dentsu SG's chief experience officer Stan Lim takes up creative chief role

Agency dentsu Singapore has expanded the remit of its current chief experience officer, creative group, Stan Lim, to take on the role of chief creative officer as well. Lim will lead the agency’s creative and experience practices, and focus on partnering with clients to help them tackle their biggest challenges and opportunities.

Reporting to Phil Adrien, managing director, creative group, dentsu international, Lim will helm a 30-strong team of creative and experience experts. Lim will also be working closely with dentsu’s local, regional and global clients.

In his new expanded role, Lim will also be taking over the duties of Joao Flores, chief creative officer, creative group at dentsu international. Flores leaves his position after three years with the agency to explore new creative opportunities. Adrien said Flores has been a critical member of the leadership team in the agency’s creative group and has played a significant role in building its vision and strategy for the last three years, including helping to launch dentsu X in Singapore in 2017. 

“I have a profound and deep respect for Flores; his passion for the work and our industry, his collaborative spirit, as well as his relentless positivity and optimism. We would like to thank him for his contributions over the past three years and wish him every success as he pursues new opportunities to develop and deliver on his unique brand of creativity,” Adrien added.

Lim’s appointment comes as the agency establishes a singular leadership for both its experience and creative teams.

According to the agency, the evolution of dentsu’s creative line of business "will mainly benefit the clients it works with as the teams deliver more seamless and integrated solutions to help clients build stronger consumer relationships, through relevant customer experiences in a deeply competitive and cluttered marketplace".

Following the leadership change, Lim told MARKETING-INTERACTIVE that the creative and experience teams will benefit from the synergies of working together even more seamlessly. “Our teams are going to gain a much broader understanding and working experience of how the different parts of branding, initiatives, communications and experience design all form part of a larger whole. This will give them the power to use these different levers to create meaningful impact to our clients’ businesses and to people’s daily experiences,” he added.

Additionally, Adrien said this change is part of the agency’s efforts to create a simplified organisation that is easier to navigate, and structured to deliver integrated, creative solutions that align with how the team sees the marketplace evolving.

Adrien also said he is confident Lim will continue to be a strong partner to the agency’s clients given his skills in technology to deliver unique creation solutions and experiences. With over 16 years of experience, Lim has worked with clients such as Intel, Samsung, Coke, Chevrolet, Diageo and FWD. Since launching its creative group, Lim has also been the chief architect of dentsu’s go-to-market strategy, helping to simplify offerings with a focus on ease and expertise. In 2019, he worked with Jones Lang LaSalle to create a data enabled wearable platform to help their sponsored competitive climbers train with precision and achieve their ambitions. He is also credited with expanding dentsu’s experience design offering by successfully consulting on and redesigning physical retail spaces that are seamless integrated with digital technology. 

Lim's vision for dentsu Singapore creative

With the reorganisation, Lim said dentsu Singapore hopes to push its offerings by achieving multi-dimensional creative, scalable collaboration with a joint creation methodology, and a culture of holistic learning which includes the cross-pollination of knowledge, skills and hands-on experience. According to Lim, bringing creative and experience together makes sense as people do not perceive a brand’s ads, content, events, apps or stores as separate encounters. They expect consistency in the way a brand portrays itself to the world, the way it interacts with the individual at any given moment.

Lim also said that bringing the teams together under singular leadership will then make teaming easier and "this will allow the agency to create the most powerful brand ideas and deliver it through experience design on every channel". In his new role, Lim intends to foster a culture of:

• Experts leading experts (an Apple approach) – Having a creative force with strong, experienced practitioners guiding passionate emerging talents to ensure powerful ideas get strong execution.
  
  
• Creative SWAT teams – To align the teams to the rapid cadence of clients’ businesses, the teams will adopt flat hierarchies and lean processes to make sure small groups of top-notch creative talent can band together easily. This makes it possible to design and deliver solutions collaboratively with these fast-moving clients without getting mired in internal regroups and delays.
  
  
• Technology-enabled – Neutral imaging filters, algo-based creative production tools, rapid prototyping on the cloud - These are some technological advances that make today’s creatives almost superhuman compared to just a mere five years ago. Just like how the agency recommends our clients to fully embrace technology to transform their offerings, it will do so with its people and product.
  
  

The transformation process of dentsu’s creative line of business has been an ongoing on that started back in 2019 when dentsu brought its experience design, integration and creative brands under one service line. According to Lim, this comes as the number of channels that modern day brands have to be present in has exploded in recent years. There is thus a need for agency partners to manage and navigate each individual interaction across various channels with their customers. “What our clients need is not more complexity. Therefore, our offering to our clients is simplicity by design,” he said, adding that it is an imperative to have a brand say, do, feel, and act in a way that is consistent and so this is a natural fit for them to work.

With so many pieces of content online, how do you grab the attention of your online audience and get them fully engaged in your brand message and experience. To learn the tips and tricks, join our Viral Content Creation: Convert Readers into Customers masterclass.

Related Articles:
Dentsu SG unveils commerce solution to take ideas from 'PowerPoint to profits'
Dermatology firm Galderma hands global media duties to dentsu X