Programmatic video grows in SE Asia

Warc, 29 May 2014

SINGAPORE: Advertisers in South East Asia are increasingly turning to programmatic buying, especially for video, as the region's market rapidly develops.

A new report from, SpotXChange, a video advertising platform, commissioned research from Forrester Consulting which surveyed 100 advertising and media professionals across South East Asia and Australia.

The results showed that, on average, companies spent 30% of their advertising budget on online video, but Australia had a higher proportion of such ads traded programmatically and within that a higher percentage were traded via real-time bidding (RTB).

In emerging markets, however, consumers spend more time online and with video and the report said the potential for RTB was "substantial" in South East Asia. Matt Von der Muhl, managing director of SpotXChange Asia Pacific told Campaign Asia-Pacific that the region was "turning into a mature market very quickly".

Brand safety and transparency were the most important factors for marketers and agencies on both the buying and selling sides across the region.

"The biggest cure for that is technology," said Von der Muhl. "Lots of companies are producing tech that helps with those issues and the more that gets implemented the more comfortable advertisers will be about trading in this space," he added.

The biggest variation in expectations between the mature Australian market and the still growing South East Asian one came in inventory, with respondents in the latter region expressing rather more concern about its availability.

Muhl said that SpotXChange was concentrating on adding premium publishers to its video exchange as he expected Asian consumers would start to look beyond YouTube.

"Asia is a region that's been quite comfortable with YouTube," he observed. "But advertisers are starting to want to find more audiences or to have brand alignment with different audiences.

"That's where we're finding that the Tier 1 publishers have a good opportunity to trade their video inventory in a programmatic environment."

Readers wanting to know more about programmatic buying can view sample content from a new Warc report, The Programmatic Primer, and sign up for a webinar on June 17 hosted by the report author Ted McDonnell, formerly head of digital innovation at Procter & Gamble.

Data sourced from Campaign Asia-Pacific, SpotXChange; additional content by Warc staff