DAN India firms up programmatic & tech offerings with Dentsu Play

The Data Sciences Division of Dentsu Aegis Network (DAN) India has launched the world’s first gaming demand side platform – ‘Dentsu Play’. With Dentsu Play, DAN’s Data Sciences Division aims to strengthen the group’s programmatic and tech offerings and in turn, help brands better connect with audiences in a unified manner.

Pegged at a US$70 plus billion-mark, e-gaming is currently one of the fastest growing categories in content consumption and industry size in Asia; and now, with most of the countries under a lockdown, the category has been propelled into further growth in terms of time-spent and user engagements. Dentsu Play will help capture an understanding of the audiences within the category.

Commenting on the launch, Gautam Mehra, CEO, DAN Programmatic & Chief Data Officer, DAN - South Asia, said, “With the growing frictionless payment facilities, mobile phone prices, data rates and promotion of localised content, there has been a surge in the gaming ecosystem within the country that has only propelled further in the lockdown era. The increasing demand from clients to understand more about these audiences to build strong consumer-brand relationships has been a long-standing pain point. The absence of a single ecosystem to understand and buy these audiences in a seamless manner has been a key challenge for advertisers that we are now able to resolve with Dentsu Play. Dentsu Play will overlay complex machine learning algorithms to better segment audiences and identify opportunities that yield maximum value for brands as well as gaming partners integrated with the ecosystem. It will also be capable of serving completely playable ads that have known to have high engagement rates and are a capability of only a handful of DSPs that exist today. Dentsu Play will bring to the forefront better control over performance and insights, whilst ensuring the best of technology deployed to ensure brand safety and transparency.”

“The pace at which gaming and e-sports in the Asia Pacific region is growing is absolutely phenomenal. New start-ups are mushrooming the space every month. The industry has already attracted some of the biggest names in the global ecosystem such as Youzu, Nazara, Unity Tencent and Alibaba investing in it and has over 500 game development companies actively invested. Forging a unique and one of a kind partnership with Unity Technologies, Dentsu Play will expand the network’s capabilities in programmatic gaming with the ability to deploy engaging creatives at scale across the APAC region,” added Sunil Naryani, Vice President Commercials & Partnerships, Amplifi, Dentsu Aegis Network Asia Pacific.

Dentsu Play will be operated by DAN Programmatic and will feed into the Dentsu Marketing Cloud ecosystem for advanced visualisation, segmentation and analytic capabilities.