According to most media spending forecasters, outdoor media businesses continue to see a recovery in advertising spend after a severe drop in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. At the same time, companies are turning to less mature markets, including Asia Pacific, for opportunities to grow media revenue.
Billups, a managed-services media agency specializing in outdoor advertising, has been busy both expanding its acquisition of a Malaysian company and hiring a former Dentsu executive to oversee the growing Asia-Pacific business opportunity, Digiday has learned. Billups has also hired a new COO with holding company legitimacy to oversee the business.
Ben Milne, a career-long OOH executive, is stepping down as head of Dentsu OOH to become CEO of Billups APAC, relocating from London to Singapore. Milne has extensive experience working in the region, but observers agree that the region shouldn’t be viewed as one region given the differences between India, China, Korea and Japan.
Billups will be tasked with expanding the company’s business across the region, with its Malaysian acquisition of TAC Media as a growth platform due in 2023. Billups has also invested in BillyMedia, a smaller OOH company based in New Zealand and Australia, which will also report to Milne.
Coinciding with the TAC Media acquisition, David Krupp was promoted from CEO of Billups Americas to CEO of parent company Billups, and became the chief architect of an expansion plan that also included acquisitions in Canada and Belgium. But when it comes to APAC, TAC forms the core of growth in the region.
“We were really looking to get business from familiar and smart operators in the region first and then build from there,” Krupp explained. “We’re not sure how long we’ll continue with this approach, but we’ll look at everything outside of China first and then decide whether to expand into mainland China as well.”
Milne explained that while the market potential in the region is huge, the OOH presence is missing certain elements that Billups believes it can offer: “This will allow us to expose the Billups platform and data partnerships to a wider range of advertisers and partners in the region, which we think they are ready for,” he said, noting that what is generally lacking in Asia Pacific is the room to digitize its back-end platform and expand its offerings of in-store, outdoor advertising, customer location data and retail media networks.
“We are able to answer one of the biggest challenges facing outdoor advertising in the region – data and measurement at scale, and providing it to advertisers to make outdoor advertising fully accountable for all.”
“There hasn’t been a lot of investment (by holding companies) in the practical application of planning, buying, trading, measuring and reporting in this area, so there are probably fewer experts out there than there were 15 years ago,” Krupp said. “We want to ensure we have a strong local market, but we also want to allow them to be independent, to manage and grow their own businesses. But when the opportunity arises, we want to be able to take our clients to any corner of the globe they need to reach their customers.”
Anna Bagger, president and CEO of the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, agreed that the biggest growth region for OOH is in Asia Pacific. “Outdoor advertising represents a big chunk of advertising spend in Asia Pacific, even bigger than the U.S.,” Bagger said. “If you lumped it all together in one region, it’s the fastest growing part of outdoor advertising. There’s high growth in other regions, but Asia is definitely ahead of it. So if you want to be a global player, obviously you need to be in Asia.”
As Krupp and Milne noted, Bagger cautioned that it’s a mistake to think of the Asia-Pacific region as one big one, given the unique characteristics of each country: “Asia is a difficult place to talk about because it’s such a mix of different regions. It’s not like Europe, but there are big differences between Sweden and Portugal.”
Separately, Billups named Claudia Valderrama, formerly CFO at Wieden & Kennedy, as global COO, in charge of accounting, finance, IT and human resources worldwide.
