Brand

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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Sorosh Tavakoli is the founder and CEO of Videoplaza. Here he discusses the recent the Videoplaza solution, the recent series B fund raise, and trends in the video ad market.

For those unaware of the Videoplaza proposition, can you give an overview of your solution?

We position Videoplaza as a sell side ad management platform for the New IP-delivered TV. This means that we empower broadcasters and publishers to maximise their advertising revenues from their IP-delivered videos, regardless of where and how that content has been consumed.

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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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CES 2012 exploded this year. It’s always been big, but this year it got REALLY big.

Once we look beyond the latest gadgetry hype, however, there are a number consistent themes for the online ad industry…

Greater Accessibility

Consumers are going to have a lot more affordable ways of accessing the internet via multi devices in 2012. It will not necessarily be the products on show at CES but this latest innovation cycle will speed up the diffusion of innovation. Consumers will genuinely have greater access to multi platform connectivity which opens up some interesting opportunities for those on the buy and sell side and everything in between.

Measurement Systems

Greater consumer adoption of connected devices really starts to create the pressure on the main measurement behemoths to come up with new ways to measure across screen. Google could start owning this for themselves and the Google-Kantar tie up is surely a sign of things to come. If we as an industry want advertisers to invest in the new opportunities that
multi devices create, then we better be prepped with the ability to help them measure it all.

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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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Wes Biggs is the Co-Founder and CTO at Adfonic. Here he discusses the big opportunity for brands around mobile rich media formats in 2012.

Imagine enabling your brand to interact with consumers in a visually gripping, cinematically inspiring and fully interactive experience, on devices that are already in the hands of the majority of Europeans and North Americans. That’s the promise of rich media on mobile, where an ecosystem is rapidly emerging around the tools, technology and services to create, traffic and measure highly effective interactive campaigns in the mass-market smartphone display advertising channel via ad networks and exchanges.

Mobile rich media encompasses a variety of campaign features, and while the definition (like that of “smartphone”) is not set in stone, the term describes display advertising that moves beyond the traditional static banners and looping animations that have been prevalent in mobile advertising for several years, exploiting the rich features of HTML5 and deep integration in mobile app environments to allow for advertising that is more visually arresting (custom animations or in-banner video), more interactive (banners that expand on-screen when a user taps), and more story-driven. Advertisers and agencies are creating mobile rich media campaigns that not only tie into above-the-line TV and billboard campaigns, but go beyond those by providing brand-building in-ad mini-games, extensive discoverable video and audio content, or direct calls to action including on-device purchase options. Because of this, and because of the mobile medium’s unique targeting capability and consumer dynamics, rich media enables premium performance for advertisers and can provide premium monetization for savvy publishers and app developers.

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Tim Finn is the newly appointed head of EMEA at StrikeAd. Here he discusses his recent appointment, the latest round of funding and the Japanese partnership.

You’ve just joined StrikeAd. What were you doing before and why did you join them?

Prior to joining StrikeAd I was one of the founding team at contextual ad network Vibrant Media. Having spent the last five years building that business in New York, I was able to experience first hand the advances in exchange and Real Time Bidding (RTB) technologies and the profound impact they were having on both the buy and sell sides. When I met the StrikeAd team and they articulated their vision for the programmatic buying of mobile inventory on a global basis it seemed like an opportunity too good to miss.

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