Let’s make an analogy to illustrate how important it is not to neglect the service. Imagine you drive the fastest sport car there is, but you don’t know how to switch gears. It’s not because you have the best technology on the market that you will know how to use it to its full potential.

Who remembers the digital era at the end of the 90s? Everybody sold almost the same formats with channel or homepage sales packages, looking for a way to be perceived as the best agencies’ and advertisers’ partner through the services. By service, we literally mean an intangible commodity and, more precisely, a set of any time-consumable and perishable benefits. In the digital industry, where lots of profiles interact and coexist and where a technology dimension becomes more and more important, the services translated into expertise and support dedicated to customers with different purposes.

The agencies or advertisers account management had clearly become one of the strategic pillars to reinforce and retain relationships and gain market shares in a very competitive market. The main mission of the customer services team was to check daily campaign delivery, optimise performances and bring updated status reports to agencies or advertisers, according to their expectations. Consequently, this type of added value has helped give a clear meaning to the service concept.

I’m quite sure that if you asked a newbie who has recently jumped into the ad tech industry if something like that happened in the past, s/he would probably laugh, since the digital industry has drastically shifted.

Today, I think that there are two buzzwords to qualify what we are living in the ad tech industry: Automated and Programmatic … and all the main actors (older or newer) try to differentiate by talking about how their technology allows automated trading or programmatic buying seamlessly.
Behind these words, I would tend to say that these concepts are very exciting and very promising and that they envision a bright and innovative future. However, it would be wrong to believe that Programmatic Buying is all automatic and seamless. From the marketing digital strategy design to the execution, all actors at the different stages of the process must continue to bring their own expertise, because technology alone cannot deliver on expectations.

Indeed, since the end of the 2000s, we have seen new technologies appear such as Demand Side Platforms, Supply Side Platforms and Data Management Platforms, designed to automate many tasks that were, until then, performed by humans. All technology providers now claim that their solution is the best to increase sell-through rates, maximise revenue, reduce field costs and so on … but what about service? Obviously these new technologies have already demonstrated their added value mimicking financial trading models by optimising the flux between buyers and sellers. That said, we cannot disregard that they have brought complexity to an industry where people are not necessarily ready and trained to understand technicalities and mechanisms. Service has not quite followed this trend of innovation, however, and clients are often left alone wondering how to use their tools.

The ad technology in the 90s and today has shifted even if engineers and program managers have always been a part of this adventure.

At the end of the 90s till the mid-2000s, the collaboration between product managers and program managers on platform developments nurtured thoughts through competitor’s innovations or agencies/advertisers expectations and, based on the high-level strategy, built without considering other industries. It worked well, but maybe it would have been good to open the eyes and analyse more what companies from the top 50 advertisers did from an innovation perspective.

At the end of the 2000’s, the digital industry has become more mature and new companies appeared with ‘out of the box’ approaches, replicating the financial trading operations with the objective of bringing efficiency and maximising revenues.

Such an evolution has consequently impacted the people who have joined the digital industry at an early stage and weren’t hired with the competencies and skills required today. Even for a large majority, like myself, who have grown up within this amazing industry and has tried to constantly catch up with the advertising evolutions and shifts, we still need to benefit from customer services from partners with who we are working, because we move from a media approach to a financial approach. Today, I’m disappointed to see that the notion of service and support has become secondary. I am a hard believer that the successful equation for an ad tech company is a combination of technology (and expertise by extension) and service to its customers.

A concrete example to illustrate that is from a data management perspective. It’s not because you choose a data management platform based on X or Y criteria. It’s not because you put all your data inside and it’s not because your platform is connected to all third-party data providers and inventory sources that you will better know how to efficiently use your data.

Indeed, it’s with the support and the expertise of the technology provider that you will achieve your goals. Nobody can say that these new platforms automatically manage everything from A to Z. Ad technologies are highly technical and highly customisable. No single client has the same need, and service is needed to define the right strategy, deploy the right settings, provide consulting services and help client to maximise the capabilities of their platform.

The enthusiasm towards new technologies probably pushes people to constantly talk and think about technology itself. My strong belief is that history always repeats itself, and we do not need to reinvent the wheel. Just like 10 years ago, differentiation will come from the service layer that technology providers will bring as a full part of their offer.

Given these tools solely assess Age and Gender ratings, usage won’t be appropriate for all advertisers, but we expect to see strong take-up based on our experiences in the US, where 15-20% of campaign briefs, and a larger percentage among the largest advertisers, request their usage. Demand is particularly strong among brands that are heavy TV spenders.

Lower down the customer purchase funnel, when attributes such as interest or intent behaviours are more important for targeting or driving the call to action (currently around one third of UK campaigns) other sources of data will naturally be more suitable.

Nielsen OCR has only just become a live market proposition in the UK, but we are already seeing strong interest from advertisers.

The new demographic measurement tools are already having an impact and changing the way the market views different data sources and how it develops campaign strategies and tactics.

As more brands investigate whether using OCR and VCE-validated audiences are the appropriate targeting to drive awareness and familiarity, they will assess whether these data sets offer the best solution for them and how this relates to demographic targeting from other third-party data providers.

Third-party data providers will also have to be more upfront about the sourcing and value of their data, questioning what it means and and on what it’s based. The arrival of Nielsen OCR and comScore VCE will force data out of the black box into a heightened state of transparency, and that can only be a good thing for addressing privacy concerns.

