EMEA > Audience Buying

Petteri Vainikka is CMO of Enreach.

Call me crazy, but I believe the biggest problem premium publishers face in better monetising their digital content is that they don’t know what business they are in. In other words, they are selling the wrong product.

Allow me to explain.

Since 2011, all conversation on publisher ad revenue and yield management has revolved around RTB. Only very recently has anyone dared to remind the ad tech seminar loyalists that, in fact, something as unsexy as direct guaranteed sales actually make up the cornerstone of publishers’ ad sales. Not RTB. (There is now also a healthy amount of innovation around direct guaranteed sales taking place, but that is a different discussion…)

For publishers, the disproportionate RTB debate (i.e., the debate around the sales channel and transaction model) has unfortunately distracted them from addressing a more fundamental question: What should they be selling to create a sensible and sustainable business in the digital age? (Not how should they be selling what remains the wrong product.)

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The Rubicon Project recently released some localised data in its Nordic RTB Market Growth blog post. At ATS Stockholm last May, ExchangeWire saw a fairly nascent market still testing and probing the potential of impression-level buying. Rubicon’s report on the Nordics seems to indicate a big adoption of RTB-based buying (see graphs below).

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ATS Paris is just weeks away, and we again look forward to assembling the ad trading community in Paris for our second big event in Paris. A lot has happened over the past twelve month in the French market. We have seen the rise of two publisher exchanges, La Place Media and Audience Squared, the big jump in the number of Independent Trading Desks servicing the French ad market – as well as the increasing dominance of the two big display players, namely Google and Facebook. All of these factors are contributing to huge growth in the local data-driven eco-system – and ExchangeWire looks forward to going to the heart of growth of the market. Agenda and speaker details are now available for the full day on Wednesday October 24. Early bird tickets are now available, but again we have limited space available. For those looking to attend, the full day event will be through both French and English with a full translation service available in both languages throughout the day.

Hot on the heels of our Japanese launch, ExchangeWire is announcing today that it is rolling out a dedicated, localised site for the Brazilian market, www.exchangewire.com.br.

Brazil has one of the fastest growing digital advertising markets globally. The market is undergoing some huge changes in terms of ad technology adoption and the move to automated buying – with many local players either partnering with large ad tech providers or launching their own versions of buy and sell side technology solutions. ExchangeWire Brasil will be a native language site, and will deliver the best analysis and reporting on the Brazilian market.

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Sandy Hubert is Head of Cadreon UK. Here she discusses with ExchangeWire Cadreon’s Mediabrands Audience Platform, their plans for global expansion and the benefits vs pitfalls of programmatic buying.

What actually is the Mediabrands Audience Platform? Is it one platform (ala a DMP) or assembled across multiple platforms?

IPG Mediabrands has evolved the specialist digital practices of Reprise Media, Cadreon, Ansible Mobile and Spring Creek Group into a constellation of data-driven services and enabling technologies called the Mediabrands Audience Platform (MAP). The focus is on all addressable platforms: search, display, mobile, social, video, applications and e-commerce. MAP improves insights and results for clients by helping agencies find, buy and engage their most valuable audiences in real time. MAP will enable synergy across all the digital activities that the IPG Mediabrands agencies are currently offering to their client.

Can you provide a top level overview of the Cadreon value proposition? Can you explain how some of the pieces fit together?

Cadreon is a specialised marketing services agency that integrates technology, data and inventory to manage audiences for our clients. Cadreon is part of the Mediabrands Audience Platform (MAP). Cadreon is technology agnostic, and as such has partnerships with multiple DSPs, integrating first and third party data, and buys only relevant impressions for clients in real time. Cadreon has a multi-platform offering with display banners, video, paid social and a mobile DSP coming soon.

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The role of online retail is ever changing and facing constant disruption by the socially connected web. Despite this, ecommerce remains a major part of internet’s ecosystem, with continued growth on the horizon.

One company that is emerging as the major ad solution within ecommerce is Criteo. Its go-to-market strategy from day one has been to partner with ecommerce vendors, directly, mostly bypassing the agency. And it seems to be working, given that company is due to have revenues of around 300 million this year – and has been profitable since 2008. How many ad tech players can say that?

Criteo is thought to be mulling over a possible IPO early next year – with it likely to be another New York listing. But can a retargeting network really have a big IPO? Probably not. Retargeting can only scale so far as a business model. So the pivot is imminent. But this won’t be some desperate attempt to justify the retargeting solution – it will more an evolution of Criteo’s emerging e-commerce proposition.

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Adfonic released last week their Q2 Global AdMetrics report, the second in a quarterly series, announcing, among other things, Android has beaten iOS for the first time as the most popular platform for mobile advertisers. The report further breaks down metrics by region, device, demographic and vertical.

Paul Childs, CMO of Adfonic, comments: “The growing dominance of Android across Adfonic’s global advertising marketplace reflects wider industry trends that we are seeing from other sources, and highlights widespread consumer adoption of the increasing number of Android-powered devices. Together, Android and iOS devices now account for 80% of Adfonic’s global ad inventory. This is largely because their smartphones and tablets have the most compelling user interfaces, comprising touchscreens, geolocation features and attractive displays. They are fulfilling their tremendous advertising potential to show engaging ad formats, such as rich media.”

Gareth Davies, Commercial Operations Director, Somo Global, adds: “Adfonic’s commitment to offering robust and insightful performance metrics, in the form of their Q2 2012 Global AdMetrics Report, is a boon for mobile marketers and benchmarks important demographic and consumer trends in mobile. The significant CTR uplift from gender, geo and channel targeting highlight the significant value buyers achieve with targeted media buys, a real focus for Somo as we plan and optimise against a wide range of KPIs for our broad range of forward thinking, global brands. Given the need for more transparency in mobile media, and the value of data driven insights, Adfonic’s recent report is most welcome.”

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Adnologies announced this week that Damian Blackden will be joining the company as international CEO, as the European buy-side tech provider aims to roll-out its buy-side “stack” solution across Europe. Blackden worked as President, International at Annalect: Omnicom Media Group’s digital, data and analytics business across EMEA, APAC and LATAM – as well as leading digital development at Zenith and co-managing UM’s London office. Here Blackden, alongside Adnologies CEO, Andreas Schwibbe, explains the move, and how the product is going to differentiate itself in a crowded and fiercely competitive European buy-side market.

For those unaware of the Adnologies solution, can you some overview of the solution and the thinking behind your move to the company?

Damian Blackden: They have methodically and intelligently built out the complete ad technology stack at a time when the industry is learning how essential it is to have components work together seamlessly in order to maximise campaign effectiveness, and to remove data leakage. Plus the individual components themselves are very sophisticated. The number of business rules that can be usefully applied meant that they could show me some very interesting case studies. So – it was a very compelling proposition to me, as was the scope to build on their successes in Germany. I’m used to scaling technology and businesses across territories so I can feel the potential.

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