Opinion

24 Hours With… Blis Hong Kong MD Richard Andrew

Richard Andrew24 Hours With… spotlights the working day of some of the most interesting people in Mumbrella Asia’s world. Today, we hear about a day in the life of Richard Andrew, MD of location-based ad tech company Blis in Hong Kong.

7:00am. The sound of my alarm goes off and I roll out of bed. The addition of a brand new screaming baby in my life has changed my schedule quite a bit. Thankfully, my wife kindly allows me to get a good night’s sleep.

7:15am. My morning routine is a blur of changing Charles’ nappy, taking my dog Lulu for a walk while listening to industry podcasts. And sometimes if I can get away with it, I make eggs and toast for myself before I leave for work.

8:00am. I prepare for my 45-minute commute to work – a sequence of walk, minibus and MTR. The public transport in Hong Kong is very efficient and has Wi-Fi, so I can be productive on the go. I catch up on the news, my emails and check my meeting schedule for the day, while listening to the new Avalanches album.

8:50am. I head into the office.

9:15am. Coming from an operations background, I’m very much hands-on with my team. In the morning, I try to catch up with my operations, account management and sales teams to make sure all campaigns are up and running. I am checking with them to find what the successes are, and whether there are sticking points that need to be addressed.

9:45am. Mornings are also the best time to work on long-term projects, such as integration with publishers or data partners, as the majority of requests come in after lunch.

10:30am. I have a meeting with the Head of Digital at Mediacom. I try to have a face-to-face meeting with an agency head once a week.

11:30am. I do a quick review of the training materials for an upcoming workshop. Since there are no regulatory bodies for digital in Hong Kong, we adopt a ground-up approach when it comes to education. Beyond this, we hold our own knowledge workshops with agency partners at least once a month, where we teach the basics of location data.

12:00pm. In Hong Kong, lunch is a sacred hour for bonding! Our office composition is very much ‘East meets West’. And with so many different restaurants to choose from, all our team members come into their own. As a Brit abroad, I often rely on a sandwich, while my teammates bring in anything from salad to spicy noodles. Definitely an interesting combination of smells and heated debates. Once or twice a week, we go out for a team lunch with a client.

1:00pm. After lunch, I have one-to-one sessions with my team and conference calls with Australia, the UK and Singapore lined up. We go through a list of localization needs. Hong Kong has quite unique challenges: It’s a vertical city, where GPS coordinates alone are not enough to accurately pinpoint an ad viewer’s location – as they could be on the ground floor of a cafe in a mall, or a top floor office.

3:30pm. I have a meeting with a data partner about integrating their location data into Blis. We use their Wi-Fi data to confirm an ad viewer’s location, but the IP addresses on most public Wi-Fi providers are dynamic. We are implementing our SMART Scale solution with them to make sure our location data remains accurate over time.

5:00pm. I’m with my business development team brainstorming a proposal template for CMOs. A number of multinationals are now setting aside budgets for experimenting on new ways to innovate their digital marketing strategies. They have come to us, asking us for research, insights and information about live campaigns or for proposals. I see this happening more and more that advertisers see the value of location data as a means of really understanding ‘who the consumer is’.

6:00pm. I aim to leave the office in time. Otherwise in a traditional market like Hong Kong, if I as the Managing Director stay in late, my team will stay late with me.

7:00pm. I get home and start my exercise routine to work off excess energy. I alternate between High-intensity interval training (HIIT), short 20-minute bursts of activity.

7:30pm. I take my dog out for a jog. The dog always seems to knacker me more than my HIIT.

8:00pm. I spend some time with my son. He’s learning to coo and follow my voice.

8:30pm. Dinner during the week is healthy and dominated by quinoa or brown rice, a generous amount of veggies and fish or chicken. My wife prepared ceviche today. My official cheat day is Friday, where I indulge in fish and chips.

9:30pm. I catch Mr. Robot on Netflix for some downtime. It’s interesting because as a self-confessed techie, I find hacking fascinating. So, this series lets me live as a hacker vicariously.

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