Overview of talent sourcing market in Asian countries

As majority of Asian countries, including China and Indonesia, are already for several years enthusiastically transforming their economies from export-driven to consumption-driven, advertisement industry is continuing to show double digits growth. Taking into consideration collectivistic patterns of Asian cultures we can observe overwhelming involvement of talents in all marketing activities. No matter whether it is online, onscreen, or onsite promotion, talents are always the key part of it.

Thus, for an instance, China is experiencing a massive influx of foreign talents of all types – models and actors, singers and dancers, circus and theme parks performers, and all of them are considered premium here just because of their nationality. It is estimated that there are about 10.000 foreign models working on freelance basis in Mainland China along with more than 30 professional model agencies supplying talents for event companies, production houses, exhibitions, and else. As that all started to happen just recently, there is no any solid infrastructure and established market standards for participants’ interactions.

Success of a promotional event, TVC shooting, or a fashion show highly depends on talents involved. When a big amount of resource is concentrated to push forward a product or an idea it is absolutely necessary to be sure that talents will do their best. From another hand, talents are often misused, cheated, or simply treated bad. That’s why it might be difficult and costly to establish cooperation with professional and well-behaved models, actors, and other type of artists, until they are sure that everything will go well. Since the market is continuing to grow there is a sound call for regulations and transparency coming from both sides - bookers and talents. More particularly, there are the following problems existing within talent-booker relations:

Search. Spreading job info is resource consuming and it is difficult to find decent talents. The current supply and demand is hidden, channels are not consolidated. Bookers are not aware of talents schedule, so it takes time to contact each one. The current solutions are outdated technologically and logically.

Reputation. Tracking talent and bookers blacklist is difficult, since there is no unified database for that. Often job conditions are not described clearly, rude or lie from bookers. No fixed price for jobs, a lot of money cutting and low offers from the bookers. Models often misbehave or cheat their parameters.

Presentation. Collecting and presenting casting info is time-consuming. The final client often goes for talents with just better presentation materials instead of taking the better talent.

As the market is getting mature and more sophisticated there is a certain need for complex monitoring and preventive measures that would help to make the industry more transparent and efficient. Generally, the problems in Asian talent market are quite common for all developing markets. Thus once the solution is found and successfully introduced, it can be applied to other regions as well.

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