Dreams of a digital rockstar

Ahmed Hashim discus­ses his evolut­ion from local metal band Messia­h to digita­l market­ing, Facebo­ok and more.

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and co-founder of Cygnis Media, Ahmed Hashim is not your regular techie. His team doesn’t make banners but creates, instead, interactive applications and experiences. The small, fairly young digital marketing company has found its niche in the digital universe by taking on marketing projects for international giants like one of Canada’s biggest communication companies, Rogers and Butlers Chocolate Café in Karachi.

But Hashim’s talents stretch far beyond the digital periphery. He has played an active role in Karachi’s music scene for the last decade. A drummer for Messiah, a popular metal band that got shortlisted for Battle of the Bands, Hashim says being a tech-savvy musician had its perks, as he used his skills to create a home recording studio, where he recorded his music and shared it online.

Did Hashim ever consider music professionally? No, according to the young CEO being a rockstar is not something that everyone in Pakistan can do. For him, the dream was always digital. “Since I was 8 years old, I always knew my career would be in the digital world,” he says, adding that being a video-game enthusiast as a child may have contributed to his keen interest in computers and technology.

Hashim’s resolve to pursue a career in the digital world sharpened when he took a web applications course at Purdue University, from where he graduated and worked in the US for almost three years. Moving back to Pakistan, according to Hashim, was a step bolstered by his ambitious, entrepreneurial drive as he wanted to be part of a team that created programs that helped local advertising agencies.

“With TV ads, the biggest problem is that you can’t track your audience,” he says “you never know who may be recording a show and forwarding through the adverts. With digital marketing, we can track nearly everything: from our audience’s geographical location, to how many clicks they made, how much time they spent on our page, if they returned to or shared our page - and these are just to name a few. This data helps us calculate the return on investment, and costs a quarter of billboard and TV ads!”

Despite the boon of cost-effective advertising there are still challenges ahead. The most cumbersome challenge according to Hashim is that although people don’t deny the move towards electronic media, some are resistant to change and will want a product to be marketed digitally while still hanging on to a conventional mindset.

However, Hashim is optimistic about the future. “This is the start of something big for us,” he says “Today, Facebook is huge; as time goes by, other platforms will be hotter.”

“My team jokes that we can’t ban Facebook at work,” says Hashim. He says that the creative process for building a web application involves browsing through the social media site for hours to conduct market research and formulate ideas based on popular trends.

According to him reading blogs, finding out what’s hot and what’s not in the digital world and analyzing this information helps build a mental database so when clients approach Cygnis Media they are prepared to present a list of ideas of what is going to sell in the digital market.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 7^th, 2010.