Unfortunatley there continues to be a real dearth of European-focused events covering the area of automated ad trading and media optimisation. With the intention of fostering informed debate on the evolution of the display market and indeed online advertising as a whole, ExchangeWire is today announcing details of the Ad Trading Summit 2010. It will be the first dedicated European event of its kind, and will look to attract decision makers form agencies, advertisers, ad traders, ad nets, ad exchanges, ad-tech vendors and publishers across Europe. The best minds in the industry will be brought together to discuss and debate the changing face of the European display advertising market, the increasing influence of automated trading platforms and the explosion of the data economy.

Confirmed speakers for the day include: Mike Nolet, AppNexus CTO and Cofounder; Curt Hecht, President, VivaKi Nerve Centre; Martin Kelly, Cofounder and Managing Partner, Infectious Media; and Konrad Feldman, Co-founder and CEO, Quantcast. Additional details on the speaker line-up and agenda will be announced in the coming weeks. ExchangeWire will also bring you the thoughts and opinions of the event’s speakers in the run up to the actual event on September 23. Tickets are now on sale – but please note that the numbers are limited. Further event information can be found on the Ad Trading Summit 2010 site.

I’m not suggesting that pubs should go down the ad network route. I think publishers exploring this option should buy one hundred per cent of display media through the automated channels (ad exchanges, SSPs, etc) forgoing the messy relationship building with pubs in their niche. How might a publisher buy this inventory and target ad using their proprietary data? They could use Invite or AppNexus. But they could build their own. Granted there would be some resource required in building out the technology and hiring people who have experience of buying inventory across exchanges. But the opportunity is there. Not everyone can do it of course – because all publishers have good data. I’d be looking at one of the niche publishers to take the plunge – particularly those in verticals that pay fat CPMs or can generate the most ad revenue. The FT would be the best candidate. It has ridiculously good data which it can use to augment its reach.

How might the FT look to put something like this together?

- Hire a bunch of developers to build out a proprietary DSP solution that will leverage data but prevent leakage
- Bring in some exchange-buying expertise to trade across the automated platforms
- Use a vendor like Netezza to help crunch the data
- Use a dynamic creative provider
- Hire some ad net sales staff to get you on those all important media plans

It sounds all too easy. And it is to begin with. There will be teething problems. Some campaigns won’t work – and some will. But the thing to remember here is that the ad net market is worth £250 million in the UK alone, and some pubs are missing out on taking a slice of it. What you also need to remember is that the European exchange ecosystem is slowly being knitted together. Invite can plug into many of the exchanges in Europe, and because of this you will see a lot more centralised media buying in digital. A lot of it will be done from London. Shouldn’t the FT be looking at this development as a big opportunity for revenue generation.

But what about sales cannibalisation? Audience-buying will affect my tier one inventory, and I won’t be able to demand my fat £70 CPMs from the market. Well, there’s something called sales conflict management. Seeing as the FT is running its own DSP it can instruct its sales staff to stay away from certain brands, agencies and advertisers.

Paidcontent reported yesterday that the FT was in the process of launching a niche site on the FT network, as it looks to increase ad revenue opportunities. Why limit yourself to a few hundred thousand in advertising when you could be accessing a market worth hundreds of millions Europe wide? The FT could own a chunk of the media buying market in finance if it wanted. But is owning and running a DSP a bridge too far for any publisher?

The graph below illustrates the growth in the German exchange marketplace over the past two. Note that all numbers listed are in millions of euros.

Neumann points out that Invite will probably get access to Google’s treasure trove of search and GCN data. This will allow it to offer buy-side clients unparallel targeting capabilities. It will undoubtedly impede other players in the space, including XA.net – a DSP which Jerry has an investment in. It is no secret that Google was planning to build DSP and RTB capabilities into DFA – and it would be logical to assume they would have allowed DFA to leverage the same search and GCN data. After looking at the timescales of getting it to market, Google reasoned that it was cheaper to buy Invite at a snip for $70 million dollars. The price does severely mess-up the valuations of other DSPs, eyeing up a possible bonanza exit. I’d say some VCs weren’t too impressed – but I digress.

