Keiichi Tezuka is President & CEO of IponWeb Japan and Derek O’Neil is Chief Business Development Officer for IponWeb, here they discuss IponWeb Japan - the joint venture between D.A.Consortium Inc.’s consolidated subsidiary, PlatformOne and IponWeb Holdings. They talk about the uniqueness of the Japanese market, the ‘astonishingly fast’ adoption of RTB and the dynamics and challenges of the Japanese market. They also highlight a move into the Chinese market is part of IponWeb Japan’s plan.

Can you give an overview of IponWeb Japan its offering in Japan and the wider APAC region?

IponWeb Japan is a joint venture between DAC’s consolidated subsidiary, Platform One and IponWeb Holdings.

The primary focus for IponWeb Japan is to be the in-market client facing organization for IponWeb, initially focused on Japan, and later China.

IponWeb itself is a technology vendor, offering solutions engineering primarily for display media trading systems, both for selling media businesses and for media buying businesses.

Currently, IponWeb Japan is focused on assisting Japanese clients to understand how to leverage IponWeb’s u-Platform to support their business models and media trading activities.

As clients engage and build solutions, IponWeb Japan will manage the day to day aspects of those engagements, including providing media trading systems solution design expertise, project management and ongoing solutions support.

What is your relationship with D.A.Consortium Inc.? Are there any potential channel conflicts within the partnership?

DAC is IponWeb Japan’s first customer in Japan to build a complete trading system on IponWeb u-Platform. 

The Platform One’s products YieldOne and MarketOne have built their core RTB capabilities on IponWeb u-Platform.  More broadly, the IponWeb Japan technology vendor offering is seen as a market enabler for RTB trading in the Japanese market.

The thinking here is that there are many difficult engineering tasks in building a complex RTB trading system from scratch. It’s not easy to engineer these solutions. For many media trading businesses, if they need to build from the ground up, the engineering hurdles are prohibitive from participation in RTB.

IponWeb u-Platform abstracts these engineering difficulties, allowing media trading businesses to adopt building their own flavor of RTB trading solution without the engineering risk of a ground up build.

When DAC was considering how to facilitate rapid market adoption of RTB in Japan, the IponWeb u-Platform value proposition made a lot of sense to helping remove the technology barriers to RTB trading.

Hence the IponWeb Japan joint venture was established. We see the JV as a win win for DAC and the broader Japanese market, in that IponWeb Japan will assist Japanese companies to adopt RTB quickly and reap the benefits that RTB provides. This will be good for their businesses, and in turn that is good for DAC’s business.

What overall trends are you seeing in the Japanese and APAC exchange marketplace? How quickly is it evolving compared to the US and UK markets?

In Japan, it is estimated that about 30% of display media budgets are spent with Yahoo Japan. Yahoo Japan offers CPM priced products, meaning that for many buyers this is a driving consideration in why they are buying on a CPM basis.  For this reason also, sophistication in buying tools is somewhat lagging behind the US and EU markets.

However, in buying activities outside of media spend with Yahoo Japan, performance based buying is starting to get some traction. Combine this with the advent of RTB, we expect to see rapid evolution of more sophisticated demand side tools.

IponWeb Japan’s positioning in the market is to facilitate this expansion of sophistication.

Where do you see your biggest growth to be in Japan, Agencies? Retargeting Companies? Private Exchanges?

On the demand side, as the Media Agencies learn what they are able to do with RTB enabled supply, with IponWeb Japan we anticipate that Media Agencies will look to build their own flavor of demand tools.

We see this more as a learning curve. A Media Agency that is new to RTB can start buying through the MarketOne end-to-end packaged DSP solution. MarketOne is an easy entry point for DSP based media buying.

Once an Agency’s ad-ops team understands RTB, and start to innovate on their own desired flavor of RTB based buying, IponWeb Japan can take a snapshot of the MarketOne solution and start to iterate a specific set of features requested by the individual Media Agency.

For particularly adventurous Media Agencies, we can also do a ground-up solution build to the Media Agency’s particular flavor of feature-set design.

On either approach, we expect this will involve Advertiser specific media buying logic, where the Media Agencies will help their Advertiser client’s leverage their own data and consumer analytics capabilities to buy media in an the optimal way for that Advertiser.

As the Demand side grows in sophistication, so will the Supply side. We anticipate that the Supply side will realize they need particular new features that allow them to better sell to their demand partners, and will look to IponWeb Japan to deliver these capabilities in their selling solutions.

As a technology enabler do you face much competition in Japan and the APAC region?

In building and operating media trading systems, we are not aware of any other technology vendors in Japan that provide the same depth of capability, sophistication of toolkit or level of experience as IponWeb Japan do.

What are the biggest hurdles for growth for IponWeb Japan?

Only several months into operation, we are very pleased with the level of traction IponWeb Japan is already seeing. Given the volume and nature of the conversations we are having, and the type of solutions that are being scoped, we anticipate rapid growth in Japan.

In terms of hurdles, there is the same hurdle that we see in other markets, being the process of educating our client’s on the possibilities of what can be done with the capabilities of IponWeb u-Platform.

However, as in other markets where we are growing strongly, this education step is an empowering process we go through with our clients, and becomes an accelerator for our client’s growth as well as our own growth, and we don’t consider it a restraint.

What will be the Japanese ad exchange market’s biggest challenges in the coming year? Speed of adoption? Publishing models? Access to third party data?

Our view is that the Japanese market is in many ways a unique market, where the intra-ecosystem dynamics are very different to the US and EU markets..

As such, we are cautious about expecting the adoption path for Media Exchanges in the Japanese market to mirror that of the US and EU.

We anticipate, that as interesting publisher business models and interesting demand and data business models emerge, our Japanese clients will be looking to implement features into their solutions that will be unique to Japan, but what these features will be, right now it is too early to say.

In terms of speed of adoption, although it has been only 15 weeks since Platform One started providing RTB in Japan, the uptake by both buyers and sellers so far is astonishingly fast.

Again, early days, but it is much faster than we saw in the US and EU at the same stage of rollout of RTB enabled supply.

 What plans do IponWeb Japan have over the next year both in Japan and the wider APAC region?

Our client base in Japan is growing strongly, so we will be very busy in maturing our Japanese market over the next 12 months.  Later this year, we will also start to consider a market entry into China.

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