Grapeshot Expands Tech Offering, Targets Emerging RTB Markets

Grapeshot, a UK-based digital ad technology company, is expected Tuesday to announce that its tech offering is now available in markets in which real-time bidding (RTB) is emerging.

The company says its keyword targeting tech is now suitable for Asia-Pacific and Latin American countries, including China, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, and “much of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin America." In addition, the tech will work for advertising in the Czech Republic, Romania, and Turkey.

Grapeshot specializes in keyword targeting, and RTM Daily asked Grapeshot CEO John Snyder how that works in the RTB environment.

He said the company “analyzes the words inside every page it sees” on RTB exchanges, letting advertisers know what’s on the page before buying an impression. Grapeshot worked with AppNexus in April 2012 to deliver keyword contextual targeting. Snyder said Google followed suit in May 2013, but called it an “unusually late arrival." However, he believes keywords are now “here to stay” for RTB traders.

Grapeshot's expansion into multiple markets is noteworthy because of how immediate and vast the expansion is; the company seems to have gone global overnight. In reality, Snyder said it was easy for Grapeshot to expand so rapidly because RTB exchanges have pooled the world’s inventory together for them -- it's just their job to translate.

Agency trading desks, like Xaxis, are our largest customers on AppNexus, so when the demand comes for buying in new markets like Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Turkey, we simply give them the ability to use keyword sets in those languages,” Snyder said.

He added: “We all look at IDC and Forrester reports and see how RTB is set to win over 40% of the display ad digital spend in the U.S., then UK, but the truth is that China, Mexico, Thailand and many other language populations hold a faster growth rate curve.”

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