APAC > SSP

Established in 2008, Vizury is a privately-held CRM company headquartered in Bangalore, India with operations in China, Australia, South East Asia, Japan and South America. The company has recently raised almost USD $9 million in its Series B round of funding. With its flagship product, VRM, Vizury has witnessed 450% growth over the past year. ExchangeWire caught up with Chetan Kulkarni, Co-founder and CEO, Vizury Interactive, to discuss their strategy.

For those unfamiliar with the Vizury offering, can you give us a quick overview?

Vizury is a Digital CRM company. We are all familiar with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and how companies use their customer/prospect data to engage their customers/prospects throughout their purchase cycle. For example, an automotive company would use a walk-in prospect’s data to convert him/her from prospect, to customer, to repeat customer through a variety of marketing activities.

We do the same in the digital world by empowering businesses to use their digital data to engage in a marketing dialogue with their customers and prospects in a 1:1 fashion throughout the online purchase cycle. We call this Visitor Relationship Management (VRM), similar to CRM.

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Big publishers have generally been a bit slow to the mobile party, hence mobile has grown out in a distinct and rather fragmented manner. Media consumption has been fractured across all sorts of smaller social networks and mobile sites that sprung up and did well. Then we saw the app ecosystem explode — and that took a large share of media consumption and associated mobile ad spend. So these small sites and apps, which did not have ad sales forces of their own, began to work with what became known as mediation platforms.

These platforms are basically aggregators of lots of sites and apps, and they powered the early mobile ad networks that arose. What you effectively had in the early days of mobile was different mobile ad networks competing to secure inventory. This model, where a buyer goes to a supplier who aggregates lots of sites and apps, has been very important in mobile. StrikeAd spotted a problem here, and in 2010 we aimed to solve it by creating a DSP specifically for mobile.

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Cindy Deng is MD APAC for Turn. Here she discusses Turn’s recent launch in Hong Kong and the roll out of the solution across the APAC region.

Is there significance behind Turn choosing Hong Kong for their APAC launch?

Hong Kong is ideally situated geographically, giving us easy access to all of our major markets including Japan, China, Australia and Southeast Asia. In addition, Turn’s state-of-the-art data centre was already located in Hong Kong, so it made sense to establish our regional headquarters here as well. Ultimately, these advantages combined with an excellent pool of talented, passionate people and the dynamic nature of the city that complements Turn’s forward-thinking culture, made Hong Kong a perfect choice.

Having come from Yahoo!, what motivated you to jump on board with Turn for their APAC launch?

While at Yahoo!, I looked at various DSP and DMP technologies to use internally to further strengthen their performance advertising business. I’ve come to know various offerings in the market, and therefore understand the challenges faced by both the publisher and the advertiser.

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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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Robbie Hills is Head of Media Technology Solutions SEA/India and Head of Rich Media APAC at Google. Here he discusses the recent launch of Adx in China, and the growth of programmatic buying in other APAC markets.

Can you give some overview of the launch of AdX in China?

We officially launched our AdX in China on April 10. We’d already been testing the system with several key publishers and buyers for some time; we see the shift in programmatic buying happening at an increasing speed across the APAC region and China is growing at even faster pace and a key part of our strategy. We already have a number of large buyers actively buying on AdX in China.

How developed is the RTB market in China? Are there big volumes being sold via RTB?

In short – yes! As with many other markets, there are large volumes of display inventory in China that are not and have never been effectively monetised: given the multitude of display ad formats and thousands of websites, it often takes thousands of hours for advertisers to plan and manage their display ad campaigns, and many don’t bother. On the other side of the equation, some publishers are left with up to 80% of their ad space unsold. It’s like airlines flying with their planes mostly empty.

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Vicki Lyon is Managing Director SpotXchange Asia-Pacific. Here she gives her synopsis on the recent ATS Sydney event.

The inaugural ATS conference here in Sydney was a resounding success, with several hundred attendees and a great cross-section of industry commentary. From Star Wars analogies to resounding calls for more transparent data, it set the scene for an open and honest dialogue throughout the day.

Some of the liveliest discussions that took place revolved around Real-Time Bidding or RTB.  Advertising agencies are increasingly embracing RTB as they reap the benefits of greater efficiencies and improved campaign results. Many advertising agencies viewed that demand for RTB, particularly in the online video space, will be high this year but more publishers need to come to the party and supply more inventory and transparency.

One of the key points that came out of these discussions was the need for more quality data. This was a concern for both publishers and advertisers, and one of the key questions raised was why 1st party data wasn’t being used by agencies and publishers, none of the 3rd party data providers offer enough to run a quality campaign.

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ExchangeWire is looking forward to tomorrow’s ATS Sydney event. We are bringing together the region’s most senior digital ad execs to discuss the emerging data-driven display eco-system – and it’s likely effect on how media buying is done across the APAC region. The conference is attracting over 250 agency execs, senior marketers, ad tech vendors and publishers. A full list of speakers can be seen here. And you can get the complete agenda here. ATS Sydney is now sold-out, and we are looking forward to a lively day of debate and analysis. The hashtag for tomorrow’s event is #ATSS12, and we encourage everyone to get involved in the conversation. ExchangeWire would like to thank all the sponsors for their support in making this event possible – and also to the speakers who are giving up their time to participate in what is going to be an epic day.