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A little bit of context – Programmatic is extremely important when we talk about scale.

Historically, media was bought by partnerships from organization; companies were simply shaking hands with clients and publishers (TV / newspapers) to get deals done. Even up to recently, digital media has been bought in bulk and large packages, and therefore scaling to some degree – especially when it comes to smaller brands or smaller products – has become the focus of this conflict. As a result, access to various platforms became limited, and for bigger brands, it became a challenge to understand consumers properly.
What programmatic has been able to achieve is the ability for companies to make such decisions in real-time, as well as the ability to scale up and down when, how and if they need to.
Rohan is the VP of products and strategy for Xaxis, Asia Pacific. He is responsible for developing Xaxis capabilities across the region, including defining the strategy for various Xaxis business units, developing proprietary technology and establishing strategic partnerships to deliver best in class programmatic products.
Rohan has been part of the Xaxis / WPP family for about four years now, working primarily in Singapore. Prior to joining Xaxis, he worked in London at Starcom MediaVest Group (on the media side).
Originally from Bangalore, Rohan enjoys traveling and reading in his free time.
Tell us a little about your company Xaxis (overview of the company as a global entity, with focus on India region) (4:15)

Xaxis is a global digital media platform that programmatically connects advertisers to audiences across all addressable channels. Through the expert use of proprietary data and advertising technology along with unparalleled media relationships, Xaxis delivers results for over 2,800 clients in 45 markets across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East. Advertisers working with Xaxis achieve exceptionally high return on advertising spend through the company’s proprietary media products, as well as through its specialist companies, Light Reaction, Bannerconnect, plista and ActionX.

When it comes to Xaxis India, we want to reemphasize some of the newer positions we have to strong doubt. We have a data management platform (DMP) called Turbine that provides advanced real-time audience segmentation capabilities to fuel various Xaxis products. Turbine is the client DMP and we offer that service that no one else does.

We have the largest data assets even in most of India (reemphasizing some of the data assets through comScore and LightSpeed). The narrative is pretty much broken down into three:
• Xaxis in India has a product called Turbine, which is a DMP for our clients. It’s unique with a lot of investment behind it and is super cutting edge. It is one of the biggest footprints of our understanding of user profiles.
• Xaxis India has been active in the market for 4-5 years with a team of 30 people
• Xaxis India has relationships with some of the top publishers in the region

Your profile mentions you are a firm believer of Programmatic. Can you tell us something about Programmatic? How do you apply that in a marketing context?
When it comes to programmatic, Xaxis’ role in the ecosystem is mentioned a lot because:
Mention of consumer experiences within advertising has been improved significantly improved by adding relevant choice and better experience. This mission statement goes back to Xaxis working to make advertising more welcome. This is the first part in why we believe in programmatic.
Secondly, advertisers are making very, very granular, very, very positive and very sophisticated ways of making ad decisions. This is being done using technology, data plans and algorithms that can make a decision on each user, create unique data assets and sets clear, and use a combination of extremely valuable data assets, extremely valuable agency assets and combine that with a good user experience. For publishers, there’s more opportunity for monetizing their inventory, adding a lot of value to their inventory and letting the marketplace determine the price
With all that, Xaxis’ role is to bring everything together and move the needle for the industry.
Tell us something about scaling the marketing effort while getting similar or better ROI.
When it comes to ROI, advertisers can now create extremely complex strategies and decisions and fuse them together. Take a travel client for example – an airline may want to take different data assets into consideration when targeting. They can take very simple steps to segment their traveling consumers; they can look at people in first class, the destinations people fly through, weather, certain events, seasonality, how many people have booked tickets, price increases and much more. All these things can then be fed into the decision and exposed to consumers when targeting. So hands down, this has better ROI than traditional activities and can be only done in the programmatic world given the complexity.
When it comes to scale, scaling usually goes up and down; smaller companies and smaller brands can come with smaller budgets, while bigger brands have no ceiling, no significant barrier to actually do their investment and they all see the results. Our clients welcome our strategy where they let performance dictate how much money goes in.

How can Existing Indian brands leverage digital for brand building? We feel a lot of the large ‘old economy’ brands are still lagging behind…
In India, there’s a huge investment in the area of online video, which spreads into mobile and desktop; 70%-80% of opportunities in India are around mobile. What we’re seeing brands do is combine those opportunities for video and mobile very effectively in the last year. Most specifically, brands have started to direct online video walls with measurement and the efficacy of flagging like they did with TV.
Brands are also effectively upping the experience of different video platforms; they are creating very straightforward 15-30 second creative, as well as giving consumers lots of formats that are further enriched with custom targeting such as data and location.
Brand advertisers have significant amount of opportunities when it comes to programmatic; this starts with online video, accompanied by mobile and then further extending itself into other new emerging (radio, connected TV) markets. A significant portion of our business is focused on online video and it’s a very successful story in a market like India.

What are you reading right now?
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

What’s your dream project?
My mission as part of Xaxis is to continue to work to improve the advertising experience for advertisers. I would like to work on a project that involves making more likeable / personalized creative. For example, personally, I like to be informed of the new cars in the market, current stock prices, the weather – and further integrating my interests and understanding what I like with brand messaging. It would be cool project to see my interests, my news and preferences, further combined with brands and make that user journey very seamless. The end goal is to remove annoying ads and only create very targeted / customized ones.

Your Twitter handle?
@rohanphilips

The post Rohan Philips : Programmatic Branding with Xaxis appeared first on DesiCreative.

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