The Trade Desk reorganises leadership team to accelerate growth in Asia Pacific
The Trade Desk has boosted its leadership team to tap into the growth of programmatic advertising in the Asia Pacific.
Mitch Waters has been promoted to lead South East Asia alongside Henry Shelley, as well as ANZ'
The adtech platform has promoted Mitch Waters from his role as the general manager of Australia and New Zealand to senior vice president of South East Asia, Australia and New Zealand (SEAANZ). It has also brought in Troy Yang from Analytic Partners as senior vice president of North Asia, based in Hong Kong.
Yang will run The Trade Desk’s operations and growth strategy in Greater China, South Korea and Japan. He and Waters will join Matt Harty, senior vice president for APAC, who oversees business development for both regions. Henry Shelley, the general manager for SEA, will report to Waters.
“Asia Pacific is a big priority for The Trade Desk and this is reflected in the appointment of these senior leadership roles,” said Jeff Green, chief executive officer and co-founder at The Trade Desk.
“Having already accelerated our progress in Australia and New Zealand, I look forward to Mitch’s broadened leadership role in South East Asia. I’m also excited to welcome Troy to The Trade Desk. He has a critical role to play in our development in North Asia, and he has deep experience in China which will be invaluable in the next phase of our growth.”
The new appointments will also help The Trade Desk accelerate its relationships with brands, agencies, and publishers as it continues expanding to new areas such as application program interface (APIs) and connected TV. It hopes to get closer to agencies to provide data based on external signals.
“The creative side has been left behind and people have become hooked on the notion that all they need is the audience data,” Waters explained to The Drum.
“However, people buy different things at different times of the day. What we have been pushing in Australia is how we work with agencies to build proprietary versions of our platform that use external signals like the moment, time, location and influencing the dynamic creative optimization (DCO)”
“DCO is only one point of the story because it is using audience data and something like time of day is not used as well as it should be. We have had clients that are using API point of sale data around pop up stores. They wrote a custom algorithm with us to push out a new flavour of chips and if the sale exceeds this amount in an hour, it means its busy and we won’t push them out anymore.”
Splitting up the two regions with more senior talent means the Trade Desk can try to localise to client needs even further, rather than viewing APAC as one large market.
Localisation efforts are already coming to fruition in China, as last year The Trade Desk partnered with Baidu Exchange Services, Baidu-owned video platform iQIYI, Tencent Social Ads and Alibaba-owned video platform Youku.