Profile: Geoff Tan, senior VP, head of strategic marketing at SPH

If anyone ever needed some insight on what Geoff Tan is like as a person, they would only have to take a look at his office.
The space is more of a gallery and trophy room, filled with paintings and mementoes of Tan’s career and personal life.

Former PHD Singapore managing director Pat Lim jokingly calls the SPH marketer “a strange egg in a most affectionate way”, because, besides paintings, the pony-tailed Tan engages in a great number of other creative pursuits.

On top of jamming with his friends, the 53-year-old senior vice-president, and head of strategic marketing and customer service, has cut two music albums under the guise of local comedy act, ‘The Wah Lau Gang’. He also opted to ride a Harley Davidson motorcycle for five years because he was “bored” with the routine humdrum of life. He even has his own brand of chocolate chip cookies - aptly named ‘Looks Yucky, Tastes Yummy’ - to suit his playful streak.

For Singapore’s advertising and media industry, though, Tan’s diverse range of talents and colourful nature go well beyond fun and laughter. “He has given SPH a personality,” says Lim, “moving it from a staid, corporate, media giant to something approachable and hardworking, with room for a little bit of fun and tongue-in-cheek at any time.”

Tan began his career in advertising before joining SPH in 1986 as a sales manager for The Straits Times - the city-state’s main broadsheet. Since then, he has operated across seven portfolios within SPH’s marketing division to gain insights and experience in advertising and promotions, as well as sales, marketing and much more besides.

Such an understanding for SPH’s assets is now aiding Tan’s role as head of the strategic marketing department (SMD) and customer service. Well over a year into the role, Tan admits it has been an “exciting run”, cross-selling and promoting the company’s revamped integrated media offerings - as opposed to just relying on its print business.

Tan explains how SMD has been essential for SPH and how the company has had to evolve to match a dynamic market like Singapore. “Our role is to come in and understand the market. Then we’re able to better fashion our communications proposition,” he says.

“Before SMD, products were viewed in a one dimensional way - radio was radio and outdoor was outdoor,” he continues. “SMD has encompassed the entire slew of media offerings into a new thought philosophy - the ‘SPH is on’ ideology, which allows us to park all our products under one chart. There’s no point telling advertisers and agencies we have more than one hundred different products clustered under different categories.”

Tan stresses that his company is no longer selling inventory, but is aiming for more partnerships and collaborations with advertisers and agencies alike. “It’s different from the past, when advertisers and agencies would think of the ideas themselves and then come back to us for ad and media bookings. Now, we’re involved much earlier; we’ve become genuine partners.”

SPH’s through-the-line capabilities are also now vital to meeting the growing needs of advertisers, who, according to Tan, are becoming increasingly sophisticated.

“Advertisers are learning the trade very quickly because a lot of folks from the media business or agency side have gone over,” he says. “They’re becoming very well-versed in the terminologies, the selection process, the analysis of media and they’re actually pushing the envelope for agencies to give them the best propositions.”

Given his penchant for the creative, Tan and his team are eager to develop more innovative campaigns for these propositions. “Integration and new business models are what we’ve been working on. Some of them are still print-led initiatives, but we’re looking for stuff that cuts right across the board. We’re looking at technology and new ways of bringing our products together in hybrid formats to lend a new angle to advertising and communications. Whether it’s micro-sites, game creation or SMS technology, location-based blasting, social media marketing, an e-voucher push to even ZapCode technology - whatever it takes, we will put it together.”

According to Lim, SMD and Tan’s approach have gone down well, as there is “acceptance by the industry” of SPH now as a media owner who is “a partner in the true sense of the word and not one who takes an upper hand only because they can”.

Mindshare Singapore’s deputy leader Bharad Ramesh agrees. “We’ve been pretty impressed by the speed with which SPH has been moving to re-model itself around its core print business,” he says. “One would imagine that print media monopolies are the least dynamic, but SPH has surprised us in this respect.”

Tan’s contribution to this turnaround has been crucial, Ramesh adds. “We could have one meeting with Tan and he can pretty much sort things out internally, versus other media owners whose idea of integrated marketing is to bring ten people from different divisions into a room. He is the mahout who makes the SPH elephant dance - and that’s credit to his experience, personality and commitment to the industry.”

For Tan, the major objective of the coming year is to ensure that there is greater take-up of SMD’s solutions, given that advertiser confidence and marketing budgets should be on the up again after 2009. Ever the optimist, he is confident of success. “We’ve been seeding things strategically and out of the proposals that we have done that have been activated so far, the advertisers have come back happy.”

Geoff Tan's CV:

2009 Senior vice-president, head, strategic marketing customers servicing division, SPH
2008 General manager, SPH NewMedia - Zapcode division, SPH
2006 Vice-president, property & banking, SPH
2005 Vice-president, property & IT, SPH
2002 Advertisement sales director, property & banking, SPH
1999 Advertisement sales director, retail, fashion & beauty, FMCG, SPH


This article was originally published in the 28 January 2010 issue of Media.