Grapeshot announces new hire to lead expansion into Australia and New Zealand

Grapeshot has hired June Cheung as vice president – Australia and New Zealand (ANZ). to lead the development and growth of the business.

The announcement:

Australia, 16 June 2016 – Contextual categorisation and targeting technology provider, Grapeshot, has hired June Cheung as Vice President of Australia and New Zealand (ANZ). June will be leading the development and growth of Grapeshot’s business in ANZ, starting with its new office in Sydney, Australia. 

Cheung strengthens the Grapeshot team, bringing with her more than a decade of digital media experience from previous roles including Big Mobile ANZ and mobile specialist agency MNET.  

“The Australian market is primed for the introduction of contextual technology like Grapeshot, and I’m thrilled to be at the forefront of a new offering. We are seeing a great deal of opportunity in the ANZ region, and we believe that Grapeshot will prove itself to be invaluable to advertisers and publishers,” says Cheung. 

Cheung’s appointment comes at a time when Grapeshot is expanding globally, most recently the company has grown its team in Singapore and opened its sixth global office, in Chicago.

 Chris Pattinson, Senior Vice President, Grapeshot Asia-Pacific says, “In many ways, Australia is at the leading edge of the programmatic boom, and having a physical presence in market presents a huge opportunity for us at Grapeshot. Through our work in Asia we have already established successful client relationships within the region, and with Cheung’s expertise and strong leadership, we look forward to developing these relationships, seeing greater growth and a stronger market presence in ANZ.”

As part of the programmatic bidding process, Grapeshot’s contextual categorisation technology identifies the language and categorises the core editorial content of any web page. Its algorithms go to work and inform the decision-making process around suitability of a web page for ads to be served. The contextual analysis flags if the page content makes it inappropriate for a brand to be seen on – such as with a focus on hate speech, death or terrorism. 

“Programmatic campaigns using contextual signals have proven that they deliver better results than alternative approaches,” says Cheung.

“With context involved, programmatic can move beyond having price and availability as the main factors determining placement, to a situation where relevance is the key driver. Context mitigates ad spend wastage by delivering high value audiences across low value inventory.

Further to this, three levels of brand safety are built into Grapeshot’s contextual analysis, providing an unprecedented brand safety offering, at scale.”

Grapeshot’s technology supports customised targeting in 30 languages, 10 of which are uniquely relevant to APAC. For brands, Grapeshot’s technology ensures placement of ads in brand-safe environments; for publishers, Grapeshot increases the value of online inventory. Due to Grapeshot’s unique language capability, the technology also ensures ads are only served to people who are able to read them.