In this industry byliner, SelectMedia’s CEO and founder, Sagi Gordon, discusses the growth of video marketing in Asia-Pacific and urges marketers in the region to take the first steps towards fighting ad fraud.

The use of programmatic software for the purchase of digital video advertising is already a fact in Asia. The technology has brought about a great change to the field of marketing, which was previously dominated by traditional video marketing practices. Programmatic video marketing has been particularly preferred over traditional platforms because it utilises real-time data, hence, ensuring a video ad is presented to the target customer at the right time.

The advent of high-speed bandwidth also fuelled the growth of programmatic video ads, just as it revolutionised the way people access TV and online video content. This drove marketers to switch dollars used for TV marketing towards digital marketing.

Looking forward, I expect some significant programmatic trends for the Asia-Pacific region in 2017. First, one should anticipate increasing use of digital marketing among manufacturers. In SelectMedia, for instance, our data for Asia reveals some manufacturers are starting to invest significantly, with upward trends in advertising for clothing and footwear as well as travel, where these players are buying online packages for landing pages.

Across Southeast Asia and Asia-Pacific, in general, has seemed like a haven for online marketing, with the region embracing digital content more than anywhere else. For example, consumers in the Philippines send more text messages than any other country; and Indonesia leads the world in the use of tweets. The region’s population has shown an eagerness to use mobile technology and consume video.

The region, this year, will likely experience a surge in mobile ad spend, especially in video ad formats. In fact, with about 50% of searches occurring through mobile platforms, up to 75% of marketers in this region will see a rise in mobile spend. The growing importance of cross-device marketing further points to a likely uptake of video marketing in 2017.

However, while mobile video ad spend is growing faster than any other digital ad format, it’s still straining to catch up with desktop video. Thanks to audiences who love to consume video content via smartphones and tablets, mobile video ad spend is likely to see rapid growth. Particularly in Asia, though, the lack of agreement over metrics, as well as ad pricing between buyers and sellers, has affected mobile video growth. The disparity in mobile video ad formats has led to buyers choosing to wait and see where the trends are heading. Also, the jury’s still out on whether mobile web or in-app is the better option for video mobile advertising.

Sagi Gordon, CEO Founder, SelectMedia

I believe advertisers are starting to understand the concept of splitting budgets into cross-channel marketing strategies. They see mobile video ads as highly attractive, due to touchscreen devices and the ability to create a more private video experience, compared desktop video.

As such, all indicators point towards the possibility of mobile marketing outpacing desktop marketing in the region.

The rising affluent demographic in Asia also can present marketers with a great opportunity, but targeting this group should be done through video marketing. For instance, an interesting area where programmatic video advertising has started to gain ground in Asia is luxury goods and services; and search activities around this product segment have been high on online video platforms. This underscores the need for luxury brands and marketers to focus their efforts on digital video advertising and platforms.

In June 2016, a poll by research firm Ipsos revealed that 62% of consumers in the top-income bracket watched online marketing videos on YouTube or via social media networks. Another 2015 study by Nielsen Company indicated 75% of young adults in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, and the Philippines watched digital videos on a weekly basis; and video sharing topped the region’s social networking activities. These findings further emphasised the importance of video marketing in Asia – although the effectiveness of targeting in the region would require a combination of digital video content and TV ads, since the majority of the population here still consume TV.

Asia-Pacific presents a great opportunity for digital marketing and, in particular, programmatic video advertising. Here at SelectMedia, we’re seeing a 30% year-on-year increase, due to growing programmatic spending. Digital video ad spend also is projected to rise faster in the region in coming years, compared to display, search, and even social media.

Global organisations are starting to take notice of anticipated growth in digital media consumption in APAC, with many US companies already targeting the region by offering programmatic video ad services and opening sales offices here to support increased demand. In particular, video media companies have opened sales offices in Australia, Singapore, as well as other Southeast Asia countries, and in territories such as India, Hong Kong, and Japan, to name a few.

