ExchangeWire caught up with Carl Costa, Founder and CEO of SlingServer Asia, a divison of StrikeAd Asia to gain some insight into the Southeast Asian mobile market.

The mobile ad market in the region appears to be more robust than desktop display? Was this a motivating factor for moving into Southeast Asia?

The Southeast Asian market is the next growth market for mobile advertising, hence our move to capitalise on this growth.

Can you describe the market in more detail? Can you give some insight into how it differs from other regions?

The Asian market offers us a huge opportunity in mobile advertising, as the adoption rate of smartphones is growing significantly across various countries in the region, which is a key difference between Europe and the US and Asia markets.

The market is also geographically varied, encompassing multiple cultures and languages. Singapore provides us with a diverse mix of cultures and people from across the region, which enables us to support multiple countries from Singapore. Many of our clients also operate throughout the Asian region from a Singapore base, and hence need to programmatically buy across multiple territories and countries. This is where StrikeAd come in, allowing these buyers to effectively plan, buy and execute their mobile advertising campaigns across these multiple countries.

What sort of liquidity do you see right now? Where does inventory predominantly come from?

We are integrated with several supply sources giving us access to over 20 billion ad requests per month. Market demands are increasing hugely, on a daily basis.

So is the initial proposition in Asia a “network of networks”, in effect? Is the predominant value around workflow and centralisation?

Our initial proposition in Asia is to leverage our global agency group relationships - providing our mobile demand side platform encompassing real time bidding. Ensuring these buyers can effectively plan, buy and execute using the StrikeAd platform. Centralisation of workflow is important and we can support that process for mobile ad buyers.

Do the ad networks you plug into have fully real time biddable capabilities, or is it more of an ad decisioning play? (i.e Deciding whether to take the impression?)

All of our current partners are fully integrated using the OpenRTB standard, where we can maximise the capabilities of real time bidding across several global networks. We are seeing more and more ad networks and supply partners adopting the OpenRTB standard and we are adding these supply sources on a daily basis, hence giving us a huge monetisation potential for these supply partners and driving value for our media and agency clients’ mobile ad campaigns in turn.

Do you think RTB can plug the revenue gap that publishers face right now? It would seem that we already have an oversupply problem. How can publishers increase yield?

Most definitely, as there is demand in the market that is not being fully monetised. Supply that is not monetised by non-RTB channels can now be monetised by RTB. StrikeAd has the ability to see, bid and buy on supply that may not be available through other mobile channels, and hence open new sources of delivery for brand and agencies that they would not normally have access to directly.

Do you see any differences between Europe to Asia in terms of ad monetisation? Fill rates? Platforms? Ad formats?

Ad monetisation models are similar to those in Europe and the US with CPM, CPC, CPD all in play. We work with supply partners on a global basis; hence this gives us access to fully RTB-enabled supply in Asia as well. Fill rates are always a challenge for any supply source, but given the capabilities of our technology and our ability to optimise in real time, we aim towards maximising fill rates. We are also certified with a number of rich media vendors working to the MRAID standard, giving us the capability to work across multiple ad formats including HTML5.