EMEA > Facebook Display

ATS Paris is just weeks away, and we again look forward to assembling the ad trading community in Paris for our second big event in Paris. A lot has happened over the past twelve month in the French market. We have seen the rise of two publisher exchanges, La Place Media and Audience Squared, the big jump in the number of Independent Trading Desks servicing the French ad market – as well as the increasing dominance of the two big display players, namely Google and Facebook. All of these factors are contributing to huge growth in the local data-driven eco-system – and ExchangeWire looks forward to going to the heart of growth of the market. Agenda and speaker details are now available for the full day on Wednesday October 24. Early bird tickets are now available, but again we have limited space available. For those looking to attend, the full day event will be through both French and English with a full translation service available in both languages throughout the day.

The news industry is undergoing a transition. Print to Digital. And there are inevitably casualties along the way. Local news is no different. As recently as yesterday Johnston Press reported a 8.2% decline in revenue for H1 2012. But like most news outfits, digital display was up. Up over 40% in fact.

A lot of the digital focus from these local news groups is on nationals. While they serve the local advertising community, their eyes always seem fixated on the bigger prizes. This is not necessarily a bad thing. But surely there is still an opportunity to own the local SME market from a digital marketing standpoint. Is now the time to do the local SME roll up?

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Wildfire Founders, Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard

Google has just bought social marketing software developer Wildfire — provider of software that links to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and other social networks, allowing customers to manage their online brand and presence, with clients including Sony Corp and Amazon.com. Several sources and blogs say the sale price was around $250 million.

Founded by Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard in 2008, Wildfire has about 400 employees and powers social media marketing for more than 16,000 businesses, including 30 of the top 50 global brands. Google plans to slot Wildfire into a group of online ad services offered through its DoubleClick business.

The acquisition will allow Google to provide advanced software and services to brands who want to run contests, sweepstakes, branded games and more on Google+. Wildfire will still operate as a marketing tool for brands on Google’s competing platforms, including Facebook, putting the search giant in a curious position where it earns money on the success of its rivals.

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James Yancey, VP of Global Strategy at IgnitionOne, on the future of Facebook Sponsored Stories combining social graph and third-party data.

What would happen if Facebook partnered with third-party data providers? Warning: if you’re a privacy fanatic, then it will probably stress you out to read any further. For those with an open mind, hear me out. If you take 900 million active users and understand not just how many friends they have, but how valuable those are based on their interests, demo data and influence – what are the possibilities?

In the months anticipating the Facebook IPO, the news had been calling for more ads that show clear direct performance, like search or display. And finally Facebook has been delivering one ad unit that shows comparable promise, the Sponsored Story. It’s a simple idea: show a socially relevant ad unit to friends only in the format and context of other updates in the news feed.

The success of the Sponsored Story is based on an idea that Facebook calls “amplification”. The thought behind amplification is that the original ad can reach many people at scale if their friend’s “like” it and it shows up in their subsequent news feeds. But again, it’s tied to reach metrics. Direct response advertisers have lost their interest and patience in many cases when comparing it to things to which they are accustomed.

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Dutch Response to Cookie Regulation

Netherlands Unprepared in the Wake of “Fast” Cookiewet Implementation

Webwereld.nl
by: Andreas Udo de Haes

Despite years of wrangling and preparation, almost no Dutch site meets cookiewet (cookie regulation) guidelines since they were put into effect.

As of last week, the cookiewet force requires that sites extract from visitors explicit consent for the transfer of tracking cookies. There should also be clear information provided on why cookies are needed.

Deadline ignored

A tour of sites along Webwereld and other publishers shows that almost nobody complies with the law. This does not mean they are ignoring the rules, because most are, in their own words, “fully engaged” in compliance. But last week’s deadline came apparently so rapidly or unexpectedly that almost nobody is compliant. Ironically, this is also the case with many government sites and sites of various political parties.

Of the big sites and publishers, only De Telegraaf has taken concrete action, with a banner at the top of the site, which links to Information. Here, however, no permission asked, and therefore still doesn’t comply with the law, admits Marc Roos, Director of Digital Media Telegraaf Netherlands.

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Wildfire Integrates Adaptly’s Social Advertising Technology To Optimise Engagement

Wildfire, a global leader in social media marketing software, announced this week the integration of Adaptly’s social advertising and optimisation technology within the Wildfire Social Marketing Suite. Wildfire’s Marketing Suite is currently used by more than 10,000 customers, including Facebook, Amazon, and Target. Adaptly’s ad optimisation technology gives marketers unified control over the combined effect of paid, earned and owned social media in an endeavour to maximise consumer engagement with the brand.

Unlike first-generation ad serving solutions, which focus on traditional metrics such as cost-per-clicks, fans or impressions, Adaptly’s proprietary technology aggregates more than 160 social metrics from a brand’s earned and owned channels, then analyses the impact of paid media on earned media in real time to continuously refine ads.

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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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Damian Routley is Director at Glow Digital Media Limited, a Facebook-buying solution based in London. Here he discusses the possible roll out of sponsored stories on Facebook’s mobile channel – and why with 400 million active mobile users FB will end up owning the mobile ad channel.

It seems only right to preface this piece with the following: the only people who know for sure what Facebook’s plans on mobile are, are themselves. And they’re not telling. Every request for confirmation or comment has been ignored, but through informal sources (internal and external) we can make a couple of assumptions.

Firstly, Facebook will monetise their mobile channel. Along the IPO path, the company will need to put in large building blocks of revenue. One of the easiest ways for them to do this is to activate this channel.

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