Marketers must take the first step in fraud fight

To reap all the benefits of video, however, marketers must not neglect the need to embrace strategic safety and quality measures. The topic of fraud in digital advertising involves a broad range of issues, from fake clicks and inventory from publisher websites, to exaggerated traffic numbers and the lack of transparency in media buys. In Asia, fraud became a serious consideration only since 2014; and media companies in the region then started to use third-party tools to address the issue. However, today, such tools are not yet widely used in this region and still have gaps in what they are able to track, such as video ad serving template (VAST) video formats.

I believe education is key to improving the fraud situation, especially in Asia where the gap is wider than the West. Most advertisers are unaware of the problem, and most media vendors do not want to deal with the issue since it will dramatically reduce their inventory reach – or amount of available media to sell – and spend opportunities.

Also, marketers in Southeast Asia and Asia-Pacific, as well as Japan, still are not willing to pay for verification companies and technologies, even though these are available today and the issue is frequently discussed. They probably want media agencies to take care of it and rely on the latter’s capabilities and judgement to find the fraud matrix and, as a result, neglect it from their actual planning.

The bottom line is, until advertisers start demanding third-party verification tools and heeding the advice to set KPIs beyond viewer metrics or click-through/completion campaigns, fraud surfaces too easily and advertisers will continue to pay for its impact.

Milo Yiannopoulos, the incendiary writer and commentator who helped make Breitbart News a leading organ of the “alt-right,” resigned from the news organization Tuesday after a video of him endorsing pedophilia resurfaced online over the weekend.

Yiannopoulos — known simply as MILO in Breitbart’s own coverage of him — has been a flame-throwing provocateur whose writing has offended women, Muslims, blacks and gay people ever since former Breitbart executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon hired him as a senior editor in 2014.

Bannon, now President Trump’s senior adviser, championed the British-born Yiannopoulos’s inflammatory commentary and promoted him as a conservative truth-teller and champion of free speech. In turn, his popularity helped raise Breitbart’s profile among Trump’s supporters and the “alt-right,” a vaguely defined collection of nationalists, anti-immigration proponents and anti-establishment conservatives. Adherents of the alt-right are known for espousing racist, anti-Semitic and sexist points of view.

“Breitbart News has stood by me when others caved. They have allowed me to carry conservative and libertarian ideas to communities that would otherwise never have heard them,” Yiannopoulos said in a statement. “They have been a significant factor in my success. I’m grateful for that freedom and for the friendships I forged there.”

“I would be wrong to allow my poor choice of words to detract from my colleagues’ important reporting, so today I am resigning from Breitbart, effective immediately. This decision is mine alone,” he added.

“Milo Yiannopoulos’s bold voice has sparked much-needed debate on important cultural topics confronting universities, the LGBTQ community, the press, and the tech industry,” the publication said in a statement Tuesday. It said Yiannopoulos decided to resign Tuesday morning and “we accepted his resignation.”

As recently as last week, Breitbart editor Alexander Marlow called Yiannopoulos “the No. 1 free speech warrior of his generation in America at the moment” in an interview.

But Yiannopoulous’s views on pedophilia apparently went too far even for Breitbart.

On his SiriusXM satellite radio program on Tuesday, Marlow called Yiannopoulos’s comments “indefensible” and “appalling.” He said, “It’s all very upsetting and something we take very seriously at Breitbart,” but he made no comment about his future with the site.

Breitbart was under pressure to take action against Yiannopoulos, 32, from its own staff, which had threatened an internal revolt if he wasn’t fired or disciplined, according to people familiar with the discussions.

In a video interview early last year, Yiannopoulos bantered with the hosts of a podcast called “The Drunken Peasants” for nearly three hours. As the lengthy discussion veered into pedophilia, he condoned sexual relations with boys as young as 13 and joked about a sexual encounter he said he had with a Catholic priest as a teenager.

