According to most media spend prognosticators, the out-of-home media business continues to enjoy a resurgence of ad dollars following a serious dip in the immediate wake of the pandemic. At the same time, opportunities to grow media revenue has companies looking to less mature markets, including the Asia Pacific region.
Billups, an out-of-home specialist managed services media agency, is busy doing both, as it expands on the acquisition of a Malaysian company, and taps a former Dentsu executive to oversee its growing APAC business potential, Digiday has learned. Billups has also hired a new COO with holding company bona-fides to guide the overall operation.
Ben Milne, an OOH exec for his entire career, has left his post as head of Dentsu OOH to become CEO of Billups APAC, and will move from London to Singapore. Milne has considerable experience working in the region — which observers agree should not be looked at as one region given the differences between India, China, Korea and Japan.
He’s charged with expanding the company’s business across the region, using the 2023 acquisition of TAC Media in Malaysia as a base from which to grow. Billups also invested in Billie Media, a small OOH company with a foothold in New Zealand and Australia, which will also fall under Milne’s aegis.
It was around the time of the TAC Media acquisition that David Krupp moved up from CEO of Billups Americas to CEO of the parent company Billups, and he’s the principal architect of the expansion plans, which also includes acquisitions in Canada and Belgium. But as far as APAC goes, TAC forms the nucleus of growth in the region.
“We actually thought, let’s get a book of business that we can start with, with comfortable operators and smart operators in the region, and then let’s start to build from there,” explained Krupp. “I don’t know how long this approach will last, but we’re looking at everything outside of China first, and then we’ll make decisions about whether we want to get into Mainland China as well.”
Milne explained that the market potential across the region is huge, but the OOH presence lacks certain elements he believes Billups can provide. “This will allow us to expose the Billups platform, and our data partnerships to a much broader base of advertisers and partners in the region that I think are ready for this,” he said, noting that what’s generally lacking in APAC is digitization of the back end platforms, as well as upside in expanding in-store out of home, customer location data and retail media network offerings.
“We can answer one of the biggest challenges that out of home has in this region, which is data and measurement at scale and bringing that to advertisers in order to make out of home completely accountable to all.”
“There’s not a lot of investment [by holding companies] around the practical application of how you plan, buy, transact, measure and report in the space, so there are fewer specialists today than there probably were 15 years ago,” said Krupp. “We want to have strong local markets. But we want them to be independent, such that they can manage their own book of business and grow. But where there is opportunity, we want to be able to take our clients to the corners of the earth that they require to reach their customers.”
Anna Bager, president/CEO of the Out of Home Advertising Association of America, agreed that the biggest growth region for OOH lies in the APAC region. “Out of home is a large part of the advertising spend there, larger than what it is in the U.S.,” said Bager. “If you lump it up into one region, it’s the fastest growing part of out of home. Other regions have strong growth numbers, but Asia is definitely topping it. So if you want to be a global player, obviously you also have to be in Asia.”
As Krupp and Milne spelled out, Bager cautioned that thinking of APAC as one big region would be a mistake, due to the peculiarities of each country. “Asia is hard to talk about because it’s such so many different regions. Not unlike Europe — there’s a big difference between Sweden and Portugal.”
Separately, Billups also tapped Claudia Valderrama as global COO, who joins from Wieden + Kennedy where she was CFO. She’ll be charged with handling accounting, finance, IT and people operations globally.
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