Dan Mintz and DMG: China Inc
Dan Mintz is the personification of a ‘can-do’ attitude. Elbowing his way into China in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre Mintz set up Dynamic Marketing Group (DMG) when most Westerners were heading for the door. In a few short years he grew it into China’s biggest media agency. Dan Matthews finds out how.
China is the world’s economic success story. According to figures adjusted for exchange rates, it is the second largest economy in the world with a relative GDP of $14 trillion.
It’s acknowledged to be America’s successor as world economic superpower and with growth at 11.4 per cent in 2007 (compared with the US’ 2.2 per cent) it will reach this milestone before you can say “Deng Xiaoping”.
We know this now, but 18 years ago most people in Britain and the US thought it was just an oppressive and scary
place to be. Tiananmen had just happened, the media was tightly controlled, Westerners were under suspicion and the education system was still encumbered by Mao’s teachings.
It was into this hostile, business-unfriendly environment that Dan Mintz arrived in 1990. “I was a film director and cinematographer and I came over to shoot a commercial, just when white guys with cameras weren’t at all welcome,” Mintz laughs.
“I could see it was a fabulous place and I wanted to start my business somewhere that was only just getting going itself, and China’s big cities were perfect. So I started thinking of ways I could get in. It wasn’t easy because I didn’t know anyone and I couldn’t speak the language.”
Born and bread in Brooklyn, Mintz found his experiences on the streets of New York were an asset in the chaos of China’s developing cities. He learned Mandarin – a business prerequisite at the time – and began picking up odd producing jobs in Beijing, splitting his time between there and New York.
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He soon realised that trans-Pacific freelancing was not the most efficient career path, and spotting a cavernous gap in China’s expanding advertising, marketing and media markets Mintz set up shop full-time in a Beijing apartment block in 1993. He did so with the help of two Chinese co-founders: small time film producer Bing Wu and financial whiz Paul Xiao.
His US-style film production skills and intimate knowledge of Chinese culture formed a dynamite combo and won DMG filming contracts with huge brands including Budweiser, Sony and Audi, among many others.
“We broke into the market in a very niche way,” Mintz recalls. “At the time most agencies didn’t have creative departments, so we became the creative departments for existing firms. Building it like that meant we could grow without investment and in a very balanced order.
“We became a full service agency in 2001, having seen this huge gap in what was happening. A lot of advertisers weren’t happy with the way their banding campaigns were being run.
“Our competitors were still very Western-focused, so the Chinese contracts were a low priority for them and they weren’t making an effort to understand the country’s consumers. All of a sudden it became this huge market, and the old firms didn’t have time to adjust.”
The company’s biggest break came in 2004 when Volkswagen offered DMG a massive full brand campaign to run. China had just become the car company’s second biggest market and DMG impressed with its understanding of Chinese history and culture. It focused its pitch on the Chinese symbol for ‘heart’, which has connotations for devotion and ambition.
Volkswagen went for the idea, and Mintz and his co-founders next had the task of winning over the Chinese establishment. A full brand campaign meant airing on Party-controlled television and DMG’s plan to use traditional symbols in the campaign was potentially a taboo.
Mao himself had adopted simplified versions of the symbols during the Cultural Revolution while Taiwan had retained the old symbols, making them extremely controversial – even treasonous.
Negotiation with government agencies including the Politburo, Propaganda Ministry and government bodies overseeing TV, radio and film, hinged on DMG’s assertion that the symbols were archaic art and not of contemporary ideological significance.
Remarkably, DMG pulled it off (the great Nike had earlier pulled a campaign for offending official sensibilities and even published a formal apology) and the relationship with Volkswagen flourished, leading to more big contracts from other top advertisers.
Today DMG has five hubs in China with headquarters in Shanghai and some satellite offices in the US. Its turnover is in the hundreds of millions of dollars and though Mintz won’t put a finger on the company’s exact revenues he admits that the biggest campaigns come in at $50m a pop.
Apart from getting in early, meeting the right people and becoming submerged in Chinese culture – in both a
historical and a modern consumerist sense, Mintz credits his grasp of “guangxi”, or relationship-building, for DMG’s success.
“Working in the US you can do your job then go home and watch TV. In China you have to network, get good face, and get in among the people and figure things out. US culture is new and very diverse, in China there’s still very little integration and it goes back 5,000 years.
“In some ways they move as a huge orchestra, at least in a cultural sense. But you cannot think of them as one homogenous group who all feel the same, you might as well think every Chinese guy knows Kung Fu.”
Mintz describes the Chinese culture and ‘personality’ at great length as if this aspect of what he does is most important to the business. He never mentions the standard humdrum processes like cash-flow, recruitment or sales.
He even uses the term “guangxi” in his press releases to talk up DMG’s strong relationship with the Chinese government.
And it works. His latest contract is a huge Nike-sponsored basketball tournament involving 20,000 under-20-year-olds, staged in three provinces and judged by four US basketball legends including Kobe Bryant.
‘ZhanQiLai’ or ‘Time to man up’ aims to maintain Nike’s standing as the biggest basketball brand in China. It’s already the most popular sport and DMG’s campaign aims to enhance this in the build up to the Olympic Games and beyond.
The Games will be massive for DMG and are Mintz’s current focus, apart from “world domination”, as he puts it. Despite its deep foothold in the Chinese market the company still has plenty of room to grow; and with China’s relentless economic expansion you wouldn’t bet against Mintz achieving that goal.
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Jian Hua MiaoRead your thought about doing business in China on Research World. Partly agree, partly not agree, mainly with your comments on the research in China. I am not sure whether you have chosen the right methodology and agency to conduct the research in the past. Focus group can't tell you everything about consumers, especially their value, lifestyle and attitudes towards life etc. Ethnography and semiotics may tell you more about a deeper insight of the consumers.
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