A look back at the year reveals key challenges for the Asia-Pacific ad tech industry in the form of media fragmentation and a lack of transparency in the buying process.

A significant increase in websites over the past decade has made it difficult for media buyers to manage the various publisher platforms, observes Clement Teo, Forrester's Asia-Pacific senior analyst serving B2C marketing professionals.

Ad networks also brought about opaque pricing and 'blackbox buying', notes Teo, who urges industry players to establish more transparency across the network.

ExchangeWire: What were the key trends or hot topics that drove the Asia-Pacific ad tech industry this year?

Clement Teo: Today, new digital ad technologies, such as ad exchanges, DSPs, DMPs, and audience-targeting vendors, are helping solve 'the network problem' for marketers looking to buy broad-based media to achieve direct response or brand goals.

Clement Teo

Can you elaborate on what 'the network problem' is, specifically for marketers in this region?

It's the human relationships, such as those between clients and media buyers, media buyers and website sales reps, media planners and sales people, and people-led display buys, encompassing negotiation, management of insertion orders, optimisation, and reporting.

To clarify, are you saying that marketers this year have been looking at tools to run more targeted campaigns in order to reach specific audience groups?

Personalisation is always a goal, but it will be an iterative approach.

What remained top challenges for marketers this year, as well as ad tech vendors, agencies, and other market players?

Media fragmentation, driven by a dramatic uptick in websites in the past decade, has made it increasingly difficult for buyers to manage the multitude of individual publisher buys necessary to meet the marketers' needs.

Ad networks, which aggregated and packaged inventory, were a quick fix to help the traditional buying process scale in a fragmented digital landscape. However, they ultimately compounded existing problems rather than solved them, introducing opaque pricing, limited transparency, and blackbox buying and optimisation to an increasingly outmoded buying process.

What resulted in ad networks creating opaque pricing and limited transparency? Was it a lack of governance on the agency part, or the inherent nature of ad networks? And what needs to be done to resolve these issues?

Industry players need to come to agreement on metrics and how to make the supply of ad inventory more transparent across the network.

What gaps should ad tech vendors really start to address in 2016?

First, build a bridge between the human and automated streams of ad tech where agencies, for example, can provide more valued input to the type of ad buys, versus placing media buys on behalf of clients. Second, they need to support the ad tech market with mobile options.

What role do you see the agency playing in this space in 2016?

The human aspect: As a foil to the automated bits, providing clearer insights from the data they get to better advise clients.

With the high mobile adoption in Asia, what opportunities are there for ad tech players to tap in 2016, which they may not have addressed sufficiently this year?

Talking to agencies or vendors to gain a better understanding of how mobile will enhance targeting efforts.

Which markets are expected to see the most ad tech activities next year?

Outside of China, most markets in Asia-Pacific are likely to embrace ad tech in search of efficiency and transparency.

What kind of ad tech tools specifically will they be looking to adopt?

Programmatic buying, DMPs, and real-time bidding. Forrester's forecasts show that, over the past decade, traditional buying models have been displaced by new programmatic buying models. By 2019, programmatic buying will make up 40% of display budgets.