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Sylvain Deffay is Country Manager, France at Infectious Media

As 2013 kicked off with the e-marketing conference in Paris, it seems that the importance of measuring online advertising viewability has impacted the French programmatic market. I was presenting along with several of my peers on the possibilities of viewability and where the technology is going, whilst Alenty presented jointly with AppNexus about their latest viewability app.

To date, viewability has been associated more with branding campaigns than performance, for obvious reasons. However, by ignoring viewability measurement in performance marketing, we are implying that the click remains the best measurement, and not the impression. It is time for us in France, with such a strong performance market, to explain and promote the efficiency of seen impressions in generating conversions, even without a click.

A measure of viewability can help us do this, and could not be more timely with the latest reports showing that, on average, anywhere from 30-50% of impressions are not viewed in standard run-of-network campaigns. The good news is we are now in a position to filter the real from the fake post impression conversions. Firstly, there is no need to account for post impression on unseen banners. Through comparing the uplift in conversions based on accumulated view-time, instead of just the usual frequency metric, each advertiser, and its trading desk, can now define which of the tracked post-impression conversions can be really considered as genuine conversions. This can be a great interim strategy to eliminate accounting for unseen impressions.

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In the last of the series on programmatic premium (sorry, guaranteed!) we speak to Paulo Cunha, Co-Founder & CEO shiftforward who breaks down, in some detail, how the ad exchange can be used to deliver programmatic premium buys – and compares this methodology against the direct sales model and programmatic premium trades executed via the RTB protocol. Cunha also goes into detail about the importance of forecasting in this type of premium trade.

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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.

Mark Connolly is the newly appointed European Managing Director at AudienceScience. Here Mark talks about the issues and challenges currently facing the industry and the important role that technology will play in 2013.

I have been fortunate enough to have worked in the advertising space for 25 years and have experienced first-hand how audience data and programmatic buying technology have revolutionised the industry. I’ve also seen that, in my time, on both the buy side and sell side – for all the technological advancement – the industry still suffers from really expensive bad habits.

We have an ecosystem unsuited to do what’s best for the advertiser. Marketers pay for every layer of service and technology, including agencies, trading desks, vendors and publishers. Each player takes a cut from the marketer’s budget, creating a zero sum game. Worse, marketers pay for this with “percent of media” fee structures that encourage agencies and vendors to spend more, regardless of effectiveness, and avoid finding efficiencies for advertisers. Unsure of the right questions to ask, advertisers have entrusted budgets to agencies, with little or no visibility into how their budgets are actually allocated.

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Ad Trader Conference is back on April 18. This year we will bringing the most senior ad execs in Germany to Berlin. Now in its third year, Ad Trader Conference is the most influential event for the German data-driven advertising market. This year the theme will focus on programmatic reserved/ guaranteed – and programmatic buying strategies for German brands.

The German market is not following trends in other European markets, and instead is looking at a different approach to programmatic ad trading. We have already seen in the partnership between agencies and big German Sales Houses, particularly around the 4q initiative.

The Sales Houses are not taking to impression-level buying – but are looking at programmatic guaranteed/premium as the preferred automated option. Whether that is executed through the various methodologies recently discussed in the recent ExchangeWire series on the subject will no doubt be discussed in detail at the Ad Trader Conference on April 18.

Ad Trader Conference will again provide the forum for debate for the smartest and most influential people in the market. Early bird tickets are now available on the Ad Trader conference site. Details on format and speakers for Ad Trader Conference 2013 will follow in the coming weeks.

Brands are significantly increasing their investment in online video, but not all this new money is being spent wisely. When a market expands as rapidly as online video has, there are bound to be some red herrings. Right now, some serious mistakes are being made in the way that brand videos are being distributed.

Online video may be the fastest-growing medium of all time – spend was up by around 25% year-on-year in 2012 – but if it wants to continue to grow, it needs to deliver for agencies and, most importantly, clients.

What this means is that brands don’t want to discover their messages are untargeted, have appeared against poor quality content, or that they were costing up to 10 times what they should have expected to pay on an eCPM basis.

The reality, though, is that often the responsibility for this state of affairs lies with the marketers themselves. All too often they allocate a significant chunk of their precious marketing budgets to viral video companies in the hope that they can become the next Evian Roller Skating Babies or the next Old Spice Man, even when their content is clearly not suitable for this kind of treatment.

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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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Tinkoff Digital, the newly-launched digital ad solution provider, is announcing that it is a rolling out a DSP for the Russian market. DataMind will be Tinkoff Digital’s first product launch in the market.

The new solution is aimed squarely at Russsia’s fast growing e-commerce market, but the company is stressing that the platform can also be used by agencies. Given that the big holding groups are still figuring out their strategy for Russia, it seems likely that much of DataMind’s business will come from Russia’s big growth e-commerce sector.

DataMind will focus initially on graphical display, but there are plans to roll out on mobile in the first quarter of next year. It is also worth noting that Tinkoff Digital raised about USD $20 million both to acquire and build out its different offerings over the coming twelve months.

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