EMEA > Data Strategy

Stephan Noller is CEO & Founder of nugg.ad AG

In a previous article, Nick Stringer from IAB UK explained how the EU wants to regulate the use of data on the Internet and why this might go too far when it comes to data-driven business models. My company is one of those data-driven businesses and we are helping many publishers and websites across Europe to deliver more relevant ads to their consumers in a privacy-friendly way – because we are working with a strong data-minimisation technology built in. The concept is called ‘Pseudonymisation’ and has been introduced to the policy-discussion at a relatively late stage – although it is carrying some of the core concepts of the proposed regulation as its principle.

Pseudonymisation describes a process in which recorded data is limited in such a way that it is no longer possible to link it to the individual from whom it originated. However, the granularity of those individuals is retained – which is not the case with the more familiar process of anonymisation – so that if one person is recorded as having an interest in sports, and two people in culture, once the data has been pseudonymised it still registers as three people and three data records. Anonymisation, on the other hand, would convert that information to something like a 33% interest in sport.

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In the 1990s, a typical database consisted of just a couple of megabytes. By 2000 this had significantly increased, and one decade later we’re now storing petabytes of data. What caused this rapid growth and which types of software can help us manage these mountains of data?

The rapid growth of disk space
When I first started developing websites, a typical hosting package had only 25 megabytes of storage. Of course that was intended for personal websites – not large enterprises – but things changed quickly in a very short span of time.

Today, you can store several gigabytes for less than what it used to cost for a few megabytes. This is thanks to advances in technology, stiff competition and most importantly, cheap disks with multiple terabytes of storage. The going rate is now only about 0.05 USD per gigabyte.

The trend of rapidly increasing space and decreasing prices caused people to store more and more data. People tend to be lazy – why bother deleting something if you can just leave it there? You can compare a hard disk to your attic or basement – as long as there is space available, you’ll just keep filling it up with stuff!

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Chris Allison is Online Sales Manager at ANZ. Here he discusses the company’s relationship with Tagman, and how data insight and attribution is giving the airline brand a real understanding of the value of display’s role in the purchase journey of an ANZ user.

Can you describe what your engagement with TagMan has enabled beyond the ability to improve page load times and more effective tag management?

We were interested to find out what values we could attribute to various channels that customers used on their journey to purchase. Data from TagMan allowed ANZ to understand how channels, such as display, reached users at the beginning and throughout the purchase funnel to help drive sales. With visibility into data throughout the purchase cycle, a different picture emerged as to the value of display. Analysis showed that around 9% of sales commenced with a display ad interaction.

How is the data that is collected via TagMan enabling you to see a bigger picture in terms of your marketing investment?

The customer journey element of our data analysis has been the single most effective way of tracking the marketing spend that is working the hardest for us. Just as web analytics plays an important role in understanding onsite customer behaviour, TagMan’s data collection allowed us to understand the full customer journey and the level of impact of each media channel on each journey.

With a specific focus on display, how are you able to start assessing its value contribution? How has this changed?

For each customer conversion, TagMan was able to show ANZ the precise creative, media placement and timing of an exposure to a display banner and the exact search term (whether paid or natural) used during the purchase journey.

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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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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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ATS London Big Data sponsor IBM has just released an in-depth whitepaper addressing the issues surrounding Big Data. As everyone knows, Digital marketing has the potential to extract, interrogate and leverage large volumes of data. The challenges around high-cardinality in key variables, an increasing focus on open-ended analytics, structured versus unstructured data streams are becoming more and more complex.

However, they are also challenges for which there are an increasing number of interesting and applicable technologies that provide the real potential for a long term solution. Finding the right solution involves more than a simple evaluation of price/performance—and not just because measuring performance is inherently ambiguous. It involves the usual work of matching business requirements to the comparative advantages of each possible solution.

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What’s the state of play with Turn right now? What does a Cloud Marketing Platform mean?

It’s an exciting time for Turn. We’re in a major growth phase with over 200 employees across 14 offices worldwide and expanding. We’re seeing our fastest growth occurring across Europe with 430% year-on-year revenue growth in the region. We have major global brands using our service directly, or through their agencies. We work with the Top 5 holding companies in the world, and run 3,500 campaigns monthly around the globe. Having witnessed firsthand the interest in Turn at the DMEXCO event in Germany last week, I am excited about our prospects for continued growth, as our products address the pain points that digital advertisers across Europe have today.
Turn’s goal has always been to empower the marketer at their moment of decision. To this effect, we developed our cloud marketing platform for scalability, speed, open access and, most importantly, the easy delivery of insights for smarter marketing decisions.

What the “cloud” part means for the marketer is that there is no software to install, no need to have to integrate with advertising exchanges or inventory partners, no need to build data ingestion tools to pull in first-party data, no need to strike deals with every third-party data vendor. They simply subscribe to our service and can begin streamlining their digital marketing operations.

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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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