» MediaMath rolled a new tool on its TerminalOne platform this week, which aims to give agencies and advertisers deeper insights into audience-specific performance. MediaClarity is an analytics and data visualization solution, and is integrated into the existing TerminalOne dashboard. MediaMath claim that this insight can be made actionable by linking it to actual media data, and can help users identify potential upside and improve campaign performance. (MediaMath)
Jonathan Beeston (@searchbeest) is European Client Services Director at Efficient Frontier (@efrontier)
There has been some really interesting debate of late about the convergence of display and search. So much so, in fact, that next week’s London SES is devoting a panel session addressing this very development. There is a consensus among search marketing execs that massive opportunity exists in display. One of the big European search firms looking to leverage its expertise in biddable platfroms is Efficient Frontier. It has recently rolled out its own proprietary DSP, and is now starting to run – wait for it – display campaigns across European exchanges and other inventory sources. Are search firms about to blind-side the big holding agencies again?
The holding agencies are busily putting together exchange strategies, as they look to deliver better campaign performance for clients. Some are building out their own platforms; while others are partnering with technology companies. There does seem to be a real appreciation – in the senior ranks at least – of the changes happening in the online display market. It hasn’t been obvious thus far what the agencies are planning. But the arrival of the DSPs and the release of Google’s new Adx platform seems to have concentrated the minds of some senior holding company execs, pushing exchange trading to the forefront of actionable items.
Improve Digital is teaming up with the AOP for an event on Feb 23. The event, entitled “New Rules of Revenue”, will focus on the changing display advertising landscape, and what publishers will need to do to take advantage of new trading opportunities on automated platforms. Improve Digital is bringing together panellists from both the buy and the supply side of the exchange ecosystem here in Europe, including:
Improve Digital Says Publishers Can Benefit From RTB As Pubmatic Release Whitepaper On RTB
Pubmatic released its whitepaper on RTB entitled, ‘Understanding Real-Time Bidding (RTB) From the Publisher Perspective” last week. The paper points to initial results carried out with DSP provider, Turn. Initial results from specific RTB campaigns executed by Turn showed an increase of up to 135 percent on click-throughs and 150 percent improvement in conversion rates. Why would a publisher use RTB though?
Admeld hosted its first Partner Forum event in New York this week. The event had some great panellists and provided the industry with an excellent overview of how the display market is likely to develop in the coming months. Emily Riley, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, presented a headline-grabbing report on the evolving area of automated ad trading. The research estimates that almost 30% – over two billion dollars – of US display advertising budget would be traded through DBO (Dynamic Buying Media Optimisation) and Demand-Side Platforms by year end.
The data available on the European non-premium display market is sorely lacking. The chart below is based on data from ThinkEquity’s projected growth in non-premium display globally and previous IAB Europe audits on the European online advertising market. The chart gives an indication of the opportunity for those companies operating in this market, and the challenges facing publishers looking to monetise this growing area of their online display.
Behavioural targeting is on the radar of EU’s regulators. The EU wants to take the online advertising to task over perceived misuse of cookie data and behavioural targeting. They even passed a laughable directive late last year instructing EU publishers to offer explicit opt-ins for online behaviour tracking.
We can get into the semantics of what an EU directive actually means, but here it is in its crudest form: the EU drafts some legislation and then instructs EU countries to pass it into law; the EU has no say in how member states pass it into law and what form it will ultimately take.
There will doubtless be push back from some digital savvy member states and it will have to be re-worded. I can’t see the biggest online markets, like the UK, Germany and France, passing this directive (in its current form) into law.
John Were is Operations Director at Global Digital Markets. He took some time last week to speak to ExchangeWire.com about the state of the European exchange space, the arrival of the DSP’s and why exchange trading can return strong results for both brand and DR campaigns.
Can you give an overview of the service Global Digital Markets offers advertisers and agencies?
Global Digital Markets (GDM) is an exchange traded media business. We offer an efficient means of harnessing the global reach and volume of the key media exchanges on behalf of our agency and direct advertiser clients. We refer to ourselves variously as demand aggregators, brokers and exchange specialists.
Today’s data driven digital advertising no longer has the same rigid distinctions of old between response and brand. The DNA of both of these forms of advertising has begun to intertwine to form some super hybrid strain of advertising with ways to deliver content to the right audience at the right time to yield a response. It has begun to make response sexier and brand more efficient. Who would have thought? For the purpose of this post however I do deliberately make the distinction between brand and response. Campaigns are still bought on these metrics and there are many advertisers who would still fall into one of these forms of advertising.
This blurring of the lines between brand and response has been radicalised by the proliferation of companies now involved in this new era of digital advertising and media. Ad exchanges and the DSP space more generally have paved the way for response-driven advertisers to increase their buying efficiencies and performance. Spot buying impressions in real-time against specific target segments with dynamically served ads – and all underpinned by machine learning or computational algorithms. This of course appeals to the DR community. But what about advertisers that are not focussed on an immediate direct response?