“You’re misunderstanding what pedophilia means,” he told the hosts. “Pedophilia is not a sexual attraction to somebody 13 years old who is sexually mature. Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty.” He adds that consent by minors is “arbitrary and oppressive.”

Milo Yiannopoulos on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher.” on Feb. 17. (Janet Van Ham/HBO via AP)

A group called the Reagan Battalion was among those calling attention to the interview to highlight its opposition to Yiannopoulos’s speaking role at the upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in the Washington area.

The reemergence of the video over the weekend triggered a cascade of adverse consequences for Yiannopoulos.

First, CPAC’s organizer, the American Conservative Union, rescinded its invitation to him as a conference speaker. The group’s chairman said in a statement that the organization found his comments “disturbing” and the video “offensive.”

Then Simon Schuster canceled an agreement to publish Yiannopoulos’s forthcoming memoir, “Dangerous,” for which it paid him a $250,000 advance. The publisher said it decided to cancel the book — which had drawn protests before the pedophilia flap arose — “after careful consideration.”

Finally, about a half-dozen Breitbart employees told Marlow, the editor, that they would quit in protest if Yiannopoulos wasn’t fired or disciplined, according to people familiar with the discussions who weren’t authorized to comment publicly. Breitbart hasn’t made any public comments since the issue arose.

Yiannopoulos, meanwhile, defended himself on Facebook on Sunday and Monday as the tide of controversy rose.

“I do not support pedophilia. Period,” he wrote. “It is a vile and disgusting crime, perhaps the very worst. There are selectively edited videos doing the rounds, as part of a coordinated effort to discredit me from establishment Republicans, that suggest I am soft on the subject.”

In an update Monday, he wrote: “I’m partly to blame. My own experiences as a victim led me to believe I could say anything I wanted to on this subject, no matter how outrageous. But I understand that my usual blend of British sarcasm, provocation and gallows humor might have come across as flippancy, a lack of care for other victims or, worse, ‘advocacy.’ I deeply regret that. People deal with things from their past in different ways.”

He added, “I am certainly guilty of imprecise language, which I regret.”

Yiannopoulos’s speaking tour has sparked protests on college campuses for the past year, including one this month at the University of California at Berkeley that turned violent. In reaction, Trump threatened on Twitter to cut off federal funds to the school if it “does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view.”

‘The anti-Semitic threats targeting our Jewish community and community centers are horrible and are painful,’ the president says.

For the first time in a week, President Donald Trump on Tuesday unequivocally condemned anti-Semitism, following in his daughter’s footsteps after twice last week refusing to explicitly denounce discrimination against Jews.

“The anti-Semitic threats targeting our Jewish community and community centers are horrible and are painful and a very sad reminder of the work that still must be done to root out hate and prejudice and evil,” the president said, reading brief remarks after concluding a tour of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

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“This tour was a meaningful reminder of why we have to fight bigotry, intolerance and hatred in all of its very ugly forms,” he said.

Trump spent roughly an hour walking through the museum with his daughter Ivanka Trump; Housing and Urban Development secretary nominee Ben Carson and his wife, Candy; Fox News contributor Alveda King, niece of the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.).

The president told reporters he plans to visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “I will be doing it soon,” he said, when asked about a potential trip. “Very important. Very important for me.”

Trump’s attempt Tuesday to calm the waters came after the president and his White House alarmed many in the Jewish community and anti-discrimination groups. His long-awaited remarks came weeks after he omitted a reference to the slaughter of 6 million Jews from a Holocaust remembrance statement and days after he declined to directly condemn anti-Semitism when confronted by reporters at news conferences on back-to-back days.

But it didn’t appease some Democrats. “It’s not hard to see a connection between the rhetoric used by the white nationalists given a platform by President Donald Trump’s campaign and the increase in threats against the Jewish people,” House Democratic Caucus Chairman Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) said in a statement. “President Trump’s statement is long overdue and doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of what needs to be done.”

