Lindsay Pattison was appointed chief executive officer of Maxus Global last October. She joined the ad agency in October 2009, taking over the newly created post of UK CEO. Two years later, she became chief strategy officer.

Maxus is part of WPP Plc, the global giant that handles advertising, public relations and market research, and part of GroupM, a media investment management group.

Pattison started her career in the media industry at Young & Rubicam. Later, she worked at Omnicom Group’s media agency PHD for five years.

She talked with Shanghai Daily about her ideas for driving growth and the latest trends in social media and client focus.

Q: What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in recent years in the advertising industry?

A: We have seen a large growth in pragmatic buying. There’s a growing trend to target audiences and specific profiles of online users instead of just buying ad space from publishers or online portals.

We are continuously upgrading the algorithms to better utilize the power of data. In this aspect, Germany, the UK and the US are leading the way, and China needs to catch up a little bit.

But China is already ahead of the West in terms of the size of digital advertising.

Currently, about 40 percent of expenditure is digital in China as opposed to about 30 percent on average worldwide.

In our Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou offices, digital makes up about half of our overall billings.

Here, the digital and social media scene is more developed, and the e-commerce market is a lot broader than in the West. Chinese Internet giants cover much wider subjects and disciplines than most Western companies.

Q: What’s your strategy for driving growth?

A: Maxus has been the fastest-growing ad agency in the world in the past six years. We now contribute about 10 percent of the billings and profit for GroupM globally.

However, it’s harder to grow as quickly as our size expands. We have reached a rather mature period, if a year ago you might describe us as just adolescent. We now need to accelerate the pace of growth.

We have three directions of change.

The first is to become bolder and braver. That’s because we’re the smallest and youngest of the four GroupM branches. I want Maxus to remain clear and straightforward about our strategy. I often say that we’d rather come in last place on the pitch than being in the middle because being second means nothing to me. We want to be sharp and clear about the strategy direction and the services we’re offering.

The second is management structure. We are quite lean, with only 10 people on our global executive committee. I’d like to streamline the structure and to strengthen leadership in key regions such as the Asia-Pacific, Europe and America to make sure we stay close enough to the local market and remain competitive.

The third is maintaining agility in technology. We need to work closely with our digital teams to test a lot of different cross-tracking technologies and keep learning. I’m also hoping to make a senior global hire in the near future to help us drive technology advances. We’ll also be running a training program for senior executives to help them lead the technology changes.

Q: What opportunities do you see as Chinese brands move into the global market?

A: China is currently among Maxus’ top five markets globally, and our goal is take it to the top three.

We are very locally driven. At Maxus China, about 85 percent of our billings are local businesses. Chinese brands are seeking strong partnerships with creative agencies to sell their brands, not just products, overseas.

We’re introducing global clients to expand in China with our so-called “West In.” Our “East Out” strategy has us taking local clients globally.

For example, we started to represent Huawei’s consumer electronics division about 15 months ago to handle all digital ad expenditure for Huawei in China. Now we have become the company’s ad agency in Russia and Turkey.

We first represented China UnionPay International in the domestic market, and later extended our service to Hong Kong, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Singapore. During this process, we enhanced our digital capability. Many domestic firms are becoming aware of the importance of building up the brand equity instead of just selling a handset.

Q:What’s the advantage of staying within a large media network like GroupM?

A: Having a parent like GroupM and the overall scale of the network is very important because it offers us trading scale and rich data insights through our collaboration with WPP’s Kantar division. We can also afford to buy other service providers to enhance our technology capabilities. The way we use data and technology — combined with scale — is how we are going to win in the future.

We have just launched a social creative content division in Shanghai called “Play.” It combines digital creative work, content marketing strategies and social media management under one unified entity.

By having this department and content producers in-house, we can interpret data and create content that addresses trends in real-time.

Shanghai-based social media consultancy CIC, also a unit of WPP, has been helping us gather and organize social media content and trends. We’ve also introduced technology from Singapore-based social media agency Volcanic.

In 2013, WPP completed the acquisition of Volcanic to help analyze the information and deliver simple and neat consumer insight.

Q: What shift have you seen in clients regarding new measures to evaluate effectiveness?

A: Nowadays, the key measures for a successful campaign include not only media coverage and brand awareness, but sales and how to get consumers directly link to commerce websites.

Previously, we’ve seen clients more concerned about key measurements in media performance, for example, numbers of clicks or visitors. Clients are now shifting toward more emphasis on attitudinal changes and consumer preferences. Twelve months ago, they started to seek metrics for behavioral changes — how consumers respond to campaign information and what link that has to their placing orders. They are placing more emphasis on how much sales are driven by mobiles or social campaigns.

We’ve heard this kind of demand from clients here, including Dongfeng Automobile, Pfizer and Haier.

So we need to help clients decide which type of media investment can bring more sales and how to better determine the relationship between media spending and sales performance.

This trend also shows that more investment is required to enhance technology capability. We’ve seen similar trends in some more developed markets, like the UK, the US and Germany. Because of China’s massive e-commerce scale, there will be more behavioral indicators to pinpoint the effectiveness of ad campaigns.