The Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly championed as an important enabler to improving customer experience and providing higher level of personalisation. Deploying and managing the technology, however, can prove challenging for brands in the region.

Carl Nawagamuwa, Amobee's Southeast Asia vice president of client services, explains that IoT can offer additional touchpoints and data from which advertisers can better understand their customers. This can then further enhance customer experience and help brands connect the dots.

Setting up and executing IoT, though, can be daunting since it involves complex technology architecture and skills, Nawagamuwa cautions.

In this Q&A with ExchangeWire, he discusses how brands in the Asia-Pacific region can overcome key challenges associated with mobile advertising and why they must start thinking mobile-first.

How do you see the Asia-Pacific ad mobile market taking shape in 2016? Where are the growth opportunities?

Carl Nawagamuwa: There will be continued mobile advertising growth, but the big caveat is that this growth comes from a small base and is not on par with the amount of time spent on the device. As trust in mobile advertising grows, brands will ask more questions and look for new metrics to judge success.

I would expect to see more sophistication in how brands use mobile, resulting in more engaging and relevant campaigns. I would also highlight rich media and creative formats, the use of rich data and cross-platform campaigns, driven by video, to be the key growth areas of mobile advertising. As infrastructure improves, especially in emerging markets, the growth of video will be significant. Unique datasets that deliver powerful insights and targeting will be central in driving mobile's adoption for brand advertisers.

And how will mobile programmatic evolve?

There are some areas of mobile that programmatic currently doesn't touch, such as app download campaigns. With the importance of the app industry, I'd expect a step forward in this area with segmentation, targeting, and optimisation becoming automated and less manual.

Carl Nawagamuwa

Richer and differentiated datasets will be made available programmatically, fuelling more accurate targeting, be that verified audience segments or mobile location. Use of operator data, for example, will unlock the true power of location and move us away from the reliance on IP addresses that is, frankly, the least accurate form of location data. The use of unique data to deliver video programmatically will also be a key growth area.

What key challenges did this region face in 2015, in terms of mobile ad delivery, and do you expect these to persist this year?

There continues to be a challenge in ensuring tracking is aligned; however, I do believe things will improve as technological developments catch up to brands' demand. The bigger challenge is how more engaging mobile formats can be delivered at a cost that is appropriate for markets in Asia-Pacific, especially Southeast Asia where budgets are in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands.

Considering the talent required and the associated creative costs, engaging mobile campaign creative costs can spiral. Scarcity of inventory for pre-roll video will continue to be a problem, especially when you consider the snacking culture of mobile video usage. Pre-roll will always face these challenges, but I do think out-stream and native video formats, when coupled with data, will help ease this pressure by opening up alternative environments and new video formats.

What new challenges do you expect for the year?

I wouldn't call it a new challenge, but there is still a lack of technology solutions that allow brands to better measure and alleviate issues around mobile brand safety and click fraud. And as brands still obsess over the click metric, especially on mobile where the click results can look fantastic but also misleading, this will continue to prevent brands from executing mobile correctly and extracting the best value for themselves and the customer.

At Amobee, we have looked at alternate methods for measuring success such as uplift in in-store footfall as a result of location-based mobile advertising.

Where do you see potential for the Internet of Things (IoT) in the ad and martech industry?

We live in the customer age where brand interactions are both digital and physical. IoT provides a glimpse into the next evolution of the customer experience. Personalisation is the new battleground, as customers become more demanding and knowledgeable, and big brands such as telcos and banks have to understand how they can join the dots to build out a unified customer journey across their organisation.

By unlocking the customer data often stored in siloed departments or business units, brands can anticipate the next best product and deliver a message that is relevant for that particular customer. Brands that move to harness the right technology stack quickly and, more importantly, connect and activate their customer data, will drive ROI and win. IoT adds additional fuel to this and super-charges the possibilities for advertisers with new and additional touchpoints and data, to further deliver a personalised customer experience.

Much of the consultancy work we undertake for selected brands focuses on helping them make sense of their data and identify the optimum technology stacks to execute digital personalisation.

What needs to happen for this to materialise?

There are still technological and organisational challenges in aligning all these data points; however, not all brands recognise the opportunity here. Setting up, licensing, and operationalising technology can be daunting for an advertiser, especially as it requires the intricate technology architecture and the expertise to execute.

