APAC

Much is spoken and written about the growing economic strengths of the BRIC markets, it is one reason why ExchangeWire has a growing presence in these markets. However, when it comes to ad tech, India often is left in the shadows for some reason. When commentators future gaze about the APAC market, the focus is predominantly around Japan, China, South East Asia and Australia; but India is a sleeping giant of ad tech that is about to awaken.

The opportunity in India is sizeable, with over 100 million people online and a fast-growing e-commerce industry. Whilst it is still one of the smallest e-commerce industries in APAC, its growth is predicted to increase at the fastest pace over the next five years, according to Forrester. In 2011 alone it took on an estimated $1 billion of investment, and the economy as a whole is the 10th largest in the world, with an ever-increasing GDP — but what is the opportunity around ad tech specifically?

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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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Mediabrands Audience Platform (MAP) is expanding multidirectionally in the APAC region into China, India, Japan, Australia and Southeast Asia. Here Arun Kumar, President of MAP G14, discusses with ExchangeWire the state of the region and what to expect for 2013.

Can you give some overview on the MAP solution in the APAC region in terms of trading approach, technology and staffing resource?

We have expanded rapidly in the region in 2012, especially in the bigger markets like China, India, Japan and Australia. In Southeast Asia, we have developed centers of excellence to help drive product adoption. We have extended our technology solutions wherever appropriate to APAC markets, but have been conscious to include local solutions from partners.

SE Asia has pretty high mobile use in terms of internet access, can you give some insight into the mobile strategy being deployed by Cadreon and MAP?

Yes, SE Asia is high on the radar when it comes to mobile, but our focus extends beyond mobile RTB which is currently limited in terms of available inventory. For us, and for our clients, the bigger play is to ensure that communications are designed from the beginning to take advantage of the third and fourth screens, and the role they each play in our consumers’ media and purchase patterns.

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The rate of growth in Southeast Asia at the moment is some of the strongest in APAC. ExchangeWire caught up with Jordan Khoo, Regional Vice President of APAC at MediaMind, to discuss the state of evolution in Southeast Asia and how MediaMind are navigating the diversity of the region.

Can you describe the MediaMind business across the Southeast Asia region? What is the current stage of evolution of ad server deployment across the region?

Southeast Asia, as a whole, still represents less than 5% of digital adspend, but it is growing very encouragingly, at double-digit percent growth, across the region. We set up shop in the region six years ago and have certainly seen very positive growth momentum, but it is still very much an investment market for us. Markets like Singapore will obviously be the most advanced markets in terms of usage, focusing on Direct Response campaigns, which utilise feature sets of conversion tracking, retargeting and Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO). The rest of the markets are a lot more brand-focused, which have many more rich media and video components into the mix.

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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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Nitin Chowdhary is Business Head & Vice President at PrecisionMatch (SVG Media). Here he discusses the roll out of SVG’s new personalised trageting solution in the region, as well as developing trends in the APAC display marketplace.

Why did SVG decide to launch PrecisionMatch?

Companies like BlueKai and eXelate were established in the North American market, not in APAC. This offered an opportunity to create a unique offering in the region, to be the APAC regions’s first data provider for digital marketing. This also offered the opportunity to create incremental revenue stream for publishers.

What industry requirements is PrecisionMatch answering? What need-gap are you trying to fill through PrecisionMatch?

Display advertising’s ROI is lagging behind search and social’s because it was less targeted than search and social. Essentially, display was historically bought and sold on the basis of website placements, rather than audience. Almost 60% of internet display inventory is now available in RTB in a disaggregated form. On last count, 20% of display advertising in US has moved to RTB, and the trend is accelerating. In this scenario, the only way to effectively target display advertising is by using targeting data. Without this ROI is destroyed.

A number of publishers are capable of generating good audience insights that should be leveraged across sites, rather than on one site that consumers visit. This creates the ability to make more money for these publishers. In the APAC region, which has about USD $700 million of display advertising spend, supply of inventory outstrips demand about five times. In addition to this, the content being consumed is fragmented. Buying plain impressions no longer drives ROI, so advertisers want to buy audiences rather than impressions. Our solution is to use PrecisionMatch data to buy the right audience. Data-targeted display can improve clickthrough rates by 300%, and postclick engagement by 200%, because the relevance of the audience is significantly improved.

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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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