OpenX Partners With Dentsu CCI on Japanese Ad Exchange

Hong Kong– OpenX has expanded its footprint into Asia by forming a multi-year partnership with Dentsu’s digital arm, Cyber Communications Inc (CCI), to launch an online ad exchange in Japan that will debut in Q4 this year.

The announcement comes hot on the heels of a partnership OpenX secured with telco giant Orange to offer a multi-lingual, multi-currency ad exchange option for European ad buyers.

While OpenX’s move into Japan underscores the display ad management start-up’s global strategy to push for an online ad marketplace in key regions, what is significant about this partnership is to have Dentsu, one of the largest advertising companies and the fifth largest marketing organization worldwide, adopt an online ad exchange model and bring it to Japanese publishers, advertisers and agencies at a local level.

Fumihiko Yoshida, of CCI’s corporate planning division, said they have partnered with OpenX because no independent ad exchange provider has yet entered the Japanese market.

“And we’ve been foreseeing ad exchange would achieve some positive results in the Japan market, from both technical and marketing point of view,” he said in an e-mail interview.

Yoshida said they would not limit buyers from the Dentsu Group only and would like OpenX Market Japan to be widely used by any clients that want interactive marketing in the country.

Jason Fairchild, chief revenue officer at OpenX, explained that CCI works with more than 400 ad agencies in Japan and boasts a deep network of about 1,000 publishers representing almost 100 percent internet reach into the Japanese audience.

He said the online ad exchange space in Asia is still at a nascent stage and there is no dominant player yet.

Fairchild is confident the partnership with CCI will bring strong access to a significant pool of buyers and sellers that will “make a huge difference in jump starting the market quickly in Japan”.

According to Nomura Research Institute, Japan’s online ad market was worth an estimated $7.4 billion in 2009 and is projected to grow to more than $10 billion by 2014, the second largest online ad market globally after the U.S.

The new platform will allow publishers to maximize their ad revenue by selling their inventory in a real-time auction market in which all classes of buyers compete on an impression by impression basis that are supported in Japanese pricing and billing.

Advertisers and agencies will also benefit from OpenX Market’s existing reach to more than 400 million monthly unique users worldwide (based on Quantcast), which is expected to grow significantly with cci’s alliance.

CCI is a media rep firm that connects online media and ad agencies in Japan. It handles media planning, ad serving technology, creative services, and market analysis for clients.