iPinYou CEO: 40 percent of Digital Advertising will Adopt Programmatic Buying in China

BEIJING, May 29, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- On May 21, 2014, the 4th iPinYou Global RTB Summit, the most authoritative and influential industry event around programmatic buying hosted by iPinYou, the largest demand-side platform (DSP) in China, was successfully held at Le Royal Meridien Shanghai. This event attracted participation from global leading advertising technology leaders, 4A agency executives, renowned brand advertisers, and third party company executives, who together discussed the future development of RTB advertising and programmatic buying in general.

With a full-year's preparation by iPinYou, this summit far exceeded previous events in terms of its scale and richness of content, with over 700 participants and live TV broadcasting the summit by China Business Network (CBN). This event was also being covered by nearly 60 print, online and TV media outlets across the country. The theme of this summit was "Embracing the Programmatic Buying in the Era of Big Data."

RTB Industry entering period of explosive growth

Ms. Grace Huang, Founder and CEO of iPinYou, delivered a keynote speech titled "Eight Major Trends in China's Programmatic Buying Market." During the speech, Ms. Huang said that, as previous iPinYou summits had predicted, in 2014 the RTB industry is entering the prime stage after two years of growth. The inventory iPinYou DSP connected to has grown to RMB7 billion from RMB1 billion in 2012. RTB advertising is no longer a supplementary approach, and becoming the mainstream way of digital advertising. Starting from 2014, some advertisers have begun to allocate 50 percent of their budget on programmatic buying. Ms. Huang predicts that by 2019, programmatic buying will take up 40 percent of the digital advertising budget totally RMB17 billion. This trend is further reinforced by the premium direct buying (PDB) model. iPinYou launched the first PDB initiative with one of the largest auto group in China. The industry consensus is that PDB will be an easy way for brands with traditional cost per day buy to adopt programmatic buying and has big potential in China.

The CEO and founder of Luma Partner Terry Kawaja sent in a video speech talking about exciting opportunity programmatic buying he sees in both U.S. and China market. He made a great analogy between airline ticket and digital ad space and proves that all inventories including the premium ones will shift to programmatic buying.

When asked about the future prospect of DSP companies, Ms. Grace Huang said, "Independence and technology leadership are key to the long-term success of DSP companies. Today, there are still ad network company mixing up itself with DSP. Only DSP who does not own any media can provide the best value to advertisers. Also, only company with strong technology backbone can survive the competition. I am happy to see iPinYou has become the largest independent DSP in China."

This summit also attracted the attendance of decision makers from renowned 4A companies such as GroupM, OMG, Aegis, Publicis, IPG, as well as executives from major exchanges such as Google, Baidu, Youku, IQIYI InMobi, and AdsMOGO. All these industry elites gathered at the summit to engage in an intense panel discussion. The topics covered include those of great important such as how advertisers should embrace RTB advertising, how to measure the efficiency gained through programmatic buying, and the important role of big data.

Many still think DSP today is mainly dealing with PC banner ad. However, a major trend has emerged starting from last year, which is, video and mobile inventories are all connected to major DSP players like iPinYou. Up till now, iPinYou DSP can listen to 1 billion mobile inventory and 1 billion pre-roll inventory on a daily basis already. Programmatic buying is not a new media form or a new advertising method, but a new way of buying and optimizing digital media. Only DSPs connecting PC, mobile, and video can get hold of target audience in the era of fragmentation, and such DSPs will enjoy more advantages in China.

Trend of the RTB Industry from a Global Perspective, Conversion Coming from Impression Not from Clicking

This summit also had a global perspective. Ms. Jocelyn Hayashi, Vice President of MediaMath, delivered a fascinating speech about the development and trend of programmatic buying in overseas markets. The Head of Google Exchange APAC, Mr. Shanye Orbell, delivered a splendid speech titled "Changes in the Global Digital Advertising Buying Method: Current Situation and Future Development of Programmatic Buying," offering a unique view on the RTB market from a global perspective. This summit, with four keynote speeches and three summit forums, has attracted the biggest ever lineup in the history of RTB summits, whether it's in terms of summit scale, audience composition, or industry influence.

One of the findings iPinYou shared at the summit is that view through conversion makes up 90-99 percent of conversion a DSP ad brings. Interestingly, this is echoed by a recent report by Rocket Fuel. This finding is based on over 1,000 campaigns iPinYou ran in the past year and is significant in that it will shift the advertisers' focus on pure post-click conversion to more comprehensive measurement. In fact, through enormous datamining, iPinYou identified an important consumer path that its DSP can optimize against. This will propel advertisers to rethink about the allocation of budget between search and display ad and the importance of DSP advertising in boosting search.

During the afternoon sessions of this summit, iPinYou set up four private discussion forums. The themes were around how to build brands with an Internet mindset, how to use DSP to help build ecommerce business, mobile DSP, and self-service DSP for SMEs. This is the first of its type and generates many intriguing and in-depth questions and discussions, giving the participants a comprehensive taste of RTB.

At the end of the summit, Grace expressed great anticipation on the market, "2014 is a game-changing year of the entire Internet advertising industry, and the 4th iPinYou Global RTB Summit has witnessed a disruptive change to the digital marketing industry. After six years of investment in technology and data, we are so glad to see iPinYou becomes the best and largest DSP. We are grateful to our clients and partners and will continue such market education event in the future."

SOURCE iPinYou