Behavioral Targeting

Publicis Buyback Ends Dentsu Partnership

French advertising group Publicis has bought back 18 million of its own shares from Japan’s Dentsu for €644.4m, bringing an end to their nine-year partnership that analysts say has yielded little value.

The companies had been partners since the Japanese agency – the country’s largest marketing services group by revenues – teamed up with Elisabeth Badinter, a member of the founding family and the biggest shareholder in Publicis, to act in concert.

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Edgar Baudin is Co-Founder & Managing Director at Gamned. Here he discusses the Gamned offering, the state of the French exchange marketplace, the generalist versus specialist argument and the effect of Sapin legislation on real-time media buying in France.

Is much of the data-driven ad spend in the French market still coming from DR budgets and are brands still avoiding automated channels?

Most of the spending in France is still related to DR campaigns, i.e. acquisition and retargeting. The first group to adopt this technology was composed of merchants who focused on ROI, and that explains why they drive the biggest parts of the investments.

Now that brands have access to transparency and ad verification, they’ve started to switch part of their budget over to RTB campaigns. There’s still a lot of work to be done, informing and educating marketers, for them to increase their budgets and go from the test campaign phase to long-term RTB integration in their media plans. Branding campaigns will need a strong increase in data offering which is a must-have for audience and targeting setups.

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Criteo To Hit $400 Million In Revenue This Year

Criteo has become a colossus in the European ad tech space. The French company, founded by Jean-Baptiste Rudelle in 2005, has a client list which includes some of the biggest names in e-commerce (Office.co.uk, Zoopla, Glasses Direct, Boden, among others).

Last year the company generated $200m in turnover, compared with $60m in 2010 and $9m in 2009. If the trend continues, Criteo could double its revenues in 2012. There are already plans to hire 250 people this year, bringing the workforce to 750 employees. At this rate, Criteo could possibly become the largest Internet company in France.

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Le Trading Media

In an epic twenty-seven pages on the potential of RTB in the French market, IAB France has outlined an impressive overview of the entire market. The report goes into great detail on the emerging data-driven advertising market in France, with explainations of key constituents in the exchange eco-system. It even includes some Q&As with leading ad execs in France, including recent ATS Paris speaker, Arthur Millet, Directeur Commercial at Amaury Medias Digital. Further insight on the growth of automated buying and RTB is provided by industry heavyweights like Sébastien Robin, Directeur Des OpérationS, at AFFIPERF. You can download the IAB report on the growth of RTB in France here.

mediascale Reports Strong 2011 Growth

mediascale, one of Germany’s leading independent digital agencies, reported a gross income of €5.6m last year – an increase of 17 per cent compared to 2010. The billings for the same period rose 22 per cent from €59m to €72m.

mediascale uses its own cross-platform targeting tool NE.R.O, together with Plan.Net, to develop solutions for clients and agency partners. Julian Simon, managing director of mediascale, is bullish on future growth for mediascale:

Right now we are running about 35 per cent of all campaigns on NE.R.O. By the end of 2012, we want to increase that by 40 per cent or more. This targeting will aid not only in direct sales support but also image and brand communications. It’s more about planning for consumer-relevant criteria such as purchase decision stages, interests and attitudes of the user. There is great potential in targeting, especially for content and creative solutions. The system combines information from the user profile with the matching design, text, product or price for the dynamic creation of promotional materials. Thus, advertising effectiveness and efficiency of the campaigns increase significantly.

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This is the first post in our new column Euro Round-up. Please forward all Euro market stories and press releases to press@exchangewire.com.

