What inroads are Admeta making into the SSP space in the Nordics?

We offer a white-labelled private ad exchange, as an alternative to the SSP. Our solution is much better suited to premium publishers that are concerned about their own brand and want to maintain a direct relationship with their clients, the advertisers and agencies. We provide RTB demand and external campaigns as an integrated complement to the publishers’ own sales in their private ad exchange.

Can you explain the value proposition behind the Tango Ad Platform? What differentiates it?

WhiteBox Tango is a white-labelled private ad exchange for premium publishers, that allows the publisher to maximise performance advertising revenues while having total control of their brand safety, pricing, products, sales channels, etc. It allows data driven advertising and automated advertising integrated in the internal optimisation. Our core is our automatic optimisation power where we leverage the efficiency of performance campaigns in real-time for each single impression.

Do you think it is primarily performance-related advertisers who will make the first jump into programmatic buying and RTB? Or can you see brand-focused advertisers engaging in this space too?

Yes, I think performance and especially retargeting advertisers will move first. However, the technology is of course also suited for audience targeting etc., so there are brand-focused advertisers there as well.

How does Admeta engage the buy side?

We connect to major international as well as local DSPs that can buy on RTB. We also provide a self-service interface where demand partners can place campaigns that can run on virtually any WhiteBox Tango publisher. However, I want to stress that the main business still is the direct sales by our publishers. Our publishers are the ones engaging the buy side, using our tools.

What sort of percentage volumes are some of your publishers seeing through RTB channels versus direct? What needs to change to see this increase?

This varies by publisher and over time. On average, there are only a few percentage points won by RTB, the majority is monetised by the internal campaigns in the publishers private ad exchange. But some publisher’s have run 100% RTB some times too. As soon as the RTB bids and budgets become more competitive versus the internal campaigns, the RTB share will increase automatically in our system.

Is there a risk of conflict by serving both buy and sell? How do you manage that?

Yes it is a risk, especially in an automated ad trading situation. We don’t think it is wise to be both an SSP optimising for and paid by the sell side, and at the same time a DSP optimising for and paid by the buy side. We choose to concentrate on the sell side. Making our sales side happy includes making their customers (buy side) happy as well, by offering more efficient ways to buy advertising.

Where are you seeing most demand coming from right now? Ad networks? Agencies? Independent trading desks?

Independent DSPs and trading desks are increasingly providing demand to our publishers, but the majority of the demand is still seen directly from advertisers and agencies.

Would you be able to provide a bit more detail on the Accuen/Annalect Group/Omnicom Media Group proposition across the Nordic region?

Annalect Group is Omnicom Media Group‘s analytics, data and technology division, which among other things handles the Accuen Trading Desk. Our trading desk is a technology stack, combined with skilled people, designed to bring more value to both publishers and advertisers. Our positioning is quite clear. We do not buy cheap remnant media inventory in bulk and resell it. For us, the trading desk is about smarter media buying by applying the latest best-of-breed technologies, data and intelligent audience targeting. With Accuen we simply deliver more value to publishers and advertisers at an impression-by-impression level, and for our clients the trading desk solution is completely transparent in terms of technology, site placements and billings.

Why is the subject of automated buying important to the Omnicom Media Group business?

We believe that automated or programmatic buying is important to publishers and advertisers. As a media agency, the optimal solution to our clients’ needs is to deliver the right person, at the right time, with the right message, in the right place, at the right price. Automated buying is a giant leap towards reaching that solution. In a constantly changing environment we need adaptive marketing tools and skills, as clients, planners and buyers are overwhelmed by increasing amounts of data and channels. Our trading desk is the solution to that challenge.

Do you currently have a trading desk live in market, or is still in the planning stage?

The Accuen trading desk is live across the Nordic region and is gradually being scaled with more inventory sources. We apply Accuen across various media inventory sources ranging from all existing global and local ad exchanges to direct integration with local publishers.

It has been said that the lack of RTB demand is actually holding back increased liquidity (chicken and egg situation) of publisher inventory. How important is it for the likes of Omnicom Media Group, Vivaki and Xaxis in the region to stimulate growth in this space?

It is obviously very important. The current local inventory volume makes the buying volatile and ineffective at times. We believe that the right supply does not meet demand today, because many agencies and publishers come from very different positions. Some agencies see this just as cheap inventory and as a consequence bid below $1 (unless retargeting). On the other side, many publishers work with (very) high floor prices, typically around $2-4, so they only get a very small amount of impressions (the retargeting), and they are frustrated with the inability to scale up. So the error is on both sides. Our position is to populate the trading desks with premium inventory, and that we believe will stimulate growth.

