Ad Trading

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

Every advertiser, vendor, agency and person in the industry has a different view on the role of Digital Display for Digital Marketing. Some believe it’s a direct response tool to drive acquisitions and compete with paid search, some believe it’s a super exciting branding medium up there with TV, others believe it’s somewhere in between the two.

Which ever way you look at it, the ‘role of digital display’ has never been perfectly established, as opposed to other marketing channels such as TV, Press, SEM, Affiliates which have been.

There was a fantastic article earlier this week on Adexchanger entitled, “What if online doesn’t work for branding?”. In the article, Jerry Neumann highlights that marketeers know how to build brands, have been doing it for 100s of years, however of the total marketing budget that is spent, 2/3rd of it is on branding, yet online only ¼ of total spend is spent on branding. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this ¼ is being spent and measured incorrectly.

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Shane Shevlin is Director of Business Development EMEA at IPONWEB. Here Shevlin discusses the IPONWEB solution in Europe, how the company works with ad tech vendors, and the critical role its technology plays in the real-time advertising eco-system.

For those unaware of the IPONWEB solution in Europe, can you give an overview of your current offering?

IPONWEB is essentially the tech provider behind many of the leading Ad tech platforms in the RTB space. We build and operate customised media trading systems that enable our clients to take advantage of RTB, Audience & Programmatic buying on both the buy-side and the sell-side of the equation, all of which can operate across display, mobile and video channels.

Our solutions leverage u-Platform™, our rapid development ecosystem that packages up the very complex component technologies required to operate in this space – Ad-serving at scale, real-time decisioning, machine learning, big data management, processing and analytics, all void of business logic. We then tailor the solution to specifically solve the business challenges that drive our clients to innovate and deliver the best results for their customers. So on top of this core u-Platform™ base, we then custom develop the algorithms & ad decisioning logic, together with any other unique feature-set requirements. We do this for each and every client.

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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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Adam Jablonski is Founder and CEO from Epom. Here he discusses some key trends from the Polish online ad market, and how the mobile and automated channels are attracting budget in one of Europe’s fastest growing markets.

Poland has been at the forefront of progress and innovation in the online space over the past couple of years. The country’s integration into the European Union has been a key driving force for further rapid development of technology, particularly digital media start-ups. Online marketing has become one of the fastest-developing niches, thanks to the formation of a strong technological basis and the newly-opened opportunities for international collaboration.

Despite the recent financial crisis, the negative tendencies haven’t actually touched the internet industry in Poland. According to the recent Adex IAB study, the value of the Polish market in online advertising in the second half of 2011 amounted to nearly one billion złoty (£240m). Major brands and agencies are constantly increasing their online advertising budgets.

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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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