Posted 17 hours ago in ExchangeWire EMEA
CES 2012 exploded this year. It’s always been big, but this year it got REALLY big.
Once we look beyond the latest gadgetry hype, however, there are a number consistent themes for the online ad industry…
Greater Accessibility
Consumers are going to have a lot more affordable ways of accessing the internet via multi devices in 2012. It will not necessarily be the products on show at CES but this latest innovation cycle will speed up the diffusion of innovation. Consumers will genuinely have greater access to multi platform connectivity which opens up some interesting opportunities for those on the buy and sell side and everything in between.
Measurement Systems
Greater consumer adoption of connected devices really starts to create the pressure on the main measurement behemoths to come up with new ways to measure across screen. Google could start owning this for themselves and the Google-Kantar tie up is surely a sign of things to come. If we as an industry want advertisers to invest in the new opportunities that
multi devices create, then we better be prepped with the ability to help them measure it all.
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Posted 21 hours ago in ExchangeWire EMEA
After last year’s blockbuster Ad Trader Conference in Hamburg, we are going big this year with some of the most influential ad execs in the industry already confirmed to speak. This year’s theme of the conference will focus on building sustainable relationships between the demand side and supply side in the evovling German data-driven ad marketplace. Germany remains the biggest display market in Europe, but it will not move in the same way as the UK and France in terms of how real-time media buying is adapted.
The sales houses are very strong in the German market, and most remain unconvinced of automated buying. However they realise change is on the horizon, and it is with this in mind that we are looking to bring together some of the biggest sales house players in the market – as well as senior figures from the demand side and the ad tech space – to discuss and analyse the potential of data-driven online advertising in Germany.
2011 was dominated by lots of industry chatter around the potential of automated buying and real-time trading. 2012 is about application and making this new eco-system work.
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Posted 2 days ago in ExchangeWire EMEA 3 Comments
The PostView is a new coulmn written by senior execs working in the European online advertising industry.
Facebook and Amazon could soon bring massive disruption to the multi-billion dollar/euro traditional display marketplace – with display solutions that could even emerge as a serious threat to current kingpin, Google.
We Need Some Context
The two major themes of audience-led buying presently centre around both intent and social. They are so in vogue right now with the entire industry. We see BlueKai selling shopping intent, and the likes of RadiumOne serving up social targeting. Facebook and Amazon could easily become a major competitor to everyone working in these emerging areas of display.
The truth is, buying third-party data is hard to efficiently scale. It’s why these data companies are trying to create relationships with hundreds of publishers. They need consistent volumes of data with as many touch points as possible to build robust, rounded profiles. Facebook and Amazon are the biggest publishers and owners of data in their respective spaces – and sit on the largest, most diverse sets of user data. Up until now it has not been accessible to marketers and advertisers, but that could soon change.
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Posted 3 days ago in ExchangeWire EMEA
Wes Biggs is the Co-Founder and CTO at Adfonic. Here he discusses the big opportunity for brands around mobile rich media formats in 2012.
Imagine enabling your brand to interact with consumers in a visually gripping, cinematically inspiring and fully interactive experience, on devices that are already in the hands of the majority of Europeans and North Americans. That’s the promise of rich media on mobile, where an ecosystem is rapidly emerging around the tools, technology and services to create, traffic and measure highly effective interactive campaigns in the mass-market smartphone display advertising channel via ad networks and exchanges.
Mobile rich media encompasses a variety of campaign features, and while the definition (like that of “smartphone”) is not set in stone, the term describes display advertising that moves beyond the traditional static banners and looping animations that have been prevalent in mobile advertising for several years, exploiting the rich features of HTML5 and deep integration in mobile app environments to allow for advertising that is more visually arresting (custom animations or in-banner video), more interactive (banners that expand on-screen when a user taps), and more story-driven. Advertisers and agencies are creating mobile rich media campaigns that not only tie into above-the-line TV and billboard campaigns, but go beyond those by providing brand-building in-ad mini-games, extensive discoverable video and audio content, or direct calls to action including on-device purchase options. Because of this, and because of the mobile medium’s unique targeting capability and consumer dynamics, rich media enables premium performance for advertisers and can provide premium monetization for savvy publishers and app developers.
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Posted 4 days ago in ExchangeWire EMEA 27 Comments
Geoff Smith is Head of Activation at VivaKi and Paul Silver is the Head of Product, VivaKi. Here both discuss the benefits of centralising retargeting and why internalising this buying function at the agency level benefits the advertiser.
Retargeting is the core foundation of any performance display campaign. It’s something we all know now, but it’s not something we all knew when we outsourced our display buying to ad networks all those years ago. That’s ultimately because ad networks never disclosed the importance of retargeting whilst they were able to ride the gravy train. However those days are over, and there are several compelling reasons as to why we should all bring retargeting in house today.