Are publishers ready for this new way of executing media buys?

In general yes, in the Nordics maybe less so. Politics and technology barriers often get in the way of opening up to new ways of buying. We think that the development we are seeing mimics that of Germany, where strong (and often united) publishers have locked down the market, but have now begun embracing new ways of selling inventory. Moving the perspective on this takes time, and by focusing on improving the value of every single impression served by publishers, we will also begin to see the full potential of the new media buy.

Are agencies ready?

The road can be a bit bumpy from an agency perspective. From being very proactive about this in late 2011, many agencies have gone on stand-by these months due to lack of local inventory, technical issues and client readiness. We are ready, and programmatic buying has the highest priority.

What initiatives are you working on internally to fuel greater RTB adoption?

It is pretty simple. RTB adoption is being fueled by the results and relative performance we get from the trading desk buys. RTB get exactly the same priority as all other media buys, and as such, RTB is being fueled in the same way as all other buying alternatives. Performance will be the judge of the agency adoption.

Do marketers in the region “get” RTB?

Yes, we believe they get it. Adaptive marketing is the name of the game, and the trading desk is a compelling part of the marketer’s adaptive marketing operation. Travel, telco and finance, especially, have been quick to grasp the concept and the possibilities, while others are showing less interest. RTB can be rather complicated to grasp, but we are very ambitious on behalf of our clients and work every day to make them understand the full concept and the technologies involved.

What predictions would you make about the growth potential for programmatic buying over the next 12 months?

It is will depend on the chicken and the situation on inventory and agency adoption, but we believe we will see around 10-15% of display budgets running here by end 2012. That is as far as we are willing to go in terms of predictions.

Peter Loell, Director, Annalect, Omnicom MediaGroup, will be speaking at the ATS Stockholm event on May 24. Get your ticket today. Full agenda on the event is available here.

Robots! Diagrams! Swelling music! Almost ten full minutes of automation animation RTB bliss.

Privacy is a Red Button Issue, But Most Users in the UK Don’t Know What a Cookie Is — IAB & ValueClick Report

The vast majority of UK consumers want some aspect of control or more information about how companies use consumer information to serve online advertising. However, the exact same number of people (81%) also agreed the internet is powerful because it provides unrestricted access to information.

The findings come from a report being published by the IAB UK and ValueClick, based on 2,000 interviews carried out by Kantar Media – 650 face-to-face and 1,350 online.

Privacy online
The report reveals that although six in 10 UK consumers (62%) are concerned about online privacy, two-thirds (67%) are confident they know how to protect their privacy online. For example, half said they had deleted cookies from their computers in the last six months while one in five deletes cookies every week. Men (57%) are more likely to delete cookies than women (43%). One in five (19%) consumers don’t take any steps to manage their privacy online.

However, the report reveals confusion amongst consumers about cookies; of the 64% of people who claimed to know what a cookie is, only 57% actually chose the correct definition when given a range of options. In effect, this means that four in 10 (39%) people who deleted cookies in the last six months did so without correctly knowing what cookies are and what they’re used for.

Advertising control and benefits
Nearly half (45%) of UK consumers would like to control the type of advertising they see online and 40% want easy access to the information being shared about them. Just over one third (36%) wanted information about who was showing them a particular ad.

However, the majority of UK consumers do recognise the benefits advertising brings; 61% expect a large portion of the internet would “disappear” without advertising, while 52% are happy to see online advertising because it supports online services and content at little or no cost. Only one in 10 people would be willing to pay for websites and online services they currently use for free if those services removed advertising.

The majority of people are in favour of personalised or more relevant advertising online – 55% said they would rather see online advertising relevant to their interests. Six in 10 (59%) would rather see a lower number of relevant ads online than a higher number of less relevant ones.

Importance of the internet in modern society
The report also reveals how important consumers believe the internet is in modern society. For example, 61% said they can live more cheaply because of the internet and a staggering 42% would feel like a second class citizen without internet access. Half of consumers feel people have more political power because of it and 46% thought access to the internet should be a fundamental human right. People clearly value the unrestricted access to information the internet offers, with 81% agreeing this was what made the web powerful.

