Audience Data Sessions: Q&A with Husky Data

Tell us about yourself and your role at Husky Data. 

I'm Benjamin Wong, Founder and CEO of Husky Data. I've spent about twenty years in engineering and data — the first stretch building carrier and R&D systems across APAC, and the last twelve running my own companies — and I started Husky in 2018 because I kept running into the same gap: buyers wanted APAC audiences, and most of what was on the shelf was global data with a regional filter applied on top. We're headquartered in Singapore today, and I completed my doctorate in engineering at Hong Kong Polytechnic University part-time while building the business, which probably explains why my role has stayed deliberately hands-on. I sit close to the pipeline and the segment methodology rather than only on the commercial side. Day to day that comes down to two things: making sure every segment we publish is one I'd be comfortable defending in a client's procurement review, and working with partners like Eyeota so that our audiences are genuinely easy for a buyer to find and activate.

Tell us about Husky Data and what makes your data unique.

Husky Data is an APAC-native mobile audience supplier. Our catalogue is 295 branded segments across 13 APAC markets — Travel, Retail, Real Estate, Finance, Auto, Demographics, Lifestyle and commerce — built on a footprint of more than five billion mobile advertising IDs. What makes it different is provenance: our segments are built from in-region mobile behavioural signals such as app engagement, purchase-funnel activity and, where the local consent framework permits, location — not extrapolated from Western panels and relabelled for Asia.

We're also strict about the difference between intent and interest, and we let the lookback reflect it: intent segments run short 7–30 day windows because purchase intent is perishable, while interest segments run 60–180 days because interests are durable. Every segment ships mapped to IAB Tech Lab Audience Taxonomy 1.1 with Data Transparency Standard 1.2 disclosure, so a media team can hand it to procurement without a follow-up email. And because our depth is strongest exactly where global suppliers tend to be thinnest — Southeast Asia and India — we usually end up complementing a buyer's existing stack rather than replacing part of it.

Why did you choose to partner with Eyeota, and what does this partnership unlock for advertisers? 

Two reasons, and both of them are about the buyer rather than about us. The first is reach without friction: through Eyeota, a single integration puts Husky segments in front of 40+ DSPs, SSPs, DMPs and social platforms, so a media team that already has Eyeota access can browse, preview and activate our audiences without a new contract, a new integration or a new data pipe to stand up.

The second is trust — Eyeota is part of Dun & Bradstreet, and for the enterprise advertisers we care about, privacy and procurement review is a real gate; arriving through a marketplace that already clears that bar takes weeks out of the process. It also lets us stay a data company: we'd rather spend our engineering time on signal quality, segment methodology and refresh cadence than on building a parallel sales and integration motion in thirteen markets. What that unlocks in practice is that APAC depth stops being a special project with its own procurement cycle, and becomes something you can add to a campaign you're already running this week.

In which markets or regions can advertisers currently activate your data? 

Advertisers can activate Husky audiences today across 13 APAC markets: Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia and India.

Coverage isn't uniform and we'd rather say so — Indonesia, India and the Philippines carry very large Android-first device footprints, while Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia are where our affluent, high-net-worth and premium-travel cohorts are deepest. Travel is our largest vertical at 104 segments and it works in both directions: outbound APAC travellers, and advertisers outside the region trying to reach them. If a buyer needs a market cut or a cohort the published catalogue doesn't cover, our data team builds bespoke segments on request, on the campaign's calendar rather than ours.

What trends are you seeing in the digital advertising space, and how is Husky Data evolving to meet these changes?

Three stand out. The first is that identifier loss has become a permanent condition rather than a series of events, so buyers are shifting weight onto durable behavioural evidence and hashed-email linkage instead of assuming a stable device graph will always be there.

The second is that transparency has moved from a nice-to-have to a gating question — we're asked far more often now how a segment was constructed, what the lookback is and where the signal came from, which is why we put IAB Data Transparency Standard 1.2 across the whole catalogue rather than on a flagship subset.

The third is that activation keeps moving closer to the buyer's own data: clean rooms and warehouse-native sharing, where a brand wants to overlap our segments against their first-party CRM before committing budget.

Husky is evolving on all three — we rebuild branded segments on a monthly cycle instead of letting them drift, we now publish warehouse-native on Snowflake Marketplace with clean-room support alongside Eyeota, and we've been building event-level granularity into commerce, holding 9.9, 11.11 and 12.12 as separate audiences rather than collapsing them into one “sale shopper” pool. That last one matters more in this region than almost anywhere else, because the calendar really does move the money here.

What’s your advice to advertisers exploring data-driven advertising strategies?

Ask how a segment was built before you ask how big it is. A large modelled segment and a smaller deterministic one behave completely differently in flight, and any supplier worth buying from should be able to hand you the construction logic, the lookback window and the provenance without hesitation — if they can't, that's your answer.

Second, don't treat APAC as one market: purchase behaviour, channel mix and creative expectations in Indonesia have very little in common with Japan, and a single “APAC audience” line usually means someone has averaged away the thing you were trying to reach.

Third, match the recency window to the flight — a 30-day intent audience is the right tool for a conversion push and the wrong one for an always-on brand campaign.

Finally, test before you scale: run an overlap or a clean-room match against your own first-party data, buy a small flight, and let the measurement pick your suppliers. The advertisers who get the most out of third-party data are the ones who treat it as something to be measured, not something to be trusted.

About Husky Data

Husky Data is an APAC-native mobile audience supplier headquartered in Singapore, operated by Husky Technology Pte. Ltd. Founded in 2018, Husky builds 295 branded audience segments across 13 APAC markets from in-region mobile behavioural signals, mapped to IAB Tech Lab Audience Taxonomy 1.1 and documented to Data Transparency Standard 1.2. Husky audiences are distributed globally through Eyeota, part of Dun & Bradstreet, and are also available warehouse-native on Snowflake Marketplace. Learn more: https://huskydata.io/