We are also seeing, and expect to see further, increases in data providers validating their own segments against OCR and VCE. Some now even go so far as tailoring those segments in terms of sites, collecting the data to create more ‘OCR/VCE-compatible’ versions of their data segments.

To ensure advertisers can best target their ideal audience, datasets such as comScore VCE and Nielsen OCR allow Videology another means to optimise audiences in real-time, and deliver the reach the advertisers desire smoothly and at predicted and guaranteed pricing levels. The result of this unique granular cluster-based optimisation against VCE and OCR will be more effective planning and greater efficiency for advertisers’ campaigns.

OCR, for example, is based on privacy-protected data from Facebook and enables advertisers to deliver and assess granular level GRPs by age, gender and demographic in a way that can be directly compared to what they already do on TV.

It also gives advertisers a way to assess how their content travels from device to device and how their target audience makes this transition as well. This gives advertisers the insight and data they need to to finally optimise their spend at an impression-level and make sure that video messages are aligned and efficiently targeted.

The arrival of OCR and VCE will also give publishers a powerful boost. By getting their audience/readership validated under these datasets they will have a powerful accreditation to sell.

Until now, publishers have not had the tools that enable them to demand a higher price from advertisers for whom demographics are a defining KPI.

By putting online and mobile publishers (specifically VOD publishers) on a par with TV advertising, the expectation is that ad spend will move from TV, providing additional revenue for this market where it can now be optimised and measured according to traditional TV metrics.

The future growth of the programmatic advertising business requires both demand and supply sides of the online video equation to grow together. To do this, both sides need to be able to measure effectively what’s being delivered, using the same language.

Failure to do so can lead to a mismatch between buyer and seller that undermines both sides’ confidence in this emerging and hugely effective channel.

For many advertisers OCR and VCE will be the first time they have had that common language and this will give them the confidence to take that activity to a new level.

The figures published in Adform’s Q1 RTB Trend Report 2013 also highlight the improving health of programmatic advertising across all devices, with a 66% increase in RTB spend by advertisers in March 2013 alone.

Martin Stockfleth Larsen, CMO, Adform says, “RTB spend has continued to increase as the industry realises the benefits of automated campaigns for reaching and engaging with the most relevant audiences. Coupled with the accessibility of the technology, the availability of more premium inventory and the increasing number of rich media formats in the programmatic arsenal, advertisers now not only have the option to run RTB performance campaigns where direct response is the main goal, but also RTB brand campaigns where they can build brand awareness with relevant audiences.”

General Growth in Spend

Where CPM rates for programmatically traded inventory had peaked during the 2012 Christmas holiday season, and fell as consumer shopping declined in January, the trend was reversed in February and by March CPMs reached an all-time high.RTB spend in March brought overall spend for the quarter to an all-time high.

Possible Reasons:

1) Increased Supply and Demand: The supply of digital and mobile inventory available through global ad exchanges is still increasing dramatically. Publishers, having tested programmatic selling over the past few years, are beginning to see numerous benefits of the model. Additionally, new technologies are enabling private deals and exclusive sales arrangements to flow through RTB pipes.

2) Increased Buyer Expertise: Agencies and advertisers continue to advance through the programmatic learning curve, gaining valuable experience in setting up, optimising and measuring RTB campaigns. Having moved from the trial stage, marketers are dedicating real budgets to RTB/programmatic buying.

3) Premium Publishers Jumped into the Game: With stronger prices, whitelists, and brand ad quality controls available on the global ad exchanges, publishers’ confidence in programmatic trading is on the rise. This growing sense of security is prompting premium publishers to jump into the RTB game. As a result of the higher quality inventory, RTB CPMs are going up.

4) Programmatic Buying Is Getting Easier: Advances in technologies, such as demand-side platforms with easy-to-use console interfaces, make programmatic buying easier and more convenient than ever before. Additionally, advertisers have a bigger toolset for fine-tuning their campaigns, including CPM & CPC bidding models, as well as better targeting options such geotargeting, demographic targeting and time-of-day targeting.

CPMs Are Still Rising

There are two reasons for this:

- Supply and demand are not quite balanced. Despite the increase in inventory in the market, buyer demand still exceeds supply, resulting in a scarcity of inventory in the RTB market. The scarcity drives competition and, with it, CPMs.

- With more publishers offering premium inventory in the RTB markets, CPMs increase.

Rising CPMs are good news for publishers and advertisers alike. Publishers have long perceived RTB as a ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of revenue, and were hesitant to offer premium inventory to the programmatic markets. Higher yields go a long way towards instilling confidence in the sales model. Moreover, RTB is an efficient way to move unsold inventory, as each bid received represents a willing buyer, resulting in few defaults and higher yields.

Advertisers also benefit when publishers offer more of their inventory to the ad exchanges. Scale and inventory quality are chief concerns among marketers – two problems that will be eliminated once premium inventory is freely available in the RTB markets.

More importantly, rising CPMs are a clear indication of stability in the RTB market. For markets to succeed in the long run, they must obey the fundamental rules of supply and demand, with both sides benefiting equally.

Digging deeper into the Nordic region, it appears that advertisers and media agencies experienced slightly different RTB learning curves, as represented by the CPMs marketers were willing to pay for inventory. One would expect CPMs to reach their zenith during the peak holiday-shopping months when competition for consumers is at its highest. However, each country seemed to follow its own trajectory, as reflected in the volatile prices. Adform believe the volatility was due to experimentation in bidding strategies.

