The marketing landscape in Southeast Asia is undergoing a rapid transformation, driven by the proliferation of mobile advertising, superapps, and retail marketing. With a significant portion of the population increasingly engaged online, marketers have unprecedented opportunities to reach and convert digitally-savvy audiences. However, alongside these opportunities come challenges, particularly in adopting advanced performance marketing strategies. Nopparat Yokubon, Country Lead for Moloco Ads in Southeast Asia and Australia New Zealand, provides an insightful overview of the current state of the industry, the obstacles businesses face, and how Moloco’s Machine Learning solutions are revolutionizing advertising campaigns across the region.
Could you provide an overview of the current state of the marketing industry in Southeast Asia and highlight some of the key challenges marketers face in adopting performance marketing strategies?
The current state of the marketing industry in Southeast Asia is experiencing significant growth and transformation, led by the rise in mobile advertising, superapps and retail marketing. According to We Are Social’s Digital 2024 April Global Statshot Report, 73.7% of Southeast Asia’s total population are on the Internet, marking a 2.5% increase from the same research conducted in April 2023. This indicates a growing number of consumers in the region are spending significant amounts of time online. Additionally, the region also surpasses the global average in social media usage, particularly in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. This trend presents marketers in Southeast Asia with a wealth of opportunities to reach, engage, and convert digitally-savvy audiences in the region through various marketing strategies online. However, despite the positive trend in digital engagement, Southeast Asian marketers still face a couple of challenges.
Much of the region still relies on traditional models of monetization and advertising. An example of this behavior would be how many broadcasters prefer manual bidding processes for ad spots, which typically occur well before the program airs. This approach relies on historical data and projections rather than real-time performance metrics. Such attitudes primarily stem from a lack of awareness and understanding around Modern Monetization and Machine Learning’s role. Big Tech companies such as Amazon, Google, and Meta have created tremendous value through products powered by ML, where it allows the product to autonomously and continuously make decisions that impact the business in real time. However, these solutions have largely been confined in their own environments. With recent advances in open source software and cloud computing, operational ML is far more accessible and allows marketers to leverage “off-the-shelf” performance marketing solutions.
Thanks to this democratization, companies can now control their own data and have in-depth access to performance results. Businesses have access to the same quality of algorithms as the tech giants, without any of the industry challenges around data opaqueness, visibility and ownership – putting the power back into the hands of the advertiser and helping them make their own informed decisions.
What are the main obstacles that businesses in Southeast Asia encounter when trying to integrate performance marketing into their advertising strategies? How can these challenges be overcome?
Aside from the general lack of understanding surrounding Machine Learning technologies, some of the specific challenges that marketers face when making performance marketing work for them include evolving their strategies from manual bidding and targeting to leveraging ML for greater efficiency, especially in an ever changing user privacy landscape.
According to a press release by Gartner, 75% of the global population will have its personal data covered under privacy regulations by 2024. This highlights the urgent need for businesses to rethink their approach to data privacy, focusing on robust consent management and building strong first-party data strategies. By prioritizing transparent data practices, consent management, and leveraging first-party data, businesses can ensure compliance, build customer trust, and enhance their marketing efforts in an increasingly regulated landscape.
Additionally, with the increasing number of digital platforms available, businesses may struggle to identify which solutions are most suitable and effective for their specific business vertical and target audience. As such, it is crucial for app marketers to work with the right channels to meet their goals.
Another hurdle that businesses face is the lack of robust analytical tools in collecting, analyzing and acting on data to improve performance marketing efforts, including the critical task of monitoring user engagement with ads. To overcome this, businesses must understand that performance marketing is about targeting the right audience at the right time and not just reaching the largest number of people. This cost effective, highly targeted approach to advertising relies on advanced Machine Learning capabilities. Machine Learning helps monitor user engagement with ads and use those insights to optimize future campaigns, providing precise predictions across billions of parameters and daily bid requests in milliseconds. Leveraging real-time, first-party data allows businesses to adapt to changing consumer behavior and market trends.
How do Moloco’s Machine Learning solutions optimize advertising campaigns for different stages of the advertising cycle? Could you share some specific examples of these optimizations in action?
Moloco’s Machine Learning solutions are designed to tackle different challenges that marketers may face in their advertising campaigns, enhancing the user journey from discovery to retention. For instance, Viettel Money, a digital finance app based in Vietnam, encountered significant challenges in acquiring new iOS users following the introduction of the SKAdNetwork privacy regulations in 2021. Viettel Money thus needed a partner with the expertise to effectively reach new users and drive growth for the app outside of Self-Attributed Networks (SANs). To overcome these iOS acquisition challenges, Viettel Money partnered with Moloco. Using our ML solution, Viettel Money was able to streamline the user acquisition phase by targeting high-quality traffic across the open internet, moving beyond SANs. Our cost per action (CPA) model played a crucial role in this, facilitating precise targeting of new high-value iOS users and ensuring they were reached at the right time for the right price. By leveraging Moloco’s ML to find high-value users on the open internet, it successfully paved the way for Viettel Money to consistently expand its monthly new user acquisition, supporting its goal of becoming the premier e-wallet app in Vietnam.
