People with right skills in short supply as industry moves towards new media
SOARING demand for online advertising in Singapore is creating a war among ad agencies and clients competing for the bright sparks who create or sell interactive ads.

The talent squeeze has sent salaries soaring for people with traditional and new media skills over the past 12 months.
Aquent, a global firm specialising in staffing for the marketing, communications and creative industries, said the median salaries for interactive jobs in the ad industry are going up.

In the last nine months, the pay for interactive creative directors has jumped by about 25 per cent to an average of $180,000 a year in Singapore.

Their job scope is extensive and involves more than just overlooking the design element of branding and advertising for a client.
They must also understand how to craft banner ads, use applications like Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash, and have strong creative concept development and design ability.

Interactive creative directors are not the only ones in the money.

The pay cheques of executive producers of digital media have leapt by over 60 per cent in the last nine months, to about $120,000 a year.
And the pay of interactive copywriters has inched up by about 10 per cent to $66,000 in the same period.

'We have seen an upward pressure on salaries in the interactive sector over the last year and are predicting this upward trend will continue into 2007,' said Mr James Koh, director of Aquent in Singapore.

The surge in activity away from traditional marketing communications towards new media - Internet, e-mail, SMS, multimedia, mobile - has caught the industry flat-footed, say industry watchers. Many firms which invested in the digital space scaled back after the dot.com boom in the late 1990s.

'During the dot bomb, many people left the industry never to return,' said OgilvyOne Worldwide's vice-president for the Asia-Pacific, Mr Ken Mandel.

'Unfortunately, as the industry came back, the people did not, and worse, it took out an entire bloc of people who if they had stayed would be very knowledgeable now.'

OgilvyOne is the interactive and direct marketing arm of Ogilvy & Mather.

Agencies are not the only ones needing digital staff, he said, as clients themselves are heavily recruiting skilled people for their marketing and internal digital projects.

'During my nine years of managing digital staff, I lost most of my best people to clients, not other agencies,' said Mr Mandel.

'The writing is on the wall. Traditional media gets further digitised every single day. There will never be enough digital-savvy people to keep up with demand. At least not within this decade.'

And with the likes of Yahoo and Google both seeing a healthy uptake in online advertising over the last year in Singapore, demand for interactive creative talent is not letting up.

'Yahoo has seen a massive uptake in online rich display advertising and search marketing over the last 18 months in Singapore and Malaysia,' Yahoo's head of marketing for South-east Asia, Mr Dennis Susay, told The Straits Times.

'With major advertisers such as Singapore Airlines, HSBC, Nike, Samsung, Dell and Nokia driving online advertising and search marketing, the demand for online creative talent and online network performance marketing must surely be top considerations for ad agencies.