Nick Stringer, Director of Regulatory Affairs at the IAB UK, comments: “This research shows the balance that the industry needs to strike: providing clear and transparent information and control to empower consumers and help them safeguard their privacy, whilst enabling relevant advertising to help fund the quality content and services that they demand. Businesses across Europe are rolling out a new icon in online ads to enable this. Backed by a campaign to explain how online advertising works and what the icon means, this study will help inform our communication.”

Carl White, CEO ValueClick Europe, adds: “Businesses and brands must begin to engage consumers in an open and transparent dialogue about how and why they see advertising online. This study shows that people are more receptive and open-minded about online advertising than is often reported, but they are also wary and understandably confused about the mechanics of digital marketing and privacy. It is up to us as an industry to communicate how online advertising works and the benefits it delivers more effectively.”

Summary points
- Over half (52%) of UK consumers are happy to see online advertising because it supports online services and content at little or no cost
- 55% said they would rather see online advertising relevant to their interests; 59% would rather see a lower number of relevant ads online than a higher number of less relevant ones
- Nearly half (45%) would like to control the type of advertising they see online
- Half of UK consumers have deleted cookies from their computers in the last six months while one in five deletes cookies every week
- Six in 10 people said they can live more cheaply because of the internet

Collective Scores WWE Sales Agreement

WWE® and ad-technology company, Collective, have announced a new two-year online advertising sales agreement. Under this agreement, Collective will handle all WWE.com display and video pre-roll inventory advertising for the UK market.

This is the largest international online advertising sales agreement for WWE and it ties in with the recent re-launch of WWE.com, highlighting the significant investment currently being put into digital by WWE.

WWE.com currently generates around 69 million display ads and 1.5 million video impressions per month and Collective, who work with other entertainment brands including BBC, Sony Music and E! Entertainment, will push the display and pre-roll advertising for the UK and potential third-parties.

James McEvoy, Director of Media Distribution at WWE, comments: “WWE’s digital strategy is multifaceted, with the aim to make the the most engaging digital experience possible, across all platforms. Now our role, with Collective on board, is to grow our digital business and to keep providing our fans with compelling and engaging content.”

Steve Filler, MD, Collective, adds: “WWE.com is a great addition to the Collective exclusive distribution platform. WWE delivers some of the highest engagement rates across display and video due to its premium content and loyal user base. This, along with proprietary data and Collective’s high impact personalized advertising experiences, drives some of the highest advertiser engagement rates in the business.”
Yahoo!’s Right Media Exchange Goes Fully RTB

Yahoo! announced last week that they are going fully RTB on their Right Media Exchange, with supply now 100% enabled and ready for RTB demand globally. The feature also enables tech providers (Demand Side Players) to process multiple bids within a single data stream.

With up to 11 billion daily impressions traded on the Right Media Exchange globally every day, and over 30% of activity in EMEA, RTB-based spending in some European countries is still expected to grow at a CAGR rate of more than 100% annually (Source: IDC, 2011). Large media agencies in Europe are predicted to move significant budgets to the real-time bidding platform.

Sue Hunt, Director of Right Media Exchange at Yahoo! EMEA, comments: “Real-time bidding offers both buyers and sellers of display advertising more data and inventory to enhance the performance of their advertising campaigns. We’re seeing more and more publishers and advertisers taking advantage of the scalability of the Right Media Exchange, showing the improved campaign performance and yield that real-time bidding brings to the industry. We’re excited to see the impact of this technology in digital media.”

German Mobile Boom

The German mobile advertising market achieved a total of 1,973 campaigns for the 2011 reporting year – a new record. Compared to the previous year, this represents a growth of over 62%. The number of advertisers has grown by about 45%, to a total of 359 companies that have enabled their advertising campaigns for mobile devices. This information has emerged from a recent survey done by the mobile advertising unit of the Mobile Division of the Association of Digital Economy (BVDW).

Oliver von Wersch, (G + J Electronic Media Sales), Head of Unit Mobile Advertising to the trade group Mobile BVDW, comments: “With these impressive growth numbers, it’s clear mobile will remain the fastest growing media category. Year-on-year the growth rate has accelerated and we expect the trend to continue this year. This positive growth in mobile advertising will be reflected in future advertising spend.”

