A Winning Streak on e-Commerce
By Thomas Boatman
Published in the ACCJ Journal
"Beautiful, isn't it?" Susan MacDermid thought I was admiring her new roommate: a two-and-a-half-foot tall Buddhist statuette that she had procured in Thailand and that would soon join a number of others in her Tokyo home. MacDermid collects Buddhist art and wine.
However, what I was admiring was the FCC Tokyo Ad Show Best of Web, awards that she helped win for client Coca-Cola (Japan) Co. and agent InfoPlus in 1998 and 1999.
McDermid also collects accolades, academic degrees and valuable information. Clients pay well for her information and advice, but she also has plenty to offer free of charge.
"Mediate your relationship with media," she says, "otherwise it becomes like ice cream and goes down too easy." She is warning against a failure to "self-monitor" the kind of complacency in which a person ingests nothing but, say, left-leaning publications and television, and becomes blind to how his or her thoughts are being molded.
She ought to know. As president and representative director of Modem Media Japan, the Tokyo office of one of the world's largest interactive advertising agencies, she is responsible for helping to mold consumers' minds for some of the biggest corporate brands on the market.
MacDermid has moved fast. Having left InfoPlus Ltd., a Tokyo public relations company, she took the reins of the fledging Modem Media Japan only last June. Before August was over, her new company had already grabbed a piece of the IBM interactive business and scooped up GE Japan. Today, according to MacDermid, the company is growing just as fast as it can find qualified personnel.
Modem Media is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Modem Media.Poppe Tyson, the world's eighth-largest interactive agency in terms of revenues, according to Advertising Age . Global clients include Delta Air Lines, Citibank, Sony, Intel, and 3Com. It is a pioneer of interactive advertising, boasting several industry firsts: the first Internet banner ad (back in the old BBS days) and the world's first Enliven banner (to allow purchases directly through the banner).
Confidence in a knack for being in the right place at the right time is readily apparent as McDermid contemplates the next big e-commerce trend. "I think Japan will leapfrog North America in the growth of device-oriented access to information, such as through cell phones," she says. Her reasoning is that a high 6.3% of Japanese access the Net from something other than a computer and 80% of Japanese university students have a cell phone.
"We want to be on the forefront with clients that are on the forefront of change," she adds. Not bad for someone who landed her first real job through anadvertisement in the Japan Times . MacDermid has combined hard work, good timing and common sense to travel the road to success.
After reading John Wharton's Jobs In Japan: The Complete Guide to Living and Working in the Land of Rising Opportunity (Global Press), she decided to look for a university position here in 1983. She sent aerograms to 120 Japanese schools. Waseda University responded. Three and a half years later she was back in Canada working on a second Master's degree. Then Japan called again. In 1992, after completing a Ph.D. fellowship in the faculty of Business and Commerce at Keio University, she answered a want ad for a senior editor and was soon employed by the small PR agency InfoPlus. Another career had been launched through the classified section.
"At the time I didn't know it, but I was interested in marketing," she says. At InfoPlus she discovered how to implement integrated strategies and polished her marketing/communications skills while helping to develop business goals. She impressed her employers by gaining access to information and societies in Japan that the average foreign PR practitioner can only dream about. In 1995, she started the InfoPlus interactive department, which became a prime growth engine, and was soon made a board member.
"By expanding into interactive services we were able to achieve double-digit growth throughout the recession," she says. Then came the Coca-Cola (Japan) Web site, the FCC awards and Modem Media. Now the woman who secured her first personal e-mail account only one year ago spends her days thinking of new ways to approach e-commerce and foresee the next great interactive trend in Japan. Keep an eye on her.