In the first quarter of 2013, however, all four countries appear to follow the same trajectory, with CPMs steadily going up throughout the region. By March, the price differential narrowed considerably.

RTB Performance & Brand Performance

In boardrooms and C-suites alike, the term ‘ROI marketing’ has gained significant currency, driven by the expectation that every ad shown can be assessed for its impact on the brand.

In response to these demands, digital campaigns can be divided into two camps: performance or brand. Performance campaigns, also known as direct response campaigns, seek to encourage specific user behaviour, such as clicking on an ad, completing a form or making a purchase. Campaign goals are specific and are measured using standard metrics such as click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC) and conversions. As advertisers and agencies focus on engagement rate and time for their RTB brand campaigns, they will then begin to deploy algorithms to optimise those metrics.

Country Comparison

To get a sense of in-market variations, Adform compared data for key campaign metrics – CTR, engagement rate and engagement time – on a country-by-country basis.

Devices

Until recently, RTB spend on mobile inventory represented just a fraction of the European marketer’s ad spend, largely due to fear of low campaign performance.

Last quarter, Adform reported a significant uptick in mobile and tablet CTR, both of which surpassed the CTRs of desktops. They predicted that if CTRs held steady on mobile, spend would increase. This prediction has been borne out, with spending on both tablet and mobile devices increasing each month.

A Look Forward

- With rising CPMs, Adform expect to see European publishers offer more inventory to the RTB markets. Additionally, with the advent of new technologies to support exclusive deals between premium publishers and advertisers through RTB pipes, we anticipate the quality of inventory will rise.

- By monitoring key brand campaign metrics such as engagement rate, engagement time and banner visibility, Adform expect to see RTB expand to encompass brand campaigns. This, in turn, will increase both the number of campaigns that are executed programmatically as well as the spending on rich-media ad formats.

- Mobile and tablet RTB campaigns are on the rise, although the market can hardly be considered mature.

- Mobile web traffic is growing by leaps and bounds, and marketers have been slow to meet the consumer in this hugely important channel.  Mobile increases are anticipated all around: in percent of budget, CPM and performance.

- Advertisers and agencies tend to purchase below-the-fold and other sub-premium inventory for their performance campaigns, which Adform see as a mistake. The combination of strong CTR and relatively modest price premium for above-the-fold inventory more than justifies the extra cost.

- Newer eye-catching banners will attract an increasing amount of ad spend. Consumers, inured to the standard formats, can’t help but notice Megaboard. The proof: two times better CTRs.

You can download the full report here.

Everyone in the marketing space has a view on data, where to host it and how to use it. The solution is a data management platform – a DMP; if you’re a client aiming to invest in a DMP, there are a few basic scenarios to consider, and with a view to opening a debate on the issue, here is my take on the options are clients facing.

Any client-side marketer with digital marketing budget control will need to review whether a DMP sits best with an agency, a third-party advertising technology provider, in-house or partially mirrored as some kind of combination of these.

There is a rationale behind each option, but I think these are best understood and evaluated in the context of how each has added value to brands during the evolution of the ad tech space.

The Issue With DMPs Supplied by Agencies
We have agencies that have spent the last five years testing the many ad tech point solutions on offer, and building agency infrastructure to cope with the ever-changing range of solutions available, while maintaining some semblance of spend and return reporting.

Some agencies have tried to build their own ad tech solutions, but this is very expensive and could have the tendency to become a somewhat closed system, potentially isolated from further valuable innovations going on in the wider market, which doesn’t sit well with the vendor agnostic/interoperability that agencies like to support.

The Issue With DMPs Supplied by Point Solutions
There has been a huge amount of investment in the ad tech industry in recent years, and this has driven a lot of innovation. However, it has, as we all know, created a hugely fragmented supplier-side marketplace. This fragmentation of suppliers has also resulted in the fragmentation of advertiser data.

This is a bad thing for advertisers because data analysis and attribution of influence and action cannot be meaningful in silos, it can only be meaningful at the budget-level, which is across all paid or earned media.

Tag management solutions have emerged to handle the many vendor pixels and scripts that these point solutions need in order to get access to a brand’s conversion data and valuable intent data, outside of their specific digital solution silo. So, we have point solutions inviting advertisers to expose their pixels and scripts on advertisers’ content to get access to audience and intent data.

Some of these companies are offering a DMP to make this flow of advertiser data more complete, but brands should consider how their first-party data is being used by these point solutions – is it possible for these suppliers to use that data to sharpen the performance of other advertisers?

Some of these suppliers are even making a virtue of data pooling and establishing a competitive landscape to maximise their yields. Buying display for your site visitors doesn’t have to be like buying search, and, well, you wouldn’t support Google Analytics tags on your site if it meant you paid more for warm prospects in Google Adwords as a result of sharing that first-party data!

The Issue With DMPs Supplied by Third-Party Buy-Side Marketing Stacks
Third-party technology providers that offer a point solution for every digital channel, built on a single technology platform, have enjoyed great success recently. It is easy to see the benefits of a complete buy-side marketing stack; one throat to throttle, all data in one place and accessible to the media delivery systems of the buy-side stack.

This is a potentially virtuous circle, but marketers would do well to ensure:

The chosen buy-side stack is an ‘open stack’ that accommodates integration with emerging technologies from other vendors.

