Ivan Hady Wibowo founder of Flock Indonesia reflects on their busy first year of operation

| | No Comments

Flock_1.jpgFlock Indonesia reaches its first anniversary today. Former J Walter Thompson Indonesia ECD Ivan Hady Wibowo founded Flock to create a 360 offering that connects brands to consumers. Campaign Brief Asia caught up with Wibowo (centre) to find out about their success over the past 12 months.

CB Asia: Firstly, a bit of background as to how you came to start Flock. Startups often pivot in their first year – explain what Flock is and how does it benefit clients?

I have a total of 20 years of experience in the industry, 11 years in Singapore and 9 years here in Indonesia. During my career I’m grateful to have worked alongside renowned global brands and together with an amazing team, I’ve always managed to consistently claim a spot in Indonesia’s top 5 performing offices.

During my 20 years long career, I’ve noticed that the need for clients to create a 360 brand experience to connect with their consumer is becoming increasingly more important.

From branding, to traditional and digital marketing and all the way to how a brand can connect with their consumer using the latest technology.

It should all be a one seamless experience. And as marketeers we all know this, but the issue is, many agencies work with various partners to facilitate different touchpoints in trying to create such a seamless brand world. You have branding agencies, technology companies, event organizers, media agencies and so on.

Creating and maintaining a brand’s message, and designing a seamless brand experience around it, takes a lot of people and communication. And unfortunately when you partner up with various partners, valuable information just gets lost and there’s a lot of time and quality wasted going back and forth.

As an entrepreneur I saw this as an opportunity. Not only business wise, but also to serve clients and bring them a truly full service company. All capabilities from A-Z under one roof working together as one to create seamless brand experiences. That is Flock.

CB Asia: How successful has your first year been?

We are the fastest growing independent creative agency in Indonesia. So far we have 4 companies under the Flock group. We have:

1.     Flock as a creative agency and also serving as the holding company

2.     Maleo as the digital and social media agency

3.     Kokako as our content and in-house production house

4.     And OU Design as our branding agency.

We’ve grown incredibly fast. We started with 4 people and are now 48 people strong in just a year. And we are still aggressively recruiting.

In total we are actively serving 16 clients under our portfolio. And two are in the top 10 biggest advertising spenders in Indonesia (Tokopedia, Djarum).

We have produced more than 40 video contents so far, including TVCs and Digital Content. But what’s more, is the full range of services we are able to provide our clients because of our unique set-up.

Flock_2.jpgOur four companies are under one roof and this enables us to give serve our clients from end to end. For example, we are helping the biggest cheese manufacturer from Japan, to enter the Indonesian market. Our involvement starts from the very beginning with our brand agency OU Design. We helped the naming of their products, market strategy and designed a unique packaging design for the Indonesian Market. And this is just the beginning of the brand experience we are creating.

We are also helping Astra Life to launch a new product to the market from the very early stage. From product consultation, brand building and communication strategy, production until the media buying. And we have more of such full service projects coming up, like Nature Strength and a new product line from Djarum. And we are hoping to take on many more of such projects to show our full range of capabilities and create 360 brand experiences.

CB Asia: What are the unique technical offerings that make Flock and its subsidiaries stand out from the crowd?

Like mentioned earlier, we are able to serve our clients from end to end. And as we have all capabilities under one roof, the quality can be traced back to how we serve the client, the quality of every produced deliverable, but also how each deliverable fits in the whole brand experience.

What also makes Flock unique is that each of our individual companies are chasing their own revenue and projects. Making us the fastest growing independent agency in Indonesia.

We are also very agile and are keen to take on new opportunities when we spot them. For example, we’ve set up Kokako after three months because we understood the increasing need of high quality video content.

With our in-house directors and equipment, Kokako enables us to be flexible in producing digital contents really fast and cost effective.

Another opportunity we took on is broadcasting live on YouTube and Facebook. We are the first agency to build our own digital broadcasting capabilities in Indonesia with the latest technology & equipment on the market.

Then after that, we’ve setup Maleo, our social media and digital department. And recently we’ve setup OU Design, focus in design and branding.

OU Design is also producing their own contents as well in an online magazine call “OU magazine” (oumagz.com – coming soon). Here we are targeting the needs of millennials who are increasingly more interested in Art, Design and Culture.

But what makes us truly stand out is our talents. We hire slow, fire fast. Our talents produce the best work of their careers. Work that cuts through the clutter. And by producing great work, word spreads very fast. Without any advertising or push, every month we have clients that are inviting us to pitch. It’s really a humbling experience for us, especially when we’ve just started.

CB Asia: Can you tell us a bit more about your partnerships with Djarum and Tokopedia? What percentage of your company’s revenue are these two firms responsible for?

Tokopedia and Djarum are two of our first clients. And we are forever in debt to them. They trusted us to produce work for them. And we are very grateful that the work that we produced for them earned us all the clients that we have now.

For Tokopedia, they have extraordinary growth. They grew from the no.1 product market place in Indonesia into an platform that enable people in Indonesia to help them settle their day to day need. We successfully launched the new brand campaign “Everything Starts from Tokopedia” early this year. An attempt to change the habit of our consumers daily life. And right now we are moving on to the next phase of the campaign that we will launch soon.

For Djarum, we started of handling their fighting brand Djarum Black. And after our first job, they gave us their biggest brand, Djarum Super.

It’s a huge task as Djarum Super is one of the oldest and biggest brands in Indonesia. We will be launching the new exciting brand positioning soon. Also they just recently appointed us to launch a new exciting product. Still very confidential. Tokopedia and Djarum account for almost 40% of our revenue over the past 12 months.

CB Asia: What can you tell us about the future of the creative marketing industry in Indonesia? What are the trends you guys are seeing and what makes you hopeful after one year on?

There is a big surge in demands for digital content as clients are competing with each other to create the most engaging contents on digita. The result is many content creation platforms and independent content creator are born. But that at the same time is creating another problem as Brands are struggling in navigating their contents because the content creation platform work is project based. To maintain continuity you need an agency to help you on that. So instead of focusing on what is the trend that will arise, we are focusing on what will still be relevant in the future. Which is brand building and creative storytelling from the brand perspective. We have a strong belief that brand’s co
mmunication need to be entertaining but at the same time we are also very careful not to turn our client’s brand into entertainment business. We have seen many brands fall into that trap while engaging/producing their own contents.

CB Asia: Anything else to know about Flock and its operation? 

We are growing aggressively and are hiring! We are always looking for like minded people to join us and grow together.