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StrikeAd partners with uKnow to increase ad engagement and offer mobile brand safety

StrikeAd last week announced a partnership with uKnow, a provider of targeting and optimisation solutions. StrikeAd will incorporate the uKnow solution into its mobile platform to offer advertisers contextually relevant distribution channels for mobile ad campaigns, while protecting brands from undesirable and unsafe pages.

The uKnow integration was carried out in partnership with the StrikeAd SSP partners and the contextual categorisation is performed at the SSP level, before the data is passed to StrikeAd. This allows blind and unnamed traffic to still be contextually categorised, and for the information to come through to StrikeAd for all traffic from that SSP. The independent third party verification element further enhances this data, compared to traditionally unverified publisher data sets on which media buyers normally have to rely.

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Jukka Sundquist is Partner and Head of Display at KliKKi, a Digital Marketing company focused on the Nordics markets. Here Sundquist gives an overview of the KliKKi porposition in the Nordics, the real-time technology they are currently building out and the opportunity for Nordic performance and brand advertisers around programmatic buying. Sundquist will be speaking at the upcoming ATS Stockholm event.

Can you give some overview on the Klikki solution in the Scandinavian market? Are you a pure play digital agency?

Klikki is a fast-growing Nordic Digital Marketing Company with offices in Helsinki, Stockholm, Piteå, Copenhagen and Oslo. The Company represents the next generation of Digital Marketing Company focusing on technology-driven, results-based, integrated digital marketing solutions that maximise the total effect of our clients’ digital marketing budgets.

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Nicolas Clasen is Managing Director, Germany, at Improve Digital, a real-time advertising technology provider. Here Clasen discusses the opportunity for German Sales Houses around data-driven advertising, and how they should position themselves to win the majority of this new budget.

Like elsewhere in Europe, traditional sales houses in Germany are still missing a solid revenue model for their cost-intensive premium content. While TV stations seem to be saved by an overwhelming demand for video from agencies and advertisers, print publishing houses are getting into more and more trouble.

With the rise of data-driven advertising and Real Time Bidding, that might change. But Google and Facebook are aggressively pushing into the market and publishers are finding themselves under pressure. To maintain direct relationships with their advertising customers and stay in control of their online audience and inventory, German media owners have to invest in technology, build internal data pools and start to own the automated sales channel for online display advertising.

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Online Gaming Company, Spil Games, Explores The Revenue Opportunities Around RTB

Spil Games is a global online casual gaming network, with 2.23 million unique visitors and 170 million impressions per month in Germany. The company, headquartered in Hilversum, the Netherlands, are reaping the rewards of monetising its portal pages through RTB on non-guaranteed inventory.

Stefan Beckmann, Country Manager for Spil Games Germany, explains their model.

“Games are always in need of explanation as advertising environments more than, for example, news sites. But online gaming has a huge potential for advertisers to target their relevant audience. Our predominantly female and juvenile audience is obviously not important for all advertisers, but there are many who want to address just those users.”

Spil games always has a percentage of their inventory not marketed via the Spil Games direct sales team, however this percentage varies by period.

“In the intense fourth quarter, the proportion of branding campaigns for leading global brands is very high.” Beckmann adds, “Purely based on impressions, however, the proportion of performance campaigns is always higher, as we often implement branding campaigns with large custom-size or integrated solutions, which of course achieve much higher CPMs.”

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PubliGroupe forms partnership with MediaMath

PubliGroupe, a Swiss-based provider of marketing and media sales services, signed a joint-venture agreement last week with MediaMath.

The partners have formed a new dedicated company in Berlin, Spree7 GmbH (aka LLC), to serve the markets of Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Spree7 will offer media buying services to advertisers and agencies based on MediaMath technology, launching its operations by mid-April. The underlying concept of programmatic media buying with Spree7 is RTB, which is currently powering nearly 10% of all display media transactions globally.

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The PostView is a column written by senior execs working in the European online advertising industry.

Publishers building their own bidders? Who would have thought it? For those of you who missed it, you should read Martin Van Der Meij’s recent piece on why as a publishing group, TMG want its own bidder to power its PTD (Publisher Trading Desk) operation. Van Der Meij certainly makes some compelling arguments as to why any publisher would want to execute this strategy.

If publishers are now starting on this path, is it time advertisers started to think about developing their own bidder? Is it even a realistic ambition?

What do we really mean when talking about advertisers creating their own bidder? In effect, we are looking at advertisers custom developing a bidder to drive their RTB investment. This does not necessarily mean they have to hire 30 engineers and completely reinvent the wheel. In the same way that TMG have outsourced development to ClickDistrict, advertisers could follow a similar path. Note the word ‘could’. This will not be a sustainable commercial model for all advertisers – especially those who consider the display channel an add-on.

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Robin Davies is Country Manager UK at Mediaplex. Here he discusses why we should be re-thinking attribution and why the industry should be basing models more on atatistical analysis.

Digital marketing is supposed to have solved John Wanamaker’s question: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” But the reality is that while digital media is strides ahead of “old” media in terms of accountability, there is still some way to travel before we can give brands a wholly accurate account of the multiple variables that influence people’s online purchase decision-making.

It is little wonder then that last click versus cross channel attribution, or “fractional attribution”, is one of the most hotly debated topics in digital marketing.

That the industry should focus on the appealing simplicity of last click attribution, which directly aligns spend with sales, was perhaps inevitable in order to achieve a standard around which it could unify and grow.

It’s also natural now that digital marketing is maturing, and accounting for a large proportion of client spend, that we should seek to move on from the blunt instrument of last click.

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AppNexus Addresses the Challenges of Rich Media in RTB

AppNexus Console customers now have a fully-featured Creative Template capability, the company announced last week.

The challenge for RTB is matching the capabilities of the creative to the expectations of the publisher for that particular placement. In most ad serving environments this challenge is minimised since the same group of people — ad operations, or “ad ops” — generally sets the rules for what can serve, and also manages the development of the creative rendering code. In an RTB environment the seller and buyer are only connected by APIs and protocols.

To address the problem of rich media in RTB, AppNexus introduced the use of a Media Type. A Media Type is set by a seller on a placement and lets the system know what types of creatives are eligible to be served. To ensure expandable ads run properly across sites, AppNexus has mapped hundreds of placements on their platform to specific vendors of expandables, with the goal that an advertiser can buy expandables at scale on AppNexus and know that the ads are going to expand properly.

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