EMEA > Display

ExchangeWire wrote a piece recently on why local publishers should build out the SME platform, leveraging the already existing relationships that they have with local businesses.

It is interesting to see 1&1 in the UK really aggressively going after the local SME market with a blanket TV campaign. Owning the digital relationship with SME is a huge opportunity, and scale in this market is a massive untapped opportunity. Google makes much of its search revenue from the SME sector – but display thus far has failed to really open this market segment. 1&1 is now trying to offer social media management tools to its current clients so clearly owning the platform can allow you to upsell advertising and marketing management solutions.

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So, we’re all pretty happy with how online measurement works. Right?

Ask a digital marketer why your marketing pounds should be spent online and, among the many (good) reasons they will come back with, will be its unrivalled accountability and targetability (not actually a word, but who cares).

They will tell you that you can find your likely customers (users who look like your existing customers), target them with your message and, best of all, see how many of them buy something from you as a result.

All of that’s true and, when put together well, it results in incredibly powerful marketing activity. The problem is that, with all of the data that’s available, it’s become a very easy system to manipulate. Online exchanges and DSPs have become very adept at ‘playing’ it so that everybody always appears to be doing an awesome job.

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IPinYou, the market leading ad tech company in China, recently announced the launch of its bidding algorithm competition. Having invested heavily in the research & development of their bidding platform, it has now launched the global competition in an attempt to identify new methods, theories and formulas to refine the bidding algorithm. IPinYou hopes it will also stimulate further academic and research based interest in the space. This is likely to be the first time that ad technology components have been crowdsourced in such a way.

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There are a lot of ad technology sleeping giants out there. Facebook. Amazon. Ebay. Twitter. Most of these usually pop up in breathless op-ed pieces about future dominating vendors. All have unique data sets, and all have their owned and operated inventory – but all are effectively media companies, now battling to capture agency/marketer budget. It’s interesting that the enterprise players, who are now encroaching onto ad technology’s traditional territory, are rarely ever spoken about. The Adobe’s and IBM’s are obvious examples. But Salesforce could well be the dark horse to emerge from the enterprise side.

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Jag Duggal, Senior Vice-President, Product Management and David Grant, Principal Product Manager at Quantcast discuss the attribution problem in display, and how the industry might address some of the underlying issues with the current methodologies.

You recently spoke how attribution needs to be addressed – and fixed – before we see significant shifts on spend into digital display.  Can you expand on that point?

We’ve seen explosive growth in RTB over the last 3 years. However, for that growth to continue advertisers and agencies need to be convinced that their spend is driving real results. They have to trust that the attribution scheme is a reasonable proxy for the path to conversion. The current approaches of last click and last view attribution are so demonstrably flawed that advertisers are too often skeptical of the results. We recently had a client complain that our results were too good! He simply didn’t believe what his own ad server using his own preferred scheme (last view) was telling him. That scenario would not happen in Search. In Search, the path to conversion is trusted.

Last touch attribution has the advantage of being simple but in an RTB world that is dangerously simplistic. It incents an overuse of retargeting. We’ve all experienced a visit to an ecommerce site that yields more than 20 ads for that advertiser served over the course of the next 5 to 10 minutes! Many of those ads will be cheap placements, often unlikely to be viewed by the user. This is a gaming of the attribution system rather than a focus on driving actual (new) customers. This must be fixed for the good of the whole industry.

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Sylvain Deffay is Country Manager, France at Infectious Media.

The growing involvement of publishers and technology partners has fuelled French programmatic buying progress. StickyAds Video Exchange’s recent integration with TubeMogul’s buying platform has allowed access to French premium video inventory. This is a very positive development for the French RTB market and it is becoming increasingly apparent France will play a key role in the development of programmatic buying across Europe in all digital advertising formats.

As a channel, online video will appeal most strongly to brand marketers and is the fastest growing segment in the French digital market (60% growth in H2 2012). As the Video Exchange only launched recently, I’m eagerly anticipating the next set of growth figures to see the impact that programmatic buying has on this growth. Personally, I am expecting to see stronger numbers than in other markets.

Indeed, such a private environment is the answer video publishers are looking for, with a recent study by AdMonsters and Adap.TV reporting 73% of EU publishers not offering video inventory on RTB due to their fear of pressure on CPMs in open exchanges. However, 30% of publishers surveyed said they will be running a private video ad marketplace within the next 12 months. The continued growth of video, predicted to be 55% of all consumer internet traffic by 2016, will ensure it remains top of the publisher agenda.

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We hosted our third Ad Trader Conference in Berlin two weeks ago. It was an interesting day, and offered up some fascinating debate and talking points. Looking in you would think nothing has changed since the first Ad Trader Conference, but a cursory look under the bonnet reveals that all is not what the sales houses are saying publicly – with significant volumes currently being traded programmatically.

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Save the date, ATS London 2013 is returning Tuesday September 10.

ATS London 2013 signals evolution. We believe that the past three years have transformed the industry, from an advertising technology perspective. We also believe that the next phase of growth will come from the broader enterprise ecosystem, and we intend to take you along on that journey.

At its heart, ATS London has always embodied the theme ‘data-driven’. In 2013, we intend to widen the focus of the event, while staying true to the core values of ATS.

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