EMEA > Agency Trading Desk

TraderTalk TV is coming to Paris on March 06. TarderTalk TV provides the visual overview of the granular aspects of data-driven advertising – effectively, how all this technology, data and trading actually works (you can view all episodes here).

We will be inviting some of the leading figures in the French market along to provide insight into innovation as well as smart execution around technology and data.

The series will be profiling the best and brightest from across the buy and sell side to scribble on our now “world-famous” whiteboard. Details to follow on when these episodes will be posted.

Over the course of the last three years ExchangeWire has witnessed real time bidding emerge from a technological unknown to an established method of media buying. We are now at a point where, although automated-led buying still has room for much more growth, the marketplace has started to mature.

We are not seeing the launch of a new start-up every day, attempting to solve an unnecessary problem within the ecosystem. We have seen publishers, ‘premium’ and otherwise, begin to invest, not only to understand the future dynamics of software-led buying, but also to try to gain competitive advantage. Some of the largest publishers globally have done this: Microsoft being one of the most prominent examples, selling real-time based homepage ad slots through its AppNexus-powered exchanges.

We have seen advertisers move large proportions of their non-guaranteed display buying directly into the exchange environment via their agency trading desks/preferred trading partners as well as indirectly, via the wider pool of now RTB-enabled ad networks. Some big advertisers have begun to explore in-housing some of this work, and now employ people responsible for putting together and coordinating various technology stacks.

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Paul Frampton is Managing Director at MPG & Media Contacts

Display is still a poor cousin to search. Through the eyes of an advertiser, this is generally the consensus.

Search professes no wastage, tight targeting and is even blessed with the term “distribution” by some marketers.

However, this consensus is wrong. The truth is that display should actually be more valued than PPC. It combines the best of brand (emotion and impact) and response (targeting, call to action) in one.

The simple reason for this misconception, I would contest, is because digital display is overly complicated and inaccessible.

There used to be a multitude of sales houses and networks; now everyone is a network but no one wants to be called a network. Agencies buy from some, like a network, but increasingly buy direct through their trading desk.

I think this is all about to change and that change is being brought about by the possibilities that trading desk technology enables.

Right now however, the inaccessibility and complexity issue is probably at its most acute. The trading desk model divides people, but not in a good way.

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“The more things change, the more they stay the same”. So said novelist and journalist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (albeit in French), highlighting, of course, that as tumultuous as times are, nothing really changes. He probably wasn’t talking about the world of digital advertising and the rise of programmatic buying, but he could have been.

You read ExchangeWire and so you will already be all too aware that display media is in a period of massive upheaval. The move to a new method of trading has resulted in far-reaching changes in many of the ways the industry works. Agencies are moving from providing efficiency through economy-of-scale based media-buying to data-based efficiency. The blind-network ecosystem, once in rude health, is now facing up to reality: adapt or die.

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IDG UK (part of the International Data Group), the UK’s leading technology publisher with publications such as PC Advisor, Computerworld and Macworld has just announced a strategic partnership with PubMatic, which will see them open their assets to programmatic demand for the first time. The move should be seen as a positive for an industry that has been subjected to a growing sense of negativity recently, as IDG is not a volume business with mass amounts of remnant/unsold. Interestingly, the relationship with PubMatic seems to reflect a more strategic use of the technology and tools at a publisher’s disposal.

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Programmatic advertising has brought a wealth of new innovation. It has completely re-invigorated the display market, enabled search marketers to easily extend skills and services into a new channel and created a RTB market that has grown from USD $0 to $2 billion in just the last three years.

The International Data Corporation (IDC) has been tracking this topic closely, and its Real-Time Bidding in the United States and Worldwide, 2011-2016, is well worth a read (you can find it on the report sponsor PubMatic’s website). RTB is possibly the fastest-growing digital ad segment in history, and the report predicts it will grow to $13.9 billion spend worldwide by 2016, but how does this break down into EMEA? Are some markets more ready than others? How do we assess the geographical variations? In an attempt to answer some of these questions, let’s take a look at a few examples.

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Venture Capitalists and “tech” trade press types have been salivating over the potential of the Russian internet market for some time now with an avalanche of posts offering some unique perspective. Given the hot air that perpetually emanates from both parties, you’d be forgiven for disbelieving the hyperbole. However, the numbers and demographics definitely do support the premise that Russia will come to dominate the European internet market.

So how will this big growth affect the data-driven ad market in Russia, and who will be the key players? Before we look at the principal players in the real-time advertising space, let’s run through the numbers for those uninitiated with the great Russian internet bear.

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The notion of universal frequency capping in RTB has long been touted as a major USP. You could argue that it was one of the major catalysts behind the move to consolidated platform-based buying. But has universal frequency capping really been the game changer in the recent seismic shifts in the media buying eco-system?

Let’s provide some context here: when DSPs first arrived on the scene and slowly began disrupting the entire ecosystem of media buying (largely for the better), the ability to universally frequency cap was heralded as a huge opportunity for advertisers to save significant costs, reduce duplication across different networks and enable advertisers to have the ability to tightly manage their message across disparate inventory sources, with the intention of improving user experience.

Unfortunately it hasn’t panned out the way it was supposed to – largely because the initial use case and adoption of DSPs was (and still is to some extent) heavily skewed towards retargeting. While a DSP enabled buyers to manage frequency, it was rarely a focal point for optimisation strategies. Why? Because ROI was and is still king.

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