Women to Watch 2022: Marilyn Yeong, Assembly

Marilyn Yeong

Regional client vice president
Assembly
Singapore

Anyone in a business development role will lament the challenges of the last two years during a time where clients were understandably cutting back on spending. In Marilyn Yeong’s case, she flipped the script by contributing to strong numbers for Assembly. The Singapore office, for instance, achieved over 67% growth in revenue, 59% growth in business contracts, and 74% growth in new clients in 2021, adding popular brands such as The Trade Desk and Square Enix to its portfolio. 

Yeong also managed to assert her influence in Malaysia, where the company landed its first client last year despite a limited local presence. With Yeong’s guidance, her team leveraged their experience in market research, media planning and strategic partnerships to understand Malaysian consumers and develop a full-funnel campaign strategy that delivered over 140% of its target performance.

Because of Yeong’s big-picture, client-centric thinking, her team maintained over 70% client retention during a year when brands were scaling back media investments. The team also facilitated the growth of several key existing accounts, such as Adobe, which expanded its contract to a multi-market omnichannel strategic partnership encompassing media, data and analytics projects. And to support this tremendous growth in Singapore, the team more than tripled in size, making it Assembly’s fastest-growing market in 2021.

Internally, Yeong sits on the committee of a regional L&D initiative, a pitch-training programme designed to elevate the strategic capabilities of the team. Through a live client brief, participants get a chance to address a real-life business challenge with their strategic solutions. Apart from that, she introduced agency feedback sessions with long-term clients, allowing the team to share their thoughts on the relationship and ways to grow, thereby leading to more power-balanced and enriching agency-client relationships.

In the last 16 years, Yeong has forged her well-rounded career across agencies such as PHD, Carat, GroupM, M&C Saatchi, and brand-side with Scoot.