Meet SPH Media
SPH Media is a leading media group in Singapore. With a portfolio of over 40 media brands, SPH Media operates newspapers, magazines, and books in print and digital editions, as well as radio stations and outdoor media businesses.
Content Lab is SPH Media’s international award-winning content and creative unit. To date, it has provided advertising services to more than 20,000 brands. The team collaborates with advertisers to produce original works that run across digital, social, print, broadcast, and out-of-home campaigns in Singapore.
The challenge
Managing media campaigns in various formats across multiple channels is a complex and fast-moving operation, explains Tommy Lim, Creative Director at Content Lab. “Our workflow has a lot of moving parts, and it requires clear, timely communication between creative, content, sales, and ad operations teams for it to be effective”.
However, the existing process relied heavily on manual work, and as the business expanded, managing campaigns in the same way became increasingly unsustainable. The Content Lab needed a way to manage media campaigns efficiently without restricting growth and creativity.
The solution
Why monday.com?
”We assessed the strengths and weaknesses of many platforms and ultimately decided on monday.com thanks to its clean, simple, colour-coded interface that presents a clear snapshot of what everyone’s working on at any given time while allowing for optimised work management, cross-team communication, and reporting. I quickly noticed an increase in productivity with pre-made templates that could easily be adapted, equipped with in-built functions like the timeline view for project managers, automated reporting, and streamlined communication,” said Annie Yeo, Traffic Manager at Content Lab, highlighting the time-saving impact of monday.com.
For Handi Solikin, Engineering Leader at SPH Media, security and compliance were just as important. “When evaluating potential software, we look for features like industry reputation, security, integration, and customisation options. monday.com ticks all those boxes”.
Raising productivity and boosting performance
monday.com worked with SPH Media’s Content Lab and Tech teams to understand their specific needs and developed a customised solution that offers both high-level and granular views of every project, enabling stakeholders to understand whether campaigns have been sold, booked, progressed, or completed at a glance.
Thanks to the increased visibility that comes with monday.com, individual team members’ workload and performance can now be easily tracked and monitored at a high level, as explained by Lim: “With one centralised project board, I can now track workloads easily to determine if people are overloaded, track execution over time, and know precisely how we are performing from a macro perspective". With greater visibility comes the ability to make better, more informed decisions. Stakeholders can drill into a specific task – such as a single piece of digital content or a single print ad – or zoom out to track the flow of the overall campaign delivery. Campaign managers can monitor timelines, resource allocations, and budgets by client, project, team, individual designer, or the entire department.
With the new workflow in place, bookings from advertisers are automatically synchronised with the creative production processes using monday.com’s customisable API. Automated alerts are sent at every project phase, with task reminders as deadlines approach. All assets and communication are centralised and accessible to every relevant stakeholder, reducing the risk of information silos and missed deadlines.
A platform that moves as fast as the media landscape
In the world of content marketing and advertising, time is a valuable currency. “We worked with a local partner to quickly integrate the ad booking system and synchronise our workflows into the project boards. The team at monday.com was readily available for advice, allowing us to get up and running quickly and efficiently“ says Solikin.
