Small, senior, and in one time zone.
Asia Web Digital is a Hong Kong studio. We are deliberately small: the people you meet in the first conversation are the people who do the work, and there is nobody in the middle translating between them and you.
We started because the handoffs were the problem.
The studio grew out of a frustration that will be familiar to anyone who has run marketing in-house: a design agency, a development shop, an SEO consultant and a media buyer, none of whom could see the whole thing, all of whom were certain the problem sat with somebody else.
The work that fell between them — the checkout that was designed beautifully and built slowly, the content that ranked but did not convert — was where the money went.
So we kept all six disciplines in one room and made one team accountable for the outcome instead of for their slice of it. That is the entire idea. Everything else — how we scope, how we report, how we hand over — follows from it.
It also means we turn work down. If a project genuinely only needs a freelancer, we will say so, and occasionally recommend one.
Four things we will not trade away.
These cost us work occasionally. We have decided that is acceptable.
You own everything
Repositories, CMS accounts, ad accounts, hosting, analytics — all in your name from day one. Lock-in is a business model, not an engineering necessity, and it is not ours.
We report the bad quarter too
Monthly reporting includes what did not work and what we think caused it. A report that is always good news is a report nobody should trust.
Seniors do the work
We do not sell you a director and staff the project with juniors. If someone junior is involved you will know who, on what, and who is reviewing it.
No percentage of spend
Media fees are flat. Charging a share of your budget rewards us for spending more of your money, which is a strange thing to build an incentive around.
The people who do the work.
All six sit in the Hong Kong studio. Select anyone to read what they actually own.
How we run.
Where are you based?
Hong Kong SAR. That is our only office. Clients are spread across Asia-Pacific, Europe and North America, and everything is documented in writing so nothing important depends on catching a call.
How big a client do you usually work with?
Mid-market companies and funded scale-ups, typically with an in-house marketing team of two to twenty people. We are a poor fit for pre-revenue startups and for enterprises that need forty people in a room.
Do you outsource anything?
Photography, video production and native-language copywriting, through a small group of collaborators we have worked with for years. You will always be told who is doing what, and we stay accountable for it.
What is your working language?
English, for all project communication, documentation and reporting. For content in other languages we work with vetted native writers and are explicit about which languages we can review in-house and which we cannot.
Wing-Kei Lau
Founded the studio after a decade split between a network agency in Hong Kong and an in-house team that had to live with what agencies delivered. That second half is the reason we hand over documentation nobody has to chase.
Runs commercial conversations, sits in every diagnosis, and is the person who tells a client when the honest answer is that they should spend less.
Marco Bertolini
Leads interface and identity work. Designs in the browser, argues for the content model before the colour palette, and has a long-running objection to design presentations that cannot be clicked.
Previously spent six years on product design teams where the design system was the deliverable, which shaped how we document ours.
Priya Nandakumar
Owns the front-end and the performance budget, and enforces both in CI so that neither becomes a launch-week argument. Believes most sites are slow for about four reasons and that all four are fixable.
Runs the handover process, including the recorded walkthrough that has quietly become the thing clients mention most.
Chalida Sirichai
Technical search first, content second. Specialises in the international targeting problems that appear when a company sells into six countries from one codebase — the area we most often find broken on arrival.
Has run enough replatform migrations to insist on the redirect map before anyone touches the design.
Daniel Okonjo
Buys media against contribution margin and separates brand from non-brand in every report, which occasionally makes the first month uncomfortable and every month afterwards useful.
Built the incrementality testing approach we now run on any account above a certain spend.
Yuki Tanaka
Builds identity systems for companies that operate in more than one language, with clear rules about what stays fixed and what local teams may adapt.
Writes the voice guidelines too, on the grounds that a brand which looks consistent and sounds like four different companies is not consistent.