Digital marketing company BlueFreeway last week opened its professional social networking platform to marketers, publishers and advertisers in Thailand.
Called "Blu", this is a collaboration tool that brings together the expertise of some 25 partners or "portfolio companies".
BlueFreeway's managing director for Thailand, Michael Poonpipat, explained that Web development was a rapidly moving field where each company typically had a specialty, such as search engine optimization, data mining, analytics or a competency in enterprise solutions.
However, a company wanting to take advantage of the benefits of an online marketing or online advertising campaign needed a diverse spread of competencies, he said, adding that this was where BlueFreeway could help them.
Following a Business 2.0 model, its multi-patented common delivery platform provides access to specialist services.
Michael said the platform was a professional social networking site and explained that while the capabilities and technologies available there came from 25 portfolio companies, each of these developers retained their intellectual property rights, names, staff and offices.
Access to Blu is free, and there are no advertisements, he said. "We wanted to make a dashboard for digital marketers, offering tools, a calendar and knowledge."
The site, at blu.bluefreeway.com, has sections or "studios" that look at strategy, design, building a site, providing a campaign management platform, along with ways at refining a campaign through digital relationship marketing and profiling consumers based on analytics, he said.
BlueFreeway's Thailand office opened in September last year, headed by Michael and a specialist strategic planner. Since then the company has made three acquisitions--Reflexible, a digital creative house; Media Synergies, for back-end programming expertise; and PlanetuTech, a digital advertising agency, and now has 25 employees.
The Bangkok office will oversee BlueFreeway's Asian operations, and just last month the group managing director for BlueFreeway Southeast Asia, Bill Emden, said the office here had targeted reaching a "25 percent of the market share for digital advertising in 2008" in Thailand.
Noting that digital media currently only represented about one percent of advertising spending in Thailand, Emden said "a growth rate projected to be 40 percent annually for the foreseeable future gave BlueFreeway management the confidence to invest".
He added that a 25 percent market share "looks high--being that it is our first year in this market--however, I feel that our overseas digital campaign tools, coupled with our Thai employment expertise from traditional agencies, and with my knowledge of the digital landscape in Thailand, are our core capacities."
Michael said in an interview last week that the average person in Thailand saw over 2,000 ads a day, so the challenge lay in how to make the brand stand out and to open up communications, while noting that the company could also facilitate cross-medium campaigns.
BlueFreeway saw digital advertising eventually integrating into every channel, and the company was committed to building the infrastructure to enable this to happen here, said Michael, who was formerly with MSN Thailand.
He added that the company was now building a data center in Bangkok, and was also talking to state-owned telecommunications company TOT about bandwidth issues.
BlueFreeway was also talking to banks and financial institutions to try to resolve the issues surrounding online payments, he added, explaining that it was very difficult to open an account with companies such as PayPal to enable online payments.
Michael said that BlueFreeway would help Thailand to reach the level of New York, Tokyo or London, adding it would "have solutions to crack the nut of e-commerce in Southeast Asia" this year.
The company, which is headquartered in Australia, now has offices in Chile, China, France, India, Italy, Japan, Spain, Singapore, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and the United States.
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