Jerry is right to point out that Google is now ridiculously conflicted. It’s an ad network, an exchange and now a DSP. He points out that having insight into data and pricing from other inventory sources would give it a real competitive advantage over its rivals:

Because when Invite is integrated into Google, it seems reasonable to assume that Google will:

1. Start cherry-picking the other exchanges’ best publishers; and
2. Start front-running the other exchanges, keeping the demand for themselves****.

By giving Invite access to their marketplaces, Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL give Google access to data about position and price of every ad that runs through them. They would be giving Google the very data it needs to outcompete them. If the other exchanges allow this, they won’t for long. Because if they do, they won’t be in business for long.

**** It’s widely rumored in the industry that Google has a double standard in exchange pricing between people buying through Google’s user interfaces and people buying through the exchange API. If Invite is an insider, it shouldn’t surprise anyone if they get preferred access.

He has a point here. But it won’t be so easy for Google to dominate completely – especially when a lot of publishers on the sell-side are hesitant to throw their lot in with Google. Rubicon, Improve Digital, Admeld, Adjug, Adscale and the Orange Ad Market are becoming the preferred automated channels for a majority of European publishers. It will be difficult for Google to “front-run” other exchanges when its own exchange only has access to millions of Mickey Mouse Adsense sites with crap content. Audience matters – but so does context. Expect publishers to be more self-aware of this. And there is no doubt in my mind the good people at Rubicon, Admeld and Improve will be pushing hard on the agnostic angle. You’d expect, if you were a betting man, Google to make it very difficult to integrate DFP with these platforms. But these guys are good at innovation – and they’ve got the resource, talent and cash to meet the challenge.

Giving too much power away to Google is not in the interests of any publisher. There needs to be competition in the space to improve pricing and innovation. Is it really healthy for a single company to have a stranglehold over a publisher’s entire income? I would call that commercial suicide. Monopolies are a bad thing. But I will say one thing for Google: it keeps everyone on their collective toes, making companies innovate and continuously push the envelope.

The Invite acqusiiton could leave some on the buy-side in real trouble – especially the big agencies. Disintermediation is a real possibility here. If I was a Google strategist, I’d be looking beyond the “unnecessary buffer” of the agencies and going straight to the top European brands. Google’s got the tech and the data – and could probably deliver better results. What to do? Make yourself relevant before it is too late. Innovate. Invest in technology. Are we getting carried away? In fairness, agencies are doing all these things already. We are still at the start of this automation process in display. And as one sage industry stalwart told me yesterday, the industry needs to stop whining about Google and get on with developing better solutions and tech for its clients. It was a good post by Jerry, but now that we know the big G’s strategy let’s see if the rest of the industry can outmanoeuvre them.

If this did happen, and I was a CMO, I would be asking myself why I need an agency to manage my buys. I could hire a couple of account managers and let Google do the heavy lifting. And probably get better results with a lower cost because of the unbelievable search data I can use through its DSP. And what about re-targeting? Yep the big G can do that too. Brilliant – a one-stop shop for all my media buying needs. Where do I sign up? Alarm bells should be ringing with C-level agency execs at the minute.

Darren Hermann, Chief Digital Media Officer at Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners, knows a few things about automated trading and where the future of the display lies. He helped found Varrick Media, a specialist exchange-trading unit within kbs+p some years ago. He wrote an interesting post this week on the very subject of big agencies ceding too much control to players like Google and Microsoft. Darren’s argument focuses on the ad server, the hub of all display media buying for agencies. He argues that as media buyers and sellers both Google and Microsoft are a little conflicted (given their dominance on both the buy and sell side) and might not always have the best interests of the agencies:

I’m skeptical of Google and MSFT, specifically with the hundreds of billions of impressions they serve collectively. It would make sense that every campaign served thru them would make them smarter. Hey Toyota, did you know that your campaign for the Toyota Camry just made Honda’s campaign for the Accord much smarter?