In addition, handling, analysing, and extracting the right value out of data is a challenge. A data-led customer-centric culture with buy-in and support from the board is an absolute must, as talent and bravery play a large part in getting this off the ground and making it scalable.

How is the Asia-Pacific mobile market different from other regions and how do these impact the mobile ad market here?

For many, their mobile is the gateway to the internet. While this suggests a huge opportunity, the reality is that there remain huge challenges in executing campaigns at scale.

Digital spend is still under-represented in the region and mobile spend is often a subset of digital. This means that although there is progress, the rate of advertising spend growth is clearly out of sync with usage levels. Asia-Pacific includes multiple markets that are very different in their levels of mobile advertising sophistication. When we look at how markets are using mobile, China is different to Indonesia or the Philippines, which in turn is very different to Australia. You have markets with incredible infrastructure like Singapore, as well as key growth markets like India and Indonesia that are now at 30% to 40% smartphone penetration.

Asia-Pacific isn't a country, so understanding local market idiosyncrasies is essential. A huge benefit of being owned by Singtel is that it allows Amobee to access expertise on the ground through Singtel affiliates operating in key Asia-Pacific markets, such as Optus, Globe, Telkomsel, AIS, and Airtel.

Ad blockers, fragmentation, mobile monopolies, the likes of Facebook, Apple, and China's BAT, video, and metrics - which of these are your biggest concerns in this region, and why?

Adblocking may or may not be a significant factor. Right now, it is hard for us to predict with any kind of certainty and I fully would expect the ad industry to adapt and change as we have always done to provide value to consumers that they welcome.

Continued consolidation will occur, but will be offset by further fragmentation caused by yet more technological advances and developments. That's what makes advertising so exciting after all! Monopolies exist in mobile, but also exist in the offline advertising world so I don't see it as a significant issue for Amobee's business.

Video is an opportunity more than a concern. That leaves us with the metrics, which continues to be the biggest concern from a practical point of view. Measurement in digital is still problematic even though it is the most measurable media available. Most campaigns are still governed by the click and that has to change for brands to get the most value out of digital.

Can you highlight key technical or process gaps in the mobile ad space that remain unresolved today?

We still see innovative mobile campaigns beset with time consuming setup and tracking issues. Technology is both our greatest friend and our biggest enemy in that respect. There appears to be unwillingness within the traditional advertising agency community to think mobile-first. This is a real shame as they are the custodians of the creative idea. However, new ad creator platforms have emerged to democratise the creative process for media agencies and publishers alike.

Building mobile-first creative opens up new exciting realms for engagement, including truly native experiences. Why ask a user to click an ad when they can swipe, drag, shake, and twist to interact with it? There also are multiple sensors and functions an ad can access on the phone such as the accelerometer, gyroscope, camera, and GPS. The opportunities are endless.

How should publishers, brands, and agencies transform to improve the overall Asia-Pacific mobile ad industry?

I don't necessarily think it is a case of transforming. Good progress has been made, but there's plenty more we can do. Mobile advertising is still in relative infancy in Southeast Asia, so the more publishers can collaborate to provide regular learning and development session for clients and agencies the better.

Amobee is an active member of the IAB's ad tech and mobile leadership councils and we have seen how beneficial these learning sessions can be across the region. Publishers and agencies have to work better together to give brands confidence in mobile; especially as we know mobile can perform a significant role in brand building.

Brands also must be braver. Tentative toe-dipping is counterproductive. Commit to properly test new initiatives with individual suppliers, rather than spread small budgets across multiple markets and suppliers that often reveal inconclusive results.

What are Amobee's priorities for 2016, and how do you plan to achieve them?

Our focus is to enable brands to better engage their consumers by combining our unique data with engaging ad formats across all platforms. Through the Amobee Brand Intelligence platform, we will use insights into digital content consumption across web, video, mobile, and social to launch a highly targeted video product, called Amobee View. In addition, we will continue to develop our operator data-led products, the first of which is called Sparks. This utilises Singtel's first-party data to generate analytics and in-depth consumer location insights to better support mobile media placements.

Where does Singtel fit into the picture?

As our parent company, Singtel provides us with a fantastic footprint across the Asia-Pacific region. We are one of very few truly Asia-Pacific-first businesses and there are exciting plans on how we evolve our data-led digital marketing solutions for clients and agencies alike. We will continue to be closely involved in Singtel's ongoing digital transformation, with new products and services that leverage unique data assets and technology that will ensure Amobee is at the edge of marketing innovation in 2016.