How adidas Pacific became APAC's most profitable digital market

When I took over the adidas Pacific performance team at EssenceMediacom, the goal was blunt: make this the most profitable market in APAC from digital campaigns. We got there — through new products, new strategies and new structures, not a single silver bullet.

The 120 per cent ROAS story

The headline number is Shopping ROAS up 120 per cent year on year. Three things drove it.

• Segmentation. Structuring product and audience splits so budget flowed to where the margin actually was, instead of being averaged across the catalogue.
• Automated scripts. Codifying the repetitive checks and optimisations that humans do inconsistently, so they ran constantly and never had a bad week.
• Data quality. The unglamorous layer. Better inputs made every downstream bidding decision smarter, and most accounts underinvest here because the work is invisible.

Being first

As Global Test-and-Learn lead for AUNZ, we became the first market in the world to roll out Google Demand Gen and Enhanced Conversion Tracking. Going first is uncomfortable — there is no playbook to inherit — but it means you write the playbook everyone else inherits, and the learning compounds from day one.

Trust compounds too

Across the same period, the Vantage score on my managed accounts rose from 5 to 8, with client feedback citing quality, attention to detail, value and caring for the business. I managed four staff across four clients against client-approved quarterly KPI benchmarks. The profitability followed that discipline, not the other way around. Profitable markets are not bought with bigger budgets — they are built with structure, automation and data you can trust.