Symposium Singapore: Our Inaugural Event!

On Thursday July 19^th, Rakuten Marketing hosted our inaugural Symposium Singapore at Rakuten Crimson House. Our Symposium events are held globally and after announcing our expansion into Singapore and the wider Asia region last July, we were excited to bring Symposium to Singapore.

JJ Eastwood, MD of Rakuten Marketing Asia-Pacific kicked off the evening with the Rakuten Marketing APAC journey. Launching in Australia in September 2012 with our affiliate network, we quickly grew and launched our display and search offering, all of which are bolstered by our attribution and insights solutions cadence. After successfully helping global brands enter the Asian market, we then expanded our team in Singapore. Twelve-months on we’re happy to report triple digit advertiser revenue and partnership growth!

During this time, we’ve also driven success for our clients. Vanja Wilson, Senior Account Manager was joined by Singaporean eCommerce giant Redmart, recounting how the Redmart affiliate program drove a phenomenal $40:1 Return-On-Ad-Spend (No, that’s not a typo – that’s a $40:1 ROAS) with the help of our Strategic Launch Package. Our Strategic Launch Package (SLP) is an additional service that advertisers utilising our self-managed affiliate platform can leverage, providing advertisers with additional support for a three-month period over the launch of their affiliate program. Over this period, Redmart optimised their SLP to drive new customer acquisition campaigns and publisher recruitment.

Throughout the year we’ve made several updates to our tech stack, making it easier for publishers and advertisers to work together. Leo Wang, Senior Network Development Manager, was excited to share these enhancements with our attendees. For the APAC region specifically, we have made our publisher dashboard a multi-lingual one, now available in Korean, traditional and simplified Chinese, driving further partnership opportunities for our advertisers and publishers in Asia.

And what would Symposium be without a session dedicated to our affiliates. Alex Short, Director of Publisher Development in Asia spoke to our audience about some of the latest publisher innovation we’re seeing from our Asian affiliates. This included a live demo of the Snap, Shop, Wear app Goxip; an overview of how Hypebeast are utilising the Rakuten Marketing tool automate; and an introduction to the new American Express Model. Alan Gu, Founder and CEO of China’s largest cashback site 55Haitao then joined Alex to discuss how advertisers and publishers can align cross-border shopping with the average Chinese consumers.

To conclude the evening we moved onto an evening of networking with plenty of canapes and drinks! Thank you to all our attendees, especially those who flew from all over Asia and the UK to be in attendance. To view the photos from the evening you can visit our event gallery.

Interested in attending Rakuten Marketing events? Visit our event page here