There is the above issue and now an important one. MSFT and GOOG can see every advertisers campaign that uses their system including cpms, impressions, conversions, etc. Being that MSFT and GOOG sell media too, they have a huge advantage if they were to use that data in the way they pitch us and price us.

So what to do? Well, that’s something for highly-paid agency strategists to figure out. Agencies could go agnostic I suppose, and use a buy-side only ad server. This would address some of the issues Hermann talked about in his blog post. Agencies could also consider building out their ad server technology. WPP already own an ad server through its purchase of 24/7 Media so it’s no stretch of the imagination to imagine that other holding agencies couldn’t follow a similar route by buying in the technology. They could build in some DSP capabilities. That’s why I reckon a MediaMath or another hybrid service/tech buying platform will be bought by a holding comapny. The one thing that agencies need to be aware of is that their position in the display (or even digital media) buying chain is quickly being eroded by the growing influence of some ad-tech players – and ultimately the evolution of the display space.

» There’s some interesting numbers in Adsafe’s industry report for the first quarter of 2010. The most striking is the percentage of campaigns running through automated platforms:

The composition of the buying channels utilized by AdSafe clients varied across the course of Q1 2010, with Ad-Exchanges / Real-Time Bidding Platforms / Demand Side Platforms serving the majority of traffic at 47% of inventory. Ad-Networks served 34% of traffic and Direct Sales served 19% of traffic. This percentage of traffic served by Ad-Exchanges / Real-Time Bidding Platforms / Demand Side Platforms increased significantly from Q4 2009’s share of traffic, suggesting that premium brand advertisers are beginning to shift a larger percentage of media dollars to these channels.

These numbers relate to the US market – and are based on Adsafe clients only. It does suggest a significant change in buying habits for display. Why is this significant for Europe? We tend to be about 6-12 months behind the US in ad-tech development. And you are already seeing significant volumes flowing through exchanges in Europe. According to Adscale CEO, Mathias Pantke, the automated market is expected to rise from 40 million euro to well over 120 million by the end of 2010.

Munich, June 1st 2010. AdScale, the leading marketplace for online advertising in Germany, has announced today the successful conclusion of the financing for its expansion in continental Europe. TIME Investors, a Paris based specialized investment firm providing strategic support to European Telecom, Internet, Media mid-sized companies, is investing more than 5 million euros in AdScale (www.adscale.de) for a minority shareholding and is thus expanding the circle of existing investors, beyond the European Founders Fund and Holtzbrinck Ventures.

Matthias Pantke, managing director and spokesman for AdScale’s management: “We are delighted about the investment of TIME Investors, which is proof of the great potential that AdScale holds in store. The additional financial means, combined with the expertise brought by Time Equity Partners, management Company of Time Investors, will give us the opportunity to further expand Adscale’s product portfolio and geographical reach. We will introduce further advertising formats and booking options to our business model this year. In this way we will strengthen our position as a leading online advertising marketplace in Europe.”

Jean-Luc Cyrot, partner at TIME Equity Partners, management company of TIME Investors : “It is our main goal to operate at the heart of the digital revolution. With a very solid business model, AdScale has experienced stellar growth thanks to an impressive and highly scalable online advertising platform that can be leveraged on a pan-European footprint. And most of all, AdScale is led by an excellent and visionary management team with which we look forward to partnering. The aim of our investment is to substantially support the growth of the company over the coming years.”

Sven Achter, partner at Holtzbrinck Ventures: “AdScale has proven from the very start how well the business model can work in Germany. Within a very short time frame the company has developed into the leading and a profitable marketplace for online advertising in Germany with a triple digit growth rate. We are convinced that the future will belong more and more to the online advertising marketplaces and are looking forward to further expanding the market leadership of AdScale together with TIME Equity Partners.“

About AdScale

AdScale is the leading marketplace for online advertising in Germany, which brings together advertisers, media agencies and publishers. Via AdScale, advertisers, advertising agencies and website publishers buy and sell video, display and text advertisements.

