Yet another video from the recent ATS London event. This time we have Jason Kelly, Chief Revenue Officer at Admeld, speaking to Anthony Rhind, co-CEO at Havas Digital about the evolving data-driven media buying landscape and the agency strategy. Rhind, one of the most respected and senior digital agency executives Europe, give his analysis on some of the big changes happening in the market and how it will affect the European agency.
Data Strategy
2 December 2011 in ExchangeWire EMEA
ATS London 2011: Publisher & Media Plan Panels
Here are some of the highlights from the “Whither The Media Plan?” and Publisher panels from the recent ATS London. The first panel, ably moderated by Microsoft’s Zuzanna Gierlinska, focused around the media plan and whether or not it would still be around in 3-to-5 years given the rapid move towards automation. The panelists included Vivaki’s Marco Bertozzi, AOL’s Brandon Keenen, Martin Kelly, Infectious Media, MediaIQ’s Gurman Hundal and Nigel Gilbert. The discussion touched on wider trends in the marketplace such as the in-housing of the re-targeting function by agencies, the ad net’s potential demise and publisher concerns around CPM pricing.
The Publisher panel focused on sell-side issues and the opportunity for publishers in the emerging data-driven display space (note the mention of the Publisher Trading Desk and the pan-European publisher exchange here). This panel included: Tom Barnett, Director, Switch Concepts; Martin Van Der Meij, Yield Manager, De Telegraaf; Tim Gentry, Head of Optimisation & Effectiveness at Guardian Commercial; Jonathan Wolf, Chief Buying Officer, Criteo; and Nicholas Timms, Head Of Network Products, A&NY Media.
24 November 2011 in ExchangeWire EMEA 3 Comments
Yi Shi CEO & Founder, Avazu Inc, Talks About The Company’s Private Exchange Business And DSP Solution, Moving Into China & Poor Localisation From Ad Tech Vendors
Mr. Yi Shi who is both CEO & Founder of Avazu Inc on Avazu’s offering as a display advertising company, with a private exchange business and a priority DSP – and why they have chosen to move into China. He discusses the challenges within the Chinese marketplace, how Chinese publishers are accustomed to selling their inventory and ad placements for a fixed price per month or per year. Shi points to localisation as the key reason why western companies typically fail in China. He also describes how the DSP is attracting more and more attention from the Chinese VC and PE industries – and how Avazu hopes to increase their RTB inventory fivefold next year in China.
Can you give a little background to Avazu and its offering?
Sure, Avazu is a 2 years old display advertising company with its own private exchange business and a proprietary developed demand side platform. We started at the end of 2009 with a direct-response business model, offering performance oriented advertisers, especially from the Western European markets, one stop media buying solutions across the largest ad exchange platforms and yield optimizers (the word SSP came last year I think) worldwide. Our private exchange part is called Avazu Network.
23 November 2011 in ExchangeWire EMEA
Turn's Pierre Naggar Discusses The Multi-Channel Approach To Marketing And Why DMP & DSP Solutions Can Bring Efficiency To The Media Buying Process In Europe
Audience information is gold, but only if it is used in the right way and many of the more traditional marketing solutions are sadly guilty of treating channels as standalone silos when a multi-channel approach to marketing is far more effective.
Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) make it possible for marketers to really coordinate messaging and reach target audiences with an unparalleled precision by leveraging universal parameters, increasing efficiency and controlling user over-exposure. Whatever a marketer is looking for, whether it is performance or brand awareness, DSPs make it possible to execute campaigns across multiple media channels which also include real time bidding (RTB), ad exchanges and premium publishers.
Cross channel targeting and reporting is key to unlock the potential of digital marketing but it is not the only one in our space. Systems such as the Turn platform enable display buyers to maximise efficiency and performance by putting a powerful media management platform at the centre of their digital efforts, giving users more control than they have ever had before. We all know how cumbersome and time consuming it is to book a campaign across different digital channels – this holds even truer in very fragmented markets such as Europe, where most budgets are still small in comparison to what we are seeing over in the US but the amount of work involved during the trading activity is the same if not greater.
9 November 2011 in ExchangeWire EMEA 1 Comment
Matthew Hunt, Managing Director, Adconion UK, Gives An Ad Net Perspective On The Evolving UK Display Space
It’s fair to say that the digital sector is one of the few industries that are faring pretty well despite the current tough economic times. And where you find an industry enjoying 27.5% year on year growth, you’ll almost certainly experience a business environment rife with change. These changes can be felt throughout the sector – technology advancements, privacy issues, social media, ad exchanges (real time bidding (RTB), ad networks, demand side platforms (DSP) and supply side platforms (SSP) are all driving this space forward. It can be a proverbial minefield for marketers as they try to navigate their way through.
But what do the changes mean? Where is the market heading. And what should marketers be mindful of as they plan their campaigns? Here are a few of my thoughts.
