New York, USA – Adtech company Kargo has acquired cloud-based video technology SaaS company Ziggeo. This move will see Ziggeo bringing a suite of products to Kargo’s growing omnichannel platform, including a video player, video recording capabilities, and numerous APIs. 

The acquisition will also enable Kargo to quickly expand its video offering with exclusive products that deliver value for audiences, brands, and publishers alike.

Over the coming months, Kargo will be focusing on building a next-generation ad-supported video player for publishers with the ultimate goal of creating a marketplace of advertising opportunities and content from content creators. 

Moreover, Ziggeo’s award-winning API and mobile-friendly design make it the ideal platform for next-generation video products, as Kargo looks to set a new standard for future digital video innovation within the industry. The Ziggeo developer team will also be joining Kargo to set the strategic direction for the combined organisations’ video player roadmap in order to deliver differentiated video ad products for advertisers.

Oliver Friedmann, founder and CTO at Ziggeo, commented that the Ziggeo team is thrilled to join Kargo, a company that shares our vision to deliver innovative and breakthrough experiences for their customers that grab attention.

“Together, we plan to launch new video products that will benefit from our combination of video player, video recording technology and sophisticated transcoding pipeline, which will be integrated into Kargo’s new and existing publisher partners and clients,” said 

Meanwhile, Harry Kargman, founder & CEO at Kargo, said that video is the fastest growing channel where consumers spend time to consume and create content, and they will innovate within this channel bringing new solutions to the open web. 

“Video innovation across the open web has been stagnant and we plan to disrupt the industry with new ideas and formats for advertisers and content creators. With Ziggeo, we can level up video advertising with unique, disruptive and industry-changing video formats and capabilities that meet consumers where they are and drive impactful experiences,” added Kargman.

Singapore – Streaming giants Netflix and Disney+ are going head-to-head with their ad-supported subscriptions this year by announcing its latest adtech tie-ups. Disney+ has tied up with The Trade Desk while Netflix has tied up with Microsoft.

Both streaming platforms previously operate on an ad-free subscription basis, but have shifted to these ad-supported ones following competition and expansion to other regions, including Asia-Pacific. Disney+ had announced its intention to do so by late this year, and Netflix as well after reporting substantial loss in subscriptions in 2021.

In the tie-up between Disney Advertising and The Trade Desk, advertisers can access Disney’s portfolio of premium supply, rooted in secure data collaboration and powered by automation through Disney’s Clean Room technology.

In addition, said agreement will enable a first-of-its kind integration between Disney’s proprietary ‘Audience Graph’ and the open-source identity framework, Unified ID 2.0, within a secure environment. As a result, buyers will be able to discover more addressable, biddable inventory across the Disney portfolio, all validated by Disney’s proprietary Audience Graph.

Rita Ferro, president for advertising sales at Disney Media & Entertainment Distribution, said, “Disney Advertising had a bold vision backed by proven results from the start, and we’re thrilled to continue to deliver on our commitment to power greater automation and addressability for our customers through this expanded deal with The Trade Desk.”

She added, “We have spent years investing in our data and technology strategy to create innovative solutions for advertisers to engage their audiences with greater precision and accuracy in a privacy-focused way. This first-to-market capability sets the stage to empower access to the Disney portfolio, validated by powerful audience insights, in a way that’s automated and accessible.”

Meanwhile, Tim Sims, chief revenue officer at The Trade Desk, commented, “With this agreement, Disney and The Trade Desk are pioneering a new approach to audience addressability in a post-cookie environment. By creating interoperability between Unified ID 2.0 and Disney’s Audience Graph, we are unlocking the opportunity for our customers to activate their first-party data at scale programmatically, against some of the world’s most premium content, across all channels. As a result, advertisers will be able to deliver relevant advertising, while ensuring consumers have more control of their own privacy.”

On the other hand, the partnership between Netflix and Microsoft is that it allows marketers to look to Microsoft for their advertising needs and will have access to the Netflix audience and premium connected TV inventory. All ads served on Netflix will be exclusively available through the Microsoft platform.

Greg Peters, COO at Netflix, said, “Microsoft has the proven ability to support all our advertising needs as we together build a new ad-supported offering. More importantly, Microsoft offered the flexibility to innovate over time on both the technology and sales side, as well as strong privacy protections for our members.”

He added, “It’s very early days and we have much to work through. But our long-term goal is clear: More choice for consumers and a premium, better-than-linear TV brand experience for advertisers. We’re excited to work with Microsoft as we bring this new service to life.”

Singapore – theAsianparent, the parenting content and community platform under the parent-tech company, The Parentinc, has launched its first-party data insights and activation services called ‘ADvantage’. This offers a breakthrough solution to mum and child brands, amidst industry upheaval over third-party cookies fast becoming a thing of the past.