The analysis, done by the Mobile Advertising Unit of the BVDW, is based on data for mobile advertising campaigns from the participating mobile marketers: Axel Springer Media Impact, Contnet AG, German Telekom AG, G + J Electronic Media Sales GmbH, Interactive Media CCSP GmbH, RTL / IP GmbH Germany, Telefónica O2 Germany GmbH & Co. OHG, TOMORROW FOCUS Media GmbH United Internet Media AG, Yahoo! Germany GmbH, YOC Mobile Advertising GmbH.

How progressed is the Nordics market from an automated trading perspective?

It’s a simple question to answer – immature. The Nordics are very immature in the automated trading market. ATS Stockholm is the first Nordic conference about the subject. However, seen from a technology provider point of view, let me just give you some of the constraints we face in the market.

First of all, the tools are not available in the market. The supplier approach has been very limited and as such most publishers have had to make their own inquiries and experiences. Trends, reports, tools, best practise, etc. is coming from the US/UK. It takes some time to digest and create new products and strategies.

Industry bodies are just starting to relate to these new tendencies and to describe the ecosystem and the players in the market, as well as analyse the regulatory measures needed to support the online media market.

The banner standards are not consistent. Most Nordic publishers can provide the Universal Ad Package, but the interest from international demand goes beyond these standards.

The demand is predominantly from international DSP’s—and the demand is very low. Domestic media agencies will of course help to grow demand, but the market is in a hen and egg situation (neither supply or demand is available) and we need to constantly evangelise about the new trend.

Publishers are standing by traditional sales models, however there is a positive interest in using RTB to optimise their remnant inventory. Yield optimisation is a major concern to all publishers. But premium inventory is their Achilles heel—will the automated buying of front page banners, takeovers, and maybe the more specialised categories, reduce the sales department’s control of inventory and agency relations?

And who owns data? Will publishers allow advertisers to use their Data Management Platforms (DMP) to enrich data and use it across different websites? Or will the self-regulatory OBA initiative prevent advertisers from using profile or behavioural data? Who should gain from the data—the DMP’s, the advertiser, the publisher? This issue must be handled fast, otherwise supply will be reluctant to share user data with advertisers.

So, in general we need far more interaction between the players in the market to embrace the inevitable evolution. I hope that ATS Stockholm can help to kick-start the process.

Can you explain the Emediate SSP product offering in more detail? Is it predominantly buy or sell side focused?

Emediate develops and provides a comprehensive set of products and tools which enable publishers to maximise their profit and gain much better control of their inventory.

Emediate Exchange, our SSP solution, works on 2 levels:

1. Publishers can work with the major RTB exchanges, and fully control who gains access to their inventory. It’s possible to maximise the potential buyers by allowing everyone to bid, or to finely control access by creating a private exchange with fine-grained control and many possible levels of pricing.
2. The Emediate Exchange also allows existing networks to bid on the inventory, as Emediate is creating strategic deals with many of the Nordic networks. This allows Emediate to handle all the remnant pass-back deals which are normally time consuming and tiresome for the publisher to maintain.

When was your SSP launched? What levels of volume are running through it?

Emediate launched our SSP in February 2012. We provide access to both supply and demand. The product offering consists of yield management in a controlled environment. We handle both reporting and invoicing.

The demand is enabled from advertising networks, RTBs and Emediate customers. Every customer is offered detailed optimisation in a nuanced setup, based on their specific requirements— which can include a private exchange or a mix of direct performance campaigns.

Every customer can of course decide their own individual floor prices on a very detailed level of creative placement, categories, targeting, brands and more.

We manage black lists and white lists and can also pre-audit creatives. When it comes to levels of supply, it’s not a question of how much we’re able to deliver, but more a question of the demand level. According to various sources, the number of available RTB impressions is around 60 million per day in Denmark. We currently offer around 2-3 million of these. We could easily supply more, it’s a matter of turning a valve, but the issue is that the keep rates (fill rates) are too low at the moment and there’s too little demand. Most ad networks buy directly through a pass back solution and only very few of them have their own DSP. Some media agencies have access to trading desks or a DSP, but the demand here is too low as well. So we adjust the supply step by step.

Which DSPs is your SSP connected to? Who are the predominant demand partners?

We’re connected to many DSP’s but the largest buyers are now: Criteo, Adform and ad pepper. We also see MediaMath, Mediamind, Unanimis, Turn, Xaxis, Delta Project, Missing Marketing Link, MIG Network and many more.

What features of an adserver would you say are most in-demand in the Nordic market? Does this differ by country?

