Tango Digital expands brand safety offerings to SEA markets

Hong Kong-based PR tech consultancy firm Tango Digital is mulling expanding into the Southeast Asia markets with a particular focus on Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, offering its brand safety solutions to overseas enterprises.

This comes as Tango Digital believed SEA markets traditionally have not been as adequately covered and serviced by tools globally, due to the language proficiency of international tools not catering to Asian local languages and nuances of Asia business practices.

In a conversation with MARKETING-INTERACTIVE, a spokesperson from Tango said its system covers 30+ languages, but the language model has been specifically trained on slangs and internet buzzwords common in the SEA region to better serve clients in the region. "Our team also has deep roots in SEA, with teammates from different countries in the region, which helps our local understanding and market insights even more."

Leveraging its latest artificial intelligence (AI) integrations, Tango Digital aims to further deepen its capabilities in identifying brand threats in local channels, in local languages, while also providing automated solutions to neutralise those threats.Its Singapore office will launch in November 2023, while it is targeting other Asia offices such as Japan and Korea as well as North American branches in 2024.

Upon the expansion, Tango Digital hopes to offer its brand safety solutions, powered by the integration of artificial intelligence and PR technology within the Social Listening system - EARFUL, to overseas brands in the SEA markets, by aggregating data from various sources, including global media, websites, news blogs, social media, local forums, amongst others.

These data sources are then integrated with automated public relations solutions such as content generation, content blasting, daily news summaries, fraud detection. This combo aims to offer clients comprehensive analyses and services while improving their PR and marketing resource allocation.

The EARFUL system employs AI to systematically track and analyse online sentiments. The system also boasts the capability to analyse more than 30 languages, including Cantonese, Japanese, Korean and Malay, among others, thereby accommodating diverse market demands.

In terms of its competitors, the spokesperson said it has competitors in the social listening space such as Meltwater, but it is also focusing on developing technology for PR crisis and brand safety automation - "PRtech" , where its automations go beyond "just monitoring", it hopes to continue to innovate to create more unique "PRtech" that specifically deals with digital reputation problems instead of just "listening".

When it comes to future strategies, the spokesperson said Tango is fielding a lot of clients and interest from international brands to have "eyes and ears" locally while having an international understanding that can present local data and cultural insights to their global management team or co-ordinate regional teams on a high level, while being able to work with local teams in Asia, "our team fits that profile with myself and teammates coming from previous regional and global roles in PR, branding and tech."

On the other hand, there will be local entities that have always wanted to gather international intelligence, but would want to have local business insights injected to make sense of those data, "that's why our analyst team is very valuable to our clients, and our clients prefer us over other self serve platforms or agencies because we combine both tech and also business analytics to come up with reports and data they can realistically use, and not to put all the burden on PR team by subscribing to a lot of tools but having the team do tons of extra work to analyse and not fully utilise each platform."

Brian Tang, Tango Digital's founder and CEO, said: "Tango Digital aspires to be the market's premier provider of brand safety solutions. Through EARFUL, our automated social listening technology, we intend to help global brands foresee and respond to PR crises while protecting their brand image. Expanding our business to Southeast Asian markets, starting with Singapore, will enable us to reach more large-scale corporate brands and sustain a significant impact within the realm of brand safety."

Founded in 2020, Tango Digital has been providing a wide range of product solutions to several Asian firms, brands, and government agencies, including Brand Hong Kong, ICBC (Asia), Cathay Pacific and Greater Bay Area Youth Community Fund, amongst others. Tango Digital has also completed its Series A funding round, led by Axis Capital Partners and several family offices, raising over US$1m, according to the release.

Don't miss: HK hands Brand HK digital media promotion remit to two local agencies

Back in July, the Hong Kong government spent close to HK$17m to recruit digital agencies Tango Digital and Founder New Media to help promote “Brand Hong Kong” in Mainland China and internationally.

According to the government gazette published on 28 July, the Informations Services Department (ISD) has approved two contracts of HK$8.56m and HK$8.28m respectively, to hire Tango and Founder New Media.

Tango is required to undertake a digital media promotion including planning, booking and advertisement coordination to promote “Brand Hong Kong” in the international markets for a period of 12 months, commencing on 1 July 2023 and expiring on 30 June 2024.

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