Akshay Trivedi, chief commercial officer at The Parentinc, noted, “This monumental change aside, we’ve seen how businesses in the past few years have been moving towards performance over-amplification. By launching this service, we are able to fast-track that movement for our partner brands, towards advertising efficacy and efficiency through tailor-made campaigns.” 

With theAsianparent having a wealth of tools, resources, and forums across parenthood stages and a robust data science team, the platform is able to convert meaningful data into streamlined, customised user experiences. Helping its brand partners thrive in a privacy-safe ecosystem, this process now also produces refreshingly relevant and action-packed advertising.

Beginning with highly valuable, reliable 1P data plus custom research such as polls and surveys, theAsianparent and brands work together to devise strategies and goals per customer segment—maximising scale, improving campaign performance, and reducing ad wastage. Going beyond demographics and device, customer clustering can also be based on: parenting stage and milestone moments; consumer lifestyle and interests; and brand affinity and product inquiry, amongst others, which is based on over 50 data points. Bespoke activation features such as sequential messaging and mid-flight analysis for campaign course correction and content enhancement are also offered.

Roshni Mahtani Cheung, The Parentinc Group’s CEO and founder, shared that data, products for parents by parents, and engaging with their community at every turn, have long given them the confidence to say, ‘We know SEA mums’. 

“We experience firsthand how the depth of this data leads us to understand today’s mums—their concerns offline, [and] their habits online. These, combined with the soft knowledge that’s beyond hard numbers and patterns, guide our decisions. We are happy to be able to offer this service to our brand partners; while, very importantly, continuing to keep user data safety paramount,” said Cheung.

Meanwhile, Malena Gong, theAsianparent’s VP for product and partnerships, said, “Our 1P data-based ad solutions ensure that brand action is maximised at every stage of the marketing funnel. The advantage is seen well before roll-out, targeting only the most relevant set within an already relevant audience. At the advocacy level, the forums are already set up, where mums can easily share their brand experiences with the community.”

Cannes, France Leading companies committed to improving fairness in marketing campaigns. The initiative announced at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2022, brought together agencies, brands, and other leaders to generate awareness and take action towards mitigating bias in advertising technology. Committing organisations include IBM, Delta Air Lines, WPP, Mindshare, 4A’s, IAB and the Ad Council.

In 2021, IBM launched a research initiative to explore the hypothesis that bias can exist in ad technology, which initial findings confirmed. The research also showed that mitigating bias in ad technology was possible by using AI tools and resources in marketing processes. More industry participation and data collection are needed to better understand the potential impact of bias on these campaigns, but several industry leaders are demonstrating early activism by raising awareness and taking action via IBM’s Advertising Fairness Pledge.

“While the risk of bias in advertising is well known, by making this commitment, these organisations are among the first in the industry to take action,” said Bob Lord, IBM senior vice president of The Weather Company and Alliances

“Together, we are agreeing to educate ourselves and our companies and ask other industry leaders to join us in helping to mitigate bias in advertising,” added Lord.

Bias is often unintentional, a result of human assumptions and judgments encoded into algorithms that can result in unfair targeting, exclusion of certain groups, and marketing campaign failures. Organisations taking the pledge can contribute data to ongoing studies that seek to better explain the impact of bias. According to Salesforce’s 2022 State of the Connected Customer survey, nearly 62 per cent of consumers surveyed reported they are concerned about bias in AI, up from just 54 per cent two years prior, emphasising the imperative for brands and agencies to better understand its impacts.

“As technology and data prevalence accelerates, the risk for bias in advertising compounds. It is our duty to address this head-on,” said Adam Gerhart, global CEO of Mindshare. “We believe the industry needs to take clear and intentional action, which is why we are committing to leverage the Advertising Toolkit for AI Fairness 360,” added Gerhart.

As the advertising industry continues to face issues related to privacy and transparency, many organisations believe that tackling bias in ad tech could be the next key area of focus for marketers. With increasing consumer demand for transparency in how their data is used, marketers must look for new ways to remain effective. Tapping into alternative privacy-forward data sources, such as weather data, can be effective predictors of behaviour that could also help rebuild trust with consumers.

“As a global brand, we know that every decision we make, whether it’s about a supplier, an employee or an ad campaign, is a reflection of our values and the change we want to see in the world,” said Emmakate Young, Delta’s managing director of Brand Marketing.

Hong Kong – Emodo, the mobile adtech business under Ericsson, has partnered with CKDelta, a data innovation company, to provide more relevant ad experiences for consumers, while helping advertisers improve inventory, targeting and campaign quality through AI solutions Delvify. 

The alliance between Emodo and CKDelta further expands on the companies’ established international partnership, which debuted in the UK in 2020. In that market, these models have proven to significantly elevate the quality and accuracy of advertising data, enabling marketers to tailor messaging more effectively and make ads more relevant for consumers.

