As the market matures in APAC, tech vendors like MediaMath are looking to help brands and agencies trade in the new data-driven advertising marketplace. Here Mike Peralta, CRO at MediaMath, discusses the strategy in the APAC region, and how their offering can help advertisers and agencies in the market.

Can you give an overview of MediaMath and its offering in Australia and the APAC region?

With the opening of our data center in Hong Kong, we’re now servicing APAC and Australia with over 6B daily impressions. We’re seeing early adoption from trading desks and agencies, and we’ll soon be opening our Sydney office. It’s an exciting time for us as we enter the fastest growing digital market.

How will MediaMath differentiate itself from competitors in the region?

It’s truly right there in the name- we use math to empower agencies to drive client results 10x better than the traditional media plan. MediaMath is built on real technology: machine-learning algorithms that optimize across millions of data points in real time, letting you focus on strategy instead of performance optimization.

You recently signed a deal with Cyber Agent in Japan can you tell us a little more in detail what this means for MediaMath?

Partnering with the leading internet services company in Japan was a great way for us to begin delivering our platform to agencies and brands in the Japanese marketplace. The way to do business in Japan is to partner, and thus we’re exploring joint ventures on many fronts.

Can you provide us with an insight to MediaMath’s Australian and APAC strategy? Will you be pursuing partnerships and joint ventures? Agencies? Client direct?

Our strategy will be localized, as APAC/Australia doesn’t behave as one region. In some countries we’ll be putting feet on the street, others we’ll be doing JVs. We’re currently interviewing in Sydney and Singapore and we’ll have an office in each by Q1.

Will moving into Australia and APAC markets throw up similar or different challenges for MediaMath  to the US and UK?

It’s different, but there are definitely parallels. Interestingly enough, Australia is similar to the German market, very publisher focused. Big publishers control a lot of the inventory, and the way we do business with publishers is just as important as how we sell to advertisers (a trend we’re now seeing in the US as well). Each country has its own challenge, but the deep international experience within our team allows us to scale this process quickly.

Any lessons learned from the US and UK markets that you’ll be bringing to Australia and APAC?

The way the European marketplace wants to buy is far different than the US, and we have adjusted our teams and orientation accordingly. For instance, in Europe, we saw that agencies were far more interested in our self-service offering. It’s more difficult to categorize APAC as a whole, as different countries prefer to do business in their own way, but suffice to say that our ears are open before our mouths are.

How much liquidity is there in the Japanese and wider APAC marketplace?

We’re seeing over 6B impressions per day across the major ad exchanges in addition to the private marketplace deals we have in place with major pubs. We expect this will soon grow faster than the US has been growing.

What will be your strategy around sourcing local RTB enabled inventory?

Having a centralized source of massive amounts of inventory via ad exchanges make it easy- sourcing local inventory can be as easy as checking a box in our interface. Beyond that, we make it simple for local pubs that aren’t yet working with exchanges to plug into our Private Marketplace to begin selling to great brands at high CPMs.

As MediaMath’s footprint grows in APAC will you look to integrate both local language and currency into your offering?

We’re are rolling out out local currency feature as we speak. As for languages, we’ll respond to demand as we see it. For now, English has worked for us out there.

How will MediaMath handle latency when dealing with the Australian and APAC regions?

Our data center makes this a non-issue.

How will you manage brand safety and privacy in Australia and APAC?
For one, we’re working with ad verification firms such as DoubleVerify and privacy technology firms like Evidon. This is in addition to working with top quality publishers for whom brand safety is never an issue.

Can you provide an insight into how mobile, social gaming and social media will develop in Australia and APAC over the coming year? What role will they play MediaMath’s strategy in the region?

We’re focusing on digital, primarily. With that in mind, social media has been great for us in APAC as we already plug in to hundreds of millions of Facebook users through MediaMath Social on TerminalOne. It’s remarkably easy for agencies to drive performance at huge scale without much effort, and I see Social – across all devices – as a major driver for adoption of MediaMath in APAC.

Does finding talent present an issue for MediaMath’s growth in the region? How big is the talent pool in Australia and APAC?

The talent pool is huge out there, and interest in this space is growing fast. We’ve had good success so far, and we’re close to hiring senior roles in both Sydney and Singapore.

What’s coming up for MediaMath over the next year? Any new product developments? What other markets will you look to move into?

We’ve begun doing business in LatAM (Argentina and Brazil are big for us) and we see that market growing quickly in 2012 for us.

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