Tag: Digital Advertising

Singapore – Performance-driven ad solutions provider Rakuten Advertising has named Sydney-based e-commerce growth partner and digital agency The Thoughtful Agency as its first Platinum Agency Partner in the Asia-Pacific region.

The Thoughtful Agency has been recognised for delivering ‘comprehensive and industry-leading’ solutions for their clients through the Rakuten Affiliate Network.

“We are delighted to welcome The Thoughtful Agency as our first Platinum Agency Partner in the Asia-Pacific region,” said Nicola Murray, director of advertiser and agency development at Rakuten Advertising.

She added, “The team’s dedication to driving success for their clients aligns perfectly with our mission to empower the digital advertising industry to outthink and outperform through performance. We can’t wait to see what the team will achieve—this is just the beginning.”

The Thoughtful Agency’s Chief Growth Officer, Prav De Silva, also expressed his excitement about becoming Rakuten’s Platinum Agency Partner and the opportunities it brings for its clients.

“We are honoured to be recognised as Rakuten Advertising’s first Platinum Agency Partner in the Asia-Pacific region. This partnership will allow us to continue to drive innovation in the affiliate marketing space alongside Rakuten Advertising and leverage its innovative solutions to drive even greater value for our client portfolio,” he added.

Rakuten Advertising’s Platinum Agency Partner program is an exclusive community of the company’s partnered agencies. The program is designed for agencies that have a deep understanding of Rakuten Advertising’s products and services and have demonstrated their ability to leverage these solutions to deliver exceptional results for their clients. 

This follows Rakuten Advertising’s launch of Accelerate, a fully-managed, affiliate marketing program led by experienced analysts leveraging unique data insights, competitive intelligence, custom campaign modelling, and publisher matchmaking.

Singapore – Digital advertising company PubMatic and AI-powered advertising solutions provider Silverpush have announced their strategic partnership that aims to enable brands and advertisers across the Asia Pacific to better connect with their target audiences through data-driven advertising.

The partnership, effective immediately, will allow advertisers to access to important audience data that can be applied on the sell side to bring greater efficiency to their campaigns. Advertisers can also leverage Silverpush’s AI-powered contextual data programmatically through Connect, PubMatic’s audience solution. 

Connect will allow advertisers to engage audiences through privacy-compliant solutions that perform without relying on third-party cookies or outdated strategies and enable advertisers to access PubMatic’s premium inventory and use Silverpush’s hyper-contextual targeting. 

“We’re thrilled to be partnering with Silverpush – together, PubMatic and Silverpush will provide advertisers with a powerful suite of data-driven tools to help them optimize their campaigns and achieve their marketing objectives,” said Brandon Lee, director, addressability APAC at PubMatic. 

He also explained that Connect will bring targeting to the sell-side,  which means buyers can gain greater control over how their inventory and data are packaged and transacted to drive the best performance for their campaigns.

Raushida Vasaiwala, vice president for APAC at Silverpush, also commented, “We are excited to partner with PubMatic to provide our AI-powered contextual advertising solutions for a wider reach of audience in the APAC market, starting from Indonesia. This partnership will enable advertisers to create highly targeted campaigns that are based on real-time consumer contexts, delivering better campaign results and ROAS.” 

Recently, PubMatic has also partnered with real-time data services provider Proximic to launch an ID-less targeting solution for marketers and media companies.

Singapore – As the pandemic thrust consumers to rely more on digital consumption, brands had to recalibrate their presence and leverage online channels to ensure they continued to reach their target consumers. This pandemic-induced reality is what gave way to the third wave of Digital Advertising — prompted by Retail Media. 

In the recently concluded conference ‘What’s NEXT 2023: Marketing in Asia Pacific’ by MARKETECH APAC, JJ Eastwood, managing director at Carousell Media Group, dug deeper into retail media and how it became the way to activate digital advertising’s now ‘third big wave’.

Watch the full presentation of Carousell Media Group’s JJ Eastwood here.

If we’re now in the third, where can we date back the earlier ripples? The study by Interactive Advertising Bureau Southeast Asia and India (IAB SEA+India) and Carousell Media Group revealed that the first wave, in fact, started with the search era in the 2000s and then followed by the social era in the 2010s when social media networks took part in digital advertising. Fast forward to 2020 — retail media networks finally took over. 

Retail media networks are classified into digital marketplaces, mass merchant retailers, and commerce intermediaries or delivery providers. To name a few, some known retail media networks are Amazon and Walmart in the US and in Asia, there are Carousell, Grab ads and panda ads.