For quite some years behavioral targeting has been in-demand. The enrichment of user data has started a new era of profile targeting. The ability to forecast and target different segments of users is in high demand and it’s well supported by DMPs like nugg.ad, Audience Science, Enreach Group, etc. Finland has been testing many different players and has created many different cases, many of which are quite successful. Denmark has been more consistent in their choice of predictive behavioral targeting and has created PBT networks across different publishers. This tendency seems to be now spreading to Norway.

The next in-demand is in-view measurement. The release of the five principles of Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS), clearly shows that if you want the advertiser to take online media seriously, you cannot sell them advertising that’s not in view.
Finally, we see a tendency of integrating the adserver into CRM, finance, CMS, booking and work-flow tools. Making the work-flow simpler and easier is a must for publishers to streamline their business.

How progressed is the publisher space? How many are taking advantage of plugging inventory into RTB-enabled SSPs via the native adserver connection?

The market is still very immature. We currently have three major networks plugged in and we’re enabling another 8-10 publishers as we speak. We’ve registered a great interest in the SSP and no doubt we’ll be able to enable most of our customers in 2012.

Can you explain further your DSP capability?

Emediate has been designing and developing a bidder, which forms the center of any DSP, for more than two years. Today, this allows us to help publishers and advertisers to bid on inventory, both from the Emediate SSP, but also from all the major players on the RTB scene. The publishers will benefit from audience extension via retargeting, enabling them to target regular visitors to their websites and thus extending their ad inventory. For advertisers, the Emediate DSP is a strong solution that will enable all the advanced features to work for them, including;

- Adaptive bidding
- Full transparency on domains, URLs and bid prices
- Semantic targeting
- Domain & URL black and white lists
- Advanced optimisation (CPM, CPC or CPL targets and any combination thereof)
- Full assistance in campaign booking and optimisation

We seem to have a big head start compared to many of the other European players. We have been working with advanced semantic targeting since 2005. This has also been a big kick-start for our DSP project, as the European market has a certain lack of audience-based data and semantic targeting. This allows us to target and optimise without the strong audience-based knowledge, which is currently missing in Europe.

Today we deliver DSP technology to a few different ad networks and many direct clients, most on a managed base, where we book, report, optimise and work closely with the clients internal procedures and goals. The managed aspect is very important, as gaining and maintaining expert knowledge in their area is quite hard. Even with technology systems as advanced as ours, the manual human touch is still very important. Using a managed service is a way to kickstart your entry into the RTB world, and this is very attractive to many networks and agencies which are just now realising the importance of gaining insight and experience in this area.

Otto Neubert Block will be speaking at the ATS Stockholm event on May 24. Get your ticket today. Full agenda on the event is available here.

Differentiating between “Media Quality” and “Creative Efficiency” is key in order to evaluate brand building through online display advertising properly. In the first of these two posts we would like to give you a background to how we ended up where we are and introduce the metrics that are required going forwards.

The advertising industry often talks about ads in terms of a creative idea, an amazing design, or brilliant copy writing, but less often the media environment where the ads eventually end up. When it comes to traditional brand building media, such as TV, radio and print there is really not much to discuss, as their media environment is constant – 15s/30s TV spot, 60s radio spot, half/full page, etc.

Online display advertising is a whole different ballgame. Unless you consider ad visibility – an important component of media quality – before obsessing about click-through rates – a parameter of creative efficiency – you will reach the wrong conclusion, give credit to the wrong driver and probably not learn very much about successful brand building online.

Online display advertising products have largely been shaped by what has been possible to measure. Click has been the currency from the very first 78% CTR AT&T banner in 1994 up until today; it is an easy thing to measure. Combining clicks with server logs you could measure the path from an impression on a web page, through a click on the banner, to the final conversion. And for direct response advertising, this was all that was needed. Add search marketing, CPC/CPA models and you get the most effective direct response media available, created in just a couple of years.

The fundamental problem is that the measurements derived from direct response marketing are poor at evaluating brand building. Media consumption online has been growing exponentially every year. Brands feel the pressure to move brand budgets online: from traditional media that everyone can understand and relate to, towards… the “ad impression”, available in thousands of different formats and shapes.

Unless factors such as visibility or the size of the ad are taken into account, using plain click-through rates to evaluate the brand building impact of a campaign will lead to the wrong conclusions. A campaign that runs on a placement with significantly higher visibility rate will obviously have a much greater click-through rate than one which is hardly ever seen – completely independently of which of the two campaigns that has the best creative.

