Out and about

This is my first blog as editor of Marketing magazine Hong Kong. I'm only three weeks into role, but you may have noticed a couple of slight changes. We've now taken Marketing Daily from three to five times a week, so any tips, news, campaigns, comments, feedback etc etc are more than welcome.

This week has seen quite a few big events, none bigger than MasterCard's luxury week. The publishers of travel magazine Escape also threw a fairly big shindig at Q Bar in Lan Kwai Fong on Wednesday to celebrate its 500th day in publishing. Spotting Media, publishers of Escape and Beats Magazine shelled out some cool prizes including a trip to Vancouver, which Joanne Wong from Ogilvy PR won!
Last night (Thursday 6 Sept) saw the official launch of media monitoring group Cision at the International Finance Centre. Not too bad a launch, good turn out, lots of reps from the PR industry turned up to see who they'll now be competing against. By that I mean a growing part of any PR business these days is media monitoring. Cision, one of the bigger media monitoring groups, is now establishing an Asian presence, so competition in this space will only heat up as its operations expand. Worth noting though that Cision's strategy in many markets around the work is based on developing partnerships and hiring third party suppliers. All of Cision's big wigs are in town including its director Anders Bjurstam (a great bloke by the way) and CEO Niklas Flyborg, who may very well be scouring the market for a partner.

Managed to meet Ibrahim El-Mouelhy at Cision launch. Ibrahim is marketing director of technology group Out Blaze, which if you've not checked out already, publishes a great blog. If you've got a few minutes and care about censorship issues, check out the Hong Kong Essay: Mammillaphobia, or Fear of Nipples. Definitely worth a read. That's it for me for now.