It’s interesting that SAP Development Day coincide with some of the Advertising Industry Event this week, starting with ATS Singapore 2014 (Don’t ask me the meaning of the abbreviation) on Monday, Ad Tech 2014 on Tues/Wed and World Federation of Advertisers Meeting (A full-day sharing session with various marketers in the industries, and no, it’s not a full-day bashing sessions on agencies. More on that later :)) on Thursday.

Courtesy of SAP Programmatic Platform Vendor DataXu, I managed to attend the ATS Singapore 2014. The ATS event gathered the industry players in the programmatic advertising space, with key topics surrounding jargons such as “programmatic”, “real-time bidding (RTB)”, “Demand Side Platform (DSP)”, “Data Management Platform(DMP)”.

Some interesting Observation:

• I’m not sure if it’s by-design or some acquisition mismatch, but first key observation is that 98% were either from the agencies or vendors and less than 2% were marketers or brands, and interesting that some of the keynotes ended up to me more of sales pitch and worse, to fellow competitors or partners, just think of “Pitching about SAP HANA and SAP Cloud solution to groups of Oracle, Salesforce of the world” – So lesson learnt – Tailor your content to the right audience  and sponsor the right industry event.
• If you see Google, private ventures, some small start-ups, global industry leaders as well as seasoned regional players in one room, you will know that this industry is up to something. Still at an early stage, especially in this region, the share of programmatic spend is still minimal but with the market expected to grow 2-3x within the next few years, opportunities abound.
• Cut through all the clutters of over-promise, over-hyping, what does it means for us as B2B marketers? This will means that the holy grail of “Right Messaging to the Right Audience at the Right Time at the Right Price” might be truly fulfilled, through Dynamic Creative (Right Message), Audience Targeting (Right Audience), and Real-Time Bidding (Right Time at the Right Price). Is the technology available? Yes. Are we as marketers ready? Maybe. Any roadblocks? Definitely.

To summaries, here are some of the tweets (Modern ways of Notes taking) (Hashtag: #ATSS2014):

RT @jnguyen: By 2018, Internet advertising overtakes TV as largest segment; 10.7% CAGR to US$195bn in 2018; major tipping point. #ATSS14

— comScore Asia-Pac (@comScoreAPAC) July 7, 2014

Video impression to right user at right time has 3x value of a tvc according to MediaCom studies #ATSS14 — Wendy Hogan (@wendy_hogan) July 7, 2014

Agency view: ‘We don’t need specific inventory from @Yahoo & @MSAdvertising … We can find them somewhere else’ #ATSS14— Ronan Shields (@ronan_shields) July 7, 2014

1st party data underutilised, 3rd party data lacking supply… Maybe 2nd party data relationships present an opportunity? #ATSS14 — Mathew Ward (@Wardynz) July 7, 2014

How The Asian Programmatic Market Can Realise Its ‘Dynamic Growth’ – http://t.co/l5JJxMPNG1 A quick round-up of insights from #ATSS14— ExchangeWire (@exchangewire) July 7, 2014

Video programmatic: growth from negligible to tiny #ATSS14 #momentoftruth pic.twitter.com/716KhKSQjp — Travis Teo (@scenz) July 7, 2014

Below is a video produced by the IAB that provides a simple yet thorough explanation of programmatic buying.