APAC > Australia

Jason Barnes is the Head of Commercial Development at News Limited. Here he discusses the Rubicon Project partnership, trends in the Australian market and the strategy that News Limited will look to execute over the coming twelve months around the areas of mobile and video.

You recently announced a deal with Rubicon. Can you give some overview on that partnership, and how that currently works? Will you be launching a PMP (Private Marketplace) at some stage?

We have been working with Rubicon for 3 years as they monetise our international inventory. When we decided to undertake a trial to make our domestic inventory available via RTB we evaluated the key technology vendors and Rubicon provided us with the demand sources, controls and technical innovation that would enable us to be a leader in this fast growing channel. We are now out of that trial phase and integrating programmatic trading into the business to fully leverage the efficiencies it brings. Our inventory is in a private exchange on an invitation-only basis, we are not exposing the brands of our sites but the inventory is categorised so there is a degree of transparency. A decision was made to include all our major sites and the key ad units so it is a quality product for our partners and we can truly gauge its potential.

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There are signs that the data-driven ad market in APAC is gathering momentum. With a number of US vendors now entering the market, and local APAC solutions getting new funding and traction throughout the region, APAC is likely to have a big growth spurt in 2013. Pubmatic, another significant player in the space, announced its move into the region with the launch of its newest data centre in Singapore, which will provide the platform to service growing business in the South East Asia and Australia. ExchangeWire caught up with Paul Shepherd, Country Manager, Australia to discuss the recent expansion.

How have you seen the Australian market develop over the last 12 months?

From a display point of view, the Australian market has been quite robust. The IAB reported that growth in FY11/12 was 15%, and to all accounts the market is continuing to grow at a similar number. I think the winners of the last 12 months have been Google, Facebook and the Category specialists like carsales.com.au and realestate.com.

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Ross McNab is Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Kinected, a company whose stated purpose is to launch and operate world-class ad technologies in the Australian and wider APAC region, with partners, Unified, BlueKai and TagMan. To these existing companies, Kinected can now list MediaMath as its newest partner. ExchangeWire is curious to know what Kinected brings to the table and what MediaMath and Kinected plan to accomplish together in APAC.

Why was Kinected chosen by MediaMath as a local partner?

Clients of MediaMath’s TerminalOne demand side platform require outstanding results from the technology. MediaMath and Kinected have created the structure that enables this for the Australian market: MediaMath provide the technology and software; Kinected ensure best path to scalable adoption via local expert support, hastening success for clients.

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Brandscreen announced this morning that it is raising a further eleven million dollars in a new round of funding. The Series B round was led by Macquarie Capital Group Limited (“Macquarie Capital”), and was joined by new co investors including SingTel Innov8 (Singapore) and existing investor Southern Cross Venture Partners (Palo Alto and Sydney). The new funding comes amid signs that the data-driven ad market is picking up serious momentum across the APAC region. Japan, the second largest display market globally, is seeing significant growth with the three big agencies investing considerable resource into the data-driven opportunity locally. China is also undergoing a big shift there. A number of key players have set up exchanges over the past twelve months, including Alibaba who runs the Taobao exchange. Google’s Adx is also heavily active in the Chinese market. While Korea and Singapore remain at an early stage of development, the signs that the market in APAC is going to move significantly in 2013 are there. Brandscreen’s new fund raise will doubtless be used to expand into these growing markets, and position it as the leading DSP in the APAC region. It will be interesting to see how Brandscreen will compete with the US and domestic players operating in the multiple markets.

Olivier Legrand is Senior Director, Marketing Solutions, APAC, at LinkedIn. Here he discusses Linkedin’s B2B marketing and audience targeting proposition in the Australian market, data-driven media buying and Linkedin’s strategy across the rest of the APAC market.

What ad opportunities currently exist on LinkedIn AU?

LinkedIn’s advertisers have marketing objectives that range from increasing awareness to driving sales, and we have products that deliver against each of these objectives. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions’ offerings fall under four key pillars – media, data, integration and social. Under the media umbrella, we offer traditional targeted ads such as LinkedIn Ads, which include display, polls/content and social ads. Our data solutions include robust targeting capabilities and analytics capabilities as well as access to proprietary research, and rich insights gathered from our user base.

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New partnership will enable advertisers to add scale and simplicity to video campaigns in the ANZ region.

MediaMind, a division of DG and leading independent provider of integrated digital advertising solutions, announced last week a strategic regional partnership with Adap.tv, a world leader in programmatic video advertising, which aims to provide greater efficiency to advertising partners in Australia and New Zealand.

The new agreement supports the integration of MediaMind’s video ad serving and campaign management capabilities into the Adap.tv Marketplace, providing media buyers with a single platform to deliver video ads across multiple screens.

Carolyn Bollaci, Regional Vice President for ANZ of MediaMind, comments: “As our agency partners look to expand their in-stream video advertising buys, this new partnership deal brings them access to a major pool of video inventory at group buying rates.”

Adap.tv will also become a member of MediaMind’s Strategic Partnership Program. This provides Adap.tv with access to MediaMind’s production team to enable Adap.tv to build custom rich media creative assets on a cost-per-project basis, among other benefits.

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Toby Ross is Head of Strategic Alliances at Fairfax Media. Here he discusses the new audience extension partnership with Google, as Fairfax looks to leverage its audience across dynamic inventory, and whether this move is a precursor to the launch of a Publisher Trading Desk in the market.

Can you give some overview on the targeting you can now offer agencies in terms of audience extension across inventory?

Understanding our audiences is a key priority for Fairfax. Given the scope of our digital network –which includes leading news, classified and transactional sites – we understand who are audiences are and where their interests lie. Additionally, with a large number of offline subscribers, we are able to aggregate and de-duplicate data sets across all mediums. We’ve offered behavioural targeting products to our clients for some time and these products have become more sophisticated as new technologies have entered the market. Initially we limited targeting to Fairfax owned and operated inventory but last year started extending these audiences across our proprietary network – drx – creating a new tier of products. This was the first step in transitioning from a traditional network to a fully fledged audience platform and, given the demand for our audiences, we’ve built out a strategy to further extend these audiences across brand safe third party media.

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Phil Duffield, Managing Director Adap.tv, discusses the growth of Video RTB in the APAC region, publisher adoption of the buying mechanism and some key infrastructure problems that currently is holding back the market.

Is the fusion of TV and video applicable to the current state of video advertising in AU and APAC?

Absolutely. Growth in online video consumption is a global trend and the opportunity for consumers to watch it on more channels and more devices is fueling it. One of the most interesting trends to watch in these regions will be the rise of connected TV. In the U.S. it took a significant leap onto agency media plans this year, but in Australia and APAC it’s challenging. Currently, the volume of video traffic is an issue as few homes currently have sufficient speed to stream high-definition content. But it’s improving all the time and the eventual rollout of the NBN will solve for this. After that, we should start to see a significant growth in the adoption and use of connected TV in our region.

Given that premium publishers in the region have been slow to adopt RTB for display, how will the likes of Adaptv bring premium liquidity to the market for Video?

It will be about empowering them with technology, through private marketplaces and showing them that RTB can no longer be pigeon holed as a race to the bottom but as a way to drive eCPM’s up. We will also look at premium overseas inventory through either marketplace connections or again a private marketplace option.

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