Julian Tol is the Co-founder & CEO at BRANDSCREEN. Here he discusses the Brandscreen DSP roll-out across the APAC region

You recently announced that you have launched across APAC region? How many countries are you now servicing in the region?

The total is 15 countries; Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. In top-line numbers, that translates into an online population of 805,018,922, where we serve 617,234,070 uniques on a monthly basis, providing a net reach across the region of 72.1 %.

What does this mean for ad exchange trading in the region?

For BRANDSCREEN, it's the most significant inflection point in our four years of R&D, engineering, construction and early growth. We are the only Asia-based enterprise-grade DSP in the world, so it feels right that we are first to market across Asia. In purely commercial terms for Asia, it's the moment that the Ad Exchange ecosystem goes genuinely live, at full-speed, and at scale, For the first time ever, advertisers can plan exchange and data driven audience buys at a price and scale previously not possible. For those in the region not familiar with the way this has changed the media buying landscape in the US, think about this: In March 2010 3% of traded inventory was transacted via a real time exchange. Today, 15 months later, 64% of traded inventory is RTB. The effect on performance campaigns has been swift and radical. Such is the efficiency gains from RTB that average CPAs are down by around 30%. And being delivered at scale. That is a true game-changer.

Are there any latency issues involved in serving such a huge geographic region?

It's an enormous infrastructure challenge, and managing latency is one of our chief tasks. We started in-market network deployment in the region in mid 2010, and we only launched in the last 2 big markets - India and China - one week ago. Even after the years of foundation engineering, it still took a full year of network deployment, testing, upgrade and tuning to finalize the infrastructure we have now. Our main advantage is that - unlike most DSPs - we own and operate our own technology stack and infrastructure end-to-end. The challenge is not, as some people think, to simply operate a phalanx of RTB bidders across multiple exchanges in 4 different Pac-Rim locations - although that's not trivial either. The challenge is to keep trillions of data points in sync and reachable in real-time across multiple geographical centres, to allow the system to match, filter, value and bid up to 100 K impressions per second. GeoIP, language and currency challenges are also tough problems, but with Digital Envoy's deepest integration in the region, we are currently going down to city/town/postcodes in most markets.

Brandscreen now has the potential to reach 600 million unique users in the APAC region? Does this make you the biggest for reach in the region?

Yes, by a considerable margin. Our value proposition as the only enterprise grade DSP in the region is to offer a true major advance in value, efficiency and scale to our media agency holding company partners. We offer self-service, low-trading margins, total neutrality, best-in-world optimization and deep integration with the agency finance, ad serving, attribution and operations systems. What this all means is that we make the whole process simple, painless and profitable for agencies.

You have also localized your solution and made improvements to existing dashboard. Can you provide more detail on this?

There are a few levels of localization we've done, and a few more to come. First, customers can select local currency and time zone support - simple things like displaying the buy in any currency and any Asia time zone, and billing in a major currency of their choice. Second, the UI supports all major Asian languages in native characters: English, Japanese, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Chinese SG, Indonesian, Filipino, Thai and Vietnamese. Third, we manage currency conversions and billing across multiple currencies and consolidate billing in a single currency of choice. And lastly, and this is work in progress, we are rolling our full local language versions of the buying interface. This final step wont be completed until end of 2011.

Can you give more detail about the Tumri integration into Brandscreen – and what this will mean for buyers using your solution?

SKU-level re-targeting is hot because, if the agency and advertiser can overcome the complexity of setting up business rules and XML product feeds, the return on advertising investment can be spectacular. We're sometimes talking CTRs an order of magnitude better than standard campaigns. So we are massive supporters of SKU-level retargeting, and that's why we partnered with Tumri to make it possible for all Brandscreen agencies. We have a sharply different view of this practise versus some "Re-targeting Companies" out there that sell on a CPC basis, essentially profiting from the uplift themselves. Brandscreen thinks that the agency owns and controls the data, that they put in the setup the work, and that the agency and advertiser deserve to take the risk and the upside. Tumri and Brandscreen are both open, transparent models which pass on 100% of the upside to its agency clients.

What has all this meant for Brandscreen?

You have to imagine a room full of hard-core technologists heads-down, backing RTB with every dollar we had and hour we could work, for four years. The success we’ve had is down to two things: The tech team under Co-founder and CTO Seth Yates has achieved miracles. Second, some inspiring big agency customers who liked our product and gave us the opportunity to focus on APAC in partnership with them. Customers like this are the real catalyst for innovation in our business. It simply couldn’t have happened with out them.