Tech Bites: Week of July 4, 2022

NEWS

Communiations agency W is bringing W3, its new offering that operates in the metaverse, to Asia. It will join forces with the W3 team based in London to help clients navigate this emerging world through virtual and multi-reality experiences.

PubMatic has partnered with AlikeAudience in Australia, Japan, and Indonesia to enable advertisers to access quality audience data on the supply side. The partnership expands the reach of PubMatic Connect, PubMatic’s differentiated audience solution that leverages addressable signals from across the internet to help data owners drive monetization and help media buyers drive performance. AlikeAudience offers bespoke demographic, interest, and transactional data and has more than 7,000 audience segments in the US, Australia, Japan, and Southeast Asia, across a range of industries. Unlike most data vendors, AlikeAudience claims it does not aggregate nor recycle data but sources it directly from trusted partners.  

Sydney-based media consultancy and technology business Audience Precision has unveiled its technology platform Precise360, which it claimed increase productivity by up to three times minimum. For example, strategy development for a client typically takes 2.5 people in an agency up to 100 hours to complete – at Audience Precision the same task takes one person 16 hours, a productivity improvement of 6.3 times. It claimed the platform has also proven to strip out between 20% to 50% media spend wastage for brands. For example, a media strategy developed for a client with regular TV activity yielded 47% savings to deliver the same impact as previous campaigns, while another campaign delivered 11 times higher average reach per spot against their psychographic target audience and 31% higher reach. Brands like Warner Music and Lyre’s Spirits are already using Precise360. 

Following the launch in 12 markets since the beginning of 2022, Nielsen is continuing the roll out of its enhanced Nielsen Identity System for Digital Ad Ratings. Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Mexico, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Norway, Poland, Greece, Netherlands, Belgium, South Africa, New Zealand, Malaysia, UAE, Czech Republic and Hungary are the next markets to launch with data from July 1st 2022.

APPOINTMENTS AND WINS

Thailand’s food-delivery app Robinhood and Accenture Song (formerly Accenture Interactive) have come together to drive advertising creativity and enhance brand experiences for advertisers on the platform.

Ampverse has appointed marketing agency Sportfive as its exclusive global commercial representative. Ampverse and Sportfive will work together to explore commercial development and media rights opportunities and forge partnerships. 
 
Mindshare has announced new leadership appointments namely Shankar Rajagopal as chief client officer for APAC, Ashish Thukral as managing director at Mindshare and m/SIX Vietnam, and Preeti Mascarenhas as head of strategy and product for APAC. Rajagopal was previously the CEO of Mindshare and m/SIX Vietnam, and an industry veteran with two decades of experience leading client accounts from Unilever to L’Oréal and HSBC, as well as helming business divisions in India, China, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore. Thukral brings with him extensive brand-side experience from Standard Chartered and Diageo. And, Mascarenhas has returned to Mindshare where she previously spent eight years as the GSK APAC lead. 
 
Havas Australia has appointed OIS, an out-of-home (OOH) verification platform, as its independent, third-party verification partner across digital, programmatic, and classic out-of-home client campaigns. OIS reports when, where and how brands’ OOH campaigns have been consumed by audiences in the real world, using a mix of verification technologies including proprietary tags, pixels, and physical inspections.