Sir Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital is starting to take shape after piecing together creative production house MediaMonks and performance media specialists MightyHive but Singapore will be the first integrated offering under one roof, says MediaMonks chief executive (or main monk) Victor Knaap. The new office will house the two businesses, as well as S4 exec Michel De Rijk and a new content studio, which will offer brands a scalable alternative to in-housing content creative. “We are moving into our new office at the end of this month and that will be our first fully-integrated office with MediaMonks, MightyHive and S4 together. "You can imagine you have the creative production power of MediaMonks, combined with the fully-fledged studio in which we can shoot everything, combined with the media performance expertise of MightyHive. It means brands can deliver fit-for-format content and drive that content into media, that will be the full train set,” Knaap tells The Drum. The studio will be the second collaboration of its kind after MediaMonks announced a collaboration with Avon last month. Avon is working with MediaMonks to digitise its business with an always-on approach to content creation, developing up to 12,000 assets annually in Avon's 50+ worldwide markets. According to Knaap, he is talking to brands in APAC about the Singapore studio but the plan is to focus on fashion, food and beauty as verticals. Knaap says the opening of the content studio is the development of its vision to help brands better link creative and media together, using its method of creating a media-first approach to asset creation. “Our overarching idea that we talked about a couple of months ago has been fine-tuned. The biggest change that we shared publicly was the Avon content studio and that’s what I am currently focusing on, I want to build something similar in Singapore. We are in talks with a lot of brands and platforms to start a fashion, food and beauty fully-fledged film and content studio,” he continued. “We’ll have fit-for-format creatives; so creatives that can sketch out how content works on Lazada, Google, Facebook or WeChat. We’ll also have people that will do ideation, alongside film and content directors, and photographers. We’ll have a big green screen space, editing and sound, so end-to-end production but specifically for food, fashion and beauty." Knapp said that he believes the added complexity of language and cultural diversity in APAC means there’s an even greater need to create such solutions for brands. Alluding to the growing trend for brands in-housing marketing execution, he said that S4 didn’t disagree with some in-housing but that it answered the wrong question. Instead of trying to fix an issue of making assets fit-for-purpose by hiring people internally, brands needed to start with creating assets for more platforms and more personas, he explained. Other markets in Asia Pacific that will be able to launch the fully-integrated offering will be India and Japan, he added, though it was early days. S4 made its second major hire into India, heralding the launch of the business in India in February. // Featured in this article
Singapore will be the first market in which S4 Capital’s MediaMonks and MightyHive will offer an integrated service under S4 roof. MediaMonks CEO Victor Knaap said the new office, due to open at the end of March, will also house S4 executive Michel De Rijk and a new content studio offering customers a scalable alternative to in-house content creatives.