Industry analysts regularly highlight the shift currently taking place in the way media is being traded, as the market moves from relationship driven buying to programmatically delivered electronic trading.
We’ve looked at this topic in detail previously in our series The New Digital Advertising Ecosystem, and it’s clear that programmatic will be an area of growing importance in Asia with a staggering 300% projected growth in APAC over 2014.
In light of this, the merger of Seed and mediaQuark – the company will retain the mediaQuark moniker – to create a real time media intelligence company focused on Asia is an interesting development.
With an audience marketplace of over 200 million active users, the new mediaQuark is also offering data enrichment that operates in all the local languages.
Together the new mediaQuark products should allow programmatic buyers to operate across 1st and 3rd party data sets to really show off the capabilities of data-driven marketing in the region.
In a significant step forward, this makes audience targeting at scale available in South East Asian markets for the first time.
Tom Simpson, ex Group M and Havas, will lead the new combined operation, with the goal of becoming a clear leader in providing advanced trading and media intelligence solutions to clients in the region.
“With the increased regional focus on programmatic and data-driven advertising, the merger absolutely makes sense. We are both focused on APAC, and the co-operation will be great for the market. The combined company now offers the best of inventory with best of audience, on a strong tech platform. Clients should get a higher ROI with our joint offering” says Simpson.
“The core mediaQuark semantic technology platform will enable regional clients to run ‘in target’ demographic campaigns, scale activity beyond first party data but most importantly deliver improved performance” Simpson adds.
Of course audience targeting as a concept is nothing new globally, and the use case and ROI uplifts are well documented. The uniqueness of the mediaQuark proposition is that it makes audience buying a reality right now for South East Asia.
With this development, alongside the recent launch of Traders Only and their #TradersThursday event, it promises to be an exciting year for the programmatic community in Singapore.