Moves Reflect Continuing Growth in APAC Region; Company to Expand Presence from Nine Markets to Thirteen by Year’s End
SINGAPORE – Xaxis, the world’s largest audience buying company, announced today it has named Henry Stokes as director, Client Development for APAC and elevated Arshan Saha to the role of director, Southeast Asia. Stokes joins the company’s APAC operations from the Xaxis UK office where he served as head of agency and client engagement, and played a key role in the launch of Xaxis operations in the United Kingdom. Saha previously served as director, Singapore and Malaysia where he was instrumental in establishing Xaxis in both markets.
“I am excited to join the growing Xaxis team in APAC as we work to bring data driven audience buying to additional brand channels and new markets across Asia”
In his new role, Stokes will serve as the primary liaison to Xaxis global clients in supporting their regional APAC advertising initiatives. Immediately prior to his work at Xaxis, Stokes was head of online display at GroupM agency Mindshare in the UK. Earlier, he founded and ran Circus Street, a digital consultancy for the traditional publisher sector.
As director, Southeast Asia, Saha will oversee Xaxis strategy and operations, including client development, trading and partnerships in the company’s existing Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand markets. Previous to Xaxis, Arshan was regional director for online marketer Innity, where he led operations in Southeast Asia, growing the firm’s footprint to more than 150 employees across the region. He has also worked at Adconion and at Richard Branson’s Virgin Money banking brand.
Xaxis continues to expand its footprint in the APAC region, growing from two markets at launch to nine currently, including operations in the regional powerhouses of China and Australia. The company has an aggressive growth strategy in place for the region, with plans to boost its APAC presence to 13 markets by the end of 2013.
“As we have seen from the success of each of our individual country launches and the speed at which advertisers have integrated programmatic into their overall spend, the market demand across APAC for intelligent audience buying solutions is extremely high,” said Michel de Rijk, managing director of Xaxis Asia Pacific. “Both Henry and Arshan have been major contributors to the Xaxis success story over the past two years and we look forward to their leadership in meeting the needs of our global clients throughout the APAC region.”
“Audience buying is becoming an increasingly core element of the overall marketing mix for advertisers in the Southeast Asia market, bringing increased performance to both advertisers and publishers,” said Saha. “I look forward to working with our clients and partners to continue to deliver the most effective programmatic solution for reaching audiences in Southeast Asia.”
“I am excited to join the growing Xaxis team in APAC as we work to bring data driven audience buying to additional brand channels and new markets across Asia,” said Stokes. “My goal is to further integrate Xaxis into the media planning process as a strategic, multi-market partner for reaching key audiences in the fast growing APAC region.”
Xaxis provides over 1,300 advertisers with audience buying solutions at scale, delivering hundreds of billions of impressions globally per year. The proprietary Xaxis DMP houses the largest collection of unique anonymous audience portraits. As the only universal and neutral data management platform in the industry, the Xaxis DMP allows advertisers to measure attribution, offline ROI, audience insights and brand impact based on the entire digital plan.
ABOUT XAXIS
Xaxis is the world’s largest audience buying company. Through its proprietary platform, Xaxis offers advertisers a single, comprehensive resource from which to reach and engage with global audiences across the universe of digital media. Xaxis does this for its GroupM agency partners, Maxus, MEC, MediaCom, and Mindshare. Xaxis, a GroupM company that is part of WPP, has a presence in 26 countries across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America. For more information, please visit www.xaxis.com.