– The chosen buy-side stack is flexible enough to take import/export data with the brand DMP and other key partners (server to server and other workarounds according to cost/benefit/speed considerations).

– The chosen buy-side stack is one you would consider giving a view of your most valuable asset – first-party customer or prospect data and ROI data. Can the buy-side stack also be a media owner taking a significant percentage of the brand’s media spend?

– In the spirit of transparency, this is where Mediaplex sits in the mix; we’re omni-channel and own some media, but are primarily focused on pure, high-end analytics.

The Issue with Brand-Side
There are third-party suppliers of brand-side data management platforms and, depending on from where these products evolved, they can easily integrate with parts of the digital ecosystem. For example, a third-party data provider’s DMP will have good cookie syncing with external data, and an offline DMP provider will have insight into typical offline data structures.

Brands are building their own brand-side data management platforms, consolidating many databases and considering how this data can be utilised across the business. This takes a long time and a significant financial investment, so there is clearly a case for interim solutions wherein a client’s first-party data is sync’d with a third-party DMP that is native to the tools that execute digital media campaigns.

Brands are waking up to the value of their first-party data and will not give it away in exchange for access to third-party technology. Brands are taking control of technology decision making and many procure direct relationships with technology providers that are willing to support brands with the ambition to own their own data and control the technology that activates it.

There Are Some Universal Qualifiers That Can be Used to Evaluate Any DMP Offering
The DMP should receive and associate the data the moment it is generated. Speed is critical, because of temporal context, and also it’s the only way to cut through the data gradient (if everyone had access to all data then the competitive data advantage is lost).

The data captured should be high-quality, with all the richness of metadata, available in a point solution that delivers the media. The DMP must be designed for data syndication (it must be able to both eat data and spit it out).

The purpose of a DMP is to centralise, control and activate brand data, so clients should qualify any DMP supplier they are considering by understanding their role in the ecosystem and how the brand data will be used.

Data should be keyed on an advertiser data point to maintain its portability. As this space evolves, advertisers will need the option to move to other providers in a timely way and without losing everything that’s been logged and learned in the past.

Every brand will have different objectives, marketplace contexts and agendas. At least when it comes to choosing the best DMP solution, we in the ad tech world are spoiling them for choice.

ExchangeWire is not here to second-guess the thinking of Marissa Mayer. She is a very capable lady, and there are so many reasons why she is the CEO of Yahoo! and none of the rest of us will ever be. We will say this briefly, that this could well be a massive opportunity for RightMedia to offer programmatic ‘content sponsorship’ (or native, bah) on both Yahoo! and Tumblr properties. A comeback is potentially in the cards.

The Tumblr deal aside, the other recent big M&A action has been the Accenture acquisition of Acquity. The deal was only for $330 million dollars (three times revenue) – a ridiculous multiple given the amount of money paid for Tumblr, which did $15 million dollars in revenue last year. VCs can argue whatever crazy economic model they want, but the price paid for Tumblr seems like lunacy. What was so significant about Accenture’s acquisition was that it bought an agency.

It is just another example of how consultancy firms are encroaching on traditional agency territory. As the enterprise marketing and ad tech worlds collide, Accenture sees massive opportunity in growing its digital marketing business – but why now? What has changed to make companies like McKinsey and Accenture move into traditional agency territory?

Data-Driven Planning: Automating Core Media Buying Functions

It might not be publicly admitted by Agency Trading Desks, but the process of media buying and planning is becoming automated. The rise of programmatic buying means that increasingly buyers/planners at the coal face are actually being divorced from the execution/optimisation process. Maybe this has always been thus, given that ad networks have been doing the heavy lifting on behalf of agencies over the last ten years.

With the introduction of programmatic buying, that ad net function has either been replaced by specialist agency units (ATDs, etc.) or even by – recently-pivoted – buying platforms like AudienceScience. Let us also not forget about the enterprise players making inroads into ad tech, such as Salesforce and Oracle. The $2.5 billion dropped on an email solution provider, Exact Targeting, shows how serious Salesforce is about owning the enterprise marketing stack.

Accenture has been looking on as this part of the media buying process has undergone significant technological evolution. If the process does become even more automated, is there a chance that Accenture could go to a Google, AppNexus, MediaOcean or Turn and outsource this buying/planning function. Buys informed by data and tech would allow Accenture to sidestep an increasingly low-margin business. This is what media planning/buying has become – increasingly a race to the bottom.

So, why would Accenture move into this business? Its recent deal with BMW suggests that Accenture wants to deepen its relationship with existing clients. Owning the entire relationship (including the ‘automated’ media buying process) would allow it to upsell high-margin business, like analytics and tech integrations. Acquity was an inroad into the e-commerce consultancy business – and really one of the big groups should have bought it.

Accenture: The New-Age Agency With Tech & Data at its Foundation

We, as an industry, have been throwing around terms like ‘big data’ and ‘data-driven’ for the past three years, as if we had made some massive leap forward. This could not be further from the truth. Traditional agencies have been actively trying to build this capability into its DNA, but it is not an easy task.

It takes many years for this transition to happen. Accenture is fundamentally a tech and data company. You cannot say this is the case for the likes WPP and Publicis. These groups are led by accountants and traditional agency men/women. The change required will need to be significant – a top down approach.

