What years of operating across South Asia taught me about market entry, programmatic adoption, agencies, local teams and the economics of “small” markets.
When international companies look at emerging markets, the questions are usually predictable:
Is the market big enough?Will we get the ROI?Do advertisers actually need the product?Can we find the right people?Can we build a profitable operation?
I have asked many of those questions myself.
When I first started working in emerging markets, I underestimated the size of the opportunity and the capacity these markets had to contribute to a business.
Over time, I learned something very different.
An emerging market isn't necessarily an unattractive market. It is often a market where the economics, adoption curve, relationships and operating model are simply different.
And that distinction matters.
A market that looks small when converted into USD can still contain healthy advertisers, meaningful digital budgets and significant commercial opportunities. At the same time, a market with strong demand can remain difficult to penetrate if you misunderstand how decisions are actually made.
After years of working across South Asia in AdTech, I've come to believe that one of the biggest mistakes international companies make is not entering emerging markets. It is entering them with assumptions designed for somewhere else.
Take Bangladesh as an example.
If you compare its digital advertising market directly with the US or Western Europe and measure everything in USD, it will obviously look smaller.
But that comparison can hide an important part of the picture.
Local advertisers operate in a local economy. Their budgets are generated in local currency, their cost structures are different and their expectations are shaped by the market they operate in.
A healthy local advertising budget can look surprisingly small after being converted into dollars.
That doesn't necessarily make the underlying opportunity small.
There is another side to the equation: the cost of operating the business.
Talent and operational costs can be significantly lower than in mature markets. As a result, a business does not necessarily need mature-market revenue levels to achieve attractive profitability.
This was one of the things I underestimated early in my career.
I initially looked at market size.
Later, I started looking at market economics.
They are not the same thing.
One of the biggest misconceptions I encounter is that advertisers in emerging markets simply don't have enough money to invest in digital.
I don't think that's the real problem.
The bigger issue is where the money already goes and how comfortable marketers are with changing that behaviour.
In many markets I have worked in, a very large proportion of digital budgets can be concentrated in two or three major platforms. Depending on the advertiser, Meta, YouTube and TikTok can collectively account for roughly 70–90% of digital spending.
There is an understandable reason for this.
These platforms are familiar. Advertisers know them. Agencies know them. Reporting is established. Benchmarks exist. And marketers have seen other brands use them successfully.
But familiarity can easily become dependency.
I've sometimes compared this with the way television advertising was planned.
If a programme had a high TRP, it was tempting to conclude that advertising there would automatically provide the largest possible exposure to the target audience.
Digital can create a similar mental shortcut:
Most people spend time on this platform, therefore most of our digital budget should go there.
But platforms are not interchangeable environments.
People behave differently depending on where they are, what they are doing, what content they are consuming and what mindset they are in.
The fact that someone spends time on YouTube doesn't automatically mean the same advertising strategy should work everywhere else.
The audience may overlap, but the context and behaviour don't necessarily overlap.
That is where programmatic and other forms of digital advertising can add value.
The challenge is getting marketers to understand that difference.
This may be the biggest lesson I have learned.
The technology available to an advertiser in Bangladesh is not necessarily fundamentally different from what is available to an advertiser in Europe.
The tools are increasingly global.
The knowledge, exposure and adoption of those tools are not.
The bigger barriers are often:
There is also a strong tendency to treat the biggest platforms as the default answer to every digital advertising problem.
They are extremely powerful platforms. But no platform should become a substitute for strategy.
In less mature ecosystems, there can also be resistance to greater transparency. When established commercial practices are built around existing relationships or ways of measuring value, introducing a more transparent system can disrupt those practices.
That can create resistance, misinformation or confusion around new platforms.
The answer isn't to fight that resistance with a louder sales pitch.
Education is part of market development.
When you introduce something genuinely new, you cannot assume that the market will immediately understand why it needs it.
You need to explain the problem before you explain the product.
And you need to explain it in the language of the market.
A strategy that worked in the United States may be extremely successful there. That doesn't mean it will automatically work in Nepal, Bangladesh or Pakistan.
The product may be the same.
The problem you need to solve is not.
This is where many global organisations struggle.
A successful global playbook creates confidence. It provides processes, pricing structures, sales methodology, reporting standards and market-entry assumptions.
Those things are valuable.
But a playbook should provide a foundation, not a blindfold.
When entering a new market, I want to understand:
Only then should I decide how to position the product.
This becomes particularly important when you're introducing something that isn't yet a standard part of the buying process.
You will face rejection.You'll hear misconceptions.You'll meet people who don't see the need.You'll sometimes have to return to the same organisation several times.
That requires patience, but patience alone isn't enough.
You need to keep improving the story.
In my experience across South Asia, agencies play an enormous role in determining where digital budgets go.
In many cases, the agency is the primary decision-maker or influencer.
That makes going directly to brands complicated when the brand already has an agency relationship.
Sometimes a brand may be interested in a platform, but the agency doesn't necessarily welcome the additional complexity.
And there are practical reasons for that.
A new platform can mean:
There may also be existing commercial relationships and long-standing partnerships.
So I don't think the answer is to treat agencies as an obstacle.
The agency is part of the ecosystem.
If I were entering a new market, I would initially prioritise agencies.
If I were trying to scale an established operation, I would want a balance between agencies and major brands.
The market-entry phase and the scaling phase require different strategies.
In many cases, the most effective approach is not to bypass agencies but to educate them—and eventually educate agencies and their clients together.
