Brian Lesser, Global CEO of Group M’s programmatic media and technology company Xaxis, says all digital advertising will be programmatic, and in a couple of years, video is going to power the business in India
By Abhinn Shreshtha
All advertising will be digital and all digital advertising will be programmatic – that is the assertion of Brian Lesser, Global CEO of Xaxis, Group M’s programmatic media and technology company, on his first visit to India. It might seem like a bold statement coming from anyone else, but Xaxis has a proven track record in markets like North America and Europe when it comes to programmatically connecting advertisers and publishers to audiences. Though the concept of programmatic ad sales might still be nascent in India, Lesser feels India is a market “which does not go through an adolescence period but directly into the maturity phase”.
Xaxis has been growing rapidly since its inception three years ago. Currently operating in 34 countries, it hopes to penetrate 40 markets by the end of the year. And to fuel this expansion, Xaxis relies on its in-built technology platform like the new data management platform, Turbine, as well as the increasingly popular trend of programmatic buying in digital advertising. The company has had operations in India for about two years, having started out primarily in the display advertising business where they used data to target banner advertising. The future of digital advertising, according to Lesser though, lies in an altogether different direction. “What we have seen in the last 6-12 months is that video business is growing and becoming very important in India. We recently launched our Data Management Platform (DMP)—Turbine, and that is going to power all of our display business and television business. I see, in the next two to three years, video is going to power the business here in India,” he said.
So is display advertising dead? It is definitely not the future, at least for mobile advertising, says Lesser. The problem being twofold according to him—a lack of targeting ability and performance issues of the actual ads. Despite identifying video as a key business driver in the coming years, Lesser takes pains to explain that Xaxis does not see itself as a channel-centric organization. The goal, he says, is to be where the audience is. “We think of programmatic as channel agnostic. We want to find the audience where they are, whether it is on the mobile phone or on the PC or through social media,” he said.
But this blurring of lines has its own difficulties, one important factor being the lack of common metrics for Digital and TV. In fact, this is true for all media. Lesser admits that this is the biggest hurdle. However, he says, “Advertisers know how TV advertising performs. People like to say that TV advertising is not measurable, but this is not true. Good advertisers know precisely the effects of advertising on Television. In Digital, for traditional advertisers, it is not as clear how much they spend on video or display or mobile and how that impacts their sales. So, when we talk about increasing our video business over time, we need to take the metrics that advertisers understand on Television and transition them to Digital.”
So where does programmatic buying come into this new world where boundaries between different mediums are being broken down? After all, with the rise of Facebook and other social media, native advertising has supplanted traditional ad unit ‘boxes’. Lesser feels that this evolution of the digital space actually helps the concept of programmatic buying. “The great thing about programmatic is that it is just a mechanism to buy ad inventory and so it can be applied to any type of inventory, whether it is display, video or even social. The key to programmatic is to understand your audience and apply that understanding to different types and formats. In fact, native advertising is perfect for programmatic in some ways because you can not only customize your audience, but also the creative,” he explains.
But for programmatic buying to work efficiently, what is needed is good, relevant data. To this end, Xaxis invested nearly $25 million to develop its DMP Turbine. “Our future will be built around data and all the products we bring to the market will draw from data. In the past when software companies produced DMPs, you could think of it as a box and the more data that was produced, the bigger the box needed to be. The way we think of DMP is not as a box but as ‘listeners’ we put into the data stream, which enables us to understand what data is important and action that very quickly,” explains Lesser.
When asked what advantages it provides in a high potential market like India, Lesser pointed out that with the high mobile penetration seen in the country, Turbine will allow Xaxis not only to effectively capture data to build models but also to take action against inventory in real-time.
Feedback: abhinn@exchange4media.com