When some of the top-tier finally step down, maybe agencies will need to hire a CEO/COO who truly understands tech and data at its very core. If they are to successfully compete, they will need to hire someone from IBM, Google or McKinsey who can effect a cultural change within the organisations.

This is not a slight on existing talent within the agency world, but just a reality check on how the advertising game is changing. We are now at a crossroads on how data and tech is fundamentally changing the process.

RTB and programmatic might not have significantly changed the buying chain within ad tech (we still have media plans, we still have networks), but outler players are now seeing the opportunity in automation. If and when TV finally goes down the programmatic route, we will see even more aggressive moves.

How Do Agencies Protect & Grow Their Business?

In fairness, many agencies have been attempting to transform their models over the past three years. Analytics and data-specialisation have been given priority. New business units built on data-specialisation and outsourced tech have become important features at the big groups.

Is it enough, though, to meet the changing requirements of marketers, as their goals and objectives become increasingly informed by offline and online data? How customisable is this proposition? If this function becomes more integrated into the enterprise marketing stack, can the agency really compete with the likes of Accenture, without having the core in-house tech capabilities required?

This will need to be addressed. How this is done is for another post (…or highly-paid consultancy gig…?). Acqui-hires or acquisitions could work. Buying in talent and locking them into performance payouts could well infuse agencies with the requisite talent and skillset. The recent purchase of Elisa DBI by Havas was a smart move, giving the agency access to strong tech and data capabilities. A start, but agencies also need to foster a tech culture to attract the staff that will help evolve the agency model.

Local Digital Buys Shifting to Global Execution

The one area that seems to be overlooked by the industry is globalisation. Traditionally, much of the buying processes have been done locally. Now, big brands like P&G want to use a central platform to manage all P&G data and make the buys. P&G let agencies plan, but do not actually execute/negotiate the buys on a global basis. Witness the recent Accenture deal with Ford – consolidation of local strategies into one central process. We will see more of this. How prepared are agencies – or even the ad tech industry – for this shift in strategy in digital buying?

In many respects, ad tech exists in a bubble – oblivious to the core requirements of marketers. We talk to ourselves for the most part. However, the next evolution in programmatic and data-driven advertising will be the intersection of marketing tech and ad tech. This is something we cannot ignore.

Agencies are not to be written off yet, and invariably have a knack of surviving significant changes in the industry.

ATS London will explore these themes in greater depth and will again bring together the key constituent players, including those that will ultimately shape the enterprise marketing and ad tech space over the coming years.

We only have a handful of early bird tickets remaining for ATS London – so be quick to grab them before they sell out.

Can you give us an overview of the company structure? How does Project-A work? Is it a similar model to Rocket Internet?

It has a similar model, however there are differences in how PA goes about its business, in particular, our approach to projects is quite different to that of Rocket’s. Project A’s strength lies in the operative support it provides to its ventures. Experts from different areas such as IT/Development, Marketing or HR/Organisational development are made available to create a free-flow of knowledge throughout the company. We take particular care to ensure that both momentum and sustainability can be harmonised.

What is the relationship between Project-A and its funded companies?

We have a very condensed working relationship with all of our ventures. For us, it is not just about financial support, but also about creating sustainable business models. We do this by staying immersed in the market and passing on our experience and industry knowledge. We work closely with our investments to create individual, sustainable and cooperative working practices, as well as finding and effectively implementing individualised solutions to whatever issues arise. PA is an investor, mentor, enabler, ambassador and sparring partner. As partners, we want to be perceived as a reliable, co-operative and consistent team who take the right steps at the right time and provide a clear focus.

Do you help incubate funded companies?

Yes we do, it is important for us that we don’t just give them an injection of funds, however. We also provide Marketing, IT, HR and PM support to help the ventures succeed.

Where does Marketing Technology (data management, media buying, etc.) feature in the Project-A operation?

Apart from e-commerce, marketing technology is an important investment aspect for PA. What makes PA different is that we are very data-driven, in all areas. We systematically exhaust all sources of data, for example, by efficiently collating data from the AdServer, DWH and CRM.

Does this operation reside at the Project-A hub, or in the bands themselves?

We develop innovations internally and the ventures then profit from this. If we decide on a certain technology, or have implemented a new tool, it migrates into the ventures. Here, too, we also offer support with the implementation in each venture and we operatively work with them on it. A good example of this could be with a new tracking tool or other marketing aids.

What is the role of Project-A when it comes to ad tech? Is it a big focus? You’ve made a number of strategic investments, like Glow. How do you arrive at these decisions? What are you looking for in terms of the investment?

Ad tech is really important and plays a crucial role for us. We invest in innovative tools that add value to our marketing plan, and which have a high market potential. The development of ad tech is driven by our investments – we invest and then we work on development. This is proving to be a successful strategy for us.

Do you think Project-A can execute all RTB/data-driven buying needs in-house? What framework and infrastructure would you need to create to enable this?

Yes, we truly think so. To ensure that this channel remains in-house, PA recently launched a new venture: Tectumedia. Our experience told us that ventures could take care of most of their operative marketing work themselves, with the obvious exception of RTB, however. RTB is complex and particularly time-consuming in relation to decision making, set-up and workflow. There are also financial considerations. Which start-ups can afford to work directly with a DSP considering the current minimum spends per month?