The company offers a portfolio that currently comprises over 3,500 websites of all sizes, which advertisers can book self-contained via a single platform. As a real time and a transparent platform, AdScale offers publishers and marketers a tool for controlling inventory use. According to comScore, AdScale has achieved a reach in Germany of almost two thirds of all internet users (64.9 percent or 35.1 million unique users in April 2010) in the online display sector and delivers nearly 8 billion ad impressions a month in Germany. Advertising spaces are auctioned for every ad impression. As such AdScale achieves fair prices while at the same time creating transparency. Launched in September 2007, AdScale was founded by Klaus von Doemming and Stephan Kern. Since the beginning of 2008 the management has also been reinforced by Matthias Pantke. Further information can be found online at www.adscale.de.

About TIME Equity Partners

TIME Equity Partners advises and manages a 100€m equity allocation granted to TIME Investors by four European entrepreneurs through their joint company Yam Invest NV.

TIME Equity Partners is led by Henri de Bodinat, Jean-Stéphane Bonneton and Jean-Luc Cyrot, who have a strong experience in the Telecom, Internet, Media sectors. TIME Equity Partners focuses on companies with a proven business model and profitability and high quality management team, it provides the funds necessary to finance organic or external growth. TIME Equity Partners is above all a strategic partner for the management, thanks to the proven experience and expertise of its partners, both in investing, consulting, creating and managing Telecom / Internet / Media companies.

Let’s suppose this deal does happen, how will the rest of the industry react? ExchangeWire shall now make some ridiculous (but fun!) predictions about possible repercussions:

- Microsoft will buy Appnexus: with its own exchange platform in the works, Microsoft will likely buy in DSP capabilities to counter Google’s move
- One of the big holding companies will buy MediaMath, X+1, DataXu, Triggit or Turn: the holding agencies will feel very uncomfortable with Google being in the DSP space, and will want their own platform.
- A possible surprise buyer will pick up a DSP: we could see Adobe, Ebay or – wait for it – Facebook buying a DSP. Think of all the data Facebook could leverage in a media buy. Its targeting could only be matched by Google.

You’ve recently went through a rebranding and a repositioning of the Infectious offering. Can you explain the Infectious Media proposition in more detail?

MK: Yes, it’s simple, we make display advertising work for our clients. Clearly there’s a lot more to our business in terms of how we do that but that is our proposition and how we sell our services. We operate exclusively in the ad exchange space and offer these services to both advertisers direct and to agencies. We’ve purpose built both a team and trading platform, Impression Desk, to service this opportunity in the UK and Europe.

The rebrand and new website was about reflecting this focus.

How in your view has the exchange market evolved in the UK since the launch of Infectious Media?

MK: There wasn’t really one when we started so it’s come a long way! Right Media was the only place we could trade and was in itself the preserve of a few very smart networks, it’s incredible really that a whole new ecosystem has developed in the space of two year, the pace of change is staggering. The component areas of the value chain seem to be settling down a little now and both publishers and buyers are starting to do deals with and build infrastructure around DSP’s and SSP’s in order to service the opportunity. It’s not yet clear how the traditional intermediary, ad networks, will respond to these changes.

Do you think there is still not enough quality inventory available through automated channels?

MK: I think there is quality inventory available at scale but an issue that buyers will find in this environment is that it’s hard to find and the ways of doing this differ by platform. All supply sources take a different approach to defining quality as do all the DSP’s so it’s a minefield with no standardisation. We have chosen to tackle this issue head on and have invested a lot of time and effort in to devising our own manual vetting procedure for inventory sources. We are about to introduce our own transparent classification system for inventory that we vet ourselves so watch this space.

