which means demand for creative grows too."

That insight chimes with what Zhao Yuanyuan took away from his factory visits: "My sense from Alibaba is this: out of 10,000 good products, maybe only 100 have a brand. The rest are factory goods. And out of those 100, maybe one can become 'a brand people actually think is decent'… Right now, marketing and product are completely out of sync."

What has also struck Ma Xiaobo is that the client budgets and brand commitment he has seen over the past two years are nothing like what existed a few years ago. Values are no longer cookie-cutter, and he reads this as a sign of the whole market maturing. Having built a strong reputation through several well-received campaigns for Fotile, he recently won competitive pitches for MissFresh, Oppein, and Midea.

"But it's not that 4A business declined and ours improved — it's that there are simply more ad agencies now. The biggest business will always sit at the 4A level," Ma Xiaobo said. "Add up the yearly revenue of every boutique shop ranked below 50 and you still won't match the billings of a single big 4A."

The Glass Ceiling for Creative Directors

As the year wound down, Sun Erhei already knew a promotion was coming. Starting in 2018, he would move from CCO of Havas Shanghai to CCO for all of China, overseeing creative departments in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.

With four days left in 2017, Sun Erhei sat for our interview at a Japanese izakaya and said: "I have a problem too — I'm about to hit my ceiling."

Sun Erhei made a point of showing off the Supreme jacket he was wearing. "I'm no old-timer — I like new things. Supreme's quality is genuinely terrible. Unimaginably terrible. So how does it command ten times, a hundred times the markup? Why do people flock to it? That's what a brand does. It got one thing exactly right: wear this jacket and you're cool, you're keeping up with the times."

But faced with all the viral campaigns of 2017, Sun Erhei couldn't find his own Supreme in China. The number of companies willing to build a brand for the long haul, the odds of a traditional brand ad breaking through in a digital media environment, the chance of a client handing a "make me a tomatoes and eggs" brief to a 4A — none of it looked especially promising.

After his promotion, Sun Erhei is weighing two things: first, raising the quality of the company's creative output and "putting some values into the world"; second, exploring how to use Havas's resources to build his own IP, to "move toward R&D and gain more voice." In October 2017, the Paris-headquartered ad group was 94.75% acquired by Vivendi, the multinational media conglomerate, whose portfolio includes Universal Pictures, Canal+ (Europe's largest pay-TV channel), Universal Music Group, and the game platform Gameloft.

Lu Minhao had spent twelve years in advertising creative work, and last year he too was looking to reinvent himself. In 2016 he left the Coca-Cola team at McCann Erickson. One reason: a sense that "the very best talent is leaving the industry." Another: a rare chance to direct came along, so he spent a year as a freelancer.

He didn't leave advertising entirely, though. Over that year, Lu Minhao directed three ads himself — for Ant Credit Pay, Dianping's Must-Eat List, and Tencent Weilidai. And while shooting, he joined a competitive pitch from Yilei, leading a team on his own to make what he considers "the work I love most from my entire career": How Does a Werewolf Get Through Mid-Autumn Festival? That ad has racked up over 38 million views.

In Jiang Pan's words, clients who come to Yilei now — "even if the brief doesn't say it, we know perfectly well they want something with conversation-worthy impact."

After that ad, Oppein briefly wanted to sign Yilei as an annual-retainer client — but "we looked at what we'd have to do over a year and turned it down." A retainer would have pulled Oppein's monthly promotional pull-up banners into Yilei's remit, and would also have required hiring more people dedicated to that one client.

How Does a Werewolf Get Through Mid-Autumn Festival?

"The media environment is incredibly complex right now — you could have 100 million yuan and, if you don't play it right, watch it dissolve," said Jiang Pan. "That's when you need creative. That's when we have leverage. Right now is when we truly have leverage — before, all the power was in the media's hands."

Spend 10 million yuan to produce genuinely good content and distribute it, generating more than 20 million yuan's worth of effect. The satisfaction that brings is nothing like what Jiang Pan, Xu Jiayi, and Lu Minhao knew at 4A agencies — designing an ad and watching every media outlet pick it up and copy it.

Two or three years ago, Lu Minhao and a circle of industry friends would always be debating "what kind of work is likely to win awards this year," studying trends — whether to fill a quota or build a reputation. That has all but faded. Now "what determines your standing in the industry is whether your work can go viral on WeChat."

Zhao Yuanyuan thinks brand campaigns today have to read like social news. "You have to take a side, carry an emotional charge — because people's threshold for getting excited is so high now." Behind that is the fact that in the mobile news feed, social news and advertising sit on the same level. "Above is a KFC brand push, below is a social news story, below that is Mimeng. People today would rather spend 700,000 yuan on one Mimeng post."

But what still puzzles Sun Erhei is this: "You say traditional advertising is dead — but didn't Tomatoes and Eggs go viral? Isn't it just a video? Isn't it the same old playbook? I find it strange too. All old techniques — and it blew up."

Nobody Cares About the Cannes Trophy Anymore

Among 2017's many ads, Mo Kangsun named Tomatoes and Eggs one of his ads of the year. He has been in the business for forty-two years and belongs to the first wave of ad people who came from Hong Kong and Taiwan to build careers on the mainland; the industry reveres him as one of the "Four Godfathers of Chinese-Language Advertising."

"You'd never have expected China Merchants Bank to accept a communication approach like this… If the brand were more exposed, a lot of people wouldn't find it distinctive. Instead you think: 'This is remarkable — selling a credit card this way.' It's on the level of the P&G ad for the London Olympics five years back, the one 'dedicated to all the greatest mothers in the world' — not a single product appeared, and yet it was brilliant."

