Nila Marita Indreswari

Chief Corporate Affairs
GoTo

Jakarta

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“Keep your curiosity high. Try new things out, but always be clear of how you measure your success."

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As corporate affairs chief at Indonesia’s GoTo, Nila Marita oversees communications and public affairs for the country’s two most valuable startups —  ride-hailing giant Gojek and e-commerce firm Tokopedia. That puts her squarely at the center of one of the region’s biggest innovation stories, via technology infrastructure and solutions that aim to drive access and inclusion in the digital economy. Before joining Gojek in 2017, Marita spent most of her career advising leading businesses on financial and investor communications, crisis management and media relations, including seven years at Edelman, where she led heading the corporate and financial Practice in Indonesia.

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How do you define innovation?
Related to Q11, I think we cannot rely on just one person or one role to innovate our brand engagement. It starts from the leaders on how a company should build their brand and engage with its stakeholders over time. The key is consistency and communicate in a creative and engaging way that it is meaningful to the company's stakeholders. If I have to name parties who have the most influence, it would be the CEO, business, marketing and comms leaders. Agency's role is to provide/enrich the team's creative ideas and execution.

In your opinion, which brands and/or agencies are most innovative in their approach to PR and marketing?
Each agency has their own unique and creative approach to build brand engagement. Some names that I hear often times in the market are Ogilvy, H&K.

Describe a moment in your career that you would consider to be innovative.
When we have to fundraise during early pandemic time in 2020. We have allocated US$7 million to help our driver and merchants partners in the ecosystem and those people who are impacted. But, given the wide severe impact, we still fundraise so we could help more people. We need to come up with creative and innovative ideas since everybody is doing the same thing. We came up with one holistic idea that could create high engagement i.e hosting an online concert, collaborating with one of the top bands in Indonesia, and get people to sing together and make donation. We also launched a series of online workshops led by our key leaders with topics that are relevant with their expertise. For example, we have workshops on marketing, PR, tech, data, made it relevant with the Covid situation. This was effective in attracting people participating and resulted in quite meaningful tickets sales.

Who do you admire for his/her approach to innovation?
For local figure, it is Wishnutama Kusubandio. He has the expertise to create optics with wow effects. He is one of the trusted person by our President for helping the Palace in creating creative concept for state events.

How do you get out of a creativity rut?
Usually I do brainstorming with experts and my team, and go through some great examples to get inspiration.

What advice would you give to the PR industry around embracing innovation?
Keep your curiosity high. Try new things out, but always be clear of how you measure your success.

What would you be doing if you weren't doing your current job?
I honestly don't know. Love what I am doing :)

Which book/movie/TV show/podcast/playlist/other cultural source has provided inspiration over the past year?
Learn to build by Bob Moesta

How would you like to see work culture, and the role of the office, evolve?
As we have entered a new normal era, I believe people are now used to a hybrid model. I hope this new normal era will give people more flexibility and at the same time being more productive. So we can keep work life balance and being happier at work.

How can the PR and communications industry harness innovation to make more progress on diversity, equity and inclusion?
I think we need to cover the basis, i.e. make more efforts to close gender gap, let women to speak more; find ways of promoting DEI in a more holistic ways, not only focusing on the mainstream issues. We have other issue as religions, ethnicity that require attentions around the world. People with these types of diversity also need equal attention on how we can help them be more inclusive and equally treated at work and society at large.