Our new venture, Tectumedia, is there to support our start-ups with Programmatic Buying. Reading synergies from our own ad tech investments (Eyeota, Glow, Semasio, Metrigo) puts us in a good position to offer input on how to get the most out of tools and how to push them further. To offer optimal campaign performance we also provide expert consultation on campaign management and optimisation. Tectumedia is leading on this and it assimilates our own Ad-Tech investments into its services.

Given the scale of the organisation, could Project-A roll out a media-buying solution of its own that serviced companies outside companies you’ve already invested in and brands you have strong relationships with, like Otto?

Although interest in data-driven Display has undoubtedly increased exponentially in Germany, its actual implementation has been quite slow. Access to the right technologies has been an issue, but there is also a lack of know-how out there. To engage in Programmatic Buying you need a strong analytical team, which is at odds with the traditional Display Marketing skill-set. We envisage that RTB will be primarily managed by BI in the future and that classic Display optimisation themes will become more secondary. This is the main impetus behind the launch of Tectumedia. We have experienced BI, IT and marketing experts at PA and these are the basis for a successful RTB set-up. Apart from our own ventures, Tectumedia also works with clients from the Otto Group and other external clients.

How are you seeing the growth of data-driven media-buying in Germany? Are we now at the tipping point for adoption of programmatic buying?

No, not just yet. Although everybody is talking about it, nobody really seems to be doing it, or at least not doing it 100%. To give you an example of how contradictory the market has become, there are publishers who have made their inventory available to RTB, yet still maintain a strong sales team. So, one could get cheaper access to traffic through a salesperson than with RTB – this makes no business sense. RTB will grow as people slowly come around to the new way of operating. The signs are all positive. Importantly, the above is all relative to Display Performance, Branding has experienced a different genesis.

However, despite impending legislation and public attention, the number of unique technologies encountered by individuals in the EU grew by over 40% in 2012. Even as increased requirements for disclosure and user control seem to be closing in, the data collection industry grows more complex, both through introduction of new companies and by the actions of the industry’s giants.

Big Moves from Big Players
For an early indication of how the legislation might impact online businesses, one could look at large companies like Google and Facebook, who are in the best position to afford a cautious, measured approach should they find it necessary. In March of 2012, however, Google put into effect a new privacy policy, essentially unifying the data it collects from all of its services – including web tracking scripts like its Doubleclick and AdSense products, as well as its nearly ubiquitous analytics pixel. While this doesn’t increase the amount of data the search giant collects (that was massive and stays massive) – it allows for new uses of more data about individuals. Google’s reaction wasn’t completely dismissive of coming requirements, however. As recently as April, cookie consent notices began appearing to EU users of Google’s search pages, with a link to a video explaining how the company uses cookies in the course of its wide variety of web services.

Facebook, for its part, was also bullish on expanding its use of data, launching the Facebook Exchange (FBX) – a real-time, cookie-based bidding platform for advertisers to compete with each other based on a user’s interests. Those interests are collected from activity on Facebook and around the web, as discovered by the use of Facebook ‘Like’ buttons, the Facebook connect login service, and new FBX pixels that the social network has begun to spread across the internet at large. Facebook has also been looking to actively influence the process, particularly around the proposed ‘Right to be Forgotten’ clause, which will allow users to totally remove their online data. Facebook has said that this rule, “raises many concerns with regard to the right of others to remember and to freedom of expression”, and suggested that if the rule includes responsibility that extends beyond Facebook’s site itself, it may have to increase tracking in order to comply.

Niches Upon Niches, All Filled Immediately
Smaller companies in the data collection industry are not to be outdone by the biggest of their ilk. New technology companies enter the space all the time, introducing new, focused ways of collecting, compiling, or applying user data. Acquisitions and mergers also mean more unified, monolithic data sets that, when taken together, can reveal more about users and be used in direct ways. This elaborate innovation may help the advertising bottom line, but it can also work against compliance with legislation. Evidon studies show that 55% of tracking scripts that appear on a site are placed there by someone other than the site owner – usually as a ‘guest’ of other scripts. Site owners very rarely have visibility into these companies and may be completely unfamiliar with their practices. Web users (and perhaps more importantly, privacy-focused regulators) do not take ignorance as a valid excuse. A web page is the user-facing portal to the internet and, if data is collected, then the responsibility for that collection is laid almost exclusively at the feet of the publisher of the site itself.

Clarifying the Grey Areas
At Evidon, we frequently hear site owners ask which companies have acceptable practices and which are doing something underhanded or shady. That’s always a difficult question to answer because each organisation has different levels of sensitivity about its user data, and the line between acceptable and unacceptable practices can vary. What’s important to understand, however, is that the General Data Protection Regulation is meant to address above-board industry practices, not criminal computer activity. In terms of compliance, site owners should think less about what is good data collection and what is bad data collection, instead focusing on transparent methods of doing business while giving consumers clear and meaningful choice. It’s not enough to count cookies or put up a consent message and hope for the best. Effective privacy-sensitive operations require a working knowledge of the data collection industry, a clear understanding of how to apply that technology and concise disclosure along every step of the process.

The Economics of Compliance
Dissenters often invoke the economic impact of legislation when advocating for caution. But in the case of the GDPR, following the general procedures required by the legislation can also bolster the bottom line. The kind of auditing that can lead to proper disclosure also reveals areas where a site is at risk for leaking data to otherwise undetected tracking companies. Slow load time is a leading factor for loss of audience on a website – and these scripts also frequently add unwanted latency. The worst offenders added, on average, 1.7 seconds of additional load time on the sites where they appeared. Even when considering the best performers, scripts that are typically added without the consent of publishers bring 518ms of latency, on average. By carefully examining the trackers that appear on the site, and the path by which they arrived, site publishers not only put themselves into position for compliance, but they can also increase efficiency and data sharing revenue.

