APAC

Megan Brownlow is Executive Director & Editor of The Media and Entertainment Outlook at PriceWaterhouseCooper. She recently gave an overview of upcoming trends in the Australian advertising market during a fireside chat with Paul Fisher, CEO of IAB Australia, and Stuart Spiteri, COO of News Digital Media, at this year’s ATS Sydney event. The slides and synopsis of the presentation below gives some insight into how PWC sees the various online and offline advertising markets in Australia growing over the next few years.

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It was big day yesterday in the APAC market for ExchangeWire as we held our inaugural ATS conference in Sydney. Over 270 attendees from the Australian and APAC buy and sell side came to ATS Sydney. We will be posting video footage and presentations in the coming weeks. Mi9, the new ninemsn ad exchange, was launched officially by Mark Britt, Group CEO, ninemsn, at the event. His keynote outlined the new proposition – and took aim at the biggest player in the Australian market, namely Google, referencing it as “the death star”. Marketing magazine has a run down on the Mi9 presentation here. Outside of the Star Wars references, debate and analysis on the emerging data-driven advertising space was presented by some of the biggest names in the market. The APAC overview panel give some interesting insight on how the key APAC markets are developing around programmatic buying, particularly in China and Japan. There was an excellent interjection at one stage during the open question segment by one of Taobao’s top execs, when he gave the attending audience a break down of the RTB market in China – and it would seem the Chinese automated market is growing fast. Let’s just say he was the most sought-after man in the room after we broke for the afternoon networking session. ExchangeWire would again like to thank all ATS Sydney sponsors, the speakers who give their time on the day, and all those who attended. We look forward to next year’s event.

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.

Stephen Hunt TubeMogul’s Asia-Pacific Director talks candidly about the challenges the online video industry currently faces: demand outstripping supply; publishers holding on to unsold inventory to protect its value; and lack of transparency in video advertising and the industry’s absence of regulation e.g ‘fake pre-rolls’. But Hunt argues that the opportunity in online video advertising is huge, and is poised to attract huge amounts of brand budget in the coming years.

If the latest PwC figures are accurate, 2014 will be the year online advertising will surpass TV to become the biggest segment of the media pie in Australia.  A major driver of future growth is forecasted to be brand dollars flowing away from traditional TV into online video and connected TV.

With great power comes great responsibility, however, and the industry needs to create a quality ecosystem worthy of TV’s mantle.  We have the opportunity to be good, but we should strive to be great!

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Consolidation: Super Carrier SingTel Buys Amobee For $321 Million

The mobile ad market continues to boom. Mobile advertising is projected to bring in revenues of $2.6bn in the U.S. alone this year, and that is only a small fraction of the wider opportunity in digital advertising. Pan-Asian carrier SingTel is now piling in on the action by announcing it would buy California-based Amobee to expand its own mobile advertising business, in a deal worth $321m.

SingTel has 434 million mobile customers in 25 countries, including Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Thailand. The $321m price tag may represent a good return on investment for those companies that have backed Amobee — which had raised about $54m from backers that included Accel, Sequoia, Globespan, Vodafone, Cisco, Motorola, Telefonica and Amdocs.

Amobee will give SingTel the ability to integrate existing capabilities with its own ad-serving platform that covers banner and rich-media ads. As all of Amobee’s existing employees, including CEO Trevor Healy, will be joining SingTel, it also gives the carrier a bolted-on team experienced in mobile ads.

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Managing Director of Adap.tv, Phil Duffield, discusses their increasing activity in the Australian, South East Asian and Japanese marketplaces.   He says how the adoption of traditional media buying by today’s industry has created silos in TV and video resulting in massive operational costs and time for both buyers and sellers and how 2012 promises to be very exciting with new strategic  products in the pipeline and more global expansion.

Can you give an overview of Adap.tv and its offering within Australia and the wider APAC region? What markets are you active in?

Adap.tv is the leading programmatic platform for buying and selling video and the world’s largest video ad marketplace. The Adap.tv Platform offers automated technology for buying and selling video. It’s a single platform for all video screens that can be easily configured to meet advertisers and publishers business goals.  The Adap.tv Marketplace is the largest global exchange in volume.  With the option to transact over spot, committed and RTB inventory, buyers and sellers always get total clarity into pricing and inventory. We have just launched a new office in Sydney, Australia and are also active in New Zealand, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.

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Angus McDonald, Managing Director at emerge Digital, explores why Australian publishers should follow a Darwin-esque approach to online advertising

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

Change is uncomfortable, unfamiliar and not without pain but the result is usually pretty positive. As an adaptable species, you’d have thought we’d have learnt that by now and embraced change at every opportunity.

However, Charles Darwin’s quote is very apt for the change that is currently taking place in the Digital Media Display (DMD) industry. Real-Time-Bidding, the volcano of that change, has altered sales models DMD in the US and Europe, and my money’s on Australia being the next market to erupt this year.

Let’s look at the local landscape: large, independent premium publishers in Australia are selling inventory at high CPMs (relative to North American peers) to brands who want to be associated with premium content in premium environments. Sales teams are successful so why commoditise the sales proposition?

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Carolyn Bollaci, Country Manager for MediaMind Australia & New Zealand shares some case studies on the effectiveness of data optimisation – a critical, but less known, factor behind the success of display ads. She also highlights how using data has shown an average lift in CTRs of 73%.

After years in the advertising doldrums, pulling meagre average click through rates (CTRs) of around 0.06 percent, it’s interesting to see certain digital ads now regularly storming CTRs in primary and even double digits.

Data optimisation is a critical, but less known, factor behind the rebound of display ads. From our benchmarks as a global ad server, we regularly see that data usage for targeting and retargeting lift CTRs by an average of 73 per cent. Actual conversions increase by an average of 40 per cent, with as much as 389 per cent for some advertisers.

Data optimisation technologies work by calculating the many factors that determine a display ad’s success, or failure. Like a race car’s cockpit team, data optimisation technology can tinker and tweak with a live ad in order to nudge up its results, often significantly.

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Marc Barnett is the GM of Microsoft Media Network & Microsoft Advertising Exchange. Here he discusses the growth of the Microsoft Ad Exchange in Australia and NZ, the relationship with retargeters and third party buyers, channel conflict and data monetization.

Can you give us a little background on your new role as GM of Microsoft Media Network? What does your remit entail and what territories do you cover?

In my new role I am responsible for leading and driving the growth of the Microsoft Media Network and the Microsoft Advertising Exchange across Australia and New Zealand.

Late last year, the Microsoft Media Network was brought into the joint-venture between Microsoft and Nine Entertainment Co. This change, coupled with the launch of the Microsoft Advertising Exchange, gives us a unique opportunity to offer advertisers access to our data-driven suite of products at scale along with the option to buy through our RTB-enabled Exchange. We have increased our investment in this area of our business over the past four months and the team will be expanding to include 25 people across sales, operations and media buying by the end of March.

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