According to Alistair Goodman, CEO of Emodo, they will introduce solutions in Hong Kong and across the Asia-Pacific region that empower marketers with relevant, privacy-centric solutions that optimise ad effectiveness and ROI. He also added that under the collaboration, CKDelta will apply anonymised data from mobile networks within CK Hutchison’s portfolio of companies to validate the accuracy of advertising data in programmatic environments.

“These validation insights will be fed into Emodo’s advanced AI engine to authenticate the accuracy and quality of audience and inventory data in real time, reducing the likelihood of advertising fraud in bidding transactions. This ensures Emodo solutions (Emodo Verified Audiences and Emodo Verified Supply) provide only verified, fraud-safe data and inventory,” Goodman said.

Emodo Verified Audiences and Verified Supply in Hong Kong are available exclusively through enterprise partner Delvify. Interested advertisers can access all Emodo solutions through Delvify’s managed service and issued deal IDs.

Meanwhile, Charles Allard, CEO of Delvify, commented, “With Emodo Verified Audiences and Emodo Verified Supply, marketers can better achieve campaign quality and relevance for their audiences. We’re excited to collaborate with Emodo in this market and believe these solutions will usher in a new era of campaign connection, accuracy and quality in programmatic buying.”

Australia  Australian ad tech company Cartelux has appointed former Audi Global head of media manager Kristin Harder as global head of strategy and partnerships.

The new role will see Harder steer the strategic direction of the company, launch marketing initiatives, and grow the business’ global partnership networks.

Harder joins from Audi, where during her nine-year tenure, she managed marketing communication, events & sponsorship for China, Audi’s single most important market. Her career grew to incorporate global marketing responsibilities when she became global head of sales media, before taking on global media responsibilities. 

Kristin Harder, head of strategy and partnerships at Cartelux said, “Cartelux is targeting a long-standing pain point within global campaign management by integrating retail networks seamlessly into the campaign and media buying process.” 

Harder welcomed the opportunity to apply her international experience to the fast-paced startup world as Cartelux shapes the future of retail marketing. “I have seen first-hand the critical divide that often lies between OEM and retail networks, in particular in digital advertising. Maximising synergies is critical for reaching in-market audiences at the right time and place. Cartelux has truly innovated this space by offering a simple, time and cost-efficient platform solution,” Harder added.

Cartelux Founder and CEO Josh Williams commented, “Kristin’s global experience, understanding of the most complex automotive retail environment, combined with her global marketing and media background is a perfect fit for the company. I am delighted to have her on board to grow the business together.” 

Harder joins the senior management team of automotive veterans at Cartelux, including Global Industry Lead Automotive Raoul Picello, General Manager EMEA Herve Genin, Global General Manager Patrick Doble, and Chief Financial Officer Stephen Burns. 

The appointment comes at a time of rapid global growth for the business following client activations in Thailand, India, Australia, Switzerland, Spain, and Germany.

Singapore – Machine learning company Moloco has announced the latest updates to its cloud-based programmatic advertising platform, ‘Moloco Cloud Demand-Side Platform’ (DSP). 

The Moloco Cloud DSP latest updates will focus on improving performance through intelligent budget allocation, automating workflows through smart campaign user interface, user experience (UI/UX), and ad creation. 

Powered by Moloco’s proprietary machine learning algorithms, the updates include ‘optimised budget allocation’, where real-time data is continuously incorporated into the machine learning engine, while the ‘intuitive campaign setup interface’, with Moloco’s new UI/UX updates, enables marketers to set up their campaigns through an intuitive guided flow and experience built-in recommendations. With this, customers can now create new campaigns in four easy steps with built-in recommendations presented based on the campaign’s goals. And lastly, the ‘auto-generated video end cards’, which allows the platform to now auto-generate video end cards in portrait, landscape and square formats when uploading a video as the campaign’s creative.

Anurag Agrawal, VP of product at Moloco, said, “Our DSP solution empowers growth marketers to leverage their own unique, first-party data to increase the returns on their advertising campaigns.”

He added, “These latest updates, combined with our powerful machine learning algorithms that pinpoint target audiences and adjust bidding strategies in real time, help our customers not only improve their overall campaign experience, but also help achieve greater accuracy and higher performance at lower cost.”

Bengaluru, India – Adtech The Trade Desk has announced the launch of its first market engineering hub in India, located at the city of Bengaluru. This is the company’s fifth in the Asia-Pacific region after Australia, China, Hong Kong and Singapore. The new facility will tap into the vast product and engineering talent pool in India as the company advances innovation for programmatic advertising. 

In recent months, the company announced strategic partnerships with leading players like Samsung Ads and Lifesight to offer the full suite of digital advertising capabilities on the open internet.

