Opera Mediaworks plans to expand its mobile ad platform in Asia Pacific as brands, agencies and publishers shift to mobile marketing.
The expansion will focus on key countries such as India, Indonesia, South Korea, Australia, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand.
Opera Mediaworks’ Asia operations will be run out of parent company Opera Software’s Singapore office.
As a first step, the company has named Vikas Gulati — previously vice president at mobile ad exchange Vserv — as its managing director in Asia.
“We see huge opportunities in mobile video adoption and, in turn, mobile-video advertising in the Asia-Pacific region,” said Gulati.
“We also see other trends in Asia-Pacific – the adoption of better audience targeting, and big retailers and e-commerce sites such as Flipkart and Snapdeal strengthening their focus in m-commerce as consumers get more comfortable making purchases on their mobile devices,” he added.
Smartphone adoption rates across 29 Asia-Pacific countries have spiked from 48% to 60% in 2014, according to data gathered from users of the Opera Mini browser.
Last year, the region’s share of global mobile ad impressions continued to grow, finishing the fourth quarter at 26.1% compared with just 10% three years ago.
Asia overtook Europe to become the second-highest generator of mobile ad impressions on the Opera Mediaworks mobile ad platform at the end of 2013.