Forward-thinking business are not waiting to quibble over the definition of user data or cookie consent pixel sizes. Instead, sites all over Europe are seeking to answer the cultural demand for transparency that the Justice Commission seeks to codify into rules. Actionable intelligence about the activity on their sites is leading to definitive disclosure of that activity, and web operators are able to smile across the conference room at their legal teams and confidently suggest that whatever the rules look like, they’re on the right path to compliance.

Paul Frampton, CEO, Havas Media
As an industry, we are over-reliant on the legacy ways of measurement. Tools such as TGI or Hitwise have very small samples, offer very little new insight and no real ideas on measurement across on and offline media.

As a member of this industry I think that if this problem is not rectified we are in danger of losing ground to the marketing and data consultancies that are swimming downstream to steal our lunch.

That’s why, as an agency, we are battling to find new and better ways of working out where measurement and analysis meet across traditional and ‘new’ media channels in the offline and online world.

What we want to offer clients is Connected Data – not Big Data. We want to be an agency that gives the right solution, not just the most expedient one – and data is a huge part of this.

By acquiring ElisaDBI we have given ourselves the armoury to offer real solutions to business problems in a way that we believe is unique in the media agency world. By integrating them into our business we can continue to offer our clients the full customer journey under one roof.

This data-driven approach also gives us the ability, unlike many agencies, to develop our offer in the programmatic world.

There has been a lot of noise about OOH becoming programmatic and Sky Adsmart’s launch is imminent so we see competitive advantage in an increasingly ad-served, biddable media world coming through creating unique actionable data sets.

Media auditing in the future will be less about price and stretch and more about the quality of data and algorithms and about genuine value in terms of revenue and profit.

Mike Potts, Co-founder of ElisaDBI & Head of Data Strategy
Modern Media agencies have to start incorporating data services and marketing technology into their offerings to properly address what is happening in our more connected world.

ElisaDBI offers digital measurement and optimisation, and our clients have always benefited from the insights we provide to their digital marketing performance.

By becoming part of Havas Media we have been given an unique opportunity to learn about other types of media – non-digital media especially – and how that impacts on businesses and brands while integrating this into our services.

This gives us a much more rounded offering for our clients, as well as a better understanding into how we can better combine a broader range of data sets across an even broader range of media.

We know that the technology we provide and our analysis skill-sets give us a deeper understanding of what brand engagement is, and not just how visible a brand is. This deal means we can now apply these skills to the way that Havas works in the traditional landscape.

The term they use here is Connected Data; and this explains our joined up offering really well.

In our world, we turn data into knowledge. What we’ll be able to do now is take disparate data sets and put them together and use them in a way that is relevant to our clients.

Our opportunity at Havas Media is to help them continue the progress they’ve already made in this area by further enhancing their data offering and expanding their end-to-end capabilities in a joined-up way.

On both a personal and professional level, another massive bonus of the deal is that everyone in here is data literate, and we already feel right at home.

We sit on a floor of 50 people, from all aspects of digital marketing, who all not only know about data but instinctively understand it. Not only is that a powerful proposition, but it appeals to a lot to our team.

“How can this go on?”, I hear you ask. Well, the fact is many online advertising campaigns still lack a resolute system for ad placement within content online. The reasons for this are quite simple. Marketing directors are concerned about their adverts getting the impressions and click-throughs they need to justify the spend on the campaign. For the advertising agency, they need to deliver the results for their clients. It all means there is a tremendous pressure to deliver cold, hard bottom line numbers. It’s not by any means necessary, but up until now the question of where those numbers have been coming from has been fudged.

As a consequence, once the initial rounds of advertising are placed, the content is then given up to the advertising exchange. Think of these like a tombola where the advert joins millions of others and then is randomly spat out, or served, to a website to host. Each time one of these websites hosts an advert, it receives a commission. It’s a relatively small amount, but multiply that hundreds and thousands of times, and you can work out that it can become a pretty sizeable amount.

I have seen numerous examples of banks or broadband providers appearing on sites which are clearly illegal. That’s bad enough, but then also consider the fact that an advert appearing there delivers virtually zero value and potentially damages the brand.

I am sure most marketing directors have no idea this goes on. Just imagine walking into BT, or any major organisation, and showing them one of their adverts promoting superfast broadband on a site set up to illegally download movies. They would probably try to pull the campaign and begin an investigation, but that does not mean the blame should automatically rest with the advertising agency. Up until recently, the technology simply was not available to control these adverts and where they are placed.

However, that is changing. Content verification is making it easier than ever before to control where adverts appear. Think of content verification as a massive fishing net designed to pick up websites on which brands do not want to appear. Using the content verification method, when adverts are served to sites, they are scanned for any words or phrases that the client has deemed inappropriate. If any of those words come up, then the website is rejected and the advert is sent back to advertising exchange. Much like if a fishing net catches a pike when it is trying to catch a trout, it is simply thrown back into the water and the net cast out again.

