Sydney, Australia – Global brand suitability platform Channel Factory has announced that it will be expanding its operations in Australia, and has hired Kevin Wong, former head of product marketing at TikTok, to be Channel Factory’s new vice president for Asia-Pacific. This new development will help Australian brands have greater control over contextual targeting and conscious advertising on user-generated content platforms.

Wong will be working alongside Alex Littlejohn, managing director for APAC at Channel Factory, to spearhead the growth of Channel Factory in Asia-Pacific. Wong will also be responsible for leading operations, product strategy, development, and driving sales growth.

Channel Factory’s technology allows brands to contextually target audiences on user-generated content platforms, brands have greater control over ad placements in a way that aligns with their brand values and eliminates reputational risks.

In addition, with the company being a YouTube measurement program partner, Channel Factory focuses on maximizing brand suitability, turning YouTube’s five billion videos and 500 hours per minute of new content into efficient advertising opportunities.

Speaking about his appointment, Wong said that he is thrilled at joining the company, adding that they want to achieve their mission of building a better digital advertising ecosystem by connecting brands with the right consumers in the right context; content that incorporates a brand’s definition of what is and is not suitable for that brand to be running adjacent to.

“Currently, there is a disconnect between the level of investments brands are making in user-generated content platforms, and the level of contextual targeting of audiences. Our goal for Channel Factory is to eliminate this reputational risk [while] maintaining the ROI of their campaigns across YouTube today and all platforms in the future,” Wong said.

Meanwhile, Littlejohn commented that their expansion to Australia is a step further in their mission to enable CMOs to consciously connect with consumers. He also added that Wong has a wealth of international experience and they are delighted to have him spearhead their operations in Australia and the wider APAC region.

“Channel Factory’s brand suitability solution goes far beyond traditional brand safety technologies and brings the contextual alignment of traditional TV and broadcast environments to user-generated content, while embedding its own brand values into the media planning strategy. Brand suitability is the metric that marketers need to work towards, in making sure they maximize their return on ad spend,” Littlejohn said.

Along with Wong, Channel Factory has made a number of diverse experienced hires, including Zenith’s Rhys Bennett as sales solution director.

Hong Kong – Global news company South China Morning Post (SCMP) has announced the launch of the next version of their existing brand sustainability tool, SIGNAL 2.0, featuring a suite of new functions to help drive optimization for advertisers and brands in their return of investment (ROI).

The new functions include ad fraud detection, personalization, and measurement by terms of viewability and brand lift.

The tool, which is under the SCMP Advertising arm that recently went under rebrand from ‘Advertising and Marketing Solutions Team’, ensures true performance measurement and enhancement at no extra cost, while aligning with supply path optimization goals and ensuring more media investment is put to work.

The platform also has its own viewability and time-in-view measurement for all campaigns and this data has been integrated for optimization and reporting to ensure the news platform can deliver quality engagement and post-click action. This means advertisers can increase their brand familiarity by up to 55% and ad recall by up to 79% with the platform engines’ ability to target ad placements with exposure time beyond five seconds.

“This advancement of our proprietary technology clearly demonstrates the value of working directly with a publisher as brands can now reduce their tech costs whilst also driving their overall performance,” said Ian Hocking, vice president of digital at SCMP.

Data collected by the new version of SIGNAL can help brands optimize their activation by making format, content, sentiment recommendations before a campaign goes live by looking at ad log data from the brand’s past campaigns as well as aggregated cohort data. Brand lift studies for all scaled display campaigns have also been introduced to help brands demonstrate the effectiveness of their branding campaigns and measure, awareness, consideration and intent, amongst other insights.

“With the understanding that marketers want to ensure their advertising commitment avoids all possible malicious and fake inventory, SCMP SIGNALensures the immediate identification and exclusion of spiders & bot traffic that minimises advertising fraud to help drive effective advertising spend,” the company said in a press statement.

Meanwhile, Timmy Bankole, associate director of operations at SCMP, commented, “SCMP continues to invest in its own advertising technology tools to ensure the best possible result for our advertisers, while ensuring we can continue to provide effective solutions independent of changes to the identity and data privacy marketplace. We also remain committed to transparency and third-party measurement so that brands may measure the uplift for themselves.”

SCMP has recently launched a new global subscription dedicated to enterprises and corporate organizations.