News

Programmatic spend in ‘developing’ Asia to rise 73 per cent this year

Programmatic spend in Asia

Programmatic spend in ‘developing Asia’

Asia’s emerging markets for automated media trading are the fastest growing in the world, according to a study by media agency IPG Mediabrands.

The research finds that total programmatic spend in ‘developing Asia’, which excludes maturer markets China, Australia and Japan, will reach US$501 million in 2014 – up 73 per cent – with Korea and Taiwan dominating that spend.

Korea is the largest of a group of ‘developing’ markets that includes Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, with $237m expected to be spent on programmatic in 2014.

Programmatic trading, including both RTB and non-RTB buying, will make up one quarter of total display spend in developing APAC this year.

While the combined size of the programmatic trading sector in Japan, China and Australia is six times larger than the rest of those in developing Asia Pacific, real-time bidding penetration in Malaysia and Singapore is expected to surpass that of China this year.

RTB penetration in Malaysia and Singapore will pass 30 per cent by 2018, the research suggests.

The study observes that since no market is particularly big individually yet in Asia’s developing programmatic markets, few domestic players have emerged to compete with the global firms; Google is the dominant player in most developing APAC markets.

Growth rates are high enough in the smaller countries to justify global programmatic companies setting up even though the market is still one to two years away from financial viability, the report reckons.

Prashant Kumar, president of IPG Mediabrands, World Markets Asia, said: “Traditional media – the broadcasting and the media buying was designed to homogenize perceptions by painting vast swathes of highly interesting and unique individuals with a very, very fat collective brush. It was almost communist in its insensitivity to their uniqueness, annoying due to frequent lack of relevance, and required vast operational resources that sometimes felt pre-industrial.”

He added: “Programmatic is the new way – where intelligent, fast learning, adaptive autobots can precision-target messages for max relevance and impact, often in real time. While human insights and inspirations will continue to provide the mutant new pathways to these autobots, the job of finding the optimal best within the give space and constraints, is now moved to algorithms. Programmatic is already transforming the lower funnel, and will more and more impact the upper funnel investments as well.”

North America is by far the world’s biggest programmatic market, with more than half of total spend.

ADVERTISEMENT

Get the latest media and marketing industry news (and views) direct to your inbox.

Sign up to the free Mumbrella Asia newsletter now.

 

SUBSCRIBE

Sign up to our free daily update to get the latest in media and marketing