In his presentation, Eastwood emphasised that five factors are driving the growth of retail media. This includes first-party data, which enables retail media networks to serve customers with relevant advertisements; closed-loop attribution, which helps in better understanding of ads; contextually relevant ads to the consumer; ability to reach relevant audiences at scale; and capability to run full-funnel campaigns. 

However, in particular, the growth of retail media was propelled by sponsored search ads which make up almost 80% of retail media networks’ revenue. 

Eastwood explained, “Those sponsored search ads are as relevant as organic search listings. This is what is at the core of every retail media network, what delivers results and meaningful insights for brands.”

The existence of retail media fills the needs of the brands since there has been a decline in television advertisements and the loss of third-party identifiers, whilst the stores are starting to shift into the digital world.

With this, Eastwood emphasised the retail media trends that emerged, particularly in Asia, where 99% of the brands and agencies plan to increase their retail media spending over the next 12 months. Moreover, according to Eastwood, 70% of advertisers are seeing an improvement in performance from retail media networks over other channels, whilst brands say that they will advertise on a retail media network despite not listing products in that marketplace.

Marketers face many challenges when advertising, such as measuring marketing outcomes, optimising cross-channel campaigns, and removing third-party identifiers, particularly cookies. Eastwood shared how retail media can solve these challenges. 

What’s next for retail media in Asia? Concluding his presentation, Eastwood said, “I think what is gonna happen for the next six to 12 months, particularly in Asia, are more data collaborations. Retailers and brands can come together and enrich each other’s data upon what they know about certain consumer profiles.”

He added, “Through the use of DSPs, Retail media is moving up the funnel into video and digital out-of-home formats. However, through the likes of shoppable videos, retail media will blur the lines between traditional branding campaigns and direct response.”

What’s NEXT 2023: Marketing in Asia Pacific is the inaugural 2-day hybrid industry conference of MARKETECH APAC which was launched last February 28 and March 1 as a culminating event under What’s NEXT 2023. 

More than 200 in-person participants and more than 100 virtual attendees participated in the conference to know more about what’s next in the different marketing disciplines including growth marketing, marketing and technology, retail media, public relations, travel marketing, influencer marketing, customer experience, and many more.

In the virtual conference held on the second day, Eastwood was joined by other marketing leaders from panda ads, Boost, CARSOME, and Hubilo, PrimeCredit Limited and Rentokil Initial amongst others, who also shared their insights about various marketing facets.

Carousell Media Group, the speaker for the keynote presentation, is a proud bronze sponsor of What’s NEXT 2023: Marketing in Asia Pacific. Carousell Media Group is the advertising arm of Carousell Group, which helps brands across Southeast Asia and Hong Kong acquire new customers and increase sales. With tens of millions of active shoppers and hundreds of millions of product searches on its marketplaces every month, brands can connect with consumers through full-funnel campaigns, drive conversions and gain valuable marketing insights.

Singapore – Global media and marketing solutions group IPG Mediabrands and software development company Scope3 announced a first-of-its-kind industry partnership today, with the aim of measuring and reducing the former’s clients’ carbon footprint from digital advertising.

Mediabrands will be offering their clients emissions measurement, compensation, and reduction capabilities using the standards established by Scope3, while helping increase the capacity of players across the digital ecosystem to decarbonize media emissions at scale.

The partnership will introduce complementary and mutually dependent services that provide a road map to net zero. This includes measurement and reporting of emissions generated by the end user consuming the ad by augmenting Mediabrands’ existing media consumption carbon calculator. 

It will also include using Scope3’s Green Media Products to achieve carbon-neutral campaign activations, as well as leveraging Scope3’s emissions measurement, while Mediabrands initiate dialogue and collaboration across the digital supply chain to promote ad delivery paths optimised to reduce emissions.

“Our partnership with Scope3 is one of many commitments Mediabrands is making to take intentional steps in support of climate action as part of our broader Media for Good efforts,” said Eileen Kiernan, global CEO of Mediabrands.

She added, “For action to be taken, access to accurate data and reporting is an essential first step. Scope3 provides critical insights and information that enable us to make smarter, cleaner investment choices.”

Scope3 CEO and co-founder Brian O’Kelley also commented, “From the beginning of Scope3, Mediabrands has been an incredible partner. They were the first agency network to purchase Green Media Products as part of a decarbonization strategy. They have tirelessly advocated for sustainability with their clients, vendors, and publishers.”

