India Ahead Of Many Apac Markets

- Ruhail Amin

When it comes to the use of programmatic, how has the Indian market responded to its use and adoption?

The current penetration of programmatic in India is 41 percent. It is ahead of many Asia Pacific markets already. One of the drivers of this growth is a form of programmatic called the ‘programmatic guaranteed’. Earlier, there was not much research in Asia Pacific in terms of the state of the marketplace. We have worked with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Nielsen to look at how programmatic is affecting businesses globally and particularly in India. According to them, the penetration in India is going from 6 to 17 percent, which is almost a 3x growth in programmatic guaranteed for India.

It is particularly interesting for India because here, there is a lot of engagement with programmatic guaranteed. Typically, when people look at programmatic from a publisher’s perspective, they look at premium inventories such as homepage, masthead or a premium video, which are all the crown jewels of a publisher. Usually publishers are not keen to put that in programmatic environment because they want a fixed price and guaranteed volume. What programmatic guarantee does is that it allows publishers to trade the price and have guaranteed volume with an agency. Moreover, what it has done is that it has replaced the manual with automated processes and brought efficient practices into the environment.

According to you, what are some of the major factors that have mainstreamed the use of programmatic?