I’ve been making quite a number of trips to Thailand in the past few months working on opening an office there. The story goes that earlier this year I was at the WPP Stream Asia conference in Phuket. It was a conference that involved a lot of the top advertising people in the region. There I met a group of nice people from the advertising industry in Thailand. Many of them already knew what Nuffnang was but for the rest, when I told them about Nuffnang they asked me one question: “Why aren’t you guys in Thailand yet?”.
So throughout the rest of 2011, Ming and I worked hard through many business trips to setup Nuffnang Thailand in Bangkok. Thailand is an awesome market but it’s also a little different than the rest of the blogosphere in the region. While most bloggers everywhere else in the region mainly use Blogspot or WordPress, a big portion of the Thai blogosphere was on local blog platforms. The biggest 3 there: Exteen, OKNation and Bloggang.
We spent the past few months meeting the top platforms there and persuading them to work with us. Convincing them that we will grow the market for blog advertising the way we have in Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and Philippines. Fortunately, they all agreed.
After lots of hard work, last week we officially launched Nuffnang Thailand from our new office in Bangkok.
I spent the whole week in Bangkok meeting advertisers and pitching blog advertising to them. The rest of my time was spent hanging out with some of the Thai Nuffies there.
Or getting to know some of them while we were walking to meetings.
I know I know, most of you are probably thinking “Hang on… isn’t Bangkok flooded?”
And well yeah, I admit… when I took a flight to Bangkok early this week, I had never seen such an empty flight before. Some of the Nuffies back home were even concerned about me. Like Linda here who was Whatsapped me.
But the truth is, much of Bangkok felt really normal. Traffic was terrible… like normal, people were going out like normal and business was going on like normal. I hear that the flood is mostly affecting parts outside of Central Bangkok but in much of Central Bangkok (which is huge), it’s all ok. Some tourist spots are still closed though. My Thai friend told me that Chatuchak market is closed.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space