IPG Mediabrands has also partnered with Amplified Intelligence last year, in its efforts to optimise its clients’ media selections.

Digital advertising allows marketers to target consumers more precisely with more personalised, relevant information, in real-time, on multiple devices, and on the go. Digital advertising’s highly personalised nature should make it more relevant to audiences, but brand risks, supply path murkiness, privacy concerns, and ad fraud create barriers. 

Advertisers are looking for more transparency around targeting customers online after the deprecation of cookies. I believe there will be even more demand for scalable and privacy-friendly attention metrics beyond viewability and clicks to provide more granular insights, engagement and outcomes. Brands are focused on driving outcomes and conversion from ad spending and they’re looking for more privacy compliant and scalable solutions. 

Optimising attention drives outcomes

Our research team analysed data to understand how our partners could leverage technology to capture more significant attention to understand correlations between quality, suitability, and time-in-view. The research uncovered that viewability and time in view have a medium correlation (intuitively makes sense). Moreover, when only looking at impressions on contextually relevant pages (i.e. Toyota ad on an automotive site), the correlation becomes more vital. The practical implication of insight like this is that you can drive greater attention by targeting higher viewability rates in programmatic prebid targeting and utilising contextual targeting solutions.

For example, when we analysed the automotive vertical, we saw that when the context was relevant and optimised for viewability, there was an 8.3-second increase in time-in-view for every 10% increase in viewability rates. This was 2.4x higher than in a non-optimized context. 

Here’s a preview of what we discovered:

  • Time-in-view increases as viewability and brand safety increase
  • 57% increase in conversions for viewable and brand-safe impressions compared to non-viewable and not safe
  • 171% increase in conversions for impressions with time-in-view greater than 15 seconds

Creative, contextual, and privacy-compliant advertising 

It is essential to consider how relevant the ads are to the consumers to drive greater attention. It’s human nature to engage with information that we find interesting — whether that’s through engaging in creative or contextual relevance.

IAS research showed a 40% lift in memory of a particular ad when contextually aligned. Brands can harness the dual power of contextual targeting and high-quality placements to drive greater brand engagement. It’s also vital to acknowledge that placing ads beside low-quality content can have significant consequences, including a high risk of damaging brand reputation. To ensure online ads drive the right attention and outcome, aligning with suitable contexts must be a top priority.

As our industry prepares for a cookieless future and increasingly moves away from third party audience targeting, advertisers have a significant opportunity to be intentional with contextual tools. While many brands will focus on building and investing and first-party and second-party data, marketers will start blending this expensive and highly targeted approach with scalable advertising that can be achieved via environments that are contextually relevant, using contextual as a proxy for third party audiences.

Ultimately, a shift to contextual advertising is also good news for the industry because it aligns with the preferences of privacy-conscious consumers while achieving the brand’s goals for engagement.

This article was written by Laura Quigley, SVP for APAC at IAS.

Singapore – Ever since tech juggernauts such as Google and Apple have announced that they are putting down an iron fist on privacy, the world of digital advertising has been shaken with brands and marketers suddenly thrust to the challenge of uncompromised campaigns even with the absence of what have been their cornerstone – third-party cookies. 

Due to this looming challenge, conversations around viable solutions spurred, but the industry, looking ahead to being crippled by an end of an era, would need more definitive answers to break down the perplexity of a cookie-less world.

This is why MARKETECH APAC, the digital media for the marketing and advertising industry in APAC, in partnership with Oracle, is taking the wheel to steer the discussion into what presents to be a top effective strategy for this dilemma – loyalty marketing. Happening on April 28, 2022, the webinar ‘The Future of Marketing: Loyalty-led strategies in a cookie-less world’, aims to unravel the practicability and sensibility of loyalty-focused solutions on keeping the quality of brands’ marketing intact amid a more privacy-driven digital landscape. 

We have gathered marketing leaders in the region from the industries of media, imaging, and technology, to help shine light on how loyalty, put at the heart of our marketing arsenal, can help us thrive in this entirely new environment. 

Joining the industry discussion are Norsiah Juriani Johari, the vice president of product marketing at Astro Malaysia; Anvey Factora, the head of marketing communications, e-commerce and retail of Canon Philippines; and Lisa Collins, the director of customer experience strategy at Oracle. 

Each of them will be sharing their expert views on why loyalty is never dead, and why it matters in a cookie-less world as well as the personalisation strategies that work best to boost brand loyalty in Southeast Asia markets. Furthermore, they will also be discussing the role of data in creating future-ready loyalty marketing. 

