EMEA > Behavioural Targeting

As current advertising technologies such as cookies and unique device identifiers (UDIDs) lose their effectiveness and are being scrutinised for their consumer privacy compliance, digital marketers are looking for alternatives. Here James Lamberti, General Manager and Vice President at AdTruth, discusses the issues facing targeting capabilities and breaks down their solution.

Can you provide some insight into the background of AdTruth as a business?

AdTruth is the digital media division of global device recognition leader 41st Parameter. Our focus is to provide marketers with universal device recognition across the entire digital media ecosystem so they can recognise and reach their audiences in an increasingly device-dependent world.

How and why did you make the move from financial fraud detection to mobile/ad tech?

Our parent company, 41st Parameter, continues to focus on detecting and preventing fraud in the financial services, e-commerce and travel industries. In 2011 the company realised it could leverage its eight years of research and development in device recognition to solve a new and growing problem: how to recognise users for targeted marketing.

In the world of digital advertising, audience recognition and effective targeting are core requirements. For better or worse, existing approaches – primarily cookies – just don’t perform as well as marketers demand. There are a number of reasons for this: consumers may block or delete cookies, regulators and privacy advocates look at them warily and on mobile devices – which are so critical today – they simply don’t work.

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AudienceScience announced last week that it is closing its ad network business – as it looks to focus on becoming the SaaS solution of choice for large, brand-focused advertisers.

This is a pretty significant move by AudienceScience, given that it could mean that one particular global advertiser, who has an already extensive relationship with AudienceScience, is going all in with them for global digital buying. For AudienceScience to develop a unified proposition of this kind, it would suggest that the strategy is being driven by the needs of existing large, global clients.

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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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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.

Stuart Colman is founder of Colman Media Consultancy and former Managing Director Europe, VP International of AudienceScience. He has a decade of experience in digital media, developing and managing award-winning sales teams and driving international business growth.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have been involved in data-driven digital advertising for a long time. This includes being part of the sales team that helped the FT first introduce ‘behavioural targeting’ to the UK in 2003 (and hearing the immortal line, “Isn’t this just a way to monetise s**t inventory?”), through to running the international business for the world’s largest independent data management technology company, AudienceScience. During this time I have seen data driven advertising grow from its infancy to what some would today argue is the heartbeat of the digital media industry around the world.

So, as I take stock of my last 10 years involvement in all this, I’ve been asking myself how things look to me today. Unfortunately, the answer is, “It’s a mess”, and watching many businesses make a ham fist of it makes me angry and disappointed.

This, to me, is the reality today: many publishers still don’t really know what to do with their data assets, often selling this asset cheaply in search of short term revenue. Advertisers, on the other hand, don’t truly understand the value locked up in a data world, whether they’re buying it from a third party, or it’s data they can generate and control themselves. The result is they often simply entrust their data and strategy to agencies. Finally, agencies seemingly just want to own and control everything with little consideration given to the impact of their actions on the long term sustainability of the digital marketplace — and don’t even get me started on the VC-funded, built-for-sale, not-to-scale, me-too tech providers that are often no more than ‘product features masquerading as genuine companies’ whose only value seems to be to fill up the Lumascape just that little bit more… like I say, a mess.

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Rupert Staines is Managing Director Europe at RadiumOne Inc. Here he discusses the emergence of the Dynamic Audience Platform, and why turning awareness into purchase intent could now be a reality for marketers.

According to a recent study from Magna Global, Goldman Sachs and eMarketer, global online ad spend is set to grow from $79 billion in 2011 to $155 billion in 2016. Social advertising alone is set to rocket 780% from $5.5 billion to $43.1 billion in the same timeframe. One of the main reasons for this increase in spending is the evolution of the digital marketplace, where advertisers are constantly looking for new ways to shine and differentiate themselves in this ever-emerging and congested market. However, are they getting it right?

Until recently ad networks powered the growth of online advertising, but this model has become archaic and they are therefore struggling to target relevant audiences at the right scale and in a timely fashion. Some confine themselves to using social networks and target transactional behaviour which yield narrower and less relevant results. For example, once someone has bought a pair of football boots, it’s highly unlikely they are going to purchase another pair straight away.

The internet has evolved, it is no longer just a place to research information, it’s now a social environment, a place where people are engaged in conversation. The upshot is advertisers have to evolve their marketing communications within digital. Consider the fact that each day consumers share two billion items on Facebook and over 16 billion items on the Open Web on their desktop and mobile devices. This sharing phenomenon opens the door for advertisers to capitalise on this huge opportunity. However, it’s essential for the right strategy to be put in place to unlock its obvious potential.

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It’s the biggest data-driven advertising event in Europe. It’s the event that even has its own acronym. ATS London is now in its third year, and the line-up of speakers and content is the best yet. Often copied – A LOT! – but never equalled, ATS London brings together the best in the global online ad industry to discuss the latest trends and developments in the space. And this year is no exception.

It is clear that our industry is moving beyond the mess of the LumaScape to a platform-centric world, and this certainly is one of the key areas being explored by ATS London this year. The full-day programme will be organised into three core themes: brand, application and big data. All of these are effectively shaping the data-driven ad space, and speakers and participants on the day will explore these issues in more depth.

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James Yancey, VP of Global Strategy at IgnitionOne, on the future of Facebook Sponsored Stories combining social graph and third-party data.

What would happen if Facebook partnered with third-party data providers? Warning: if you’re a privacy fanatic, then it will probably stress you out to read any further. For those with an open mind, hear me out. If you take 900 million active users and understand not just how many friends they have, but how valuable those are based on their interests, demo data and influence – what are the possibilities?

In the months anticipating the Facebook IPO, the news had been calling for more ads that show clear direct performance, like search or display. And finally Facebook has been delivering one ad unit that shows comparable promise, the Sponsored Story. It’s a simple idea: show a socially relevant ad unit to friends only in the format and context of other updates in the news feed.

The success of the Sponsored Story is based on an idea that Facebook calls “amplification”. The thought behind amplification is that the original ad can reach many people at scale if their friend’s “like” it and it shows up in their subsequent news feeds. But again, it’s tied to reach metrics. Direct response advertisers have lost their interest and patience in many cases when comparing it to things to which they are accustomed.

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