Steven Goldstein, executive director of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, based in New York, also said Trump’s efforts were too little and too late. “The President’s sudden acknowledgment of Anti-Semitism is a Band-Aid on the cancer of Anti-Semitism that has infected his own Administration,” Goldstein said in a statement.

Trump throughout the campaign battled allegations of anti-Semitic influences on his operation, including from campaign chairman Steve Bannon, who had run the conservative news outlet Breitbart. He also failed to quickly disavow the endorsement of white supremacist David Duke, and many of his supporters pushed anti-Semitic imagery, including Pepe the Frog, a popular internet meme among white nationalists.

Trump’s condemnation on Tuesday came hours after former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton called on him to speak out against anti-Semitic violence.

“JCC threats, cemetery desecration online attacks are so troubling they need to be stopped. Everyone must speak out, starting w/ @POTUS,” Clinton tweeted Tuesday morning.

Her post followed a call from the Anti-Defamation League for the Trump administration to take action in response to a wave of reported threats against Jewish community centers (often referred to as JCCs) around the country. At least 10 such centers have received bomb threats in recent days, the fourth wave of threats against JCCs the ADL has identified this year.

On Monday night, Ivanka Trump, who converted to Orthodox Judaism ahead of her 2009 wedding, tweeted: “America is a nation built on the principle of religious tolerance. We must protect our houses of worship religious centers. #JCC”

Ahead of his brief address, the president had told MSNBC’s Craig Melvin that “anti-Semitism is horrible and it’s gonna stop and it has to stop.” He added that the racial divide in America is “age-old” and speculated that “something” is going on that prevents the country from fully healing.

“Sometimes it gets better and then it busts apart. But we wanna have it get very much better, get unified and stay together,” Trump said. “But you’ve seen it where oftentimes it’ll get much better and then it blows up.”

He credited the new African-American history museum for helping bridge that divide, though.

“Part of the beauty of what you’re doing here with the museum and the success of the museum — the success is very important because it’s doing tremendous numbers. Tremendous numbers of people coming in,” he said. “I think that really helps to get that divide and bring it much closer together. If not, perfect.”

Trump was joined in his denouncement of anti-Semitism by House Speaker Paul Ryan. “Anti-Semitism in any form is abhorrent, and I encourage authorities nationwide to take these threats seriously,” he tweeted on Tuesday.

Trump’s rhetoric Tuesday was a stark contrast to his passive language last week. Trump failed to take advantage of his first opportunity last Wednesday, when a reporter asked about the rise of anti-Semitic incidents across the country.

Standing alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump immediately discussed his Electoral College victory before pledging his administration will do all it can to “stop long-simmering racism and every other thing that’s going on.” He also hinted that he personally can’t be anti-Semitic, pointing to his Jewish family members: Ivanka; her husband, senior White House adviser Jared Kushner; and their three children.

At a news conference Thursday, Trump again caused agitation. In search of a “friendly reporter,” the president called on Jake Turx of the weekly Orthodox Jewish publication Ami Magazine, who prefaced his question by noting that he did not believe Trump to be an anti-Semite before launching into a query about bomb threats against JCCs.

Complaining that he wasn’t asked a “simple” or “fair question,” Trump ordered the reporter to “sit down” and insisted he understood the remainder of the incomplete question. The president then declared himself to be “the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life” and added that he’s also “the least racist person.”

He also recalled Netanyahu’s defense of him at the prior day’s news conference, where the prime minister argued that “there is no greater supporter of the Jewish people and the Jewish state than” Trump.

In neither instance, however, did Trump condemn anti-Semitic acts of violence, instead opting to defend himself against possible charges of being an anti-Semite or racist.

On Tuesday, asked explicitly by MSNBC’s Melvin whether he would denounce anti-Semitism “once and for all,” Trump said yes — and claimed he’s been doing it all along.

“Oh, of course,” he said. “And I do it — wherever I get a chance, I do it.”