Australia-based SpotXchange to open in Singapore

Matt von der Muhll, SpotXchange country director for Australia, said the new office will be a hub for Asia-Pacific, focusing on Southeast Asia, with Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia as its main markets. Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines will be the focus at a later date.

“We have been talking to publishers here and hopefully we will be able to appoint the lead soon,” he told Campaign Asia-Pacific. 

SpotXchange is a provider of comprehensive online video content delivery solutions and operates a global marketplace of video ad inventory. It connects online publishers with advertisers, agencies, trading desks and ad networks through its IAB-certified marketplace. It has offices in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia (Melbourne and Sydney), Canada, France, Spain and Germany.

Von der Muhll noted that demand for video advertising is outpacing supply in the region. There is a large volume of video inventory available, but a much smaller percentage is relevant to what advertisers are wanting to buy, he added.

"There needs to be collaboration between publishers, advertisers and bodies such as the IAB to work together and come up with a unified set of guidelines and classifications for inventory, placements and protocols, such as initiation type and player sizes," he said.

He added that real-time bidding in Asia is starting to mature and the market is getting more comfortable with how it can be used with everyday media buying and selling.

"While display is currently well-developed, video is still gaining traction in the region," he added. "With agencies actively expanding capabilities by setting up trading desks in the Asian markets, hiring resources and implementing RTB platforms, it is now time for the publishers to equip and prepare themselves with the correlating platforms to enable these trading desks to buy video via RTB."

Von der Muhll expects private marketplace tools to be the key to driving growth this year, where it is an opportunity to complement open marketplaces. Private marketplace removes the manual efforts needed to buy and sell campaigns and provides a more efficient and automated process, while still allowing the buyer and seller to negotiate terms of the deal directly.

"It will allow premium video publishers to connect their inventory with buyers in an RTB environment," he said. "It also means they now have control, strong reporting capabilities and real-time information on what campaigns are being run and at what rates."