David West

For the past 25 years, I’ve worked around the world creating and delivering promotional campaigns for global brands such as Guinness, Cadbury, Oreo, Nutella, Kenwood, Nature Valley, Tefal, Kellogg’s, LG, Gillette, Dettol, Huggies, Qantas, American Express and many more. In big agencies, small agencies, client-side marketing, food manufacturing, orthodontics and even as a Nike sponsored athlete. I’ve covered a lot of ground deliberately. Every experience has sharpened the thinking.

In 2013 I came to Singapore after working as Promotional Marketing Director client-side for an Australian insurance company. What I found was a market that was highly promotionally active, brands spending significantly on consumer promotions – but suffering from a persistent me-too problem. The same mechanics recycled. The same ideas repackaged. A market ready for fresh thinking and more rigorous promotional strategy. That’s why I founded Bamboo Marketing Singapore and what has now become M16 Agency. To bring together promotional expertise developed across global markets with genuine on-the-ground knowledge of Singapore and Malaysia’s retail environment, consumer behaviour, and trade landscape. Thirteen years later, that founding intention hasn’t changed.

Most agencies approach a promotional brief with a handful of familiar mechanics and a preference for whatever worked last time. M16 works differently. Sixteen proven promotional mechanics, each one understood deeply, each one deployed for a specific reason. Not a menu to choose from arbitrarily, but a structured framework built from two and a half decades of knowing what moves product and what doesn’t. The briefs I work on come in by email or WhatsApp. They always have. Geography has never been the point – market knowledge is. And after 13 years working with multinational FMCG brands in Singapore and Malaysia, that knowledge runs deep.