EMEA

We are adding a number of high profile speakers to the ATS Stockholm, which is just now two weeks away. The latest speakers include, Peter Loell, Director, Annalect, Omnicom MediaGroup, Petteri Vainikka, Founding Partner & VP Marketing, Enreach, and Otto Neubert Block, CEO, Emediate. The agenda for the first data-driven advertising conference in the Nordics is now live on the site. Tickets for ATS Stockholm can be purchased here.

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New European Market Ecosystem Map by Improve Digital

In collaboration with their major customers and input from ad networks and consultants, and driven by a popular demand, Improve Digital has produced Market Map of the European online display advertising sector in an attempt to clarify roles of the various industry players and the relationships between them.

The creation of such document has been inspired by the success of the U.S. version (put together by LUMA Partnets LLC) and the acknowledgment that the European equivalent has not been developed yet.

Terence Kawaja, from LUMA partners, who produced the U.S. Display Advertising Market comments: “Ecosystem maps are a great way to frame a discussion around how an industry is structured and where it is going. Improve Digital has done a great job mapping the European landscape.”

Download your copy here.

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Struq recently raised $8.5 million in a Series A funding round. The round included investment from Reed Elsevier Ventures, Pentech Ventures and Allen & Company LLC. Here Sam Barnett, Struq CEO, discusses the Series A raise as well as an overview of the Struq business going forward.

Congratulations on your series A funding round. What will you be doing with the new fund raise? More product development? Overseas expansion?

We are planning to open a number offices globally to service new demand. This will enable Struq to bring Ad Personalization to advertisers and agency campaigns across the US and Europe.

We are also planning to allocate more financial resources to innovation and product development. We are one of a few businesses globally who have built a complete ad technology stack in-house (DSP, bid optimisation engine, recommendation engine and dynamic creative optimisation), which has allowed us to deliver performance and ad personalisation to our clients. That is credit to the incredible team we have at Struq. A sizeable portion of our investment will be used to hire exceptional talent who will be focused on innovating for the benefit of clients and consumers.

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Damien Healy is Group Head of Technology at Havas Digital. Here he discusses Google’s BigQuery roll-out and what it means for the big data requirements of digital media comapnies

On Tuesday Google released ‘BigQuery’ to the public. BigQuery is a cloud platform enabling queries (questions) to be asked across potentially VERY large data sets. Is it a revolution or an evolution? To answer this, it’s worth backtracking slightly to view it in context of ‘Big Data’ and cloud services generally.

The ‘Big Data’ ecosystem is relatively new, but essentially it enables data to be processed at a scale that simply was not possible just a few years ago. The way to achieve this is to horizontally scale (i.e. break up the load across large numbers of computers), and to minimise how much the data needs to move around. Many platforms offer this kind of capability – the Amazon cloud offers services based on Hadoop, and we ourselves in Havas use Greenplum software & EMC server clusters to power our global data analytics platform, Artemis™. IBM, Informatica, Teradata, Microsoft, Oracle, and others also have Big Data solutions of varying capability. With Tuesday’s launch, Google’s BigQuery is now another addition to that competitive set.

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O2 Launches “O2 Wallet”

O2 announced last week the launch of O2 Wallet: a secure digital wallet service that will deliver the benefits of mobile money to its UK consumers.

O2 Wallet combines the following functions:

- Money Message – O2 Wallet enables consumers to securely transfer money to any UK mobile phone number as easily as sending a text. Money Messages allow consumers to make daily transfers of between £1 and £500.

- Shopping via your mobile – A barcode and search engine function compares the prices of millions of branded goods from more than 100 online retailers. In addition, consumers will receive daily discounts and deals via the “My Offers” icon.

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adscale has announced that is putting two-thirds of its available inventory through its new RTB platform, and integrating local and international demand into Germany’s biggest supply source of – coveted – .de domains. Here Matthias Pantke, CEO of adscale GmbH, speaks to ExchangeWire, about the launch of the RTB platform and what it means for German publishers.

Can you give an overview of the new RTB-enabled platform? And who will be integrated with the platform?

The RTB offering at adscale is competing with the already existing marketplace. As a first step we will offer only IAB ads.

With our RTB solution Publishers get the opportunity to decide from case-to-case which advertisers and campaigns they want to allow for RTB. Another option which is really unique at adscale compared to international players: Publishers are able to individually approve or disapprove post view campaigns.

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The PostView is a new column written by senior execs working in the European online advertising industry.

The lines continue to blur in the media buying eco-system. MediaMath’s recent announcement that it is spinning off a new breed of agency is potentially a sign of things to come.

You have to ask yourself: does a move like this accelerate the ultimate demise of the traditional agency model? Clearly the issue is far more complex to be able to answer definitely, but there is overwhelming evidence that supports the idea that the agency model is evolving.

All the agency groups are already preparing and executing on this new course of direction. WPP recently launched the Fabric Worldwide division – a business unit squarely focussed it seems on data and the application of it through media communications. They also developed Xaxis, GroupM Next and other initiatives. VivaKi has its VivaKi Nerve Center, an entity within the group to help clients navigate the ever changing digital and addressable landscape – and of course the other groups such as Omnicom and Havas have functions performing similar roles.

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