Has the arrival of the SSPs, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and now the Orange Ad market improved the buying opportunities offered through automated channels?

MK: There is momentum growing on the supply side and these intermediaries are driving things forward. Ultimately this makes sense for everyone involved, with lower transaction costs associated to this channel and CPM’s increasing substantially in the last 6 months alone. Part of the education process for publishers is that the CPM’s that they receive for their inventory are higher than those they receive from a network as the buyer has much more opportunity to recognise value in the platform environment than they do in a bulk network buy. We, on average, currently pay double the average CPM in the Doubleclick Exchange quite simply because we can see the value that our activity is driving for the advertiser and bid accordingly

Do you think this volume on the sell-side will attract a lot more display spend into the exchange eco-system?

MK: I don’t think anyone on the demand side is under any illusion that this is the way that the market is going and needs persuading any more. The barrier is more around attaining the skills and technology to operate effectively and the speed with which this will happen.

Data plays a huge role in the automated buy. Do you think the absence of UK-specific data sets from the data exchanges and other platforms is hindering the development of the exchange eco-system?

MK: The data market has been slow to develop in the UK but there are now some companies entering the UK such as Quantcast and we welcome that development. I would also say that from an Infectious Media perspective this has meant we have had to focus our product development around data analysis and decisioning in the absence of ‘off the shelf’ target audiences.

We speak to many of the top UK publishers and they are keen to find ways to monetise their data so it will just be a matter of time before this market develops further and there is room for some big winners in the UK and European data market.

Is Infectious currently buying inventory through RTB? Would you say the buying process is different than a typical auction buy on the Rightmedia and Adx exchanges?

MK: Yes we are currently buying via RTB in the UK and across Europe. The buying process is no different in many respects, this is just the buying of display media after all. The difference is the amount and richness of data points that can be passed through to the buyers on each impression but I don’t yet think this is being fully exploited by the supply side especially. The more information a publisher passes about an impression, the more of a chance that we will see value in that impression and bid higher accordingly. What has been a real game changer for Infectious is impression level reporting which is a huge volume of data that we take in to our data warehouse to analyse but has meant we can scrutinise performance to a new level of granularity and optimise accordingly.

Infectious is an exchange trading specialist – far removed from a traditional media buying agency. What kind of skills does Infectious, which puts technology and data at the heart of its business, look for in new hires?

MK: There is some cross over with media buying agencies in what we do but we’re a very different type of company. Exchange trading is our only service and we offer this to both advertisers and agencies and because of this we have built a very specialist team and infrastructure. Our last three hires have been a statistician, a business information systems architect and an agency account manager. So some cross over with an agency in terms of personnel but in the main something completely different. Coming from large media agency backgrounds it’s been a breath of fresh air for Andy (co-founder) and myself to be able to build the team from scratch with new skills and a company structure that is fit for purpose. To date we have not employed anyone from a pure media buying background.

Now that the DSPs have finally arrived and RTB inventory has come onto the market, how do you see the space developing in the coming months?

MK: The pace of change is rapid at the moment and will not be slowing down any time soon. The coming months will see the completion of the infrastructure for the UK platform trading revolution, new UK data centres opening, trading desk offerings appearing, SSP’s hitting scale and we hope a more open debate around data and privacy that needs to happen if we are to successfully self regulate as an industry.

Oh, and loads more hype, as ever.

There’s much confusion about what Vivaki does? Is it buying platform? Is it a crack exchange trading unit? Can you explain the Vivaki proposition in more detail?

MB: Vivaki is the strategic entity created by Publicis Groupe to leverage the combined scale of its media and digital operations, which represent nearly $60 billion dollars in global ad spend and influence. VivaKi aggregates the marketplace influence of five autonomous brands, including: two global media agencies, Starcom MediaVest Group and ZenithOptimedia; two leading digital marketing agencies, Digitas and Razorfish; and a premiere futures practice, Denuo.

