Demand Side Platform

We are publishing another panel excerpt from the recent ATS London event. The panel in question focused on bringing brand budget into the automated channel. The panel was moderated by ExchangeWire editor, Ciaran O’Kane, and speakers included: Nathan Woodman, COO, Adnetik; Richard Dance, Director of Digital Innovation, Blue Hive; Alex Rahaman, CEO at StrikeAd; Andy Ellenthal, CEO, Peer39; and Bruce Journey, DataXu CRO.

It gave Richard Dance the opportunity to challenge some of the widely held views of our – sometimes – “navel-gazing” ad tech community. He provides some interesting commentary from the brand’s perspective, particularly around the complexities of the current display eco-system. He notes that Facebook has made it easy for marketers, and as such continues to suck up a lot of brand budget. Dance works closely with Ford on their digital strategy. He’s exactly the kind of person that should be canvassed by ad tech companies on where display is falling down. If you can’t sit through the entire panel session, you should skip to 11:25 on the video clip – where Dance suggests the simplicity of the Facebook proposition is one of the key reasons why it is attracting brand spend.
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Brian O’Kelley is CEO of AppNexus. Here he discusses cache update cycles, how shorter cycles are critical for buyers using real-time platforms, and why traders should be placing greater importance on it.

Last week, Right Media posted a blog entry stating that it has “slashed” their cache update cycle to 45 minutes. This is a great excuse for the industry to take a closer look at trafficking update cycles and understand why they’re so important.

A real-time ad platform is built around a trafficking database which stores all the campaigns, creatives and other targeting information. It also has thousands of servers in multiple datacentres which store an efficient representation, or “cache”, of this database. The cache update cycle is the amount of time it takes for a change you make in the primary trafficking database – for instance, a new creative – to be syndicated out to each of the servers. When the change is out on every server, we consider the cache update complete.

A cache update cycle of 30 to 45 minutes doesn’t sound very long (and in fact, I think it’s better than the industry average). However, in the world of ad exchanges and real-time bidding, it’s an eternity. In the blog post Right Media says that it serves 11 billion transactions a day. We can assume this has a peak volume of around 200,000 transactions per second. That means that in the 45 minutes that a cache update cycle takes, around 550 million transactions will occur.

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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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Le Trading Media

In an epic twenty-seven pages on the potential of RTB in the French market, IAB France has outlined an impressive overview of the entire market. The report goes into great detail on the emerging data-driven advertising market in France, with explainations of key constituents in the exchange eco-system. It even includes some Q&As with leading ad execs in France, including recent ATS Paris speaker, Arthur Millet, Directeur Commercial at Amaury Medias Digital. Further insight on the growth of automated buying and RTB is provided by industry heavyweights like Sébastien Robin, Directeur Des OpérationS, at AFFIPERF. You can download the IAB report on the growth of RTB in France here.

mediascale Reports Strong 2011 Growth

mediascale, one of Germany’s leading independent digital agencies, reported a gross income of €5.6m last year – an increase of 17 per cent compared to 2010. The billings for the same period rose 22 per cent from €59m to €72m.

mediascale uses its own cross-platform targeting tool NE.R.O, together with Plan.Net, to develop solutions for clients and agency partners. Julian Simon, managing director of mediascale, is bullish on future growth for mediascale:

Right now we are running about 35 per cent of all campaigns on NE.R.O. By the end of 2012, we want to increase that by 40 per cent or more. This targeting will aid not only in direct sales support but also image and brand communications. It’s more about planning for consumer-relevant criteria such as purchase decision stages, interests and attitudes of the user. There is great potential in targeting, especially for content and creative solutions. The system combines information from the user profile with the matching design, text, product or price for the dynamic creation of promotional materials. Thus, advertising effectiveness and efficiency of the campaigns increase significantly.

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The PostView is a new coulmn written by senior execs working in the European online advertising industry.

They used to be the kings and queens of media arbitrage. The ad tech watering holes of Goodge street and Dusseldorf would only mention their names in hushed tones. Nobody could beat them on margins. Nobody. Not even Google. But times have changed. The business model of the typical horizontal DR ad network is in real trouble – and it is going to have to battle hard for survival in a landscape that’s been radically altered by the emergence of automated ad trading and the arrival of buy-side/sell-side technology.

About twelve months ago, ExchangeWire published a piece on the future of the ad net model, entitled “The Life And Death Of The Ad Network”. It still remains to this day one of the more controversial posts on ExchangeWire. The post detailed why existing ad net models were doomed, and why they would have to pivot in order to survive. It would seem much of what was predicated has already come to pass. But how did we get here, and what now for the DR ad net market?

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CES 2012 exploded this year. It’s always been big, but this year it got REALLY big.

Once we look beyond the latest gadgetry hype, however, there are a number consistent themes for the online ad industry…

Greater Accessibility

Consumers are going to have a lot more affordable ways of accessing the internet via multi devices in 2012. It will not necessarily be the products on show at CES but this latest innovation cycle will speed up the diffusion of innovation. Consumers will genuinely have greater access to multi platform connectivity which opens up some interesting opportunities for those on the buy and sell side and everything in between.

Measurement Systems

Greater consumer adoption of connected devices really starts to create the pressure on the main measurement behemoths to come up with new ways to measure across screen. Google could start owning this for themselves and the Google-Kantar tie up is surely a sign of things to come. If we as an industry want advertisers to invest in the new opportunities that
multi devices create, then we better be prepped with the ability to help them measure it all.

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After last year’s blockbuster Ad Trader Conference in Hamburg, we are going big this year with some of the most influential ad execs in the industry already confirmed to speak. This year’s theme of the conference will focus on building sustainable relationships between the demand side and supply side in the evovling German data-driven ad marketplace. Germany remains the biggest display market in Europe, but it will not move in the same way as the UK and France in terms of how real-time media buying is adapted.

The sales houses are very strong in the German market, and most remain unconvinced of automated buying. However they realise change is on the horizon, and it is with this in mind that we are looking to bring together some of the biggest sales house players in the market – as well as senior figures from the demand side and the ad tech space – to discuss and analyse the potential of data-driven online advertising in Germany.

2011 was dominated by lots of industry chatter around the potential of automated buying and real-time trading. 2012 is about application and making this new eco-system work.

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The PostView is a new coulmn written by senior execs working in the European online advertising industry.

Facebook and Amazon could soon bring massive disruption to the multi-billion dollar/euro traditional display marketplace – with display solutions that could even emerge as a serious threat to current kingpin, Google.

We Need Some Context

The two major themes of audience-led buying presently centre around both intent and social. They are so in vogue right now with the entire industry. We see BlueKai selling shopping intent, and the likes of RadiumOne serving up social targeting. Facebook and Amazon could easily become a major competitor to everyone working in these emerging areas of display.

The truth is, buying third-party data is hard to efficiently scale. It’s why these data companies are trying to create relationships with hundreds of publishers. They need consistent volumes of data with as many touch points as possible to build robust, rounded profiles. Facebook and Amazon are the biggest publishers and owners of data in their respective spaces – and sit on the largest, most diverse sets of user data. Up until now it has not been accessible to marketers and advertisers, but that could soon change.

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