Another example is our work done with Bucketplace; a leading home and living marketplace platform in South Korea, who were looking at improving their product discoverability amongst their user base. The platform needed an effective strategy to elevate product discoverability for their merchants while ensuring a high bar for user satisfaction. Bucketplace thus decided to launch their ads business with Moloco Commerce Media, an enterprise software solution driven by ML, to optimize the consideration and engagement phases of the user journey. This solution enabled merchants to drive more product discoverability through ads while maintaining a non intrusive user experience. With this solution, Bucketplace was able to quadruple its monthly ad revenue in a year, and achieved 2.5x monthly active advertisers with 85%+ of monthly advertiser retention.
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Can you share a case study or an example of how Moloco has enabled a local or regional Southeast Asian business to enhance their advertising ROI through your Machine Learning-powered solutions?
By leveraging on our Cloud DSP Service for enhanced advertising, BIGO Live, a Singapore-based live streaming platform was more efficiently able to connect diversified communities around the world and ultimately, maximize Bigo Live’s advertising returns. The Bigo Live team partnered with Moloco to identify valuable, active users that would support their global expansion. Moloco thus brought to the table access to global inventories, enabling Bigo Live to expand to over 20 geographies, and guidance on iOS StoreKit Ad Network (SKAN) adoption when Apple’s SKAN system first debuted. The campaign also conducted A/B testing on creatives to enable further data-driven optimizations. Depending on the geography, the campaign overall exceeded cost per action (CPA) and cost per install (CPI) goals by about 10-15% for Bigo Live.
Many marketers find Machine Learning to be a complex and opaque field. How does Moloco help demystify Machine Learning for its clients and ensure they can effectively utilize these technologies to deliver more relevant and personalized ads?
Machine Learning encompasses a variety of models, each serving distinct purposes in performance marketing. Partners like Moloco thus play a key role in providing essential insights into the capabilities and complexities of each ML model, helping marketers understand which aligns best with their advertising objectives.
Moloco’s advanced operational ML solutions makes ML more accessible to marketers. Moloco Ads help marketers to grow their business on the open internet; Commerce Media and Streaming monetization enable ecommerce and streaming platforms to build and grow their own ad business powered by machine learning. For instance, our “Moloco Ads” solution significantly enhanced Burger King’s Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS) and Cost per Install (CPI) performance, achieving exceptional scalability. Leveraging our advanced machine learning-powered solution, we enabled automated targeting and bidding, optimizing performance by identifying and acquiring high-value users on the open internet. Moloco’s automated campaign also facilitated seamless testing, allowing Burger King to identify the creatives with the best performance. Through tailored solutions that cater to diverse business needs, we empower marketers to navigate the complexities of the advertising landscape, enabling them to achieve their desired marketing outcomes in an increasingly competitive digital landscape. Beyond that, as a DSP provider without a Supply-side platform (SSP), Moloco helps to maximize advertiser ROI without any bias toward a particular publisher or exchange. To further support our customers, we provide access to publisher-level data and log data, allowing for in-depth analyses of campaign results.
What future trends and innovations do you foresee in the realm of performance marketing, particularly in the context of Southeast Asia? How is Moloco preparing to stay ahead of these trends?
Performance marketing is rapidly gaining traction over traditional brand marketing in the region, driven by an increasing focus on measurable outcomes. We are seeing substantial investments in performance marketing as businesses seek to acquire new users, boost in-app engagement, and re-engage lapsed users to drive revenue and profitability. A key trend fueling this shift is the growing demand for advanced ML solutions that can analyze vast amounts of data to accurately predict customer behavior, and ultimately deliver performance results.
At Moloco, we are at the forefront of these trends by leveraging advanced ML to harness real-time data, enabling businesses to achieve precise targeting and drive incremental results. Operational ML is core in everything we do – we aim to harness the power of cloud computing and open-source innovations to drive growth and monetization for companies of all sizes. With our high processing capacity, we can deliver over 75 billion impressions every month. Built on deep neural networks, our ML models are capable of processing 7 million bid requests per second and 7.78 million deep learning predictions per second, allowing marketers to be equipped with the solutions and tools to deliver top-tier advertising campaigns and leverage the full potential of operational ML. Unlike the closed systems of tech giants like Google and Meta, our approach ensures that advertisers can access cutting-edge ML capabilities without proprietary constraints. We are focused on developing customisable solutions that cater to the unique needs of this diverse market. By continuously enhancing our predictive analytics capabilities, we empower marketers to anticipate user behaviors dynamically, thereby optimizing marketing strategies and achieving superior performance in an ever-evolving digital landscape.
As the digital marketing landscape in Southeast Asia continues to evolve, the importance of leveraging advanced technologies such as Machine Learning becomes increasingly evident. Nopparat Yokubon and Moloco Ads are at the forefront of this transformation, providing businesses with the tools and insights necessary to navigate the complexities of performance marketing. By staying ahead of emerging trends and focusing on customized solutions, Moloco Ads ensures that marketers can achieve their desired outcomes and maintain a competitive edge in an ever-changing digital environment. Through continuous innovation and a deep understanding of regional market dynamics, Moloco Ads is empowering Southeast Asian businesses to unlock the full potential of their advertising strategies.
