Moving on China
AUTHOR: Jo Cooper DATE: 06.09.07 ISSUE 1, 2007
A career with the beautiful people took Janice Chan to new frontiers.
Just what does it take to quadruple the size and profits of your business?
For Janice Chan, at the helm of advertising agency M&C Saatchi as it expanded into Greater China, it meant an exhausting around-the-clock workload. Flying from Hong Kong to Paris for a board meeting and returning 36 hours later for a pitch. Participating in a marathon four-month pitch across two countries to win the eBay business in Hong Kong.
| "In communications, no two days are the same. I find that incredibly stimulating," says AGSM MBA alumna Janice Chan. |
“M&C Saatchi was still a very young agency, but we were able to win very big accounts and blue-chip clients,” Ms Chan recalls. “From the day I became the General Manager of M&C Saatchi Hong Kong to the day when I left as Managing Director of M&C Saatchi Greater China, we quadrupled the operational size and profits.”
Agency clients included Qantas, Tourism Australia, BMW, MINI, eBay, KFC and Wyeth. In 2005, Ms Chan was named among BRW’s Top 20 Best Young Expats.
The accolades and results are the fruition of Ms Chan’s dream to run an ad agency. It was a summer internship at Saatchi & Saatchi in Los Angeles that gave her the first break and helped determine her career aspirations. “To a 19-year-old it was an industry full of beautiful people, beautiful ads, beautiful offices,” she says.
After her family moved to Australia, Ms Chan completed a two-year fulltime MBA program at the Australian Graduate School of Management in 1991. The program gave her a strategic framework to approach business issues and an entrée into the corporate world, she says. “The great thing about the AGSM was that I was recruited on campus by (food giant) Kellogg’s and I became very well trained in brand management and integrated marketing.”
In 1993, Ms Chan moved to Hong Kong to work with advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather before joining competitor, Leo Burnett. An ambitious 20-something, she became a specialist in the new mass-consumer landscape in China working with clients such as McDonald’s and Procter & Gamble.
When she joined M&C Saatchi Hong Kong in 2000, Ms Chan’s experience proved invaluable in her role on the agency’s founding team that commuted between Hong Kong and Shanghai establishing the Greater China operation.
In 2002 she was appointed Managing Director of M&C Saatchi Greater China, and the agency boomed against the trend as Hong Kong’s economy continued to experience fallout from the Asian financial crisis and the SARS bird flu outbreak.
“Our competitors were laying off people, but we refused to take part in the recession,” Ms Chan says.
She left M&C Saatchi in 2006, and today is living in Hong Kong and enjoying a sabbatical: “Success in life is about balancing work, rest, love and passions. At the moment, I’m devoting myself to my loving family and my passion of art collecting.”
While not yet planning a return to fulltime work, Ms Chan reflects fondly on the advertising industry’s move to branding and communications over the past 15 years. “In communications, no two days are the same. I find that incredibly stimulating.”