Indonesian Ad Network, Adstars, Generates 500 Million Monthly Impressions

It seems like Telkomsel isn’t the only company showcasing their ad products at IDBTYE, Jakarta. We also met the folks at Adstars too, and learned a little about their interesting work.

In brief, Adstars is a web and mobile advertising network focused on Indonesia web traffic. The figures they showed us were nothing short of staggering.

According to Adstars representative Chaizarani Muharramah, the ad network generates more than 200 million impressions per month to 19 million unique users on the web. For mobile, it generates 300 million impressions to 20 million unique users. That totals up to a whopping 500 million in combined monthly impressions just from an Indonesian audience.

“Our key differentiation from similar services is that we have a lot of localized publishers to reach localized audiences,” said Muharramah.

Adstars’ mobile ads are generated mostly through mobile websites and on selected native apps. For example, Adstars account executive, Rachmat Subakti explained that their ads are displayed on the Twitter app for BlackBerry handsets (see image right).

Subakti told us that advertisers are able to target based on web browsers, mobile carriers, operating system, and time. As for content targeting, Adstars has a wide range of publisher for advertisers to choose from, including business, technology, women, youth, sports.

A Word With the Founders

We also managed to meet up with Pandu Wirawan and Yazid Faizin, the founders of Adstars. They explained to Penn-Olson that the service was established one and a half years ago through a merger between Acquisition Digital and M-Stars Group’s mobile advertising division.

Pandu spent several years working for a regional online advertising network and was the key figure who brought the company to Indonesia. Yazid was working in the same company but later on he moved to a mobile network company in Singapore. Together, they created Adstars, the only company in Indonesia to offer a complete mobile and online advertising network focusing only on the Indonesian market.

They currently have more than 200 publishers, with 80 percent of them based in Indonesia. Notable among them are kompas.com, kapanlagi.com, vivanews.com, metrotvnews.com, okezone.com,Bhineka.com, 21cineplex.com and also individually owned sites such as smallcrab.com, ibudananak.com, simamaung.com, and beritateknologi.com.

When asked about their clients Fadzin explained to us:

We work mostly with agencies delivering campaigns for Nokia, Blackberry, Huawei, Toshiba, Telkomsel, XL, Nutrilon, Bebelac, Frisian Flag, Visa, Rexona, Ponds, Toyota, Indonesia Tourism Board, Resort Word Sentosa and many more. Agencies we work with are Group M, Starcom mediavest, initiative media, Carat Isobar, MPG, OMD, Optima, DDB, Activate and many more.