“How do you scale one commercial playbook across six markets that don't behave the same way?”

Context

Scaling a B2B adtech business across six structurally different Asian markets — Thailand, Turkey, Indonesia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore — at once, each with its own competitive and regulatory landscape. The expansion ran in the period leading up to the company's June 2014 listing in Tokyo. What made it hard was not that one market resisted the playbook — it was that no two markets shared the same publishers, the same agency landscape or the same commercial culture.

Action

• —Ran market-entry and regional operations across all six markets as Regional Expansion Lead.
• —Built and supported local commercial teams and go-to-market execution per market.
• —Rebuilt the publisher supply side country by country — the inventory that carried impressions came from a different set of publishers in every market, so the supply relationships could not be copied across.
• —Worked through local agency landscapes rather than around them, since the agencies that controlled spend differed market by market.

Result

• —Delivered roughly +32% year-over-year regional commercial growth.

The public record

The IPO and the Asia-wide footprint are public. The +32% year-on-year regional growth figure is not — that level of detail is reported to investors, not published.

• AnnouncementLeading demand-side platform FreakOut Inc. completes IPO on Tokyo Stock Exchange MothersPR Newswire · June 2014
• PressJapan's IPOs finally back up to pre-crisis levelsNikkei Asia · June 2014
• CompanyCompany history — including the Singapore branch and the Asia expansionFreakOut Holdings