#AOTYAwards 2020 highlight: Hashtag Interactive

Bagging the bronze award for content marketing agency of the year is Hashtag Interactive. 2019 was a fantastic year for Hashtag Interactive and it won a significant amount of new business and grew its operations in order to support a broader range of clients. The agency has a strong ethos on focusing on quality work and reinforcing its company culture and it is all done in line with its big #AimForAwesome push.

Product

Some of its most notable work was for Maybank through its “Inspire Good” social initiative. The campaign was crafted to allow fans to share in Maybank's mission of Humanising Financial Services by doing good for their communities. People who did good deeds were rewarded with an #InspireGoodSG card that they could use to claim a small monetary reward for themselves or to be donated to a charity partner. Maybank, in turn, shared these inspiring stories on the #InspireGoodSG website to celebrate their stories and inspire others to help out as well.

Another work that stood out was for Wildlife Reserves Singapore’s pilot initiative for Singapore Zoo. This was done to keep children engaged even out of the Zoo. Hashtag Interactive developed the overall branding look-and-feel for its “My Animal Buddy” initiative and mapped out all the digital touchpoints between the buddies and the kids. It helped translate the real-life bunny buddies into illustrations that would be appealing to the target audience.

People

On the people front, the agency growth efforts included adding new talent to join its quirky family and levelling-up on its operations to better support its creative efforts. As an agency, Hashtag Interactive takes much pride in its company culture.

As much as the company grew this year, it also made sure to invest in tools and training to help keep pace with managing a larger team. It rolled out BambooHR, an HRIS that has helped the agency better support the needs of our people. It sent people to more external training and hosted more in-house development sessions and knowledge sharing activities.

In 2019, the agency also conducted its very first #HashCon, where the entire crew flew to Bali, Indonesia for a weekend of team-building and defining what it means to #AimForAwesome. It also started to spread the joy of digital marketing by accepting more applicants into its internship programme.

Perspective

The agency began 2019 with a vision — to make sure everything it produced was the best that could be and a celebration of its creative drive. To this end, it set out to #AimForAwesome in everything the team did and avoided falling into the trap of complacency and routine.

Hashtag Interactive, after all, was created to be the dream job of every employee. To get the Hashtag way of marketing out there, the management had to make sure that everyone in the team realised that direction.

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