Women to Watch 2020: Khin Mu Yar Soe, PubMatic

Khin Mu Yar Soe

Associate director
PubMatic
Singapore

On paper, Khin Mu Yar Soe brims with qualifications. She attained her first degree in computer science in Myanmar before moving to Singapore to complete a second and third degree in IT. She then made the wise decision to move to adtech where she gained exposure across a breadth of the adtech supply chain: agency (MediaCom), a DSP (Amobee), a publisher ad server (Videoplaza) and an SSP (PubMatic). Brands in her portfolio have included P&G, Gucci, Hugo Boss, HotStar and Singtel.

Since leading PubMatic’s SEA publisher account management team in 2016, Soe has driven growth of publisher accounts across 12 markets, establishing new geographical business units, and spearheaded the launch of a local office in Indonesia. Her exhaustive list of achievements include driving 73% YOY growth of publisher account portfolio across SEA, attaining 600% growth in publisher revenue over the last two years, and aiding in new market expansion into Greater China and Korea.

It’s her extensive exposure to the adtech ecosystem that enables her to retain and grow business relationships between media buyers, adtech vendors and publishers, some of which include Mediacorp, Kompas, Summit Media, Detik, iflix and Sanook. This means she also implements complex adtech solutions—such as prebid wrappers—agnostic of market, language and culture. All of this has led to the adoption of PubMatic’s technology among top-tier publishers in Indonesia and Thailand, the two markets in SEA that are the most programmatically advanced in the region.

Soe is also a passionate advocate of programmatic technology and the benefits it brings to publishers and marketers including programmatic monetisation, what she believes to be the most transparent and efficient way for premium publishers to generate revenue. Additionally, she believes that programmatic fuels the endless potential of premium digital content creators across the region as well as empowers democratic debate. Call her a programmatic queen as she has plenty to say and execute during her reign, and it’s only just beginning.