To address this problem, the first step is to understand the difference between media contribution and creative contribution when measuring campaign effectiveness. Step two is to start working with these new models, media quality and creative efficiency, which brand marketers can both understand and make use of in building future campaigns.

Media quality is defined as the ability of an ad placement to effectively deliver content to its audience. An alternative view is to consider an ad placement an empty “picture frame” with the sole responsibility of effectively displaying its content, no matter what that content is.

Creative efficiency, on the other hand, is the ability of the creative content to actually attract attention from the audience, regardless of its surroundings. Media quality describes everything that happens outside the “picture frame”, while creative efficiency describes what happens within it. Thus media quality is the visible area, duration and size of an ad. Creative efficiency is the mouse interaction patterns, dwell and clicks.

For all practical purposes, media quality and creative efficiency are independent from each other and must be evaluated as such. Blame the publishers (or your media agency) for poor media quality. Judge your creative agency by the creative efficiency their ads deliver.

By using the distinction provided by these two models, the creative agency can finally isolate and optimize its creative content without the uncertainty that the Flash animation wasn’t visible long enough to get to the brand logo after 6 seconds. The media agency can, on the other hand, start focusing on buying better inventory which fulfills the media quality requirements from its client and the creative agency.

And finally, my 2 cents on the recent discussions on the viewable impression standard: A typical 728×90 viewable impression scores merely 3 / 10 in our media quality score. Big brands are used to TV spots scoring 10 / 10 each time. This is the reason why Burt work with publishers helping them create better ad inventory.

The post to follow on this topic will dive deeper into how we at Burt define media quality and creative efficiency for our clients and how this enables them to perform very complex analysis in a dead simple reporting tool.

Gustav von Sydow, CEO, Burt is speaking at the upcoming ATS Stockholm event on May 24. Tickets are now on sale for the Nordics first data-driven advertising conference.

Those new ATS Stockholm speaker bios in full…

Petteri Vainikka, Founding Partner & VP Marketing, Enreach

Petteri Vainikka is responsible for strategic marketing and leading Enreach’s mission to help premium publishers de-commoditize their display advertising value proposition. Prior to Enreach, Petteri has held sales & marketing, global business development, and management team positions at Sumea, Digital Chocolate, Leiki, and Rovio (best known for the hit title Angry Birds); which he also co-founded as Head of Sales & Marketing.

Petteri holds a MSc degree in Telecommunications Management from Helsinki University of Technology, where he has also been an awarded post-graduate course teacher for three years.

Otto Neubert Block, CEO, Emediate

Otto Neubert Block is the CEO of the ad serving company Emediate, joining the company in 2008. Otto is an internet pioneer with 15 years of experience from online sales and marketing, as well as a background as Sales Director at some of the largest online sales networks in Denmark. Otto and his team have made Emediate the dominant ad server in the Nordic market and have introduced different solutions for their publishers to engage with RTB and deliver supply to the ever growing automated trading services online.

Peter Loell, Director, Annalect, Omnicom MediaGroup

Peter is Director of Annalect, the digital data and analytics arm of the Omnicom MediaGroup. Annalect works with media agencies OMD and PHD to combine data, analytics, planning and buying to help clients face the challenges of the real-time advertising world, which is populated by vast amounts of data. Peter is currently working on how to make the transition from media buying to audience buying. On joining Annalect, Peter made the move from ‘Mad Men’ to ‘Math Men’ following previous roles in broadcast & advertising,

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.

Turn Integrates eXelate to Provide Marketers With Online Data

Turn and eXelate announced this week that eXelate’s data is now integrated with the Turn Audience Platform to provide marketers with the ability to design and target large volumes of online audiences. The alliance will help marketers target online campaigns at scale, make better-informed marketing decisions, and centralise data and media for high-performance marketing.

Noah Everist, Associate Director, Media Investments, Compass Point, comments: “Providing our clients with a clear, competitive advantage is critical to our success. It is imperative that we partner with technology companies that enable us to effectively compete and continually win and renew business. The eXelate and Turn integration marries the management of data with a media execution – eliminating inefficiencies. As a result, we are able to quickly and seamlessly leverage media planning technology from Turn with eXelate’s intent data to create custom campaigns for each of our clients.”

By making over 30 billion advertising decisions daily, the Turn platform provides real-time insights to marketers with an aim to help them make smarter decisions, hopefully improving campaign ROI and performance. The Turn platform uses intelligent learning algorithms to process, in real–time, the large amounts of data that flows through eXelate’s system.

