Video Ad Tech Company Unruly Opens in Tokyo

Video ad tech company Unruly today continues its rapid global growth by opening a new office in Tokyo, Japan.

The global video platform, which has worked with 90% of Ad Age 100 brands to help get their ads watched, tracked and shared online, is expanding its operations across APAC to help ROI-driven marketers in Japan benefit from its unique audience data, native video ad formats and mobile video exchange.

The Tokyo office will be headed up by former Facebook Japan Sales Director, Haruyo Kagawa, who has also previously worked at Amazon and Overture/Yahoo.

Unruly’s social video solutions have been established in Japan since 2009, with over a hundred campaigns delivered for companies such as Panasonic, Samsung and Unilever remotely from its offices in Europe, Singapore and North America. Unruly’s products include Unruly ShareRank™, an algorithmic tool which evaluates, improves and predicts the viral potential of video ads.

Kagawa will report to Unruly’s APAC MD, Phil Townend, who is based at the company’s regional HQ in Singapore.

Townend said: “Hiring Haruyo to head up our new Tokyo office shows just how seriously we are taking the Japanese ad market. Despite Japan currently having the third largest ad market in the world ($41.16bn USD) only 3% of digital ad spend ($311 million USD) in 2014 was on online video. That’s going to change massively over the coming months, with some predicting that the Japanese online video market will be worth nearly $1 billion USD by 2017 (source: eMarketer / Accenture: Market Study of Video Advertising Market in Japan / CyberAgent & Seed Planning).

“Unruly can help fuel this explosion. No one knows video better than Unruly. Our evidence-based approach to content creation and amplification minimises risk and increases certainty for blue chip advertisers in the Japanese market. We already reach over 50 million Japanese consumers across our Unruly In-Page™ and Unruly In-Stream™ formats, and having operations in Tokyo will allow us to better support our clients and publishers in the region.”

Stats from the region include:

• Only 32.0% of online video views in Japan occur on YouTube - the lowest percentage of all the top APAC ad markets. The APAC average is 45.0% (source: comScore);
• The average CTR for Japanese video campaigns is 7.95%, much higher than the global average of 3.6%. However, the average share rate is 0.10%, which is lower than the global average of 0.23% (source: Unruly Activate™);
• 79.6% of Japanese viewers say they are very likely to lose trust in a brand when an ad feels fake (source: Unruly Future Video Survey 2015);
• Japanese viewers are the most likely to find ads that “follow them” around the internet helpful (35.2%) and the least likely to find them creepy (55.2%) (source: Unruly Future Video Survey 2015);
• The majority of Japanese viewers (76.0%) mute video ads sometimes, always or often (source: Unruly Future Video Survey 2015).

Kagawa said: “I am delighted to be heading up Unruly’s Tokyo office. There is a huge appetite for online video in Japan and Unruly’s product set offers the perfect solution for advertisers, providing a scientific, data-driven approach to online video content and programmatic distribution that is both repeatable and scalable.

“Unruly’s full tech stack for social video advertising helps brands to create a direct link between content and distribution, evaluating data about content quality and viewers' preferred viewing environments, devices and sharing platforms to optimise for engagement metrics that are simply not available on current demand side platforms.”

Unruly’s key products include:

• Unruly Activate: Leading programmatic video platform, powered by UnrulyX™, the first supply side platform (SSP) to offer scaled delivery of native ad formats and guarantee the viewability of premium video impressions bought via RTB – at massive scale, with the utmost safety. Formats include:
  • Unruly In-Stream: a skippable pre-roll format, which puts the viewer in control and gives advertisers cost-efficient reach at speed and scale;
  • Unruly In-Feed™: the first ad format to deliver native video ads at scale across mobile newsfeeds;
  • Unruly In-Page: A click-to-play, user-initiated format which maximises viewer engagement.
• Unruly ShareRank: Allows advertisers to maximize the social impact of their video content by evaluating, improving and predicting the viral potential of video ads.

The move marks the tech company’s continuing investment in the APAC region, following the opening of an office in Sydney, Australia in April and the launch of its APAC HQ in Singapore last year. UNRULY, UNRULY ACTIVATE, UNRULYX, UNRULY SHARERANK and associated logos, designs and other marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Unruly Group Limited in the United Kingdom, the United States of America and elsewhere. Other trademarks are owned by their respective owners.

About Unruly

Unruly is the ad tech company that gets videos watched, tracked and shared across the Open Web. Positioned at the intersect of video, social, native & mobile, Unruly uses emotional audience data and user-friendly video formats to massively increase viewer engagement, brand performance & publisher revenues.

With 3 out of every 4 video views now taking place outside of YouTube, 90% of Ad Age 100 brands have already used Unruly to connect with audiences at speed and scale across the Open Web.

Differentiated by a unique data set of 2 trillion video views and powered by a full tech stack, Unruly adds value by algorithmically evaluating content shareability and programmatically targeting custom audiences. Viewability is 100% guaranteed to an audience of 1.35 billion monthly unique users across mobile, tablet and desktop devices.

UnrulyX is the first supply side platform (SSP) for mobile video to offer scaled delivery of native ad formats and guarantee the viewability of premium video impressions bought via RTB.

Unruly employs 200 people across 15 offices, with regional HQs in London, New York and Singapore. Its super power is emotional ad tech. Its secret weapon is passionate people on a mission to #DeliverWow. Unruly was acquired by News Corp (NASDAQ: NWS, NWSA; ASX: NWS, NWSLV) in September 2015.

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