Marketing in Asia: Veteran Marketer Talks About Emergence of Empowered Consumer

On May 8, 2015, David Ketchum, Current Asia CEO, spoke with eMarketer’s Lisa Barron about the changing role of the consumer in Asia-Pacific and the swift rise of marketing technology.

In it he said:

“You’ve got hundreds of millions of consumers who are each on a different kind of customer journey. Each customer is different. The cool thing about marketing technology, and also ad tech to a certain extent, is that it allows you to personalize and automate all of those customer journeys at scale. Previously, you had the choice of either doing a big brand broadcast (a relatively uninteractive activity) or something highly personalized—now you can have mass customized marketing at scale.

This is not exactly news in Silicon Valley, and it’s more mainstream in New York or London and, increasingly, Australia.

In Asia, marketing automation adoption is growing at 51% a year. And programmatic ad buying is growing at around 74% a year. It’s from a low base, but I do see this wave is coming here as well, and CurrentAsia was set up to be there when the wave breaks.”

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