India and more recently Korea are following Australia and Singapore as the region’s programmatic ad hotspots, Cynthia Deng says.
The Hong Kong based Asia Pacific managing director of advertising platform Turn says that while Australia is the region’s most mature programmatic market after Japan – rated second-largest globally – interest is growing fast in other countries.
Figures from Turn’s global advertising industry index are matched by similar patterns in Asia and Australasia.
Deng says marketers are learning how to data and insights to their advantage: “In Australia, advertising activity accelerates through the second quarter to the end of the year and we expect competition to be high, especially in video.”
Data from the platform shows advertisers have spent substantially more on mobile, video, display and social channels in the first four months of this year, compared to 2013. The spend on mobile has more than doubled (109 per cent) with video ads up by two thirds. Mature display budgets and also social are up 20 per cent.
Increased competition is translating into higher advertising costs, especially for social, where the effective cost-per-thousand impressions has risen by 64 per cent globally. An increase in inventory – especially in video, which actually dropped one per cent – affected mobile, up by only eight per cent.
“As spend and competition increase in mature markets, brands and agencies are using sophisticated audience-centric strategies to drive planning for programmatic advertising,” says Deng.
The Turn index shows travel and telecom were both 49 per cent more competitive than last year, followed by financial services (38 per cent), arts and entertainment (15 per cent) and home and garden (11 per cent).
Sports and recreation, and motors were the two industry verticals leading moves to become less competitive globally, followed by apparel, office products, and health and beauty.
Turn says its demand-side platform makes more than 100 billion data-driven advertising decisions a day, analysing more than 1.5 billion anonymous customer attributes.