On behalf of its agency brands and their clients, VivaKi faces the market to help identify and build technology, message distribution, audience aggregation and content solutions for the future. VivaKi also includes a “Talent & Transformation Practice”, which leverages the scale of the VivaKi brands to develop and deliver tools and approaches designed to attract, develop, train, motivate and reward the world’s best people.

Sitting at the core of VivaKi is the VivaKi Nerve Center, which serves as a think tank, R&D centre and testing ground to activate new pathways for clients to connect with consumers in an increasingly digital world.

The key objective of the VivaKi Nerve Center is to help deliver better solutions for our clients as the marketing landscape continues to evolve and accelerate at a fast pace, collaboration within the VivaKi family, and across the Groupe, is essential.

To succeed in our mission, the Nerve Center will focus on some key areas to empower our VivaKi agency teams and clients:

Global Platforms & Products: Developing global platforms and proprietary products that help our agencies differentiate and compete in the marketplace. Products will be supported by an advanced underlying technology and data infrastructure that delivers speed and scale.
Industry-Leading Partnerships: Creating strategic global partnerships that provide tangible value for our clients and partners, while differentiating against the competition.

Innovation & Thought Leadership: Investing in innovation and next generation emerging opportunities, like The Pool, which will validate our leadership position in the marketplace.

Our ad exchange solution is called Audience on Demand and is therefore a key strand in the global platforms and products category above and indeed innovation. It’s one of the most exciting areas to touch all agency groups in recent years and needs to have a defined and aggressive focus put upon it. Vivaki Nerve Center has worked very collaboratively with the brands in delivering the Audience on Demand platform to their clients. We are live with Audience on Demand and really excited by the performance of the solution.

Can you elaborate a little more on your role within Vivaki?

MB: My role in is Managing Director of The Vivaki Nerve Center in the EMEA. I report into the Global President of the VNC, Curt Hecht. The VNC has made significant progress in the US and my role is to work closely with the brand management and digital teams to establish how the VNC can help them in delivering the future-facing digital solutions that our clients are asking for everyday. Ad exchange trading through Audience on Demand is a significant area of work for me.

What’s your perspective on automated trading and audience buying through exchanges and other demand sources?

MB: I have been blown away by it. I may be biased and perhaps my background lends itself to making this exciting to me but when you see the potential of automated buying you can’t help but be impressed. It’s worth saying that automated buying is a little misleading. It requires clever optimisation strategies and insights that the agencies need to lead through talented people. I would not want people to think that you a press a button and it’s all done. Anyone who thought search bidding would be automated would testify that is not the case – it is search bidding times ten so definitely not just automated.

The trading platform allows you to target exactly the individuals you want at the price you want. You are buying one impression at a time which makes a CPM approach look outdated although it is not the death of the CPM buy just yet, not least because media auditors would not know what to judge us on! I believe it will ask questions of every agency trading model to some extent or another. It will also challenge auditors to stop judging agencies on an arbitrary discount off a pool metrics, and force everyone to consider more performance related contracts. I think for now it lends itself more easily towards the performance models but down the line I can see far more being traded through this method.

Do you think that large European holding companies like Publicis are now seeing ad exchanges as an efficient channel to buy ad inventory?

MB: I think the large network groups get a hard time for not changing enough and being slow to react. In some ways that may be true but agencies today are very different to those of 15 years ago. They have completely transformed: agencies realise change is inherent in what they must deliver year in year out.

Ad exchanges are just another media / trading / targeting opportunity that have come along, and agencies will embrace it and make the most out of it on behalf of their clients. My experience so far is that all the groups see the benefits of it but that will vary by group as some are more advanced than others. You will see who believes in it the most by how quickly they grow their ad exchange spend because once you start to see the results, clients and agencies alike will want to move their budgets into new the model.

Do you think that trading on ad exchanges makes it easier to leverage agency and client data to deliver better campaign performance?

