In this week's feature, guest writer Sujen Selva, Asia commercial director at SpotXchange, highlights key industry trends publishers and advertisers need to look out for as programmatic buying continues to see growing adoption in the Asia-Pacific region.

In Western markets, digital ad spend has started to eat into traditional media spend and video is beginning to chip away at the TV dollar. These trends, however, are still in their infancy in Asia – a market where the potential for video ad spend growth is huge. Even in countries with relatively low incidence of smartphone penetration and digital video consumption, the potential for incremental increases in adoption is massive, due to the sheer size of the populations in this region.

Last year was a big year for video, with the amount of content produced exploding and the ad dollar following closely behind. Online publishers are beginning to make a play for the TV ad dollar, and marketers are turning to video for its superior effectiveness.

Off the back of this growth, SpotXchange expects programmatic ad buying to capture up to 40% of the video ad market by the end of the year. Offering advertisers greater control, efficiency, and effectiveness in an age of data-driven marketing, where ad dollars are under increasing scrutiny, is a proposition difficult to ignore. Across the Asia-Pacific region, we expect around 50% of video ads to be sold programmatically in developed markets, and 15% in developing markets by the end of 2015.

As the space develops, there will be four market trends publishers and advertisers should watch for in this region:

1. Programmatic direct and private marketplaces will become the norm.

Programmatic will become less of a standalone term and more the foundation that supports all trading. This will lead to publishers further automating the sales process to both protect and grow their revenue and yield through private agreements with brands and agencies.

2. We are entering a man AND machine world, not man OR machine.

Programmatic will remove the middleman in some cases, but it is by no means a replacement for entire teams. It's about workflow automation, not intelligence automation.

The people using the technology will be the ones to find clients' incremental efficiencies.

3. Interactive video units will gain a stronghold in developed markets.

As marketers look beyond traditional metrics for video, interactive video units will bring a new dimension to effectiveness measures.

Brand advertisers will look to leverage interactive formats to maximise and measure engagement, and use video as a direct response medium, as well as a brand-building tool.

4. TV and online video will begin to converge, and 'programmatic TV' will enter the region.

As the online video ad market evolves and matures, we can expect to see a consolidation and strengthening of approach under the programmatic banner.

Treating 'TV' and 'online video' as mutually exclusive categories already feels as irrelevant as marking 'offline' and 'digital' marketing as separate approaches. One is complementary to the other.

Focus will begin to shift towards how video ads placed in different formats support each other and resonate with the right audiences. TV will be tested in a programmatic environment as the industry increasingly looks at planning on a single automated platform to optimise spend across multiple devices, as well as a heavily fragmented media landscape and multiple datasets.

It's quickly becoming obvious that programmatic advertising will become the basis of a growing segment of ad trading this year, driven by its economies of scale and growing demand from transparency-hungry advertisers. What's also obvious is the incredible growth in video that looms on the horizon for Asia.

As infrastructure across the region improves, the sky is the limit for advertising efficiency and effectiveness.