Online Advertising

Struq recently raised $8.5 million in a Series A funding round. The round included investment from Reed Elsevier Ventures, Pentech Ventures and Allen & Company LLC. Here Sam Barnett, Struq CEO, discusses the Series A raise as well as an overview of the Struq business going forward.

Congratulations on your series A funding round. What will you be doing with the new fund raise? More product development? Overseas expansion?

We are planning to open a number offices globally to service new demand. This will enable Struq to bring Ad Personalization to advertisers and agency campaigns across the US and Europe.

We are also planning to allocate more financial resources to innovation and product development. We are one of a few businesses globally who have built a complete ad technology stack in-house (DSP, bid optimisation engine, recommendation engine and dynamic creative optimisation), which has allowed us to deliver performance and ad personalisation to our clients. That is credit to the incredible team we have at Struq. A sizeable portion of our investment will be used to hire exceptional talent who will be focused on innovating for the benefit of clients and consumers.

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Damien Healy is Group Head of Technology at Havas Digital. Here he discusses Google’s BigQuery roll-out and what it means for the big data requirements of digital media comapnies

On Tuesday Google released ‘BigQuery’ to the public. BigQuery is a cloud platform enabling queries (questions) to be asked across potentially VERY large data sets. Is it a revolution or an evolution? To answer this, it’s worth backtracking slightly to view it in context of ‘Big Data’ and cloud services generally.

The ‘Big Data’ ecosystem is relatively new, but essentially it enables data to be processed at a scale that simply was not possible just a few years ago. The way to achieve this is to horizontally scale (i.e. break up the load across large numbers of computers), and to minimise how much the data needs to move around. Many platforms offer this kind of capability – the Amazon cloud offers services based on Hadoop, and we ourselves in Havas use Greenplum software & EMC server clusters to power our global data analytics platform, Artemis™. IBM, Informatica, Teradata, Microsoft, Oracle, and others also have Big Data solutions of varying capability. With Tuesday’s launch, Google’s BigQuery is now another addition to that competitive set.

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O2 Launches “O2 Wallet”

O2 announced last week the launch of O2 Wallet: a secure digital wallet service that will deliver the benefits of mobile money to its UK consumers.

O2 Wallet combines the following functions:

- Money Message – O2 Wallet enables consumers to securely transfer money to any UK mobile phone number as easily as sending a text. Money Messages allow consumers to make daily transfers of between £1 and £500.

- Shopping via your mobile – A barcode and search engine function compares the prices of millions of branded goods from more than 100 online retailers. In addition, consumers will receive daily discounts and deals via the “My Offers” icon.

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adscale has announced that is putting two-thirds of its available inventory through its new RTB platform, and integrating local and international demand into Germany’s biggest supply source of – coveted – .de domains. Here Matthias Pantke, CEO of adscale GmbH, speaks to ExchangeWire, about the launch of the RTB platform and what it means for German publishers.

Can you give an overview of the new RTB-enabled platform? And who will be integrated with the platform?

The RTB offering at adscale is competing with the already existing marketplace. As a first step we will offer only IAB ads.

With our RTB solution Publishers get the opportunity to decide from case-to-case which advertisers and campaigns they want to allow for RTB. Another option which is really unique at adscale compared to international players: Publishers are able to individually approve or disapprove post view campaigns.

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

The lines continue to blur in the media buying eco-system. MediaMath’s recent announcement that it is spinning off a new breed of agency is potentially a sign of things to come.

You have to ask yourself: does a move like this accelerate the ultimate demise of the traditional agency model? Clearly the issue is far more complex to be able to answer definitely, but there is overwhelming evidence that supports the idea that the agency model is evolving.

All the agency groups are already preparing and executing on this new course of direction. WPP recently launched the Fabric Worldwide division – a business unit squarely focussed it seems on data and the application of it through media communications. They also developed Xaxis, GroupM Next and other initiatives. VivaKi has its VivaKi Nerve Center, an entity within the group to help clients navigate the ever changing digital and addressable landscape – and of course the other groups such as Omnicom and Havas have functions performing similar roles.

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TubeMogul’s FakePreRoll.com Highlights Deceptive Industry Practice

Most people think they know what a pre-roll video ad looks like: 15-30 second video clip that plays in a large video player in the top left part of the screen is a pre-roll ad. That’s what most brand marketers think they are getting when they buy pre-roll video ads, but it’s often not the case.

Many video advertising vendors are using “Fake Pre-Rolls” to fulfill campaigns. Fake Pre-Rolls are video ads that auto-play on a web page where the viewer has shown no intent to watch the ad or the content after the ad. They are typically run within banner ad units or in small, syndicated players below the fold.

FakePreRoll.com will showcase instances where vendors have run “fake pre-rolls”. By shining light on the issue, TubeMogul hopes that marketers and agencies will demand more transparency from their vendors to better understand what type of pre-roll they are buying.

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Ollie Bath is head of Client solutions at IgnitionOne UK. Here he discusses the importance of understanding the user journey and properly measuring engagement in the path to conversion.

Let’s be honest, measuring online media remains a tricky subject. But it’s so important to understand.
Here’s why; money talks. Nearly £5 billion was spent on online media in 2011 – accounting for more than a quarter of all UK advertising. However, marketers must collate data from across all digital outlets to get the best return on their online spend. The resulting insight can then be applied to each channel, increasing accuracy across the online customer journey.

Last click metrics do not mirror the full conversion journey story accurately. Online purchase decisions are based on numerous actions, rather than a single one. Having visibility into user paths to conversion and distributing credit to contributing exposures is relatively straightforward, with the right tools in place. But understanding what drives online engagement is the final frontier for many marketers. So, as marketers, we need to equip ourselves with the right tools.

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MediaMath announced it was spinning out its US service business into a new agency so it can focus on its core tech offering. Here Erich Wasserman, Co-Founder & GM EMEA, MediaMath, discusses the Kepler agency spin off, what it means for MediaMath’s business and how it helps global clients.

Can you give some overview on the rationale behind this strategic move?

Kepler Group is an independent business born out of a recognition that MediaMath needs to focus on what it’s excellent at: building technology for marketing professionals that grows our clients’ businesses. Particularly in the US market, we found ourselves in the strategy and consulting role more and more, and so we made the decision to spin off that practice. This enables both businesses to focus on what they are best at. While we are a minority investor in Kepler, it will be operate independently from MediaMath. We strongly believe in its leadership and are excited to be an investor.

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