EMEA > Brand

Paul Frampton is Managing Director at Havas Media

We are all well aware that the retargeting model is broken. Still, three years into an RTB world, advertisers are frequency spamming the same users over and over again.

Whilst there are some positive innovations in the prospecting space, the reality of first-party data integration is still nascent and will never scale to the same level as the US.

My view is that the next evolution required is a new model for prospecting consumers further up the funnel, namely whilst in the awareness and interest stage. This requires a different approach; an engaging and more contextually-relevant deployment than is present in today’s remnant exchanges.

Exchanges and DSPS’s have efficiently opened up access to both the big boys, but also the long tail, of inventory eyeballs. For me, that’s where the next play will be, but it will be a content play and not a performance one.

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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 notion of universal frequency capping in RTB has long been touted as a major USP. You could argue that it was one of the major catalysts behind the move to consolidated platform-based buying. But has universal frequency capping really been the game changer in the recent seismic shifts in the media buying eco-system?

Let’s provide some context here: when DSPs first arrived on the scene and slowly began disrupting the entire ecosystem of media buying (largely for the better), the ability to universally frequency cap was heralded as a huge opportunity for advertisers to save significant costs, reduce duplication across different networks and enable advertisers to have the ability to tightly manage their message across disparate inventory sources, with the intention of improving user experience.

Unfortunately it hasn’t panned out the way it was supposed to – largely because the initial use case and adoption of DSPs was (and still is to some extent) heavily skewed towards retargeting. While a DSP enabled buyers to manage frequency, it was rarely a focal point for optimisation strategies. Why? Because ROI was and is still king.

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ExchangeWire is proud of another stellar event with ATS Paris, featuring the best and brightest of the driving force in French digital advertising. Here’s a quick summary of the day in case you weren’t able to make it or you would like to revisit key points.

SECTION I: DATA – POWERING THE EVOLUTION OF MEDIA BUYING

KEYNOTE 1 (en Français): Our first keynote speaker of the day was Alain Levy, CEO, Weborama, who posed the question: “Are we entering a new age of glory?” and cautioned: not yet. Technology platforms are not stable yet, but are ad networks dead? Not at all. They are valuable partners who give publishers the visibility they need. The light at the end of the tunnel is data. KPIs need to be optimised to the brand and advertisers need to work together using all the data assets available, embracing big data. Sometimes we over-complicate the space: back to basics. Right person, right place, right time. If publishers and tech providers can allocate and use data effectively, and agencies use data to build their KPIs, the industry as a whole can enter the next stage in evolution.

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Retargeting in mobile has often been the nirvana for many buyers but the ability to execute has often been found wanting due to various privacy restrictions and technological incompetencies. StrikeAd have just announced that they can now crack this challenge by launching a new, proprietary retargeting product. The high-load, high-speed database now powers StrikeAd’s three new solutions: retargeting, frequency capping and behavioural targeting. Claiming to adhere to privacy standards, the retargeting product enables advertisers to re-engage consumers who have previously shown an interest in their product or vertical.

This follows a recent announcement of a new partnership with AdMobius, a mobile audience management platform, enabling publishers and advertisers to discover and target relevant audiences. The goal of this collaboration is to further enhance StrikeAd’s mobile targeting capabilities. Partnering with AdMobius provides a channel for reaching brands, with their own retargeting product focusing on direct response.

The benefit of retargeting is obvious (and proven in desktop to be highly successful). However, the ability to execute retargeting in mobile is vastly more complex as many are aware. StrikeAd’s retargeting technology consists of five servers claiming to handle 85 million user records and processing thousands of queries per second, per server, at an average query time of five milliseconds.

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Stuart Byrne is Ebiquity’s UK Head of Digital

To see or not to see, that is the question. Too many digital ads never get seen. A huge chunk of digital display could be being seen by precisely no one. That’s advertiser money wasted and a poor buying strategy.

If this happened in outdoor, there would be an uproar, but just because an ad has been ‘sent’ to a computer – impression served – doesn’t guarantee that it’s actually seen, or even been rendered on a user’s machine.

Research that we’ve carried out in Germany shows that for many advertisers only 71% of their digital placements can actually be seen.

Based on diverse campaigns, and more than a billion served ads, the study found that while expandable formats were more likely to be seen by website users (80% visibility), some half-page ads were only 57% likely to be viewed.

It’s not just a problem in Germany. In the US, comScore has released software designed to measure the number of viewable impressions. Based on the principle that 50% of the ad must be visible for one second, a two-month study of campaigns for 12 big brands, including Kraft Foods, Ford and Sprint, found that 31% of 1.7 billion ad impressions were never in view.

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Online advertising spend has displayed significant growth over the last 10 years and analysts expect this trend to continue. However, a large discrepancy persists between internet time allocation in total “media time” and online advertising revenue.

Online advertising growth has been historically led by performance-based marketing; tapping into the huge reservoir of brand-oriented marketing spend will be key in closing the media discrepancy. This will be done by further blurring the lines between branding and performance marketing through the use of innovative formats, measuring technologies and improved targeting.

Nicolas Von Bülow, Founding Partner, Clipperton, comments: “Historically, online marketing growth has been driven by performance-oriented advertising players. Brand marketing, however, remains a relatively untapped reservoir of advertising dollars. We believe the emergence of a new breed of players focused on blurring the lines between performance and branding marketing will open new avenues for growth in the online advertising space. These players are already leveraging new formats and devices as well as improved targeting and measuring technology to succeed in this space.”

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Wayne is a Client Digital Partner at UM International, working across all digital channels within the EMEA region for a variety of clients within differing industry verticals.

It has been really interesting to see such a high volume of words penned for the ‘brand buying coming into the programmatic buying space’ argument of late. An area of such high-interest for marketers, buyers and vendors, and where everyone ‘in the know’ knows it is an area that needs addressing.

It’s important to understand that there are a significantly greater number of brand marketers and creative bods within the Media Industry than performance media heroes (my guess would be 10x as many). Many reading this article will think that is the legacy of the ‘Mad Men’ era of advertising, however these guys are just as applicable today as they were in the 50s, yet the ecosystem they sit within has significantly changed.

I feel sorry for brand marketers. The ecosystem is markedly different, and you only have to look as far as the agency groups with trading desks. Agency staff are plugging away with their trading desk offering without really understanding the brand’s history, ethos, audience, objectives and the vertical that they sit within — but the brand marketer has some over-enthusiastic trading desk operator utter the words, “We operate across 1,000s of websites and can target banners to audiences that look like your existing audience and we buy this in a real-time auction to ensure that this the media is bought efficiently.” Does the brand marketer really care? The brand marketer gets what programmatic buying is, they just don’t want to do it — who can blame them?

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