The 2022 AME Grand Jury includes Founders, CMO's, CEO's CCO's Strategy Directors, Managing Directors, and other prominent executives recognized for delivering ground-breaking results-driven campaigns for international brands,  They are some of the world’s most respected creative and strategic minds in advertising and marketing communications. and bring innovation, industry expertise, along with a 360-degree global perspective to the judging panel.

2022 AME Grand Jury member, Baggio Xiaofeng Song is Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of iNSPIRE Communications, one of a few truly integrated agencies from China. He has over 17 years’ hybrid experience in developing brand strategy, integrated communications campaign, media strategy and ad-tech solutions from Leo Burnett, BBDO/Interone, Google and Omnicom Media Group. Baggio leads an integrated team of brand strategists, media planners, content planners and data analysts, providing omni-channel strategy for many reputed international and local brands.

He has worked with brands from diversified industries including Audi, BMW, Clarins, Coca Cola, Castrol, Asahi Beer, Wang Lao Ji, Zespri, Deutsche Bank, Oreo, Disney Resort, BOSCH, Hilton, Dyson, Oppo, Unilever, Tiger Beer, Caterpillar and many others.

In the interview below, Baggio shares his perspective on his most favorite successful campaign, advice to entrants, evolving technological trends and more.

AME Awards: Why are effectiveness competitions like the AME Awards important?

Baggio Song: There are many award shows celebrating creative excellence. And in the last two decades when most creative agencies work independently from media agencies, creative people couldn’t get enough of real-time information or knowledge from actual media performance, the learning cycle was broken. But in normal working process we still turn to creative agencies asking them to build campaign strategy and ideas, how do they do that well if they’ve no idea of why and how the previous campaigns actually worked? Award shows like AME pushes people to find ways to answer the hard question. It pushes marketers, creative agency people and media agency people to work closely together to drive better and unified results. It pushes the industry to dig deep into proven success, and decode it to get insights that help us do better next time. It celebrates true meaningful work of both commercial and social communication success, in turn it helps shaping a better industry and society.

AME Awards: Speak to the evolution of brand positioning, values, and tone of voice during the past few years.

Baggio Song: People would say it’s getting more obvious that the brand centric talking and convincing has become two-way conversations. I agree with that. However, it doesn’t mean only from a campaign mechanism and tonality’s perspective. We can see that authentic stories are more welcomed. We can see all the #me too kind of movements have shaped brand content towards directions of social equality. We can see more ads disguised in the format of news or reviews. Good or bad, when social media and algorithms took control of content distribution, the socially relevant content has higher chance of getting hot, which in turn changed marketer and agency people’s way of thinking. Social values have never been so important to brand marketing like today. Since decades we have been educated by marketing text books to create ‘differentiation’, which is still very much relevant. However, today it needs to be built more on value common grounds that unifies people at scale. We not only see it in rising brands like Allbirds, Libresse and Perfect Day, but all shifts in big brands like Nike, Ikea and P&G.

AME Awards: What new technological trends have emerged and how have they helped deliver creative and effective results?

Baggio Song: Precise targeting is no longer a new trend, but in China market it has involved to a new level that you don’t see in other market yet. As we know China has a few top e-commerce platforms like Alibaba, JD and increasingly Douyin (called Tiktok in the world). Now the e-commerce giants open their data tools and developed systems allowing brands to utilize user transaction data to do precise targeting on other media platforms – say it’s a trading desk built upon world’s best quality user data and most advanced targeting algorithms. With lower funnel conversion data available in the same dashboard, we’re able to evaluate media campaign effectiveness and do optimization in almost real-time. Today we have clients whose 40% of media budget is spent on e-commerce user data precise targeting. Campaign results showed that it helped recruiting new users from regions and cities where the brand has no offline distribution presence, but e-commerce can reach. It is changing and re-inventing the way we do media strategy, planning and delivery.

AME Awards: Why did you agree to participate on this year’s AME Grand Jury and What do you hope to learn by viewing entries into this competition?

Baggio SongL It will be my third time sitting in AME Grand Jury, it has been a great pleasure and a wonderful learning experience too. I love seeing first hand cases in the recent year from different markets, look for commonalities, differences and nuances, and try to understand what works and what not. You can learn from international campaigns built on universal truth and values that words everywhere. You can also see very local campaigns built on specific culture or behavior that only exist in its region. Regardless of those differences, all outstanding cases have a common trait: they are all building marketing success on a scalable insight that has great potential to influence as much people as possible. I guess this is the real holy grail of effectiveness that we all chase after. It’s also a constant reminder to all of us: don’t just go for fun insights, do care about its impact at scale.

AME Awards: What is your favorite most successful ad and why?

Baggio Song: It’s always difficult to answer this kind of question but I will give it a try. I do love the ads that make a stand together with people against something they fight. It takes a lot of vision and courage to push the button to launch those campaigns because it could piss off people, trigger backfire and cost careers. But when it succeeded, it changes people’s world view, at least too some extend. To name a few in recent years,

I love ‘Viva La Vulva’ from Libresse. It challenges not just the industry and traditional values, but our senses of being women and men. Its boldness stirs up something deeper in you, and results complex feelings. It will stick to my mind for a long time, maybe in ten years I will be proud to see my teenage girl chooses Libresse.

I love the Nike 30 years ‘Believe in Something’ ad. It reminded us there are something bigger in our lives. It celebrates noble human values and voiced out for the underprivileged. It united brand values with social values, sharpened Nike’s image as a cultural icon instead of just a commercial brand.

AME Awards: What advice would offer to potential entrants on earning an AME Award?

Baggio Song: Think of a different perspective. Better to not tell the story from a brand or marketer’s standpoint. Instead, try to show the campaign success from a human and/or societal perspective. People don’t care about brands, they care about what brands do to them and their society around. So do the judges.

Put your data in context. Data itself has no value of indication, because our brains can only understand things through framing and comparison. If you would like to prove impact, show competitor data, norm data, big picture data, historical data…show benchmarks that help making your data outstanding.

Don’t forget why. Explain why this campaign and its results helped the business or cause if it’s a non-profit. Don’t get too obsessed with the campaign itself, but do think about and let us know what commercial, human or societal values it created.