EMEA > Demand Side Platform

Stephan Noller is CEO & Founder of nugg.ad AG

At this year’s I-COM conference in Rome I had an interesting discussion with the media manager of a large FMCG company known for booking premium inventory via DSPs for a number of years. We talked about his specific goals, and he said that they had nothing to do with clicks and CTR, as his products are sold exclusively in supermarkets and not online.

Responding to my question about how he managed his DSP campaigns – as, to my knowledge, DSPs up to now have only used clicks as statistical variables – he replied, “we check to see whether we actually reach our marketing targets using market research… after the campaigns in most cases”. I then asked him whether he might not prefer working with a solution that could make his targets visible directly in the booking, modulation and optimisation of the campaign instead of waiting several weeks for market research results. His reply: “Yes, of course, but as far as I know such a DSP is not available on the market, right?” Right!

In 2012 the internet replaced television as the medium with the highest spend on advertising in Germany, as well as in the UK. This trend seems to be continually accelerating. The print crisis, which in Germany has had far-reaching consequences, like the recent loss of the Financial Times, is contributing to this, as is the unbeatable success of the internet among the younger target groups.

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Dr. Boris Mouzykantskii is Founder, Chief Executive Officer & Chief Scientist, at IPONWEB. Mouzykantskii is a keynote at this year’s sold out ATS London. Here he discusses the current state of the real-time eco-system, the IPONWEB proposition and why an end-to-end stack strategy is unsustainable.

For those unfamiliar with Boris Mouzykantskii and IPONWEB, can you give an overview of the company’s proposition?

Essentially we build and operate customised media trading systems that enable our clients to take advantage of RTB, Audience & Programmatic buying on both the buy and sell sides of the equation, any of which can be designed to operate across any combination of display, mobile or video media.

We have been doing this for a long time now, and today we are managing more than 40 platform clients globally, the majority of which have unique and significant roles in the industry.

All of our solutions leverage u-Platform™, our rapid development environment 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.

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A sign that programmatic buying has become more mainstream over the past 12 months is represented not only by the fact that ATS London’s registrations from direct advertisers is already up nearly 70% year on year (with more marketers looking to attend every day) but also by ExchangeWire’s ability to host a panel comprised solely of leading advertisers and marketers.

Never before has the industry been able to hear directly ‘from the source’ on the demand side on such a large scale.

The session will focus on the key areas affecting marketers: how advertisers are integrating real-time technology into their marketing mix; how advancements in technology is facilitating new ways to reach desired audiences; and how they are able to change the way they ultimately invest digital ad spend and how agency relationships are evolving and emerging.

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Paul Frampton is Managing Director at MPG & Media Contacts. Here he discusses how his agency employs data-driven strategies to inform brand message/positioning for clients, the vagaries of oversupply of data and technology in the digital ad space, and the continued importance of the “human element” in the age of automated buying.

MPG Media Contacts seems to be transitioning into more of a brand/strategy-led agency? What is behind the concept of meaningful brands?

MPG has always been renowned for its planning heritage and Media Contacts for its data-driven performance expertise. When we brought the two together, we created a planning-obsessed agency with end to end digital capability. We have long believed that the brands that make a positive difference to peoples’ lives are those which enjoy greater business success (we’ve actually tracked this against company share price to prove it).

They have greater meaning to peoples’ lives because they offer something greater than their core purpose, service or product. We contest that the role that brands play in people’s lives must evolve, which is best illustrated through a brief history lesson: 1st generation brands were functional – focusing on convenience or price while 2nd generation brands looked to stand out from the crowd by differentiating themselves. We firmly believe that in order to succeed in a hyper-connected, hyper-transparent digital world, the 3rd generation of brands must make a genuine difference to people’s lives, i.e. demonstrate clear, unquestionable personal benefit.

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It’s the biggest data-driven advertising event in Europe. It’s the event that even has its own acronym. ATS London is now in its third year, and the line-up of speakers and content is the best yet. Often copied – A LOT! – but never equalled, ATS London brings together the best in the global online ad industry to discuss the latest trends and developments in the space. And this year is no exception.

It is clear that our industry is moving beyond the mess of the LumaScape to a platform-centric world, and this certainly is one of the key areas being explored by ATS London this year. The full-day programme will be organised into three core themes: brand, application and big data. All of these are effectively shaping the data-driven ad space, and speakers and participants on the day will explore these issues in more depth.

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Adnologies announced this week that Damian Blackden will be joining the company as international CEO, as the European buy-side tech provider aims to roll-out its buy-side “stack” solution across Europe. Blackden worked as President, International at Annalect: Omnicom Media Group’s digital, data and analytics business across EMEA, APAC and LATAM – as well as leading digital development at Zenith and co-managing UM’s London office. Here Blackden, alongside Adnologies CEO, Andreas Schwibbe, explains the move, and how the product is going to differentiate itself in a crowded and fiercely competitive European buy-side market.

For those unaware of the Adnologies solution, can you some overview of the solution and the thinking behind your move to the company?

Damian Blackden: They have methodically and intelligently built out the complete ad technology stack at a time when the industry is learning how essential it is to have components work together seamlessly in order to maximise campaign effectiveness, and to remove data leakage. Plus the individual components themselves are very sophisticated. The number of business rules that can be usefully applied meant that they could show me some very interesting case studies. So – it was a very compelling proposition to me, as was the scope to build on their successes in Germany. I’m used to scaling technology and businesses across territories so I can feel the potential.

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myThings’ Global Expansion Continues Following Recent $15m Investment

myThings, a global personalised display ad solutions company, announced this week that it has expanded its operations in the U.S. and Latin American markets, in addition to Japan, Turkey, Poland and the Nordics, with the company now operating in 15 markets worldwide. Hand-in-hand with its geographic expansion, the company has recently hired its 100th employee, with a total team growth of 120% in 18 months.

myThings’ strategic expansion decision, especially the opening of offices in the U.S. and Brazil, was a result of growing demand from marketers, particularly in the United States, to extend beyond the industry-focused cost per click (CPC) or view-based models offered by traditional retargeting companies. myThings translates its CPA-driven success to their markets, aiming to enable advertisers to run risk-free campaigns by paying only for actual conversions.

A driving force behind myThings’ expansion is its recent $15m round led by Iris Capital, the manager of the Orange-Publicis Venture Fund, in addition to existing investors Accel Partners, Carmel Ventures, T-Ventures and Viola PE. To date, the company has raised $37m in four rounds of financing.

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Dominic Trigg is Managing Director Europe at Rocket Fuel. Here Trigg discusses the evolution of real-time bidding and why it is slowly changing the fundamentals of the media buying world.

The online ad marketplace has evolved from an industry dominated by indiscriminate forward contracts on bulk ad space negotiated directly through publishers, to today’s increasingly widespread exchanges. Today, real-time bidding allows parties to use highly complex, integrated strategies based on every element of each individual online ad impression to calculate the most accurate and effective bid.

In theory, the creation of a perfectly liquid market like this, allowing for complex arbitrary bidding algorithms, should have resulted in huge value creation for advertisers. In practice, the invisible hand of the market is currently putting an artificial cap on this value by using manual bidding, but this will inevitably change as more people adopt the tools available.

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