Baby steps with programmatic in Hong Kong: Wyeth and Baby Kingdom

HONG KONG - Baby Kingdom, a parenting website in Hong Kong, has set up what it claims is Hong Kong’s first private-programmatic-marketplace (PMP), for Wyeth.

According to Bessie Pan, DoubleClick Lead at Google Hong Kong, many marketers in Hong Kong still view programmatic as “remnant inventory”. Pan believes PMPs could be a small but significant step for the industry as programmatic gains traction in Hong Kong.

Pan added that most Hong Kong publishers haven’t opened up their inventory for programmatic, which has hindered the advancement of programmatic locally.

“PMPs could be an answer in this situation, as it offers a mix of the benefits of programmatic,” said Pan. “It can give the brand safety controls that marketers are looking for and be a starting point for local publishers that are just stepping into programmatic.”                              

According to Rainer Sip, CEO of Baby Kingdom, the new PMP with Wyeth has been a natural evolution of their existing commercial relationship.

“Besides online advertising, offline events and seminars, we want to bring more interactive and professional information to parents,” Sip told Campaign Asia-Pacific.

In 2010, Wyeth approached Baby Kingdom to create a “consolidated forum section for milk powders”, which Wyeth sponsored.

The section was segmented based on information about different baby age groups and tied to Wyeth milk-powder products ranging from those for newborns through to those for children over the age of three.

From there Wyeth product banners were manually placed into this section of the website alongside the most relevant content. However, Sip explained that only “impressions, clicks and clickthrough rates” could be measured with this arrangement.

In March, this year Wyeth and Baby Kingdom worked to turn the milk powder section into a PMP using the backend support of Google as a supply-side platform (SSP) and demand-side platform (DSP).

Audience data such as cookie data is now captured using the system, and using machine learning over a period of three months behaviours can be mapped and audiences segmented so that ads are served more accurately.

For example, if the user’s behavior is more skewed toward the ‘pregnancy stage’, the Baby Kingdom site will serve ‘Wyeth Maternal’ banners.

In addition, when a significant amount of cookie data is collected from the PMP, Wyeth can re-target users outside of Baby Kingdom.

"We want to support mothers with our brand promise in every step of their parental journey,” said Rick Fong, marketing director, Wyeth Nutrition Hong Kong. “And this can only be achieved by unlocking the value of big data.”

Fong said Wyeth has been better able to uncover the needs of mothers based on the data available.

“With greater transparency and strategic partnerships, we tried to interpret the consumer data from different perspectives that allowed us to discover some insights,” he added.