Marketers in Asia set to jump into programmatic video

Everywhere you travel across Southeast Asia, people on the street, in shopping malls, or on public transport, are staring into their smartphones and tablets. They are checking their social feeds, talking to their friends, and watching video.And they are consuming a lot of video. Research shows that eighty percent of consumers in Southeast Asia have watched an online video in the past month. They are the new digital consumers, they are on the move, and they are turning to digital video for information on things like the latest fashion trends. Publishers and broadcasters know this to be true, because they are seeing their online video traffic escalate across the region.For marketers seeking to reach the digital consumer, their challenge is to move beyond television to keep pace with audiences. Research firm comScore recently found that the growth in online video viewing has far outpaced the growth in annual video ad spend.While marketers are now taking steps to remedy this by integrating digital video into their TV campaigns, scaling these efforts is especially difficult in the scattered markets of Southeast Asia. This helps explain the special appeal of programmatic buying in the region. To marketers, automated buying offers a streamlined process for reaching a diverse array of target demographics.Luckily for these marketers, there are more video ads available for programmatic buying than there ever have been. In the first quarter of this year, data on our platform showed a steady rise in programmatic video supply, rising ten percent across Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines.The fastest-growing market was Vietnam, which reported a 67% rise in available programmatic video inventory. Singapore was the fastest-growing market in terms of mobile video supply, which jumped 103%. Thailand’s mobile video inventory jumped 49%, just shading growth of 45% in Vietnam. Other hot markets were Indonesia, with a 36 per cent jump in desktop video inventory, and the Philippines with a healthy 12% rise in pre-roll video inventory.The implication for brands is that video offers scale in reaching their consumers, whether it’s the elusive 18-25 demographic, or affluent older audiences. That scale is translating into increased spending. According to Magna Global, Asia was the fastest-growing region in the world for programmatic spending in 2014.Marketers can now test, learn and evolve their programmatic video campaigns and gather more and more data on their target audiences. In programmatic, everything is driven by real-time insight – marketers get actionable data about the response to the creative message, the viewability of the ad, as well its message recall and purchase intent.Already brands can determine the incremental reach impact of running television and video campaigns in sync with each other. Supplement that with audience data and target testing tools, and the opportunity to reach the elusive digital consumer only gets stronger.In the meantime, there will be a concerted focus on understanding what programmatic practices work best, and how brands and agencies can help marketers achieve their branding goals.The writer is Phu Truong, TubeMogul Managing Director, Southeast Asia