Shaina Teope, the regional editor of MARKETECH APAC, commented, “I believe that as we put an end to what has been a fixture in our marketing gameplans, we are called to be overprepared and be more than ready for such tricky independence. This is the worthy price to pay for a much safer digital landscape, and we’re here to show you how loyalty marketing can warrant an answer.” 

The webinar, ‘The Future of Marketing: Loyalty-led strategies in a cookie-less world’, will be held on April 28, 2022, 2:30 pm SGT. Secure your spot at the webinar HERE.

Singapore – As digital advertising expenditure reaches new records, advertisers continue to waste their ad dollars through the Asia-Pacific, with more than $137.4m set to be wasted in the January to March 2022 quarter, according to data from independent media agency Next&Co.

The report found that brands in the retail sector will report the most digital ad spend wastage, of almost $32m. It was followed by insurance at $28m, finance at $26.5m, real estate at $19.8m, education at $16m, and health at $14.7m.

Across digital media channels, the most digital ad spend will be wasted on Facebook at $53m, followed by Google at $45m, LinkedIn at $28m, and Bing at $10.7m.

The data was collected using the company’s proprietary media auditing tool Prometheus.

John Vlasakakis, co-founder at Next&Co, said, “It’s alarming to see what are unacceptable levels of digital ad spend wastage in the region, especially as digital spend is set to reach $4 billion in Southeast Asia and increasing to a third of all ad spend. Prometheus has now audited more than 500 brands across APAC, with all showing varying levels of wastage across industry categories – brands need to become more aware of the dangers of complacency breeds. Spending smarter and not harder needs to be the attitude amongst brands of all sizes as this is how scale and company growth can be achieved.”

He added, “Procurement also needs to provide more negotiating power to marketing. For example, the fact that one financial services provider had procurement negotiate the cheapest rate but allowed for a clause for the agency to never be audited during their three-year term gobsmacked me. If that isn’t a red flag, I don’t know what is. Digital marketing activity isn’t occurring above board, and they are now powerless to take action.”

Hanoi, Vietnam – Despite digital advertising seeing a boom in the Vietnamese market, perception among Vietnamese consumers says otherwise, stating that they are getting tired of digital advertisements, the latest survey from data and analytics company YouGov shows.

According to the survey, around 43% of Vietnamese consumers find online ads annoying. On the contrary, around 25% of the respondents agreed that online advertising is interesting while 30% say that online advertising is creative. Despite the positive feedback, around 47% of consumers said that they always skip or want to skip online ads.

The survey noted that too much online advertising can drown out quality content for businesses. As such, online ads need to be exceptionally creative to stand out from the crowd and capture the attention of consumers.

Thue Quist Thomasen, CEO at YouGov Vietnam, said that their survey also showed that even though most people remember seeing online ads, they are significantly less likely to recall clicking on ads or buying products after seeing ads.

“In my view, the online marketing industry in Vietnam is largely, and fairly, preoccupied with tracking ad frauds and viewability. But marketers often pay insufficient attention to the metrics that truly matter, such as impact and quality, which are the key elements that drive advertising success. Why make sure people can view an ad, if the ads are boring and annoying,” Thomasen said.

Singapore – DoubleVerify, the software company dedicated to digital media measurement, has launched its podcast series titled ‘Authentic Ad Matters’ where they tackle the latest trends in digital advertising. Said podcast series will be hosted by journalist and media expert Steve Hemsley.

Some of the invited organizations for the podcast series include TikTok, PubMatic, ISBA, Advertising Association, Conscious Advertising Network, and Dell. Topics range from fighting against misinformation to the opportunity a post-cookie world presents.

DoubleVerify has already released three podcast episodes as of writing, where they discussed topics including the role of quality in digital media, the implications of the unchanged lockdown in CTV’s boost in a post-pandemic world, and the impact of cookies and data regulation on advertising.

Speaking to MARKETECH APAC, DoubleVerify said that they hope that the podcast episodes will serve as a ‘masterclass’ on how to react to what is happening in the industry right now — and what will happen over the next several months and years to come. 

“We decided to venture into the podcast space as we wanted a medium that is easily accessible to our audience – whether it was time in-between meetings or their commute from home. These podcasts aim to educate everyone about the complex and ever-evolving world of digital advertising by building their knowledge and understanding through fascinating insights from some of the most respected experts in the industry,” DoubleVerify told MARKETECH APAC.

