Singapore-based ADSKOM Capitalizes on India’s Booming E-commerce Sector

Singapore-based programmatic advertising technology platform ADSKOM announced it has expanded its team and services to India. The company is poised for a bona fide global expansion, as ADSKOM sees India with its booming e-commerce market as the ideal place to further build out business and engineering teams.

India is a promising market for any adtech company. According to digital marketing, media, and commerce research firm eMarketer, India’s digital ad market is set to surpass US$1 billion in 2016 alone. Digital display ads dominate the industry throughout the nation, soaking up more than 60% of the country’s total digital ad spend. This is encouraging for an industry that is growing by 20% annually, and programmatic advertising trades will soon account for more than 65% to 70% of all ad purchases in India.

While headquartered in Singapore, ADSKOM also has R&D offices in Palo Alto, California, and the firm’s first market penetrated was in Indonesia. “India is the hottest tech market on Earth at the moment and this make it really sexy for us,” says Italo Gani, CEO of ADSKOM in Southeast Asia. “It has the scale we are looking for while still very much experiencing a period of rapid growth. From this perspective, India makes the most sense for us as the next country to expand our operations to.”

ADSKOM has appointed Rajeev Saxena as the company’s new Country Director in New Delhi. Rajeev has a solid pedigree in the adtech world. He is the former Business Director for Southeast Asia and India for enterprise data, analytics, and software-as-a-service company Acxiom. Before that, as a Director at the scientific media buying firm AdzCentral, Rajeev delivered six-figure media contracts to hotels, airlines, educational institutions, and more. Prior to that, he was a General Manager for Exponential, a brand performance and engagement global ad-network, where he oversaw multi-million dollar digital ad deals.

“ADSKOM was looking for a person who could play the role of marrying data with tech for the benefit of advertisers,” explains Gani. “Rajeev became our obvious choice due to his long-standing reputation in adtech and the data business. More importantly, Rajeev was somebody that we felt we could trust and he shared the same belief in our mission.”

According to a recent report from The National Association of Software and Services Companies, India is the third largest startup ecosystem in the world with more than 100 accelerators, 200 active angel investors, 150 venture capital firms, and over 4,200 startups active in the region. Many of these budding companies are e-commerce firms, giving ADSKOM a relatively green field for client acquisition.

“ADSKOM’s data platform coupled with our sophisticated trading arm is well-suited for marketers and brands alike,” explains Gani. “In reality, the new publishers are going to be e-commerce players who have access to rich consumer data. With this in mind, ADSKOM sees India as a new opportunity to help publishers monetize via adtech. We don’t see any other players doing quite what we’re doing, which is what makes us really confident about our position.”

In the adtech business, Data Management Platform (DMP), Supply Side Platform (SSP), and Agency Trading Desk are important terms. DMP refers to a software system that aggregates, sorts, and saves information. From there, the software then displays it in a meaningful way for publishers and businesses to make decisions about where to put their advertisements. An SSP is a tech solution for easily automating the ad sales process. An Agency Trading Desk is a real-time bidding and ad exchange. It’s a service dedicated to helping companies actually purchase online ads and it helps brands make the most of their budgets.

In the past, ADSKOM was the first company in Indonesia to build its own DMP product called VASA. With it, marketers, publishers, and businesses in general can optimize their spending by targeting specific users with the right ads, at the right time, and in the right places. Additionally, ADSKOM provides a complete solution for digital ad campaigns via its SSP product called AXON, as well as its Agency Trading Desk product called ACTIO. All of these products and services are now available nationwide in India.

“We plan to grow our sales team in New Delhi to ten people by the end of the year to drive our expansion,” says Gani. “India will need to have its own team to build partnerships with local advertisers, e-commerce companies, and publishers. We believe local data and partnerships will be the key to winning the Indian market.”