In conversation with Gavin Buxton, Managing Director, Asia of Magnite

Gavin Buxton currently leads the growth of Magnite Asia, where he focuses on helping media owners and brands win across every channel and format. Gavin has over 19 years’ global experience in digital advertising, having worked in leadership roles at tech and publishing companies, including Microsoft, Turner Broadcasting and LinkedIn, with the last ten years based in Asia building businesses. His working knowledge spans television, digital, search, programmatic, mobile, content marketing and social media.

Agency Reporter – The emergence of the digital consumer is increasingly driving businesses to adapt their models for a digital future. In your experience, what key changes have you observed in the mindset of customers, specifically in Asia?

Gavin Buxton – The digital landscape has undergone substantive changes over the past several years as consumer behaviour has shifted online, which has required many of our clients to adapt quickly. Many of our clients are looking to understand the best ways to reach these increasingly digitally savvy audiences and leaning into our omnichannel expertise and tools to educate and advise them as to how best to reach their intended goals.

Within Asia, there have been some clear trends that have been exciting to observe. The main drivers of reduced data fees and lower entry smartphones, outdoor display screens and smart TVs, have seen an acceleration of multi screen time, especially within mobile.

This has led to consumers increasing time spent both at home and on the move across multiple channels, such as video streaming, audio streaming, gaming, ecommerce, super apps and news and entertainment sites. This has created both an opportunity and challenge for brands looking to engage with consumers. The increased screen time has opened up new ways to reach and engage with consumers, but significant fragmentation in how to reach them is seen as a remaining challenge.

Programmatic has continued to prove to be an efficient and effective way to understand, reach, target and engage with digital consumers. Programmatic’s transparency and controls that enable brands to activate and adapt to changing market conditions has further accelerated brands’ belief in the value that it can deliver. We expect this to continue to expand into the relatively nascent areas today of OTT, Audio and DOOH.

AR – The drastic changes in the way audiences prefer to consume content have led to a massive shift toward CTV and have disrupted the linear TV space. What opportunities does this shift present for advertisers to reach out to their audiences more effectively?

GB – The shift to CTV and streaming means that advertisers now have greater opportunities to reach audiences when and where they’re watching. Viewers on streaming platforms are more highly engaged and more receptive to advertising than those on traditional TV, our recent OTT research study shows. CTV combines the best of linear and digital, allowing advertisers to reach curated audiences en masse by leveraging first and third-party data, and accomplishing the holy grail of marketing: timely, personalized messaging to coveted consumers without compromising scale.

AR – The ad tech ecosystem is evolving at lightning speed and the technology being utilized by publishers is becoming more and more sophisticated. Could you please shed some light on which tools are currently dominating the space owing to their ability to effectively target the audience?

GB – 1, Header bidding / holistic demand activation – with increasing demand activation points, across both programmatic and direct demand, publishers require the tools to ensure they are able to share all available ad request opportunities to allow buyers to match audiences and activate demand.
2, Yield management and ad prioritization decisioning – with increased buyer points, the supply side are in need of more sophisticated yield management tools that allow them to prioritize strategic campaigns that have unique audience needs over broader targeting campaigns, which can allow greater activation for buyers and higher yield overall for publishers.
3, Supply Side audience activation – with the ad server and SSP platform being closest to the supply source, this enables SSP platforms to better enable match rates at source.
4, Data clean room – buyers and sellers are looking for the best methods for activating audiences in a secure and privacy compliant way.

AR – Talking about effective targeting for a minute longer, the demise of third-party cookies will reshape the digital landscape in more ways than one. How does it impact Magnite’s current offerings and what new solutions should we look forward to?

GB – As the third-party cookie will soon be deprecated, audience creation is moving from the buy-side to the sell-side, which directly owns the relationship with consumers. Though this shift is new for many publishers, seller first-party data has long been key to addressability in CTV/OTT. While Magnite will continue to support industry IDs such as UID 2.0, a range of identity signals must be used to make as much inventory addressable as possible.

This year, we acquired Carbon, a company with unique tools and expertise to help
publishers drive revenue with their first-party audience data, and Nth Party, a startup developing cryptographic software for secure audience data sharing and analysis. This will help grow Magnite’s audience and identity capabilities and accelerate their integration across our omnichannel offerings. These acquisitions will accelerate our ability to bring audience creation tools and our audience marketplace to the world’s largest publishers and advertisers.

AR – The ad tech industry in India has taken center stage and is poised for continued growth. What are the market sentiments surrounding the Indian ad tech ecosystem and how would you compare it to other countries?

GB – The Indian digital advertising market is one of the fastest growing in the world and the second largest in Asia, due in part to a large middle class that is growing exponentially every year. Ad tech is well positioned for continued rapid growth here, with Magna Global predicting the ad industry will grow 15% by year’s end. Greater accessibility to increasingly affordable streaming devices and cost-effective home broadband plans will only accelerate this growth going forward. As consumers spend more time on OTT devices, ad dollars will continue to follow, further propelling the industry forward.

AR – The streaming market is crowded and given the price-conscious audiences of today, we are witnessing a steady growth of AVOD. In your opinion, would AVOD dominate the market, and turn out to be the future of CTV?

GB – CTV provides scale and reach at a level rivaling traditional TV and it’s become clear that there is a place for advertising within the CTV/OTT landscape. AVOD continues to lead viewership growth across India and the rest of Asia, especially with broadcasters increasing investment in digital-first content. It’s also reasonable to assume that as long as there is demand for premium content, consumers will still flock to streaming services, even if that means they may need to pay a little bit more to view their favorite content or watch ads on an ad-supported plan to access content.

Asia has long been the region where we had predicted that ad funded or ad light
subsidized subscription offerings would eventually dominate and all platforms would eventually come to the AVOD party in order to achieve greater scale in the region. The increased amount of platform options available and higher price sensitivity in changing times has accelerated AVOD activations further.

AR – Magnite recently worked on a Heineken UK campaign to drive brand awareness for the launch of the brand’s new product. Can you please tell us what went behind the scenes to execute the campaign successfully and how did you utilize Magnite’s strengths for the same?

GB – Heineken UK turned to us to launch their new product due to the strength of our combined platforms to accurately measure the incremental reach of their digital strategy against similar linear activations, along with being able to track the brand awareness they generated from their cross-channel activation. The two month campaign combined delivered efficient media buying across curated OLV and CTV publishers across all screens, as well as continuously helping to optimise the campaign and troubleshooting any issues that arose. Our dedicated account team provided measurement reporting across the entire campaign, highlighting the digital incremental reach on top of linear TV. In tandem, a brand uplift study was executed in collaboration with Audience Project to understand brand awareness driven by OLV and CTV formats.

AR – As we move towards a more evolved ecosystem, what trends are you expecting to witness in the digital advertising space over the next few years?

GB – I expect that in the digital advertising space over the next few years, we’ll continue to see increased collaboration across the buy and sell-side as we work to solve for fragmentation, particularly in the programmatic ecosystem. The end result will be more optimal supply paths and greater efficiencies that lead with brand safety and privacy at the core.