Meanwhile, Nick Reid, RVP for Northern Europe at DoubleVerify shared to MARKETECH APAC, “Advertisers need to be on the ball when it comes to how the industry is evolving and how changes affect their brands, consumers and businesses. The podcast shines a light on the biggest issues, challenges and trends important to industry pros today, in a way that is easy and convenient to access.”

Aside from being available on their site, the podcast is also available on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts.

This is the era of privacy. The modern consumer expects truly personalized experiences on whatever touchpoint they engage with your brand. Challenge accepted. But here’s the kicker, they want this complemented by heightened privacy, tighter data controls, and the right to have the information erased with the click of a button.

During the past three years, major technology companies have been announcing their removal of third-party cookie plans. Their decisions have been influenced heavily by the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal which emerged in early 2018.

Since March 2018, when Chris Wiley blew the whistle on the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandal, governments have been investing in regulations. The European Union was the first to tighten the General Data Protection Regulations GDPR in May 2018. Less than two years later in January 2020, the state of California passed the California Consumer Privacy Act.

In January of 2020, Google announced plans to phase out support for third-party cookies within a year. Since then, browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s Safari have announced they will be stepping away from cookies too. However, the timelines changed in June 2021, when Google explained that third-party cookies will not be eradicated until 2023.

They moved out the timeline for phasing out cookies, giving a new period of grace for advertisers and publishers that we’ll see in late 2022. Stage two, which is the phasing out of cookies, will start in mid-2023, and then end in late 2023.

A consumer’s perspective

In the past, consumers surrendered their data in exchange for convenience, however with all these changes coming in the next couple of years, the consumer has never been more aware of how they are being tracked online. We can certainly see more consumer awareness around what marketing tactics are considered creepy versus cool.

According to a 2021 Consumer Trends Index Report by consumer engagement Cheetah Digital, 73% of global respondents said they were okay to receive recommendations from brands based on past purchases. The report showed 54% of consumers were also ok to receive an email reminder about an abandoned cart, however, 66% said they do not like adverts that follow them across devices.

Furthermore, 69% of respondents said adverts relating to something they talked about near a smart device are ‘creepy’, while 72% said they do not want advertisements from companies they don’t know based on their location data.

There’s a big difference between targeting a golden audience segment with a silver bullet of an offer versus going through a consumer’s proverbial trash by analyzing their browsing history.

A marketer’s perspective

Consumers want more personalization and more privacy, this is the paradox marketers are grappling with right now. We can see marketers are primarily using segments or cohort-based personalization, versus true one-to-one personalization.

As we get closer to the cliff edge of the deprecation of third-party cookies, we’re going to see marketers ramp up and hopefully get more people into using advanced personalization at a one-to-one level using known data.

How to thrive from the death of the cookie

As brands and marketers start to address what they’re going to do in this cookie-less future, many are starting to build first-party relationships and incentivize direct engagement.

The entities in the advertising and marketing supply chain that have first-party relationships are the brand marketers and publishers. Everybody else in the middle of that is an intermediary, from the big agency holding companies to supply-side tech platforms to data management platforms. These are all intermediaries without a relationship to an end consumer.

Those entities, over the next two years, need to be able to leverage any element of advertising transaction, whether it’s through programmatic channels, automated channels, private marketplaces, or direct type deals. Many other marketers, including the analysts, are promoting zero-party data as a sensible strategy, given the need to balance privacy and personalization. This is data that a consumer willingly gives a brand in return for getting better, personalized products, content, or services.

While marketers can take advantage of free services and personalized discounts to get the best direct engagement, the best way for organizations to engage with customers directly without the need for cookies is through loyalty programs. And as the cookie begins to ‘crumble’, marketers need to reduce their reliance on third-party tracking and look towards the future of first-party data sources such as loyalty brands to ensure they can build a harmonious relationship between the brand and the consumer.

Loyalty programs that when done well govern the value exchange between brands and consumers, not just for a single interaction, but for direct engagement over the customer lifetime. With contextually differentiated, personalized experiences, they can be the conduit for the one-to-one relationships that build customer lifetime value.

This article is written by Billy Loizou, VP for Go To Market for APAC at consumer engagement solution Cheetah Digital.

The article is published as part of MARKETECH APAC’s thought leadership series What’s NEXT. This features marketing leaders sharing their marketing insights and predictions for the upcoming year. The series aims to equip marketers with actionable insights to future-ready their marketing strategies.

If you are a marketing leader and have insights that you’d like to share with regards to the upcoming trends and practices in marketing, please reach out to [email protected] for an opportunity to have your thought-leadership published on the platform.