Across South Asian markets, campaign sizes can vary considerably, but my experience puts a typical ticket around the $5,000 level, compared with perhaps $8,000–$10,000 in more mature markets.
The obvious conclusion is:
Smaller campaigns = smaller business.
I don't think it's that simple.
Yes, smaller ticket sizes mean you need more clients and more campaigns to generate the same absolute revenue.
But profitability isn't determined by revenue alone.
The cost of operating the business matters.
A market can generate less revenue than a mature market while still producing attractive margins because the underlying operational costs are lower.
This is one of the reasons I wouldn't evaluate an emerging market solely by its revenue potential.
I'd evaluate its profitability potential.
There is also an interesting balance between client types.
High-value clients provide stability. They are often more structured, and once a strong relationship is established, they can become long-term partners.
Smaller advertisers, on the other hand, can provide scalability.
They may have smaller and less predictable budgets, but they expand the addressable client base.
You need both.
Selling AdTech requires knowledge.
But knowledge can be learned.
What is harder to teach is hunger.
The people I've seen succeed most consistently tend to have a strong reason to sell. They're comfortable picking up the phone, walking into a meeting, starting a conversation and hearing “no.”
They don't treat rejection as failure.
They treat it as information.
Step back.Understand what went wrong.Change the approach.Try again.
A strong network within the ideal customer profile is obviously valuable, but it cannot replace the fundamental sales traits of resilience, preparation and proactivity.
This becomes even more important when you're introducing something new.
You're not just selling a product. You're changing behaviour.
One of the biggest lessons I've learned managing teams across different cultures is that global consistency and local adaptation are not opposites.
You need both.
A global company should absolutely maintain standards around:
But how those standards are communicated and implemented needs local understanding.
South Asian workplaces can have very different communication and management dynamics from European organisations.
Hierarchy can be stronger.Feedback can be more indirect.People may hesitate to escalate a problem.Direct criticism can sometimes be taken personally.
If an international organisation simply says, “This is how we do things globally,” and expects instant adoption, it can create friction rather than alignment.
The better approach, in my experience, is:
Build globally. Listen locally. Adapt before you roll out.
That doesn't mean lowering standards.
It means making the standards work.
A local leadership layer can be extremely valuable here because people who understand the local culture can help interpret how communication, incentives, pressure and organisational decisions will actually be received.
Some of the most important factors in emerging-market business don't appear in a market-sizing spreadsheet.
The first is relationships.
A strong business relationship—and sometimes a strong personal relationship—can dramatically change how quickly trust develops.
Trust creates credibility.Credibility creates access.Access creates conversations.And conversations create opportunities.
The second is cash flow.
Payment behaviour can change the economics of an operation very quickly.
Giving credit without understanding the market's payment behaviour can turn an apparently successful business into a cash-flow problem.
Credit discipline isn't just a finance issue.
It's a market-entry issue.
The third is context.
I learned this through campaigns that looked successful in a report but weren't necessarily successful from the client's perspective.
One campaign, for example, delivered strong numbers: reach, clicks and CTR all looked good.
On paper, it was a successful campaign.
But the client looked at the publisher environments where the advertisements were served and felt they weren't sufficiently relevant to the brand.
The problem wasn't the numbers. The problem was context. A campaign can be statistically successful and commercially unsuccessful at the same time.
That experience reinforced something I still believe today: metrics don't replace context.
Another lesson came from pricing.
When entering a market, there may not be an established benchmark for a new category.
The global organisation may have a pricing structure based on mature markets and assume that the same benchmark should apply locally.
But advertisers in an emerging market can be extremely price sensitive, particularly when comparing a new proposition against familiar platforms.
The first instinct can be to ask: what does the global pricing model say?
The better question can sometimes be: what does this market actually value, and what is it prepared to pay for that value?
When you're a first mover, you're not simply selling into a market. You're helping create the market.
That means you sometimes have to discover the benchmark rather than inherit it.
If I were given responsibility tomorrow for launching an international DSP in Bangladesh, I wouldn't start by asking how quickly we could sell campaigns.
I'd start with three questions:
What is the market fit?What is our USP?Who is the ideal customer?
Then I'd find a strong local salesperson—ideally someone with an existing network among the right type of customers.
I'd initially focus on agencies.
I'd prioritise categories such as FMCG, automotive and financial institutions, depending on the actual ICP and market opportunity.
And I would not decide whether the market works based on the first campaign.
I'd look for repeat business.
A first campaign proves that someone was willing to try.
Repeat business tells you that you've created value.
I'd also give the operation enough time to learn.
For a new commercial resource, I'd want roughly a year before making a serious judgement about whether the market is viable, assuming the fundamentals and support are in place.
But I'd also tell HQ something very clearly:
Don't expect a new market to develop without investing in education, workshops and marketing.
You cannot ask a market to adopt something new while refusing to invest in teaching it why the change matters.
When I started working in emerging markets, I underestimated the market's capacity to contribute.
Today, I would make the opposite mistake if I assumed every emerging market was automatically attractive.
The real lesson is more nuanced.
You cannot fully understand market demand from a distance.
Research can tell you the size of the market.
A spreadsheet can tell you the potential revenue.
A market report can tell you the competitive landscape.
But you only understand the pulse of a market when you step into it.
You discover how people buy.Why they hesitate.Who influences them.What they trust.What they don't trust.What they say they want versus what they actually pay for.
The opportunity in an emerging market isn't necessarily to replicate what worked somewhere else. It is to understand what is different—and build around it.
That, to me, is the real challenge of building an AdTech business in an emerging market. And also its greatest opportunity.