MediaQuark Unveils Programmatic Media Trading for APAC Advertisers

With more display ad tech players – the DSPs, agency trading desks, and exchanges – launching in Asia Pacific, mediaQuark, a media trading tech provider, aims to offer these players a competitive advantage through its advanced trading solutions for the region.

“Targeting and bidding algorithms play an important role in programmatic, yet most buyers use the exact same targeting methods and bidding algos. Even the really big buyers,” notes Mikko Kotila, CEO for mediaQuark.

The former founder and CEO for STATSIT says they’re seeing a surprising lack of sophistication in the way both publishers and advertisers approach media trading.

It wants buy-side players to approach automated media trading from a more macro perspective.

“The programmatic market is essentially about investing in media, but you don’t hear much talk about investor psychology, market conditions, or risk modeling. The kind of things an investor would typically be thinking about,” Kotila adds.

In Asia, most of the buzz around programmatic buying is in Australia, Japan, Singapore, China, and India.

However, each of these markets is at varying levels of growth and some may not have established specialized firms focusing on media planning and attribution or verification/privacy within the ecosystems, for instance, compared to more matured markets in the West.

MediaQuark noticed that the biggest gap in Southeast Asia was around the use of data and algorithms particularly with data reduction, processing efficiency, and computational intelligence.

Its goal is to reach out to trading desks, DSPs, DMPs, exchanges, or even a brand that is serious about building competitive technology capabilities for programmatic media trading.

The privately funded start-up currently has eight employees, mostly scientists and programmers, based in Singapore to service clients in the country.

MediaQuark is eyeing Sydney, Australia next.

In terms of product development, the media trading tech provider will focus on supporting English language capabilities and other regional languages.