MB: Trading on ad exchanges will allow data to become more important but actually it’s not the exchanges where the benefit lies but with the use of DSPs like Audience on Demand. It is this technology that allows us to best use data to enhance the performance of campaigns and target only those users that are most likely to deliver a beneficial response for our clients.

The combination of our clients being able to retarget their visitors but on a much larger scale with the introduction of third party data means we can turbo-charge our schedules to deliver at the right cost and at the right level of volume. Those third party vendors need to move quickly over here. We already have demand and they are a little slow to get going. I was pleased to see Phil moving from Yahoo to Quantcast, perhaps a sign of things to come.

Does Publicis have an exchange strategy for Europe, and if so will this be headed up by Vivaki? Are there plans to devote more resource to developing this area of the business?

MB: This is not a UK or US only market place. It will become important across all major markets so of course we will grow our business in those countries. Many of our major European markets are already testing different models and gaining from the insights. Vivaki Nerve Center will take the route that drives the consistency and ability to learn as a group and not at a country/agency level. We are in the very formative stages of this area so it’s important we all learn from each other.

Resources will evolve over time. Some people will re-skill into this area, some will be recruited. But we have time yet to get into that. Rest assured though that the number of people working in this area will grow substantially!

What do you think are the key difficulties in moving an agency toward automated media buying? Is it the lack of technology and data skills that exist within the agencies? Or is it a lack of technology?

MB: It’s not a technology issue. We have the technology and it works. I am sure all of our competitors have their technology too. Some will work better than others perhaps, but generally I don’t see that as an issue. Technology should not be the differentiator for agencies, it’s the people behind it and what it delivers that counts. Clients do not want pitches where we all get our technology out and wave it about; they want to see insights and results.

In Vivaki there are pools of people who understand this new area and those that know less about it but is that not always the way? Over time we will train people and recruit people so that we have the right level of understanding and evangelism in the business. Look how agencies changed around search. We had the same discussions back then and we now have these amazing skill sets around search in the agencies, so I don’t really see too many issues. If you think the opportunity is a good one, you can make things happen.

Do you think the arrival of DSPs into the European market will help agencies bridge this technology and skills gap?

MB: DSPs will allow agencies to build campaigns across multiple ad exchanges, create data pools, and control frequency etc across the whole playing field rather than at a site or network level. They will also provide us with the largest search area when we are trying to find the elusive consumers who have visited our client sites previously. DSPs are enablers so of course it’s a great innovation in the marketplace globally.

I would say that I believe a true DSP is one that’s only interest is in providing technology to do all the above. It should not to try to resell inventory or have morphed from an ad network. There are many blaggers out there and it’s important that people choose carefully in who they work with as you may discover that the systems they provide are not as future-facing as you thought. The market place is very grey around the edges!

What’s your view on real-time bidding? Is it a game changer for the display market? Or are there still fundamental problems that need to be worked through (such as the computational costs) before we see the benefits?

MB: It works. Our campaigns are delivering great results on the RTB strands of the campaigns. I think RTB will be affected by many different elements not least volume of competition, which will only increase. But this is where the clever use of data helps you in RTB: only you know what is deemed a valuable cookie. Hence you will be bidding on it, not the rest of the world. This is different to search where everyone knows that if you bid on home insurance you will sell insurance. This is a huge benefit for ad trading – the agency knows who is valuable not the publisher telling us what is valuable.

Overall I believe that RTB will be a game changer. Suddenly impressions are valuable again in the volume game. Interestingly though, they are valuable from a data perspective and not so much from a context /channel perspective. The rules have changed. What’s premium now?

How do you see the European exchange space developing over the next twelve months?

MB: I think you will see many of the major players in the US getting people on the ground here to push into big European markets. The ecosystem is developing rapidly in Europe, and it will not be any different than the US. There are already companies up and running in Europe, providing ad serving and other services, and they will try to steal a march in these markets. The DSP pure players will soon be driving a more objective approach across Europe. I also think we will see the likes of Google really ramping up in the markets here, which in itself will drive liquidity.