Aug 5

Written by: marketing
Thursday, August 05, 2010 1:16 PM 

Source: adoimagazine, May 2010

The recent IAB Revenue Report is, as Jeff Seah of Starcom correctly points out, ‘’a significant step in the right direction for the interactive industry’’.

However, it has also sparked some serious debate about supply and demand for those acting as sales intermediaries in Asia. As our esteemed IAB Chairman Ken Mandel has pointed out, the gap between the number of people online and the still relatively small amounts of media spend allocated to reach them has to shorten.  We’re all working hard to achieve that and we have an agreed goal; to achieve an online share of 20% against overall ad spend by 2020. It’s an admirable goal, but in the meantime it will dictate an awful lot of un-monetized inventory across the APAC region.

International publishers can often be frustrated when they compare sell-through rates in developed markets like the US and UK and compare them to Asia and it’s likely that the volume of unused inventory in Asia is one of the prime drivers of an increased performance market – advertisers getting large volumes of space at low cost to drive sales.

As long as this makes sense commercially for publishers and doesn’t cannibalize the premium brand offering for publishers, this can be a clear win-win.  In the meantime though, the responsibility lies with the digital stakeholders – yes, you and me – to drive the demand up by ‘core messaging’ the patent advantages of a media that delivers results … and has so much supply as it has so many people consuming it!