Australia will see significant movements in the mobile ad space this year; with both buyers and sellers looking to better target audiences and manage campaigns through private marketplaces.

With its ad tech market among some of the world's most matured and sophisticated, Australia would see major developments around mobile as advertisers begin shifting more of their spend towards the platform.

Citing figures from Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Australia, Steve Wing, vice president of international mobile and marketplace at Rubicon Project, said mobile ad spend in the country grew 81% last year to AUD$1.55bn (£815m), with growth seen across mobile ad spend.

Mobile accounted for 40% of Australia's overall general display ads in 2015, compared to 25.5% the year before, and fuelled growth in search.

This momentum is expected to continue this year, with both buyers and sellers looking to optimise their inventory and campaigns on the mobile platform, noted Wing, who was speaking to ExchangeWire ahead of Rubicon's Marketplace Summit in Sydney, Australia, this week. He added that much of the discussions at the conference would revolve around mobile, and how programmatic could further automate processes and fuel growth in this space.

"From a mobile perspective, we'll be talking about the role of programmatic in knitting together the fragmented mobile marketplace, as well as the move towards more engaging forms such as video and native advertising", Wing said in a phone interview.

Programmatic would pull together the various mobile platforms to create a scalable and quality audience inventory, to facilitate more effective campaigns, he said.

He added that the emergence of location-based data also offered better ways to target audiences; and this, given the nature of the technology, was unique to the mobile platform.

"So, we'll be looking at better, more relevant, more targeted, and more engaging mobile creativity, knitted together by automation, to deliver the scale and efficiencies this market deserves", he noted.

Asked if the fragmentation would prove a bigger challenge for the wider Asia-Pacific region, Rubicon's Japan Asia-Pacific managing director Rick Mulia acknowledged the issue would be more pronounced, especially in markets such as China, where there are several more variants of the Android platform, for instance.

He also pointed to emerging markets, such as India and Indonesia, which still focus heavily on feature phones, and app developers there would assess market opportunities based on the functions, while limited, available on such handsets. These, Mulia added, presented more challenges in the mobile space for those markets.

Apart from its more sophisticated market landscape, compared to others in the region, Australia also was better able to leverage the global scale that programmatic offered because of its English-speaking environment, he said. This enabled market players to do cross-border and multinational ad buys, with brands and marketers able to purchase audiences efficiently through programmatic, inbound and outbound of Australia, and across all audience sets.

Rise of mobile PMPs

Wing also pointed to the growth of private marketplaces (PMPs) for mobile, fuelled by both buyers and sellers seeking trusted relationships. Describing the move to these marketplaces as a "flight to quality", he said increasing consumer adoption of mobile and content consumption had resulted in more available inventory and the need for premium placements in mobile.

Rubicon, for instance, saw a 1,400% climb in the use of its mobile platform last year, he said, citing the company's 2016 global mobile advertising survey, conducted with ExchangeWire.

Elaborating on the findings, Rubicon's senior vice president and head of mobile Joe Prusz said in February that the transition to PMPs was led by brands and direct-buyers looking to move the bulk of their mobile budgets into these automated marketplaces.

"[Within these PMPs], they can handpick their seller partners, yet execute programmatically via RTB at scale", Prusz explained. "They expect to spend more on video and native in-app ad formats, spending more on mobile native than on any other format, and plan to dedicate 81-100% of their mobile budget to location-enabled inventory to better connect with consumers on-the-go."

Mulia noted that, in the Asia-Pacific region, mobile app and game developers also were coming on board and tapping PMPs to further monetise their inventory. He added that this underscored the need to put the necessary deals into place and guide app developers on how to build packages for such marketplaces.

He also pointed to more developments in Australia to automate other ad components, such as out-of-home, cinema, radio, and TV – all of which presented opportunities for automation. Another focus area in digital ads was on the premium direct side; where workflow could be further enhanced and more automation could be introduced in the transaction process between buyers and publishers.