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23 January 2012 in ExchangeWire APAC
Chris Brown is team lead at DoubleClick Performance Products in Australia, South East Asia and NZ. Here he discusses the progress made by the DoubleClick Ad Exchange in the region, timeframes around when mobile and video inventory will be made available and the recent Direct Deals launch.
Can you give some overview on the progress made by the DoubleClick Ad Exchange in the Australian and APAC markets? What similarities and differences did you see in relation to the UK and US markets?
The Australian market was already primed for exchanges due to the DoubleClick Ad Exchange 1.0 having been launched here in 2008, and RightMedia already being active in this market. Uptake was swift on the buy-side due some of the big holding companies strategies, and local independent agencies and Ad Networks always being close to ‘game-changing’ developments in the online world.
The major difference I saw from an agency perspective was how autonomously they were acting in this region. Country by country – each agency has a different take on how they should approach exchange buying.
A major similarity I saw was how some publishers perceived exchanges. They wanted to get involved as they were seeing the focus that agencies were giving, but were unsure on how-to.
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23 January 2012 in ExchangeWire EMEA 3 Comments
Martin Kelly is the co-founder and Managing Partner at Infectious Media. Here he discusses the RTB hype cycle and why the nascent media buying methodology is currently languishing in the trough of disillusionment.
2011 was the year RTB hit the mainstream marketing press as agency groups bought in to the concept wholesale. Spend is pouring into the real-time space with predictions for 2012 ranging from 10% to 20% of all online display (which is an incredible adoption rate for a technology just three years old). But, when you ask what the real benefits of RTB are there tends to be a scratching of heads. Impression level bidding, terabytes of data…what does it actually mean for advertisers?
Current benefits of RTB to an advertiser are pretty scant. Centralisation and control of retargeting, along with black box optimisation algorithms are as far as anyone can get, and are all trading and workflow related benefits. If we look at the market against Gartner’s Hype Curve, it feels as though we’re on the way down into the trough of disillusionment as RTB rather than ushering in a new era of display advertising, has merely shuffled budgets from one supplier to another. I’ve sat in quite a few meetings with advertisers recently where they tell me they’ve ‘tried RTB’ but it didn’t really work out and they couldn’t see any discernable difference from all their previous display activity. So is RTB really a game changer?
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20 January 2012 in ExchangeWire EMEA 3 Comments
Doug Conely is Senior Director, Global Data & Targeting at Tribal Fusion. Here he responds to a recent PostView coulmn, and argues that instead of the focus on the post view window argument, we as an industry should be moving to a weighted or linear attribution model.
I’m on record with you in agreeing that fewer, well placed, larger ads with better rich media executions should be the way forward. It will take time but I think enough people are pushing the larger and better formats to drive that change. However, publishers, while agreeing in theory, are yet to be convinced that fewer ads with placements likely to have view-time is a better monetisation strategy in practice (and no one wants to be first to jump!). The quantitative case has not been made yet but I’m optimistic that that will come.
I’m also on record as saying that last-impression-post-view is the least-worst attribution method available today given current infrastructure and education but it’s certainly not the way forward. Here I think you do the industry a disservice: we’ve now spoken with enough smart, passionate people with integrity who understand the post view issue that we’re convinced this too will change. Eventually, enough people will move to more sophisticated/ fair/ scientific (pick as appropriate) non-manual models that those agencies and third parties with vested interest in the status quo will be found out and commercial reality will kick in.
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19 January 2012 in ExchangeWire EMEA 1 Comment
The PostView is a new coulmn written by senior execs working in the European online advertising industry.
Like it or not we live in world where buying display advertising is still inherently inefficient. The convergent trend is for increased efficiency through ‘owning’ or building the entire stack – the likes of Google, Microsoft and Adobe appear to be accelerating their efforts in this space. However, when you break down what the end result could look like it actually might not be an entirely good thing for the performance industry, or at least some of the key industry players, to work in a world where there is 100% efficiency.
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19 January 2012 in ExchangeWire EMEA
Tim Finn is the newly appointed head of EMEA at StrikeAd. Here he discusses his recent appointment, the latest round of funding and the Japanese partnership.
You’ve just joined StrikeAd. What were you doing before and why did you join them?
Prior to joining StrikeAd I was one of the founding team at contextual ad network Vibrant Media. Having spent the last five years building that business in New York, I was able to experience first hand the advances in exchange and Real Time Bidding (RTB) technologies and the profound impact they were having on both the buy and sell sides. When I met the StrikeAd team and they articulated their vision for the programmatic buying of mobile inventory on a global basis it seemed like an opportunity too good to miss.
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