Tech Bites: Week of June 6, 2022

NEWS

Singapore-based CapitaLand has launched its first 24-hour experiential party in Decentraland, with the help of DBS. Called CapitaVerse, music, fashion and fun are combined with real-world swag. People can choose their avatars and explore four levels of discovery points with live music performances, brand discovery docks, CapitaVerse-exclusive Aura Wearable NFT, and virtual hunts. 

Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) has expanded the use of its sell side platform Monetize SSP to include Xandr’s Prebid Server Premium, which offers server-side header bidding across all formats and channels, including digital video and Connected TV inventory. Powered by Prebid, the open-source header bidding solution, it gives sellers a unified view of header bidding performance across all demand, formats, and channels, while providing actionable insights to improve performance or troubleshoot issues.

InMobi has expanded its partnership with Microsoft Advertising to support enterprise and strategic advertisers in Southeast Asia, Middle East, and Africa. InMobi will offer marketers an integrated solution to power their campaigns built on the search and native display capabilities of Microsoft Advertising and mobile ad tech capability of InMobi’s advertising platforms. Both parties have been in a strategic partnership since July 2018 to help enterprises accelerate their digital transformation by providing them with insights, audience, and engagement platforms for a connected world. The partnership was expanded in 2019 as InMobi added the Microsoft Advertising products and solutions to its offerings in India.   

Wootag has partnered with OneAd, a Taiwan-based video marketing technology company, to integrate its visual interactivity solution into OneAd’s in-stream advertising platform SuperView. This enables advertisers to drive more interactive and in-visual engagement from understanding audience’s preference, developing actionable insights to increase the conversion rate through in-stream advertising. According to Wootag's video marketing campaigns in 2021, the overall advertising participation rate (including viewing, interacting, and clicking on ads for more than 5 seconds. OneAd has done scientific research on brand participation behavior, designing an interactive advertising mechanism that best meets the needs of advertisers; key interactive indicators can be significantly increased by 116%.

DEPT has announced the launch of its dedicated creative automation practice, helping brands to supercharge their creative output through technology. The practice specialises in three core services: delivering creative assets at scale, dynamic advertising, and conversational marketing and chatbots.

Yahoo has launched Yahoo Stories Ad in Southeast Asia, a solution it said enables a dynamic and interactive storytelling experience. A mobile-web-first solution, Yahoo Stories Ad will help advertisers deliver storytelling experiences on a larger scale and with greater reach.

ESL Gaming and Nielsen have expanded their business relationship for another three years. The new agreement enables ESL Gaming to regularly report monetary valuations to brand partners and advertisers based on Nielsen’s Quality Index (QI) Media methodology. This allows for determining the quantitative success of a partnership and for credible benchmarking against other esports and traditional sports.

Bent Pixels Asia (BPA), a revenue accelerator for YouTube esports and gaming creators, has partnered with Tier One Entertainment, to help the latter’s creators accelerate their revenue from YouTube reserved media offerings, as well as grow their capabilities as creators in producing quality content to engage their audiences. Through the partnership with BPA, Tier One Entertainment’s creators will be offered to advertisers as part of YouTube Reserved Media deals, which offers brands to secure sought-after ad spaces instead of via auction. Creators can potentially unlock opportunities to uplift their YouTube revenue via access to branded content deals and access to premium tools.

BPA will also offer creator development programmes for Tier One Entertainment’s talents who have YouTube channels to help them grow their reach and subscribers base, by offering workshops, best practices and tools that will help creators strategise, analyse and execute compelling video content.  It will also provide creators troubleshooting support for issues faced by Tier One Entertainment’s creators on their respective YouTube channels.

APPOINTMENTS AND WINS

Snap has made a series of senior appointments in APAC. Read the full story here.

OMG Vietnam has made several senior management appointments. Trang Tran is elevated from business director to the new role of head of transformation, Hoang Nguyen joins the agency as planning director after working with agencies including Wavemaker, GroupM and Saatchi & Saatchi. Uyen Nguyen Diep has been hired as strategy director from Mindshare. San Nguyen has been promoted from senior digital manager to associate planning director.

Dentsu China has appointed Hawk Liu as CEO of Merkle China. In his new role, Liu will lead the growth, performance, and greater integration across its CX consulting, data science, digital transformation, loyalty marketing and B2B services. In his most recent role, Liu served as the managing director for Accenture China, leading the digital transformation practice for brands like Huawei and Tencent.

Under Armour has awarded its media and influencer management business to Wavemaker in the Philippines. The three-way pitch, which was conducted in January, took immediate effect upon awarding.

The Trade Desk has hired Gregory Fournier as general manager for client development in Asia Pacific. Fournier will build relationships with advertisers and agencies to help them understand, navigate and leverage the power of the open internet to solve their unique advertising challenges. Prior to this role, Gregory was the global senior vice president of strategy and head of luxury at Unruly, where he spent eight years.