EMEA > Facebook Display

ExchangeWire is partnering with Ratecard.fr to bring readers some high-level overview on the French market in 2012. The first of these specialist pieces is a general overview of the evolving French display marketplace. Below is a detailed eco-system map on the companies active in France – with some French commentary from Ratecard.fr.

Souvenez-vous, il y a 10 ans… Pour acheter des espaces publicitaires sur Internet, il fallait passer 125 appels pour savoir qui était en régie chez qui, faire 30 déjeuners avant de se mettre d’accord sur un CPM net net, et passer 380 heures en réunion pour comprendre la logique des grilles tarifaires. Et Ratecard fut. Non que cette base de donnée ait agi sur la variable déjeuner / réunion, mais elle a réglé le problème du « qui est où sur quelle thématique » de façon simple et claire, avouons-le. Vous remarquerez qu’à l’époque, on rêvait déjà de gagner du temps. Avec, en question de fond: comment automatiser tous ces processus d’achats et de ventes, tout en touchant l’internaute susceptible d’être réceptif au message diffusé?

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It’s probably the last thing you want to be seeing on your first week back: namely, another prediction list for 2012. But given that 99.5% of these lists have been overwhelmingly US-centric, it’s useful to have some European perspective. ExchangeWire will not be held to account for any of these predictions except if all of the following are realised through the course of 2012. Do include some of your own soothsaying in the comments area.

1. Publishers Banding Together To Pool Data & Inventory

Watch out for a sizeable announcement in the first half of the year from a group of large European publishers looking to build their own publisher exchange. This will be the first of many. I expect a similar initiative in Germany, as the powerful sales houses look to close ranks. It won’t be pan-Euro – but instead start out country specific. There have been numerous debates on ExchangeWire in 2011 as to why publishers should/shouldn’t do it. But ultimately it comes down to control. Control over inventory, data and pricing. Publishers are within their right to trade on their own terms. I think a centralised exchange would allow publishers to put in place the right resource to get the best price for their (data-enriched) impressions. Managing premium supply when the marketplace is saturated with brand unsafe inventory could turn out to be a stroke for struggling pubs. European publishers would be wise to steal a move on the market now and partner with a tech provider to build their own exchange. If you think I’ve lost it, how do you explain the MicroYahooAol “partnership”?

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Season’s greetings, listeners. Today TraderTalk looks at the 2011 year in full – with some perspective on possible trends in 2012. This edition covers everything from the rise of the trading desk in Europe to ad tech’s growing obsession with acquiring/building the end-of-end stack. ExchangeWire Editor, Ciaran O’Kane, is ably assisted in the end-of-year review by the Guardian’s Tim Gentry, Martin Kelly, Managing Partner at Infectious Media, ValueClick’s Carl White and Eric Ward, Director, Digital Media at goetzpartners. So that you get all future episodes, you can subscribe to TraderTalk here.

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Will Margiloff is CEO and Founder of IgnitionOne. Here he discusses the current fragmentation in the online advertising landscape, why consolidation is inevitable, and the how a “complete stack” approach will help marketers better manage media spend and drive performance across all digital marketing channels.

The fragmentation of online advertising is stifling innovation. This is a problem for everyone in the online advertising ecosystem.

Because we’re all feeding the industry increasingly indulgent treats (the infamous landscape slides say it all), marketers are navigating the technology landscape instead of focusing on strategic initiatives and leveraging data insights more effectively.

The result is an overly complex system that prevents marketers from realizing the full potential of digital advertising, and arguably prevents online advertising budgets from growing as quickly as our industry would like. It’s high time we tackled the issues impeding progress and tamed the ad tech beast.

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Gustav Mellentin is CEO of Adform – a pan European ad server company. Here Mellentin discusses the launch of its DSP solution and how it will be offered as part of the current ad server stack to existing European clients.

For those unfamiliar with Adform, can you give a brief summary of your existing offering – and footprint in the European market?

We are a leading display advertising technology firm and our mission is “making display advertising simple, relevant, rewarding”. Our product strengths and strategic focus areas lie within our real time buying (RTB), rich media and dynamic creative optimisation offerings, as these areas will create the most value for our clients going forward.

Supporting this offering we have developed an end-to-end ad serving platform offering comprehensive media planning, campaign optimisation and reporting functionality. The platform supports various online channels, such as social media, search, mobile and video, enabling our clients to optimise display campaigns using data across all online channels.

On a historical note, Adform was established 10 years ago in Copenhagen, Denmark by three engineers from Denmark’s Technical University and today we have offices in 10 European countries including the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, Eastern Europe and the Nordics. We work with leading media agencies and online advertisers and receive a great deal of praise for our unrivalled service, flexibility, data reporting and targeting capabilities. We serve more than 2,000 advertisers and 200 agencies across all our markets.

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Nick Gill Commercial Director for Marin Software, APAC on their recent launch into the Australian market. He discusses how their expansion from search into the Google Display Network, Facebook and YouTube and partnership with Criteo (retargeting) means advertisers can now manage all their biddable media including workflow, analytics and optimisation from one interface. With their success to date he highlights while this year they have opened offices in Sydney, Singapore and Pars, there are more to come.

Marin has recently moved into Australia – why Australia? What other markets is Marin servicing in the APAC region?

Marin chose to expand into Australia for primarily two reasons. One, several existing customers of ours have offices in Australia and having an “on the ground” presence allows us to better serve them. Second, Australia has a strong, growing market and an office in Australia allows us to better partner with agencies and brands in the area. In addition to Australia, Marin has an office Singapore.

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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.

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.

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