Every business aims to acquire and retain customers at a price that drives profit. For years, business people and marketers have grappled with this task. Many business areas claim they are key to driving success; ‘advertising persuades consumers to buy our products’, ‘our product is the best on the market’, ‘our reputation is solid because we serve our customers with respect’, ‘our manufacturing is better than our competitors’, ‘we secured the best store location’; the list goes on. Clearly, all have a role to play, but a highly debated topic is, ‘how much value does marketing really add’?

Marketers who are tasked with generating revenue from a sizeable budget are at the frontline of accountability, and have a variety of levers they can pull. Before the dawn of the internet, much of the intellectual debate focused on how to best sell the consumer promise between influential media: from TV, to newspapers, to direct mail, and other ‘traditional’ media choices.

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When Facebook initially made its move to monetise onsite inventory with foreign datasets (foreign, meaning an advertiser’s first-party data), it divided opinion. We took a somewhat negative stance on the strategy.

With the launch of newsfeed ad formats being made available to RTB, does this require a new approach as to how the paid-for element of the Facebook platform will be leveraged, perhaps pointing to the future of RTB?

ASU Gold Rush

The initial FBX launch turned into a retargeting frenzy. Predominantly used to help drive greater cost efficiencies for businesses running existing RTB campaigns (FBX on numerous occasions was found to be unsurprisingly cheaper) and also to prop up the volume of click-based acquisitions that made the overall click-average-to-impression-conversions on RTB campaigns healthier.

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Adap.tv held a half-day event in London this week to discuss the themes around programmatic video. The agenda was packed with eclectic speakers coming from different ends of the media buying jungle: from programmatic traders to traditional TV buyers. Here, ExchangeWire sketches out the afternoon’s key themes.

End-to-End Platforms

Adap.tv is clearly trying to position itself (and doing a solid job) as an agnostic platform player that connects buyers and sellers. Amir Ashkenazi, CEO of Adap.tv, spelled out the challenges that the video industry has encountered to date: too many middlemen, rogue behaviour and practices and too many layers diluting the flow of investment.

In doing so, Amir painted the picture of a consolidated end-to-end video buying stack, unsurprisingly what Adap.tv are able to offer.

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ExchangeWire wrote a piece recently on why local publishers should build out the SME platform, leveraging the already existing relationships that they have with local businesses.

It is interesting to see 1&1 in the UK really aggressively going after the local SME market with a blanket TV campaign. Owning the digital relationship with SME is a huge opportunity, and scale in this market is a massive untapped opportunity. Google makes much of its search revenue from the SME sector – but display thus far has failed to really open this market segment. 1&1 is now trying to offer social media management tools to its current clients so clearly owning the platform can allow you to upsell advertising and marketing management solutions.

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So, we’re all pretty happy with how online measurement works. Right?

Ask a digital marketer why your marketing pounds should be spent online and, among the many (good) reasons they will come back with, will be its unrivalled accountability and targetability (not actually a word, but who cares).

They will tell you that you can find your likely customers (users who look like your existing customers), target them with your message and, best of all, see how many of them buy something from you as a result.

All of that’s true and, when put together well, it results in incredibly powerful marketing activity. The problem is that, with all of the data that’s available, it’s become a very easy system to manipulate. Online exchanges and DSPs have become very adept at ‘playing’ it so that everybody always appears to be doing an awesome job.

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IPinYou, the market leading ad tech company in China, recently announced the launch of its bidding algorithm competition. Having invested heavily in the research & development of their bidding platform, it has now launched the global competition in an attempt to identify new methods, theories and formulas to refine the bidding algorithm. IPinYou hopes it will also stimulate further academic and research based interest in the space. This is likely to be the first time that ad technology components have been crowdsourced in such a way.

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