VietNamNet Bridge – At present, foreign ad firms are believed to be the strategists who build creative advertisement thinking for clients, while Vietnamese are just the hired workers to implement the strategies. But things will change soon.

Foreign firms make big money in Vietnamese market

Vietnam is believed to be the lucrative market for the ad industry, where the world’s six leading ad groups have been present, including WPP, Ominicom, Dentsu, Publicis, Internpublic and Havas.

Foreign ad firms are the guests in Vietnam, but hosting the ad market thanks to their great advantages including the technology, experiences and financial capability. Especially, they have big clients, the multi-national groups which are willing to allocate big budgets for advertisement campaigns.

Analysts said that foreign firms usually take the big contracts worth hundreds of billions of dong. They play the leading role in the contracts’ implementation, building the creative advertisement strategies for clients, for which they can earn 15-20 percent of the contracts’ values.

Meanwhile, Vietnamese ad firms just can get some pieces of the cake by undertaking some components of big projects, for which they can earn modest money.

According to the Vietnam Advertisement Association (VAA), the Vietnamese ad market may have the total turnover reaching $3 billion per annum by 2020. However, Vietnamese ad firms just can hold 30 percent of the market share.

Do Kim Dung, Director of the Vietnam Ad Training and Research Institute, noted that while foreign firms have been succeeding with their strategic thinking, Vietnamese firms just strive to follow the paths set up for them, or in other words, they do the outsourcing for big international firms.

He went on to say that Vietnamese firms do not think they should gradually improve themselves to create their own values to attract clients, instead of working for foreigners.

Vietnam-made products for Vietnamese, why not?

However, while the majority of Vietnamese ad firms are trying to glean like silver coins by working as “sub-contractors” for foreigners, some others try to get bigger pieces of the ad cake by providing comprehensive integrated ad solutions, which remain inaccessible even by some foreign groups in Vietnam.

Integration Company, for example, with its way of approaching services in both areas of ATL (above the line) and BTL (below the line), has obtained the Abbott’s comprehensive ad budget for the whole year 2013.

Meanwhile, Venus Communication and Publicis have been joining forces with international groups to implement projects for mutual benefits.

In general, international ad agents have very high creativity in implementing services, which is obviously superior to Vietnamese, who lack knowledge and experience.

However, the limited knowledge about local culture, labor force and language barriers of foreign agents all make it impossible to develop the ideas suitable to Vietnamese consumers.

Meanwhile, these are not the big problems for Vietnamese firms at all.

Therefore, analysts say Vietnam has every reason to believe that besides the works being undertaken by both Vietnamese and foreign firms such as TVC production, print-ads design or ad communication, Vietnam can also be dominant in some other sectors such as PR, Digital Marketing, and Local Integrated Marketing.

DNSGCT