When I first crash-landed in Southeast Asia eight years ago, the concept of an ‘Ad Network’ – multiple publishers aggregated and organised into one piece of technology – was alien to the market. All inventories were procured on a single site basis, through a sales order, with fixed prices and hidden margins.
Looking down the lens in the future, I expect all inventories to be procured through programmatic technology – including programmatic TV – and impressions being procured across the digital space based on the value to that particular advertiser of that particular campaign at that particular time.
So we’ve come a long way right? Well, kind of.
Exchange Wire, a global provider of digital data and insights, claimed that 63% of advertisers have little understanding of programmatic advertising. It’s not that agencies and advertisers in the Philippines don’t know how they work but it’s impossible to scale a fully managed or self-serve co-operation without key support functions like account management, ad operations, tech support, strategic media planning, on-boarding, data analysis, etc.
The key advantages most multi-channel technologies bring include large-scale efficiency gains, increased ROI, automated optimization, transparency, cross channel analytics, unique targeting features and sophisticated reporting. What Ad Parlor found is that advertisers in local APAC markets are chomping at the bit to buy across the social and video space through one piece of technology but there are often multiple stakeholders and it requires a high-touch point service for a solid co-operation.
Another challenge is that the technologies have caused mass confusion about where everybody sits on the supply chain. At planner/buyer and marketer level, people often don’t quite understand who is supposed to do what and why, and how they ‘account for it’. On a more macro level, I believe over time it will cause organisations to re-think what value they can and should bring to the market.
Agencies have been quick to see how technology is going to change the game for digital advertising, but often slow in understanding how they charge clients for it and whether they should own it, use it, buy it, license it or work with vendors that ‘are it’.
What we know is that advertisers want it and that its deployment in campaigns makes digital advertising just work so much better. And most advertisers need to spend more on digital, as that is where their audience is. As an industry we need to focus on getting the right commercial relationship between the end advertiser and all the intermediaries that sit between them and the actual media. If we can’t do that, we fail to add value.
Within a five-year period all major advertisers in APAC and the Philippines will spend the lion’s share of their budget on digital, and working with a small number of technology partners that have the publishers and tech stack to meet their needs. I’m looking forward to being part of that journey.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Matt Sutton is the Senior Vice-President of Adknowledge and has over 10 years of experience managing businesses across major APAC markets. A dynamic business leader with cross-platform media background and extensive global contact book, he spent the last 8 years with C-Suite reporting lines where he managed all functions of the business, written and executed on business plans as well as holding full P&L responsibility.
This article was first published on the November-December 2015 issue of adobo magazine.
