Following a host of new device launches this year, from Samsung’s Galaxy S4 to Blackberry’s Z10, new data to be released tomorrow by ad tech platform Adform has revealed that Europe’s digital advertising community has vastly increased its investment in programmatic mobile marketing, with a near three times (275%) increase in mobile RTB spend in Q1 2013.
The figures published in Adform’s Q1 RTB Trend Report 2013 also highlight the improving health of programmatic advertising across all devices, with a 66% increase in RTB spend by advertisers in March 2013 alone.
When Facebook initially made its move to monetise onsite inventory with foreign datasets (foreign, meaning an advertiser’s first-party data), it divided opinion. We took a somewhat negative stance on the strategy.
With the launch of newsfeed ad formats being made available to RTB, does this require a new approach as to how the paid-for element of the Facebook platform will be leveraged, perhaps pointing to the future of RTB?
ASU Gold Rush
The initial FBX launch turned into a retargeting frenzy. Predominantly used to help drive greater cost efficiencies for businesses running existing RTB campaigns (FBX on numerous occasions was found to be unsurprisingly cheaper) and also to prop up the volume of click-based acquisitions that made the overall click-average-to-impression-conversions on RTB campaigns healthier.
Adap.tv held a half-day event in London this week to discuss the themes around programmatic video. The agenda was packed with eclectic speakers coming from different ends of the media buying jungle: from programmatic traders to traditional TV buyers. Here, ExchangeWire sketches out the afternoon’s key themes.
End-to-End Platforms
Adap.tv is clearly trying to position itself (and doing a solid job) as an agnostic platform player that connects buyers and sellers. Amir Ashkenazi, CEO of Adap.tv, spelled out the challenges that the video industry has encountered to date: too many middlemen, rogue behaviour and practices and too many layers diluting the flow of investment.
In doing so, Amir painted the picture of a consolidated end-to-end video buying stack, unsurprisingly what Adap.tv are able to offer.
In this week’s #TraderTalkTV, Adfonic CTO Wes Biggs explains the mechanics of the Adfonic ad platform, and the specifics on how they execute real-time bidding on mobile devices.
Can you give an overview of the PubMatic proposition in the German market?
We provide premium publishers in Germany with a real-time media-selling platform for managing revenue across every sales channel and every platform, including mobile, desktop and tablet. PubMatic provides a flexible set of capabilities that allow publishers in Germany to customise their ad technology. These capabilities include: superior Private Marketplace tools for managing premium inventory and brand control with transparency; appending first- and/or third-party audience data to media, increasing the value of impressions and improving the user experience; real-time dynamic reporting across direct and indirect inventory to enable publishers to see which channel will deliver the highest value per impression and enable complete control over how their inventory is sold.
Simon Halstead is Director, Microsoft Advertising Exchange and Scale Display, EMEA, Microsoft Advertising
Disclosure – I have worked for agencies, sales house, networks and now work for one of the world’s leading publishers and exchanges. Microsoft have a valued partnership with AppNexus in Real Time Bidding (RTB). All views expressed are my personal opinions, and don’t necessarily reflect Microsoft strategy.
The topic of programmatic ‘premium’ or ‘reserved’ means a publisher, or SSP, needs to clearly define its programmatic goals. There are a number of functions that are currently fulfilled by RTB and the programmatic channel:
- Monetisation of unsold impressions
- Additional revenue not captured by a direct sales team
- Efficient selling processes
- Focusing direct efforts to custom/integrated selling
Currently, a number of publishers are exercising RTB as an additional revenue channel, whilst many are simply utilising RTB as a sweeping function. For a publisher who wants to extract maximum value from programmatic, they will need to redefine and evolve their strategy.
Numerous reports and studies show just how the RTB market is exploding, with IDC estimating that global spending on real-time bidded display ads in 2016 will be $13.9 billion. What’s more, a lot of that research seems to be focusing on the European markets.
For those who are wondering why that is, there’s a reason why real-time bidding across Europe, and especially in the UK, is generating all the big headlines: Unlike a number of other digital disciplines, RTB in the UK and Europe seems to be advancing at a much greater rate than in the US. Although overall spend is of course much higher, we’re simply not seeing US agencies spend the same percentage of budget on RTB in relation to UK agencies.
There are a number of reasons why this is the case – and most of them focus around the two countries’ respective agency environments. In particular, UK agencies have employed a more top-down approach on buying and trading for several years now, which enables them to make decisions and deploy them in a macro fashion. Digital trading teams, and the role of the digital trader in general, are not a new concept across the EU, but they’re just now starting to take fuller shape in the States.
It has long been noted that technology itself is no longer a differentiator; but strategy and execution is what paves the way to competitive advantage. To that end, Datacratic recently unveiled the first phase of their vision to help create an open-sourced ad tech environment.
ExchangeWire caught up with James Prudhomme, CEO & Jeremy Barnes, CTO to determine what inspired the project to bring to market an open source bidder solution, how companies can begin integrating and where businesses should be looking to provide value in the ecosystem as underlying technology becomes increasingly commodotised.
We live in an increasingly multi-screen world. Cisco forecasts The Internet of Things to comprise 50 billion connected devices by 2020, that’s 6.5 devices per individual on the planet; pretty significant considering that only 35% of the global population is currently online. The major driver in this multi-device connected future is of course, mobility.
With mobile accounting for 15% of global internet traffic — forecasted to reach 25% by the end of 2013 — there’s no denying the far reaching implications for both advertisers and publishers as consumers shift their discovery, engagement and purchase behaviours to mobile devices. In effect, ubiquitous access and multi-device audience convergence makes the distinction of device and marketing channel irrelevant, providing of course that as an advertiser I understand my audience, can tailor my message, and deliver relevant, impactful and measurable brand messages, across screens at scale.
Call me crazy, but I believe the biggest problem premium publishers face in better monetising their digital content is that they don’t know what business they are in. In other words, they are selling the wrong product.
Allow me to explain.
Since 2011, all conversation on publisher ad revenue and yield management has revolved around RTB. Only very recently has anyone dared to remind the ad tech seminar loyalists that, in fact, something as unsexy as direct guaranteed sales actually make up the cornerstone of publishers’ ad sales. Not RTB. (There is now also a healthy amount of innovation around direct guaranteed sales taking place, but that is a different discussion…)
For publishers, the disproportionate RTB debate (i.e., the debate around the sales channel and transaction model) has unfortunately distracted them from addressing a more fundamental question: What should they be selling to create a sensible and sustainable business in the digital age? (Not how should they be selling what remains the wrong product.)
Following a host of new device launches this year, from Samsung’s Galaxy S4 to Blackberry’s Z10, new data to be released tomorrow by ad tech platform Adform has revealed that Europe’s digital advertising community has vastly increased its investment in programmatic mobile marketing, with a near three times (275%) increase in mobile RTB spend in Q1 2013.
