I am Niranka T. Perera, Co-Founder and CEO of Antyra Solutions.

I am a digital marketer and eCommerce enthusiast, and have been engaged in the industry for the past 17+ years. I worked on my first SEO project all the way back in 2003 at the age of 19, and have been an ardent creative enthusiast while formally studying IT and software engineering. I was blessed to be able to marry these aspects throughout my career where I have functioned across the spectrum in the digital marketing field, from designing and building ad platforms to running global marketing campaigns. Today, I run Antyra Solutions - a creative led, data driven digital agency with offices in Singapore and Sri Lanka.

As I progressed in my career, I found myself increasingly focussing on how I could effectively combine creatives with data – the intention was to develop data driven, creative, marketing and communications strategies.

Performance is what drives me. Every engagement, whether it is a website or digital marketing campaign, needs to be quantified in the context of solving a problem and needs to push the client closer to achieving their business goals. At the end of the day, as an individual and an agency co-owner, accountability for every dollar spent on behalf of a brand is of paramount importance. That has been a core differentiator for me.

I am the Chairman, Co-Founder and CEO of Antyra Solutions. The agency was set up to introduce our ethos of creative led performance marketing, and it is my responsibility to ensure that we live that ethos in all we do.

For me, a good marketing communications professional should have the ability to pick up the dynamics of the market they are serving, and be able to introduce an approach that can test assumptions in communications.

Antyra Solutions is a boutique, integrated digital agency that combines creativity, technology and performance-based digital marketing under one roof. We have offices in Colombo and Singapore, offering services via three business verticals. Antyra Labs is our technology arm, building web platforms, AR/VR solutions and software products. Antyra Digital provides performance-based digital marketing services including SEO, PPC, Social Media Marketing, Analytics and more.

The design arm of the company, Antyra Studios, works on end-to-end branding and creative solutions. Over the past six years, we have become specialists in the fields of travel and hospitality, eCommerce, finance and insurance, fashion and education.

In my opinion, the process of marketing communications begins with identifying a brand’s value proposition and communicating that value proposition to potential customers in an effective manner.

At Antyra, we are driven by data in everything we do, and that applies to our approach to marketing communications as well. Our marketing strategy road map takes the form of a three-step funnel.

1. Discovery – creating brand touch points and generating awareness.

2. Engagement – turning awareness into meaningful conversations and brand interaction.

3. Action – converting user engagement into meaningful action for the brand.

We believe that it is important to set a strong foundation before developing digital marketing campaigns for our clients. How we do this is by conducting ample research to understand consumers and the market, defining the brand’s short term, long term and intrinsic business objectives, and defining the brand platform and USPs. We have built our own in-house ideation process called the 7-Pillar Framework, and we use it to take a ground-up, holistic approach to a marketing campaign.

Winning a NYX Marcom Grand Award is indeed an honour for Antyra. Traditionally, Sri Lanka isn’t well known for its creative talent and marketing communications expertise. As a result, it has been challenging for us to attract the attention of international clients, although we have so much to offer. Awards and recognitions such as these mean a lot to us because they are a validation of our ability to create and execute effective campaigns. The global exposure is an added bonus!

With international awards come international exposure and recognition. Most international clients we work with today initially came to us through direct inquiries after seeing our work through an award won. We are confident that this win too will result in more brands noticing our work and capabilities.

We won the NYX Grand Award for Tales of Ceylon, a destination marketing platform we designed and developed for Sri Lanka. We have increasingly felt that tourism marketing campaigns from across the world are starting to blur into one mass. So, we asked ourselves how we could make Sri Lanka stand above the clutter and how we could target potential travellers at the inspiration stage of travel. It definitely was a challenge to develop a message or story that would inspire and drive conversion.

Sri Lanka has such a rich and interesting history and culture. As a tourism destination, however, the country has traditionally been sold in pieces – as a beach destination or wild life destination. But areas such as culture, heritage and historic wonder are underserved, even though they offer something that is truly unique to our island. So, we decided to focus on the stories of heroic kings, epic battles and amazing feats of engineering that are an integral part of what makes us Sri Lanka.

As eCommerce increasingly becomes as large a distribution channel as traditional retail, businesses are willing to push boundaries and think bigger. I believe that this is driving the industry as a whole, and it is exciting to see how companies such as ours will innovate, solve problems and help brands engage with consumers in new and inspiring ways.

1. Solving problems for varying clients.

2. Exploring challenges and opportunities in different industries.

3. Developing creative ideas and solutions and being able to sell those ideas to paying clients!

I encourage continuous learning and my go-to platforms now are Flipboard and TikTok! I believe that managing our time is the most difficult in today’s context, so with these two platforms, every time I have 10 minutes to spare, I am either reading an interesting article related to Digital on Flipboard or watching a design example video on TikTok.

Automation and right-sourcing are two trends I believe we will likely see in the next 5 years.

Like the IT sector, we are seeing the growth of agency networks and right-sourcing models blooming. Even now, we support smaller agencies with resourcing for services like PPC, SEO, Social Ads and Analytics and I think that will become increasingly common.

I also believe that increased automation will obscure the technology behind execution in the digital space, and the creative and marketing communications role is going to be the key differentiator. So, although today you may be comparing your website against a competitor on the basis of which site works faster etc., we will eventually hit a plateau on benchmarks such as that. That is when the creative marketing role will become more important because it will be the unique value creator for any brand.

Leading Antyra has been an exciting journey, with plenty of triumphs and challenges along the way. From the beginning, we have been hyper focused on delivering for our customers. This means that with every client engagement, we ensure we can justify the time, effort and money invested in the work we do. I strongly believe that focus has played a large role in our success, helping us build a reputation as an agency that is performance-driven.