EMEA > Spain

Here are some of the highlights from the “Whither The Media Plan?” and Publisher panels from the recent ATS London. The first panel, ably moderated by Microsoft’s Zuzanna Gierlinska, focused around the media plan and whether or not it would still be around in 3-to-5 years given the rapid move towards automation. The panelists included Vivaki’s Marco Bertozzi, AOL’s Brandon Keenen, Martin Kelly, Infectious Media, MediaIQ’s Gurman Hundal and Nigel Gilbert. The discussion touched on wider trends in the marketplace such as the in-housing of the re-targeting function by agencies, the ad net’s potential demise and publisher concerns around CPM pricing.

The Publisher panel focused on sell-side issues and the opportunity for publishers in the emerging data-driven display space (note the mention of the Publisher Trading Desk and the pan-European publisher exchange here). This panel included: Tom Barnett, Director, Switch Concepts; Martin Van Der Meij, Yield Manager, De Telegraaf; Tim Gentry, Head of Optimisation & Effectiveness at Guardian Commercial; Jonathan Wolf, Chief Buying Officer, Criteo; and Nicholas Timms, Head Of Network Products, A&NY Media.

Audience information is gold, but only if it is used in the right way and many of the more traditional marketing solutions are sadly guilty of treating channels as standalone silos when a multi-channel approach to marketing is far more effective.

Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) make it possible for marketers to really coordinate messaging and reach target audiences with an unparalleled precision by leveraging universal parameters, increasing efficiency and controlling user over-exposure. Whatever a marketer is looking for, whether it is performance or brand awareness, DSPs make it possible to execute campaigns across multiple media channels which also include real time bidding (RTB), ad exchanges and premium publishers.

Cross channel targeting and reporting is key to unlock the potential of digital marketing but it is not the only one in our space. Systems such as the Turn platform enable display buyers to maximise efficiency and performance by putting a powerful media management platform at the centre of their digital efforts, giving users more control than they have ever had before. We all know how cumbersome and time consuming it is to book a campaign across different digital channels – this holds even truer in very fragmented markets such as Europe, where most budgets are still small in comparison to what we are seeing over in the US but the amount of work involved during the trading activity is the same if not greater.

Read in full →

Volker Ballueder is VP International Sales, mexad Ltd. Here he gives some some insight on where he thinks RTB is pushing the industry.

Without wanting to get sentimental, we are nearly at the end of the year. Q4 is upon us and we continue to see a lot of change in the data-driven display space. Networks are morphing into SSPs, the big G is ramping up its YouTube video inventory for impression-level buying, and more technology seems to come to market every other day in Europe.

Underpinning all this change is RTB (or real-time bidding). Delivering the right impression/ad to the right user at the right time. Decisions are made in milliseconds. And all those decisions are made to get the highest CTR, the lowest CPA and the best performance.

Read in full →

Dennis Buchheim, GM, Scale Display, Microsoft Advertising (MSA), delivered a keynote at the recent ATS London. In his address Buchheim discussed the Microsoft Ad Exchange – as well as the scale, addressability and brand safety now offered by Microsoft’s automated channel.

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.

Paulo Cunha is Co-Founder and Director at Portugese ad tech development provider, ShiftForward. Here Cunha Discusses the ShiftForward tech development solution, its value to local European players and where it sits in the eco-system.

Can you give an overview of the ShiftForward proposition in Europe?

ShiftForward’s core is its know-how in technology development and its application in the online advertising industry. Online advertising has very specific technical and business requirements, often not found in other fields, that can take engineering teams a long time to be up to speed with what the business and market are talking about.

Read in full →

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.

Read in full →

Andrew Moore is European MD of SpotXchange. Here he discusses the SpotXchange proposition in Europe, RTB in online video, and the potential of private marketplaces.

Can you give an overview of the SpotXchange offering?

At SpotXchange, we have created one of the largest global marketplaces for online video ad inventory and work directly with publishers to offer an auction-based marketplace of quality, brand-safe inventory.

Each month, SpotXchange runs campaigns for over 200 major brand advertisers, reaching more than 110 million unique users globally in more than 20 countries.

From our inception in 2007, SpotXchange has led innovation in the exchange space for video – we were the first video marketplace to be fully RTB-enabled and pioneered automated optimization for video to drive campaign performance.

Read in full →