The P&G ad for the 2012 London Olympics, Best Job, won a Gold Lion at that year's Cannes Lions, and has become a standard reference point — ad people reach for it whenever they describe a "universal idea," which is exactly the kind of creative Cannes likes to reward.

Best Job — P&G's 2012 London Olympics ad

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, held every June, is known as the Oscars of advertising. To this day, WPP's annual report still devotes a full page to listing the number of advertising awards its creative agencies have won. But in 2017, Publicis — the world's third-largest ad group — announced it was withdrawing from Cannes to cut costs. WPP then hinted it was "considering withdrawal" as well. Though both companies ultimately reversed course, the episode pushed Cannes to announce a reform package built around lowering the cost of attending. It was widely read as a sign of creativity's declining clout in the advertising supply chain — or more precisely, of a widening gap between what ad people consider good creative and what clients consider effective advertising.

After many years as a holding-group executive, Mo Kangsun says that in truth, "winning one award means burning enormous energy dealing with all the problems that come from not winning awards." The award-winning work may not be what clients valued most or spent most on, and inside the agency it can also create political awkwardness.

Lu Minhao's sharpest Cannes memory comes from his time at DDB Shanghai. "One year I was asking for a promotion and a raise. The executive creative director asked me: 'Have you won any awards for clients?'" Lu Minhao says that at the time, winning advertising awards was built into the performance review for everyone at creative director level and above — scored every year.

Yet in practice, many people who piled up Cannes Lions inside the 4A system never rose to senior positions. The Xiong Chao and Yang Yexin mentioned earlier were both known in the 4A world for making "ghost ads" — work never actually placed in the market, or placed in negligible quantities. Some companies hired them for exactly that purpose: to win trophies with ghost ads.

Now, fewer and fewer people care about those Cannes trophies.

But the "universal ideas" Cannes once championed have themselves shifted subtly in 2017. The most telling case is the award-laden ad phenomenon Fearless Girl: a bronze sculpture that appeared in the early hours of March 7 in New York City's Bowling Green Park, hands on hips, staring down the famous Wall Street Charging Bull. This feminist installation-as-advertisement went viral within hours, briefly becoming the trendiest attraction in New York, with countless residents flocking to photograph themselves beside it and signal their support on social media. Adweek called it "forged from an ancient medium, yet crafting the most modern of marketing messages with perfect precision."

Meanwhile, 2017 also brought a wave of "existential dread" marketing and a string of controversial campaigns, mostly from internet companies. In the US, a run of Super Bowl, Grammy, and Oscar ads all came with built-in political stances. Denise Sabet, North America general manager for brand consultancy Labbrand, told QDaily at the time: "There is no scenario in which a brand is required to stand up and discuss political issues. In almost every case, this is a choice — a strategic choice."

And turning back to Tomatoes and Eggs, or Love Letter in Cooking Fumes — ads with their plain, honest expressions of family love and romantic love — that kind of work feels comparatively rare. Mo Kangsun has always stressed his fondness for brand-building. Last April he retired as chairman of McCann Erickson China and founded his own boutique shop, "Match·Mamaye," then immediately sprinted through 33 ad films in eight months — about one a week.

During our interview, Mo Kangsun spent a long time playing us ads Mamaye had made over those eight months. They feel different from most boutique shops opening today. Viewed through the lens of viral campaigns, you might even find them a touch conventional.

Mamaye's clients lean toward traditional industry. Mo Kangsun says the internet-era media environment has badly hurt these companies — for a long time they never built brand equity properly. "That becomes our opening. For us, a brand like Supor giving us a dozen film projects is enough; Ajisen Ramen giving us two chances to do the brand right — that's enough for us. But it's nowhere near enough for them. They have to keep accumulating."

When they reached a Supor thermos ad fronted by Huang Xuan, Mo Kangsun seemed to offer a deliberate aside: they chose Huang Xuan because he genuinely fit Supor's target demographic. "A year ago, people would ask why you'd use Huang Xuan instead of a traffic star. Now that Youth is out, they say: 'You were so smart!'"

Whether they are creative directors who have gone independent, those still pushing for a breakthrough inside 4A agencies, or ad people who entered BAT and felt a new world open up — across all our conversations, you can feel their hunger for creative work and their ideal of building a brand.

And things are getting better, too. Browse the campaigns Shengjiia made for Fotile in 2017 and you'll be surprised at how willing this domestic company was to fund carefully crafted storytelling: beyond Love Letter in Cooking Fumes, there's a piece comparing its new sink dishwasher to "mom's time machine." Ma Xiaobo says "time machine" has become a client IP they will build on for the next decade.

In a way, this sounds like a return to the "big idea." But Ma Xiaobo sees the difference: "What we look at now is how much client resource a single creative idea can mobilize, and how much business impact it can generate — not just how long it can last."

Shengjiia, now thirteen years old, draws 80% of its staff from 4A backgrounds. "We still believe the creative director should be the core of the team," Ma Xiaobo says. So starting last year, he scrapped the GCD and ACD titles common at 4A agencies and created a new position: ICD, or Integrated Creative Director. "The requirement is that you can own the whole process — from strategic output to final creative execution to delivery, controlling every stage. It's essentially a product manager."

Near year-end, Lu Minhao ended his stretch as a freelancer when an offer came from W+K Shanghai — the veteran American boutique — inviting him to be creative director on the BMW account. For W+K, the BMW China creative-agency business worth $20 million it won in July 2017 immediately called for more creative talent.

W+K told QDaily that this round of hiring aimed to keep the creative team "half Chinese, half international" — seeking "local insight with an international perspective" — and even brought on a full-time in-house translator. W+K's old hiring standard was a firm "must have strong English and strong work." Now it has become: just "strong work" will do.

(Reporter Chen Siyin also contributed to this article.)

Cover image source: pixabay