Tejinder Gill, general manager at The Trade Desk in India, said, “The rise of digital media will spur Indian marketers to adopt data-driven, digital advertising solutions. Over time, more and more digital advertising will be transacted programmatically. There is immense growth opportunity for us here in India. In fact, we have been encouraged by the momentum of our commercial office and are doubling down on hiring engineers, as well as for business-related roles. Our new engineering hub will help us stay ahead of the innovation curve.”

Since the launch of its operations in India last year, The Trade Desk has been helping India’s digital marketers capture the fast-growing advertising opportunities on the open internet. The Trade Desk plans to hire more talent to meet the growing demand for programmatic advertising as brands continue to accelerate and shift spend towards digital advertising.

Meanwhile, Shantanu Goel, director of engineering at The Trade Desk in India, commented, “The Trade Desk’s community of engineers value collaboration, diversity and critical thinking. Engineers in our Bengaluru engineering hub will be part of the global engineering team who will work on large-scale projects spanning around the world, as well as petabyte-scale data challenges, machine learning, and advanced visualisations.”

Toronto, Canada – Global independent programmatic digital out of home (DOOH) ad tech company Hivestack has announced the appointment of Kira LeBlanc as its newest global chief marketing officer, effective 1 April this year and will be responsible for leading the team responsible for the company’s global marketing across all of its over 25 markets.

LeBlanc will report directly to Andreas Soupliotis, co-founder and CEO of Hivestack, working closely with the C-suite team at Hivestack. She will lead and scale the global marketing team that includes digital marketing, product marketing, content, communications, localization, creative as well as the regional marketing leads across EMEA, the Americas and APAC.

She first joined Hivestack in early 2021 when the company announced its global expansion and has since expanded her role to VP of global marketing. Prior to Hivestack, LeBlanc held positions at globally scaled organisations such as AOL, Oath, Verizon Media (now Yahoo) and several other digital media companies, along with her former work as a consultant supporting small and medium businesses and start-ups working on digital transformation.

According to Hivestack, continued development of the global Hivestack brand and operations will be a crucial part of the role but it will also be expected that the CMO brings a wealth of experience working with international markets which require a focus on building localised, relevant and authentic narratives.

Speaking about her appointment, she said, “It’s an honour to become a member of such a high performance C-Suite team. Leading Hivetsack’s marketing and brand strategy during such a transformative time for our industry is an incredible opportunity. As Global CMO I look forward to delivering across several key priorities, including driving meaningful connections with DOOH publishers to ensure they benefit from programmatic monetization via our SSP/Exchange and ensuring they understand how they can maximise yield across programmatic and direct sales channels via the Hivestack Ad Server and our recently announced Yield Optimization solution.”

She added, “On the other side, I will seek to evangelise to global agency and brand partners that they can plan, activate and measure DOOH globally with great precision via our state-of-the art, audience-driven DSP, or by working with our brilliant omni-channel DSP partners. Put succinctly, I am thrilled to help shape the future of programmatic DOOH as Hivestack’s global CMO.”

Meanwhile, Soupliotis shared, “I am so very thrilled to offer the well-deserved appointment of Global Chief Marketing Officer to Kira. Kira has demonstrated a unique ability to dig deep into the business while maintaining a prudent peripheral view of the industry. Since joining Hivestack last year, she has played an integral role in supporting the growth of our global operations and business development, building out our multi-language digital and social media ecosystem, growing our team and the necessary infrastructure for our marketing operations across countless new markets.” 

He added, “Her commitment to authenticity and detail is unparalleled which has allowed for her to execute both a global and local strategy without losing the important nuances of each. I am thrilled to have her join the C-Suite at Hivestack alongside our talented global leadership team.”

Singapore – Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) has recently unveiled enhancements to HUAWEI Ads, its programmatic digital advertising platform, in the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2022, which ran from 28 February to 3 March in Barcelona, Spain. 

HUAWEI Ads is a programmatic advertising marketplace designed specifically to enable advertisers and brands to reach and directly engage with Huawei smart device and app users. One of the new features showcased is its enhanced Universal App Campaigns (UAC) mode, where advertisers now only need to upload three ad creatives to enable the system to automatically generate more than 400 variations based on the original versions. The UAC mode also enables intelligent image creation and personalised colour matching to feed ads based on the user’s preference.

In addition, HUAWEI Ads has introduced ‘preset templates’ in the platform for advertisers to create customised ad landing pages with features such as lead generation form at ease.

HUAWEI Ads has now expanded its operation to over 170 countries and regions worldwide. In addition to the full suite of Huawei’s native app resources such as AppGallery, Petal Search, and HUAWEI Video, there are over 36,000 third-party publishers and SSP platforms aggregated into the HUAWEI Ads network. Additionally, HUAWEI Ads provides tools such as Smart Bidding and Smart Banners with the aim to give advertisers more control over the ad settings.