Glow Machine Now Available In The AppNexus App Marketplace, Adding Facebook Ad Buying In The Ad Stack

If you were to believe the hype machine, Facebook is set to take over the ad world. Glow Digital Media, a European based ad tech vendor, is clearly responding to the market with its new Glow Machine® app for the AppNexus marketplace, announced this week. Glow Machine® integrates Facebook media buys into the AppNexus Console user interface. The new app gives advertisers the ability to access and control FB campaigns alongside display inventory. The goal is to make Facebook Ads more effective through advanced campaign management, automation and optimisation for AppNexus Console users. The app allows existing AppNexus users to buy across the Facebook channel. BannerConnect also launched its first app on the AppNexus marketplace, as the a la carte ad stack grows. The BannerConect app was built for Dutch-based Mark and Mini, who maintain 5 million Dutch online user profiles. It enables buyers in the AppNexus eco-system to enhance their campaigns with this data.

The DoubleClick Ad Exchange Delivers Revenue Uplift to EMEA Publishers

Google’s Ad Exchange, DoubleClick, released a whitepaper this week analysing their positive impact on publisher revenue in Europe. According to their internal report, 88% of display advertisers are planning to buy in real-time going forward. However, content remains critical and 74% of real-time bidding buyers will pay a premium for quality environments. In the survey, buyers also revealed that programmatic channels would see the biggest increase in investment over the next year.

For inventory that would have gone unsold, according to their study, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange demonstrated significant success in monetising unsold inventory. For inventory for which there was no other demand, it delivered a fill rate of greater than 90%.

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George Odysseos is EU Director of Publisher Services at Tribal Fusion. Here he discusses instances when RTB can help publishers secure higher prices – and why it should not be used on all classes of inventory.

In 2011, real-time bidding (RTB) was the trend that – at the coalface of online display advertising – I have most come across. As what the market understands as an ad network, Tribal Fusion is in the thick of it when it comes to addressing this trend, particularly with our publisher partners, and now is the time for me to offer a view.

There’s no question that RTB as a mechanism for setting the price for display inventory has its place. Like all auction models it seems on the surface to offer the best way to guarantee the seller the highest possible price for a product or service and, mysteriously, the lowest possible price for the buyer. But, like all auction models – not least because both those things cannot possibly be true at the same time – it doesn’t work that way.

For some inventory – mainly the highly sought-after impressions from users suitable for retargeting – RTB secures a very high price. But, for all else, far from raising prices to their highest possible level, it commoditises inventory such that impressions that could be packaged up and sold for a justifiable premium, go for an absolute song. This is bad in the short, medium and long-term for publishers and advertisers. Here’s why that’s my view:

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After last year’s blockbuster Ad Trader Conference in Hamburg, we are going big this year with some of the most influential ad execs in the industry already confirmed to speak. This year’s theme of the conference will focus on building sustainable relationships between the demand side and supply side in the evovling German data-driven ad marketplace. Germany remains the biggest display market in Europe, but it will not move in the same way as the UK and France in terms of how real-time media buying is adapted.

The sales houses are very strong in the German market, and most remain unconvinced of automated buying. However they realise change is on the horizon, and it is with this in mind that we are looking to bring together some of the biggest sales house players in the market – as well as senior figures from the demand side and the ad tech space – to discuss and analyse the potential of data-driven online advertising in Germany.

2011 was dominated by lots of industry chatter around the potential of automated buying and real-time trading. 2012 is about application and making this new eco-system work.

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

Facebook and Amazon could soon bring massive disruption to the multi-billion dollar/euro traditional display marketplace – with display solutions that could even emerge as a serious threat to current kingpin, Google.

We Need Some Context

The two major themes of audience-led buying presently centre around both intent and social. They are so in vogue right now with the entire industry. We see BlueKai selling shopping intent, and the likes of RadiumOne serving up social targeting. Facebook and Amazon could easily become a major competitor to everyone working in these emerging areas of display.

The truth is, buying third-party data is hard to efficiently scale. It’s why these data companies are trying to create relationships with hundreds of publishers. They need consistent volumes of data with as many touch points as possible to build robust, rounded profiles. Facebook and Amazon are the biggest publishers and owners of data in their respective spaces – and sit on the largest, most diverse sets of user data. Up until now it has not been accessible to marketers and advertisers, but that could soon change.

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