EMEA > CEE

Infectious Media today released its Insight Report looking into the Spring 2012 online advertising trends. It details how advertising prices through the RTB ad-exchanges are shifting across Europe, in addition to other trends impacting online advertisers. The report offers opinions on the causes of these movements and makes predictions of coming trends within the market.

This, the third quarterly report from Infectious Media, encompasses data collected between March and May to identify the European trends in CPM (cost-per-thousand), CPC (cost-per-click) and CTR (click-through-rate). It also draws on original data sources to provide an analysis of brand exposure time per impression, the effect of increasing ad impressions on CTR, and a league table of the leading inventory sources, by European region.

The next Trend Report will be out after summer – just in time for dmexco, ATS London and ATS Paris.

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Weborama announced yesterday that it was acquiring Datvantage, a data management solution, for an undisclosed figure. The acquisition might well signal the start of a wider consolidation in the European ad tech space. Here Weborama CEO, Alain Levy, and Datvantage’s Co-Founder, Arnaud Caplier, discuss the deal and how it will augment the current pan-Euro data solution offered by Weborama.

For those not accustomed with Datvantage, please explain what the value proposition; what category do they operate in (exchange, DMP, etc)?

Arnaud: Datvantage is a data exchange: it aggregates audience segments from publishers and offers them to audience buyers (advertisers, agencies and networks) to help them target and optimise their campaigns. The Datvantage platform offers DMP capabilities which enable all stakeholders (publishers, agencies and advertisers) to understand and manage monetisation and usage of their data assets.

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Well we finally passed the date of the ICO amnesty. And no arrests so far. In fact the new “implied consent” interpretation makes the cookie apocalypse soothsayers look a little foolish. The UK looks good for now – but the greater European market cannot be ignored by any company based here. The recent decision for instance by Dutch legislators suggests things are going to get very hairy in the European digital advertising space.

The Dutch Are Going Hardcore On The Explicit Opt-In

We can thank the ICO for taking the sensible decision of implementing implied consent but spare a thought for our Dutch friends. ExchangeWire attended a recent IAB event in the Netherlands on automated ad trading, and spoke to some senior industry leaders about the implications of hard opt-in for all cookies set on websites in the Netherlands. Again the government there has given the industry an amnesty – this time until the end of 2012 – to get its act together. The new law sees no distinction between first and third party cookies. This means that even websites using Google analytics will need permission from users to set the cookie. It means re-targeting is completely out of question – as is the use of social tools. And you can forget about third party ad serving. It would seem contextual advertising is back. Let’s target like it’s 1999. Wooooh.

Am I Breaking The Law If I Serve A Cookie To A Dutch User From A Site Outside The Netherlands?

The first question most people asked in private conversations around the fringes of the IAB event was whether sites outside the Netherlands that drop cookies on users with Dutch IPs are exempt from the law. The answer is: Yes. As long as your content isn’t in Dutch you can drop as many first and third party cookies as you want – just as long as you comply to the laws of the country you are based in. This is a potential disaster for the Dutch digital media industry: it has effectively put in place a huge commercial disadvantage on the companies based there. There is already speculation over whether or not some of the native and international ad tech vendors will keep their data centres there given that the new Dutch law would cover their activity across Europe.

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Improve Digital released its updated eco-system map last week, and it is messy. Very messy. More new categories, and even more companies. You need to ask yourself if the display market (4.5 billion euro at the last count) in Europe is big enough to support all these companies. In an interesting caveat at last week’s Automated Ad Summit (encroaching on trademark there, perhaps) in Amsterdam, AppNexus CTO, Mike Nolet, presented his own version of the eco-system – the Nolet-scape if you will.

Many of the categories on the Nolet “no nonesense” map were replaced with just two: namely, tech enablers and buyers/sellers. He pointed out to the audience that Google was slowly assembling the complete stack, and that many feature companies would get crushed by this formidable end-to-end stack. In fairness to Nolet he did intimate that AppNexus was taking a similar approach albeit with a more open strategy.

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Shane Shevlin is Director of Business Development EMEA at IPONWEB. Here Shevlin discusses the IPONWEB solution in Europe, how the company works with ad tech vendors, and the critical role its technology plays in the real-time advertising eco-system.

For those unaware of the IPONWEB solution in Europe, can you give an overview of your current offering?

IPONWEB is essentially the tech provider behind many of the leading Ad tech platforms in the RTB space. We build and operate customised media trading systems that enable our clients to take advantage of RTB, Audience & Programmatic buying on both the buy-side and the sell-side of the equation, all of which can operate across display, mobile and video channels.

Our solutions leverage u-Platform™, our rapid development ecosystem that packages up the very complex component technologies required to operate in this space – Ad-serving at scale, real-time decisioning, machine learning, big data management, processing and analytics, all void of business logic. We then tailor the solution to specifically solve the business challenges that drive our clients to innovate and deliver the best results for their customers. So on top of this core u-Platform™ base, we then custom develop the algorithms & ad decisioning logic, together with any other unique feature-set requirements. We do this for each and every client.

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Infectious Media released its RTB Insight Report for the Winter period 2011/12 (December, January and February), providing an overview on buying and pricing trends across the European exchange eco-system. The report’s findings are put together using aggregated and anonymised campaign data from its proprietary technology, Impression Desk. The findings, whilst specific to Infectious Media, represent work carried out for clients spanning all industry sectors with differing objectives, budgets and target audiences, which may be indicative of industry wide trends.

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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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Jason Bigler is Director, Product Management at Google and is the point man for all of the company’s display products in Europe. Here he discusses Google’s European display strategy, the bespoke approach that is required, the cross-channel opportunity, and how we get to that $200 billion figure.

We hear lots about Google’s display strategy in the US. Can you give some overview on the approach to Europe’s fragmented display market?

Our general approach actually isn’t very different on the core issues. Publishers look to us to help them maximise the value of every ad impression while advertisers look to us to help them achieve the best ROI on their advertising spend. If we aren’t delivering on either of those core concepts then we don’t have a business in any market.

However in Europe, as you point out, the market is more fragmented and each country can be in a different phase of product adoption. You really have to apply a country-specific lense when examining the best approach. As an example, we are seeing tremendous growth on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange in Europe. Spend has increased more than 130% year on year and the number of buyers and sellers has increased more than twofold over last year. This is going to be a big year for programmatic buying across most of the region. But is it exactly the same in every country across Europe? Not a chance. So in some countries we’re in full commercialisation mode and in others we’re still in the evangelising phase.

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