Riyad Shahir Ahmed Husain was born in the UK and raised in Bangladesh. After finishing his schooling in Scholastica, he completed his Bachelors Degree in Business Administration (Marketing) in 2005, from Richmond University, UK. He then worked in London as part of a Graduate Management Trainee Program at Arcadia Group, the world’s second largest clothing retailer at that time. In 2007, Riyad came back to Bangladesh and started a communication agency from a stationery shop with his partners with zero investment. Within the next 5 years, they co-founded Root Marketing Services, Giant Marketing, Printex Limited and Zakat Connect, a social initiative.
As a developing country, internet penetration has greatly improved over the years and consumer behaviorism has also been changing constantly in Bangladesh. How has that helped change the face of digital marketing in Bangladesh?
In 2013, 3G was first launched in Bangladesh. The following year marked the advent of affordable android smart phones entering the Bangladeshi market through various Chinese and newly launched local brands. Incidentally, the cost of internet bandwidth also went down during this period. So with telecom operators promoting 3G internet through attractive products, internet users were growing exponentially. This led to an organic growth in the demand for brands needing to be in the digital space to engage with their audience.
Apart from the growing number of internet users, there are other reasons for brands wanting to go digital. Digital marketing makes it possible for brands to reach the exact target audience, every interaction is measurable thus leading to higher return on investment and it empowers the brand to interact with its consumers. Moreover, it’s a great medium for reaching the global audience.
As a result of all this, the sudden growth in demand for brands wanting to be in the digital space, paved the way for agencies like us.
Obviously the recent social media blackout would have a negative impact on digital marketing in the country. What’s your take on that and how did you have to deal with it?
The main problem is that social media is still considered as just a social networking platform by some. In reality it is also a channel for brands to communicate with consumers and a platform for a lot of businesses to earn money. A lot of eCommerce shops aggregate their traffic from social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram. Therefore, when something as large as this is closed down, not only did brands face difficulties in communicating with their consumers, but more importantly, businesses were affected because the traffic to their digital assets took a blow. This had a negative impact on the digital economy as a whole.
To tackle this problem, we looked for alternative channels for our brands. We worked with brands to develop and improve their own properties, such as further enhancing the consumer experience in their websites or developing their own mobile application channels, through which they can communicate with consumers. So, it was a wakeup call for all brands to not just focus on one or two mediums in the digital space, but rather to spread out across different channels.
Recently Magnito Digital won Gold and became the “Rest of South Asia – Digital Agency of the Year” at the Campaign Asia Pacific Agency of the Year Awards 2015. What’s the story behind this great achievement?
It was a very proud and humbling moment for us to win one of the most sought after awards in the advertising industry and thus represent Bangladesh on the global stage.
We started Magnito Digital in 2013, with a team of 6 people and a vision to empower the local and multinational brands in Bangladesh, the Government bodies, SMEs and even smaller retail businesses with the ability to engage with their consumers in the digital space. Initially the challenge for us as a company was to attract the top talents from the industry. To overcome this, we had to focus on building the organizational culture of the company. My partners Fayaz, Amer, Samad and Munazer were instrumental in developing the company culture. On-the-job-training and internal workshops were organized regularly to build the capacity of our team. We were lucky enough to have the likes of Macon Phillips, Chief Digital Strategist for the 2008 Barack Obama Presidential Campaign, as speakers at our workshops. Starting from the attractive office space to the team development programs, word started to spread about Magnito’s winning culture. Within a few months, we became a desired career option for marketing graduates and digital media enthusiasts.
After building a good team, we started working with various clients. Within the first year we worked with over 20 clients, which included companies like Unilever, Marico, Banglalink, City Bank Ltd, Chevron and so on. In our second year, in 2014, we had a major breakthrough, as we became the dedicated digital agency of Grameenphone. Later that year, we became the digital agency for Access to Information (a2i), a project of the Prime Minister’s Office in partnership with UNDP and USAID. In 2015, when Telenor Digital Norway launched a lifestyle Android based application called WowBox, they wanted to test it out in the Bangladeshi market, before launching it globally in other emerging markets. For this, they were looking for a content and marketing agency and we were lucky to win that account from Telenor Digital. These major accounts enabled us to increase our team and resources and by 2015 we moved from a six person team to a sixty-one people company albeit with a very young workforce, with the average employee age being under 30. All of this culminated to our two-and-half year old agency winning Gold and becoming the ‘Digital Agency of the Year’ at the Campaign Asia-Pacific Agency of the Year Awards 2015 in Mumbai in the Rest of South Asia category. We were the only Bangladeshi agency to win globally in the Digital Agency category this year.
A lot of the export oriented larger industries such as FMCG, Garments and Leather have yet to explore the realms of digital marketing. How can digital marketing help them enhance their presence in the international markets?
I strongly feel that digital marketing is the ultimate medium for brands, companies or industries to reach out to the global audience at scale. The export oriented companies within the garments, leather, ceramic or pharmaceutical industries are mostly missing out on this opportunity of reaching out to the global audience by sitting in their current comfort zones. However, it is high time they realized that to compete at an international level, it is important to build their brand and represent themselves globally. We have seen companies or industries in India, Vietnam, Malaysia, etc doing it quite effectively. A starting point for all these local companies would be to have a world class online presence, which is missing in most cases. Unless we have a strong web presence, gradually other competing countries will start getting all the leads and we will lose out in the long run. A positive way forward would be if associations such as BGMEA, FBCCI, DCCI, and so on, can help spread awareness among its members by working with the digital marketing community as well as with the IT evangelists such as BASIS and the ICT Ministry.
What initiatives have Magnito Digital taken regarding increasing the awareness of the importance of digital marketing in Bangladesh?
From Day 1, we have been actively working towards industry initiatives. One of the well known projects was Digi-Café, a digital marketing networking event that we hosted every 3 months for a year. Senior representatives of brands, advertising professionals and key industry stakeholdersparticipated in the knowledge sharing sessions, run by highly credible speakers, which included professionals from Google and founders of digital agencies from France, Malaysia and Pakistan. Digi- Café turned out to be a successful networking platform among the marketing professionals. Magnito also actively works with communities such as Google Business Groups, Dhaka and the Standing Committee on Web Solutions & eMarketing at BASIS. Through these initiatives we are, in a small way, trying to spread awareness among Bangladeshi businesses to be a part of this digital ecosystem.
