Digital Kaway Ltd.

"Digital Kaway"

The name says it all.

Kaway means "wizard" in Burmese. My co-founder and I picked the name because what we were selling in 2015 was something most people in Myanmar had not seen yet and did not really believe in. We opened with two people, two computers and an internet connection. Our first client was a baby nutrition company, won at a networking event on a simple pitch: instead of spending thousands on newspaper ads and billboards, let mothers post photos of their babies on Facebook and collect likes. It worked, and that was enough to build an agency on.

It was the right year to be doing it. Telenor and Ooredoo had just entered the market, mobile internet was spreading fast, and for millions of people Facebook was the internet — the first version of it they had ever used. Most businesses were still putting their budgets into advertising that was expensive, untargeted and impossible to measure. We offered the alternative and everything around it: social media management and strategy, content marketing, branding, copywriting, SEO, Facebook campaigns and advertising, translation, and consulting for brands trying to reach the Myanmar market.

The client list grew across every sector — Samsung Myanmar, local restaurant brands, international NGOs, fashion labels, consumer goods companies, and a lot of businesses that had never thought of social media as a serious tool. My co-founder moved on eventually, as co-founders do, and I ran the agency from there. Over six years we worked with more than a hundred brands and delivered over 150 campaigns. By the end, a generation of Myanmar businesses understood digital marketing and branding differently than they had in 2015, and we had a hand in that. The work also put me on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list and among the Innovator 25 in Southeast Asia.

We closed in 2021 for reasons that had nothing to do with the business. When the military took power on 1 February, the business environment collapsed and civil society was dismantled with it, and carrying on stopped being possible. So I shut the chapter with the work unfinished and the conditions for doing it gone. Six years, over a hundred clients, more than 150 campaigns, and an industry we helped bring into existence. It was not the ending I planned, and I have never pretended otherwise.