With this technology now in place, it will be harder for brands and advertisers to avoid this thorny issue. They can no longer say it is a consequence of the system. That excuse simply will not wash anymore. More rigorous and scientific approaches need to be taken in order to protect the brand and the advertiser. For advertising agencies in particular, getting in on this early could be key. Imagine pitching for business, showing an example of a brand appearing where it should not, and then saying that agency can help to prevent that happening whilst the others cannot. It could be a huge competitive advantage until this is brought in by all advertising agencies.

Until this happens, however, advertising campaigns will go on funding criminals. Adverts will continue to deliver little value and, potentially, a brand is going to get caught up and shown to be supporting criminality. Savvy marketing directors and agencies chiefs should be giving this serious consideration before it even becomes an issue in the mainstream media.

Marketers who are tasked with generating revenue from a sizeable budget are at the frontline of accountability, and have a variety of levers they can pull. Before the dawn of the internet, much of the intellectual debate focused on how to best sell the consumer promise between influential media: from TV, to newspapers, to direct mail, and other ‘traditional’ media choices.

Today, with the rich tapestry of choices that the internet offers, the world is frustratingly more complex for marketers. Do they invest in a mobile app, should they risk their Google search word investments for Facebook opportunities, how should they think about Twitter, is it economical to buy key ad spots on AOL if so few people click on the advert? All of these are the types of questions yet to be answered with confidence.

Lay people may find it curious that digital marketing can be difficult to figure out, “Surely the internet is full of tracking technologies?” Marketers share their feelings of bemusement. Marketers typically have 8 – 10 tracking technologies: website tracking from Google Analytics, to advertising tracking from Doubleclick, to reports from Facebook and Twitter about their advertising campaign successes, to email reports, and many more. Each has a deep view of the services they provide. The problem is that these vendors’ reports do not integrate into a single view of the consumer.

The crux of the problem is that tracking vendors can only ‘see’ what they are practically permitted to ‘see’. Internet browsers, such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, govern the practicalities. The dominant tracking mechanic is the ‘cookie’. The rule is that the tracking vendor can only see the cookie that they injected into the consumer’s browser. No one vendor, not even Google, covers all the bases of digital marketing, and this is why every vendor can only see a small piece of the consumers’ interaction with advertising and websites.

The double whammy challenge for the marketer is they are left holding high-quality reports from each vendor, but do not have a single view of the consumer journey. Without data integration there is no way to assess if the person who opened the email is also the person who bought their product two hours later via their website. This reality has led marketers to adopt very direct thinking and marketing strategies, typically known as last click marketing. Some of the biggest companies in the world have been built on the back of this strategy, the biggest of which is Google’s search advertising business.

The interesting thing is that even before digital marketing was an arrow in the quiver of the marketing team, the belief was that influencing a consumer’s purchase required multiple marketing touch points. Ford would never think of just running television adverts because they knew they needed to have influence through newspapers, magazines, the dealer network, local radio adverts and so on. The point is that the marketer knew that the consumer needed to hear the orchestra not just the violin to fall in love with the song.

With the birth of the Tag Management System (TMS) there came a solution to the fragmented view of the consumer. A ‘tag’ is jargon for a digital marketing vendor’s tiny piece of software – a JavaScript code – that is embedded into web pages, mobile apps and advertising to collect data. Advertisers need tags so vendors can help make advertising and other digital campaigns more compelling to consumers. With billions of tags across the internet, a TMS allows marketers to control and manage these vast numbers of tags on every page and every advert, without having to change any code on the website. A direct result of managing all vendor tags through a TMS is that the marketer can see how the consumer is touched by all marketing channels: from email, to mobile apps, to buying a product on the website. The marketer now has a unified view of the consumer journey.

A paradox of having a unified view of the consumer journey is that the digital world becomes a three-dimensional landscape for the marketer. Important marketing questions can finally be addressed: does Facebook drive consumers to purchase, does search create a sales opportunity or act as a navigation tool only, are consumers influenced by banner adverts, does targeting adverts to specific consumer categories make economic sense, which affiliates are performing better to drive conversions? These are the big questions that have vexed digital marketers for years. By having a unified view of the consumer, the ‘facts of behaviour’ are established. From the ‘facts’, hypotheses can be created and tested and digital marketing can be redefined.

Another quantum leap in the world of marketing driven by a TMS is known as ‘auto-optimisation’. Before digital advertising, marketers would make a plan, execute the plan, review the plan and then refine the plan. The whole process could take a year and many long lunch discussions. Today the opportunity lies in ‘auto-optimisation’, where a marketing vendor uses the marketers’ unified view of the consumer journey to optimise their services on the fly, and in real-time. Behind the scenes, the vendors’ data centres consume, crunch and make sense of their place in the consumer journey to auto-optimise their delivery in lightning speed. The TMS is crucial to this process in two ways: firstly, to collect the unified view, or ‘facts’, and secondly, to pass the data to the vendor. The TMS is uniquely able to do this because their core competence is collecting and connecting data across millions of pieces of software in the blink of an eye.

The early results have been impressive, with stories such as Air New Zealand, a global long-haul airline that grew revenue 15% by reducing search and increasing adverts in display; or a leading European retailer who grew performance 200% with their display advertising vendor, myThings, by passing data points from multiple channels and combining them to provide a unified view of the customer journey in real-time. Marketers are actively refining hypotheses, optimising strategies and putting vendor hype to the test now that they have access to the right tools. The impact will be felt on Wall Street as well as Main Street, welcome to web marketing 2.0, less hype and more data-driven decisions.