SINGAPORE: As the programmatic buying market develops across the Asia-Pacific region, local advertising inventory is outperforming global providers in some markets a new study has said.

The Real Time Media Insights Report from Brandscreen, a demand-side platform, noted that major publishers in China, including Taobao, Tencent, Baidu and Sina, all had ad exchanges and said that these had played a vital role in growing the programmatic market there.

"The local inventory from Taobao and Tencent performs, on a CPA (cost per action) price performance basis, over 200% better than the global providers in China," Stuart Spiteri, Brandscreen CEO, told AdExchanger.

He observed that one of the ongoing trends in the region involved "rebalancing of the global inventory to be equally balanced between Google, AppNexus and Rubicon, mainly" but added that local exchanges were making inroads.

For the fourth quarter, Brandscreen reported a 70% year-on-year rise in the number of campaigns on its network in the APAC region. In addition, Google's share of inventory had been decreasing over the past several quarters, while those of Rubicon and AppNexus had been growing.

For the future, however, Spiteri expected that "local inventory and local providers of that inventory … will continue to win the performance race and continue to offer better quality product."

He highlighted several aspects where such publishers and providers benefited, including languages and an understanding of the nuances of each market.

Everyone, however, was having to deal with the problems presented by a lack of data. Spiteri suggested that building the data marketplace would help improve the programmatic market in the region.

Retargeting was an area that Brandscreen said had been successful for advertisers: retargeting impressions were up 200% year on year and up 50% on the previous quarter. CPA was 74% lower, the report found, for non-retargeting impressions.

The APAC market held many similarities to the global market, noted Spiteri, "but now you can see the first steps and first insights into how the programmatic industry in APAC will evolve slightly differently to other places of the world".

Data sourced from Brandscreen, AdExchanger; additional content by Warc staff