The key industry changes that are affecting the online display advertising business today
The biggest changes are revolving around the use of technology to automate the buying and selling of online display media. The net result is the emergence of the ad exchange that comes in many different forms. Large agency buying groups have launched Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) in order to automate much of their performance and audience targeted buying. On the publisher side, many have chosen to automate the sale of remnant advertising space by allowing Supply Side Platforms (SSPs) to auction their inventory. This is a positive move because the top tier networks will continue to drive scale in an automated ad market and also offer buyers and sellers service-based alternatives to direct exchange buying.
7 November 2011 in ExchangeWire EMEA 2 Comments
Quo Vadis RTB?
Volker Ballueder is VP International Sales, mexad Ltd. Here he gives some some insight on where he thinks RTB is pushing the industry.
Without wanting to get sentimental, we are nearly at the end of the year. Q4 is upon us and we continue to see a lot of change in the data-driven display space. Networks are morphing into SSPs, the big G is ramping up its YouTube video inventory for impression-level buying, and more technology seems to come to market every other day in Europe.
Underpinning all this change is RTB (or real-time bidding). Delivering the right impression/ad to the right user at the right time. Decisions are made in milliseconds. And all those decisions are made to get the highest CTR, the lowest CPA and the best performance.
31 October 2011 in ExchangeWire EMEA 5 Comments
MediaMind's Nerissa MacDonald Gives Her Overview On Last Week's ATS Paris Event
Nerissa MacDonald, Director of Trading, EMEA at MediaMind gives her overview on last week’s ATS Paris event.
Last week saw the inaugural launch of ATS Paris, a first of its kind for the French market. With an attendance of over 200 of France’s most influential and senior ad trading specialists the event certainly delivered what had been billed.
The atmosphere was charged from the moment I arrived with a mix of agencies, trading desks and several advertisers/publishers. We entered armed with our French translation devices and took up our seats in the decadent underground bunker room.
The opening address – delivered in French – by ExchangeWire Editor, Ciaran O’Kane, set the tone for what was to become a memorable and informative day.
27 October 2011 in ExchangeWire EMEA 1 Comment
Latest Improve Digital Eco-System Map Shows Big Growth In The European Display Space
Improve Digital released its new eco-system map for Europe. There is huge growth in the number of new companies on the map – compared to last year’s iteration. Let’s just say those boxes are getting very snug. Some of the big changes on last year include the growth of ad trading desks, ad traders, audience targeting networks and exchange infrastructure companies.
Comparing the new map to last year’s version shows a huge increase in the number of audience targeting networks (200% growth), trading desks (337% growth), and agency trading desks (166% growth) as the industry moves towards audience buying and automation. New players have entered the market, but much of this activity is also undertaken by ad networks moving or expanding their business remit.
There is doubtless going to be talk of a bubble in the space – and I will preface all this growth by saying that many of the European companies on the map are self-funded. The reason? We lack proper ad tech investment structures here (as I alluded to in a post last week) so we have to work quickly to what we call… PROFITABILITY. You can download the new Improve Digital eco-system here.
25 October 2011 in ExchangeWire EMEA
TraderTalk Episode 11: Mathieu Roche Gives An Overview Of The Weborama Solution, The Move Into Data, Its New Pan-European Data Partnership With Vivaki, The Opportunity For Growth In The European Market And Much More...
With ATS Paris taking place this week, TraderTalk has gone all French. Episode 11 sees Ciaran O’Kane, Editor-In-Chief, ExchangeWire, interviewing Mathieu Roche, Managing Director UK at Weborama. Here Roche gives an overview of the Weborama solution, the move into data, its new pan-European data partnership with Vivaki, the evolution of the display eco-system in Europe, and the opportunity for growth in the European market. So that you get all future episodes, you can subscribe to TraderTalk here.
21 October 2011 in ExchangeWire EMEA 2 Comments
The Great European Opportunity: Why Ad Trading Is Now Making Scale Possible In Europe
Europe has always been the poor relation to the US in terms of ad tech. US companies have access to capital. Lots of it. You need only do a Q&A on Adexchanger.com, and you too can have foaming-at-the-mouth VCs bursting down your door to invest. And these companies have access to one of the biggest markets globally. Scale is not an issue for US ad nets, ad tech vendors or digital advertising specialists. As one sage insider said to me recently, “you can easily build a $100 million plus ad net business… in Europe it’s nigh on impossible”. He’s not wrong. Compared to the US, we find it almost impossible to build truly pan-European advertising businesses. But over the last 6-12 months I have seen a lot of European advertising businesses looking at pan-Euro strategies. Why now? What’s changed? How can these smaller players be even contemplating scale? Let’s look at the changing environment and examine how we as an industry can build truly European businesses.
Dynamic Inventory = European Scale
While the greater European advertising community tried to get its collective head around programmatic buying and RTB, a handful of players spotted a huge opportunity to scale their business across Europe. In the past it took serious resource and investment to even consider a move across the Channel or the Rhine. If you were running an ad network, you had to think about sales staff to sell into agencies and publisher acquisition teams to aggregate supply. Very few have succeeded. Off the top-of-my-head, I can only list two-to-three real successes – Hi-Media being the most prominent. Dynamic supply is changing the game.
