EMEA > Trading Desk

Mark Connolly is the newly appointed European Managing Director at AudienceScience. Here Mark talks about the issues and challenges currently facing the industry and the important role that technology will play in 2013.

I have been fortunate enough to have worked in the advertising space for 25 years and have experienced first-hand how audience data and programmatic buying technology have revolutionised the industry. I’ve also seen that, in my time, on both the buy side and sell side – for all the technological advancement – the industry still suffers from really expensive bad habits.

We have an ecosystem unsuited to do what’s best for the advertiser. Marketers pay for every layer of service and technology, including agencies, trading desks, vendors and publishers. Each player takes a cut from the marketer’s budget, creating a zero sum game. Worse, marketers pay for this with “percent of media” fee structures that encourage agencies and vendors to spend more, regardless of effectiveness, and avoid finding efficiencies for advertisers. Unsure of the right questions to ask, advertisers have entrusted budgets to agencies, with little or no visibility into how their budgets are actually allocated.

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Programmatic premium is largely seen as the key driver for continued growth in automated buying. It has been held up by many as a means to deliver improved yield and revenue for publishers drowning in unsold, but is programmatic buying still marginal?

There has been little sign of scaled adoption of branding through RTB. Beyond the suggestion from certain industry commentators that display advertising can not act as a demand generator, why isn’t programmatic premium seeing the early growth rates that RTB saw?

Does premium demand exist?

Perhaps there simply isn’t any ‘premium’ demand right now. Are we trying to shoe horn something that doesn’t exist? The premium demand that publishers were anticipating from creating private marketplaces was not focused on CPA performance or price efficiency.

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A major part of ATS London is around the growing theme of ‘programmatic premium’, which MediaMind are speaking to, but how can programmatic coexist with premium?

Many companies in the programmatic space today are limited with the capabilities of their solutions, which is preventing brands from jumping in. Either they are dabbling in private exchanges and calling it premium, or utilising verification tools after the fact to ‘finger point’ when quality isn’t being achieved. In addition, post-verification alone is no longer acceptable and advertisers are looking for more preemptive measures to verify RTB buys, often through their ad server.

A recent visit to a large FMCG client of ours highlighted that big brands are really keen to get involved, but they want to get their hands on the technology themselves and all the necessary education to know how to use it.

Once the programmatic part is fine-tuned, premium can be obtained. Buyers on the exchanges want good content and good reach. But, advertisers don’t want a high CPM. If you can prove the value proposition advertisers won’t mind paying more for quality.

What does MediaMind have to offer in this space beyond rich media capabilities?

MediaMind, the online division of DG, has evolved far past that of a mere rich media provider into a full online technology platform. Recent acquisitions and partnership agreements with Peer 39, Encore Metrics, Adagoo and Nielsen demonstrate that we are providing an end-to-end stack of core capabilities from planning and buying media, to delivering advertising and measuring and analysing campaign performance that is suitable for advertisers, agencies and publishers alike.

Specifically for trading, MediaMind has developed a set of trading desk capabilities around our managed service offering. The data powerplay we now have in place, with a leading ad server platform together with Peer 39 data, features heavily in our product offering.

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Sandy Hubert is Head of Cadreon UK. Here she discusses with ExchangeWire Cadreon’s Mediabrands Audience Platform, their plans for global expansion and the benefits vs pitfalls of programmatic buying.

What actually is the Mediabrands Audience Platform? Is it one platform (ala a DMP) or assembled across multiple platforms?

IPG Mediabrands has evolved the specialist digital practices of Reprise Media, Cadreon, Ansible Mobile and Spring Creek Group into a constellation of data-driven services and enabling technologies called the Mediabrands Audience Platform (MAP). The focus is on all addressable platforms: search, display, mobile, social, video, applications and e-commerce. MAP improves insights and results for clients by helping agencies find, buy and engage their most valuable audiences in real time. MAP will enable synergy across all the digital activities that the IPG Mediabrands agencies are currently offering to their client.

Can you provide a top level overview of the Cadreon value proposition? Can you explain how some of the pieces fit together?

Cadreon is a specialised marketing services agency that integrates technology, data and inventory to manage audiences for our clients. Cadreon is part of the Mediabrands Audience Platform (MAP). Cadreon is technology agnostic, and as such has partnerships with multiple DSPs, integrating first and third party data, and buys only relevant impressions for clients in real time. Cadreon has a multi-platform offering with display banners, video, paid social and a mobile DSP coming soon.

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