With DSPs in China wearing multiple hats and operating key functions across the ad stack, local brands often end up unaware about where, or how, their dollars are being spent.

Amid this environment, company executives from TubeMogul are urging marketers in the country to better understand what programmatic can do for them and the need for transparency.

The ad tech vendor last week officially announced its presence in China, where it operated a sales outfit in Shanghai as well as an engineering site in Chengdu. It also held its first educational summit that featured sessions on global and regional programmatic developments as well as industry best practices.

In a phone interview with ExchangeWire, Jeffery Zheng, TubeMogul's Greater China managing director, noted a lack of awareness among marketers in the country about what they actually could get out of programmatic.

From discussions with several clients, Zheng said brands appeared to be "misguided" by local DSP players. He noted that many of these market players doubled up as DMPs and also were publishers with their own inventory and media resources.

As a result, marketers in the country increasingly had allowed their DSP partner to manage not only their ad buys, but also their data and campaigns, he explained. "With this model, however, they don't know what they're spending on and where", he said. "There is no transparency and real results because everything belongs to that one DSP player."

"So we need to explain the importance of transparency, real-time metrics, and why independence matters", Zheng said.

Susan Salop, TubeMogul's Asia vice president, also noted a lack of trust in local DSPs because all key activities were performed by that one vendor. She added that the ad tech vendor was looking to change this by championing its business model.

TubeMogul had set up its Shanghai office in the first quarter of this year and obtained a license to operate in the China market – a process that took two years to process, revealed global communications manager, Ryan Levitt. While tedious, it was necessary because the company wanted to avoid having to establish a local partnership, which might not have enabled it to be fully transparent, Levitt said.

"Our approach is to be hyper-local", Salop said, adding that this meant putting in the necessary investment, building its research facility in Chengdu, and having local teams run its operations. It also is working with local publishers and other local market players.

Its campaigns and accounts are hosted at Amazon Web Services' data centre in Beijing.

TubeMogul, however, is not planning to run a local version of its "Independence Matters" campaign, at least, not just yet. Launched in March this year, the initiative was aimed at breaking down walled gardens in the ad tech ecosystem, specifically, Google's.

While Google does not have much of a presence in China, the local media market is dominated by three primary players (Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent) collectively known as the BAT.

Asked if it was planning to launch a similar campaign targeted at BAT, Levitt said TubeMogul's focus for now was on educating the market about programmatic and the importance of transparency as well as positioning the company's selling point as a DSP.

"So we don't want to launch a walled garden campaign just yet because that would be like running before we can walk", he said. "Eventually, we will do that."

Asked if the company was planning to acquire any local companies, Levitt declined to comment, citing US FCC regulatory guidelines.