The Trade Desk is restructuring its business, following the promotion and relocation of ANZ general manager Mitch Waters.
Waters has been named senior vice president of South-East Asia, Australia and New Zealand (SEAANZ) for The Trade Desk and will now be based out of Singapore.
His replacement is former head of owned and earned at Mindshare Clay Gill, who will be supported by Waters locally until he relocates to the Singapore office in the second half of the year.
Gill joins from customer experience software [24]7.ai, where he held the role of head of APAC for its customer acquisition cloud division.
As part of the his role, Waters will take over full responsibility for the new SEAANZ region. Prior to joining The Trade Desk in 2017, Mitch was the managing director of AOL Platforms in Australia and New Zealand.
Locally, Gill will continue to focus on developing media agency relationships, leaning on his extensive agency background.
Gill, who also spend time at MediaCom both locally and abroad, is also charged with continuing the work started by Waters in China, exposing more clients in Australia to the benefits of advertising in the region.
"We've only just touched the tip of the iceberg. I think there's still so much in the programmatic space that we can expose the agencies to, especially around our key products," Gill told Adnews.
"Clients want to make sure that they are making the right choices in their marketing technology decisions and also make sure that all that investment that they have in first-party data is coming to fruition, so we'll continue to guide them in that respect."
Gill added that connected TV will also be a core area of growth for the business, as The Trade Desk starts educating "traditional TV teams" around the audience shift in viewing into the space.
Speaking to AdNews, Waters explained his new remit will still include supporting the ANZ business, as well as new general manager, Gill.
He said the business is focused on four major regions in the globe and two are primarily in Asia, with focus on how the business can scale in Australia and South East Asia, while also making inroads into "green grass areas".
"By segmenting out South East Asia and Australia, we recognise there is a fair amount of crossover in terms of sophistication of certain markets," Waters said.
"Singapore and ANZ are very aligned in terms of their scale challenges in terms of the population makes them more experimental and 'first movers' in programmatic strategies and technology."
The Trade Desk will also begin to invest early in countries such as Indonesia and Thailand, which are seeing a developing middle-class population.
Waters said with people increasingly making larger purchases such as TVs, fridges, cars and motorbikes, due to their "mobile-first" nature, they have skipped the early challenges that came with desktop.
"It's an incredibly exciting world but we can't go into it assuming there's going to be a laggard in the development of their programmatic capability," he explained.
"They'll leapfrog a lot of what we struggled with and we need the innovation that we've had in Australia and New Zealand to help complement what we're seeing in South East Asia."
The Trade Desk's new ANZ GM, Clay Gill
Troy Yang has also been named senior vice president of North Asia for The Trade Desk, based in Hong Kong. He has experience working with advertisers across various markets and sectors to the new North Asia role, having also worked at Nielsen in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
Yang will run The Trade Desk’s operations and growth strategy in the new North Asia region, covering Greater China, South Korea and Japan.
Have something to say on this? Share your views in the comments section below. Or if you have a news story or tip-off, drop us a line at adnews@yaffa.com.au
Sign up to the AdNews newsletter, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for breaking stories and campaigns throughout the day.