Most brands in Asia are simply taking campaign methodologies for traditional media, and slapping them onto mobile platforms, without first assessing new possibilities the latter can offer.

This results in much inefficiency that otherwise can be improved with the deployment of mobile programmatic, says Shi Yi, CEO and founder at Avazu Holding, in this week's Q&A with ExchangeWire. Yi also discusses the lack dominant tech players in this market segment, which is especially vital in Asia-Pacific, as the region faces unique challenges in cross-channel platforms.

ExchangeWire: Let's start by defining mobile programmatic, since there have been varying definitions floating in the industry. How would you define what mobile programmatic means for the Asia-Pacific industry?

Shi Yi: We count different fields into mobile programmatic, including RTB, predictive bidding, user audience profiling, creative personalisation, and so on. In general, it encompasses all fields that can be applied to increase the efficiency of media buys on a real-time basis.

What opportunities or benefits does it bring to brands and Asia's ad tech industry?

In Asia, a lot of brands are still using the traditional way of media planning and buying, which involves large teams of planners and buyers managing media buys on a manual basis. In some countries, like China, the most common way of pricing media buys is CPT (cost per time). This means brands are putting a fixed amount of money to buy a certain ad space, for a fixed amount of time. We see a lot of inefficiency in those fields and think that mobile programmatic will largely help all those advertisers achieve better performance online.

Asian brands tend to simply apply the mentality and methodologies of TVC (TV commercial) campaigns to mobile, without thinking deeper about the possibilities that mobile can bring. Brands, for example, still book campaigns based on app or site placements without looking at audience and targeting.

Tracking, transparency, inventory, brand safety, and technology – which of these five areas pose the most urgent issues that need to be address in mobile programmatic? How should the industry work to resolve them?

With persistent user identifiers such as Android IDs and MSISDN (Mobile Station International Subscriber Directory Number) on mobile platforms, tracking is more accurate on these devices than the desktop – as long as it involves in-app inventories.

Transparency and brand safety also are better managed due to the monopoly of Google Play on Android and App Store on Apple iOS, where apps have to comply with the respective policies outlined on these two appstores.

As for inventories, we are currently seeing 25 billion of ad impressions every day on our mDSP, so there is scale.

So, I think the most urgent issue for mobile programmatic is still the technology. As mobile programmatic is pretty new – compared with developments on desktop – and it works differently from desktop. There aren't any dominant tech players in the market yet.

Cross-channel platforms, in particular, are more challenging in Asia-Pacific due to the different standards in each country. In a lot these markets, you would need government licenses to run these kinds of operations. So, a lot of localisation must be involved to manage cross-channel in the region.

What is still lacking in the Asia-Pacific mobile programmatic space today? What needs to happen to address this?

If we look into the whole ad landscape in the region, we won't find many local SSPs offering inventory here. Most of these large SSPs and ad exchanges are still based in the US, or are international players without local operation teams that are stationed in the Asia-Pacific. In order to get more local inventory, we need to integrate directly with local publishers, instead of going over a SSP. This field is hugely lacking still in Asia.

So, the availability of local SSPs is still lacking, even though the demand and the market potential are there.

Private exchanges have been touted to offer higher quality inventory and better data targeting, both of which are lacking in the mobile ad space. Do you agree this is the right way forward for Asia-Pacific?

I do agree that private exchanges are the right way forward. However, private ad exchanges are platforms that are more targeted at sophisticated customers including agencies, networks or more advanced media buying companies.