By 2020, according to the Boston Consulting Group, the total digital display and video ad market in the APAC region will reach $19 billion in value.
Programmatic means of media buying and planning are estimated to make up 36% of the share of this value. A report from 2016 by MAGNA estimates that the second largest region after the US for programmatic was the APAC region and a recent poll from the World Federation of Advertisers found that 90% of marketers in the APAC region use programmatic tools for digital media planning and buying.
And yet advertisers and agencies are plagued year after year with the rise of ad fraud and the realization that ecosystem-led countermeasures just aren’t working. While technology companies in the region such as Adjust and IAS are focused on placing layers of protection to verify views, clicks, and downloads, an alternative approach has focused on conversions.
Joining the ranks of Alavi and Optimizely in the APAC region is Scibids, a France-based AI-based programmatic bid management solution.
The beauty of space that we operate in – a world of AI, cloud and global real-time markets – is that physical presence is needed only for the human connection and less for product delivery.
Rahul Vasudev, formerly the MD of APAC for MediaMath has joined the company in a similar role to generate new business, navigate the regional ecosystem, and helping brands increase return on ad spend using algorithms that analyze approximately 22 million variables.
The announcement comes less than a year after Scibids raised €2.2 million Series A funding. This coming a month after securing a distribution partnership with Adflex in Japan.
“At the moment, we are delivering a step change in media effectiveness to marketers and their agencies, via programmatic campaigns,” said Vasudev.
“Our AI is able to deliver 40 to 70 percent KPI improvement to clients across various categories, including performance marketers within the travel and e-commerce sectors, brand marketers from sectors such as FMCG and those in between like automotive, insurance and so on. As a result, Scibids clients include agencies, trading desks and marketers who have in-housed programmatic.”
According to Vasudev, working hand in hand with the world’s leading demand-side platforms (DSP) has resulted in great traction with the big holding agencies as well as independent trading desks who believe in machine optimized real-time decision making.
“These companies often have internal teams who build complementary assets with their internal data science teams,” said Vasudev.
“In 2019, we have already set up in Asia Pacific, with a local team and are live with local clients. Moving forward, we plan to have our feet on the ground in the US as well as across Western Europe by the end of the year.”
As an AI-as-a-Service company structured around digital media buying, Vasudev believes Scibids can stand out as an outlier among similar companies offering AI based conversion optimization due to its internal learning models and a customizable system programmable around the goals of the advertiser. Positioned as an intelligence layer, the system works to enable campaign harmony between DSP’s, advertisers, and agencies, even for marketers that prefer to use 3rd party data sources or intelligent attribution models.
“The beauty of space that we operate in – a world of AI, cloud and global real-time markets – is that physical presence is needed only for the human connection and less for product delivery,” said Vasudev. “That said, we are already experiencing high growth in APAC, and we will be doubling down on the region.”