Maureen Little, Vice President of Business Development, Turn, adds: “eXelate’s vast data sets – analysed and verified – achieve an unprecedented level of reach on our platform, which provides marketers with the scale needed to achieve even the most aggressive campaign goals efficiently and precisely. It’s critical our technology enables clients to engage with their target audiences, and by incorporating eXelate’s data into our best-of-breed ecosystem will enable marketers to build custom and meaningful audience segments that perform well in their advertising campaigns.”

eXelate premium data spans 350 million users globally and provides consumer insights across the purchase funnel. With over 1,000 targetable segments in online purchase intent, household demographics and behavioural propensities, eXelate allows marketers to act upon online data in real-time.

Damian Garbaccio, Chief Revenue Officer, eXelate, concludes: “If the highest quality data is the fuel for the online advertising ecosystem, it takes a high performing engine to deliver the campaign results that marketers demand today. The Turn platform is an industry-leading marketing solution, and when combined with eXelate premium data, empowers marketers with unprecedented reach and control over their targeted marketing endeavours. Our partnership with Turn is another step toward helping marketers make optimal marketing decisions through online data.”

RTB Growing at Unprecedented Levels of 70% Month-on-Month

It is often said that there is more supply than demand in mobile advertising but recent statistics show that dramatic growth in RTB is driving mobile advertising spend. Alex Rahaman, CEO of StrikeAd, explains how developments in RTB, combined with powerful ad tracking, are helping to drive demand for mobile advertising

RTB has rapidly evolved from a technology option to become the strategic foundation of mobile advertising. Forecasts from the International Data Corporation (IDC) indicate there will be a huge increase in display advertising based on RTB by the year 2015. The growth predictions are, America – 71%, UK – 114%, France – 103%, Germany – 99%. And we anticipate a huge increase in mobile ad spend on RTB as well.

RTB in the mobile driving seat

Our experience at StrikeAd as the developer of the world’s first global mobile Demand Side Platform, is that RTB is seriously in the driving seat as regards mobile advertising spend. One of our partners, the mobile advertising exchange Nexage, is now experiencing a 70% per month bid volume growth while showing a minimum 2x eCPM premium on their RTB exchange.

The role of the DSP in the process

RTB-enabled DSPs – such as StrikeAd – integrate with all major ad exchanges, enabling advertisers to buy from multiple exchanges. The more reach a campaign has, the more efficient it will be, and the better it can work at scale. By being able to see all the information on one platform from multiple ad exchanges, DSPs allow the advertiser to make a holistic decision on a campaign’s progress, when compared to accessing multiple ad exchanges individually and manually.

RTB provides impression-level transparency

Combining RTB capabilities with a mobile advertising exchange’s inventory allows advertisers to monitor traffic across multiple networks, identify the individual consumers they want to reach and deliver targeted advertising to them in real time. This impression-level transparency that RTB provides is something advertisers have never had before – and is a huge reason why mobile advertising demand is ramping up.

Add powerful ad tracking

When RTB is combined with powerful new developments in ad tracking, then mobile advertisers have unprecedented levels of transparency. There are solutions on the market right now that allow advertisers and agencies to very precisely track and attribute downloads, conversions and even in-app events such as frequent use, purchases, game level completion and much more. Plus, by plugging app download tracking data into a mobile DSP, its learning mechanisms can automatically adjust the buying strategy to buy more of the traffic that has the same profile as that which delivered the best results.

Taboola partners with German Newspaper Network OMS to Bring Personalised Video Recommendations

Taboola.com Inc., a leading video recommendation provider, announced this week that it has signed an agreement with Germany’s OMS earlier this year to provide video recommendation functionality on its network of sites. OMS is an alliance of more than 30 newspaper publishers and operates an advertising and video syndication network, which provides online video marketing for about 200 German newspaper websites.

OMS piloted Taboola on Derwesten.de and Weser-Kurier.de in recent months and the reported results were promising. Under the agreement, OMS will have access to both web and mobile solutions from Taboola.

Recommending videos to over 120 million users each month, according to Quantcast, Taboola’s widget-based video discovery engine aims to enrich the user experience for visitors on the OMS sites by providing personal video recommendations based on each user’s content and video consumption patterns and the newspapers editorial preferences.

Kim Kriegers, Head of WebTV at OMS, comments: “Within the first month of deploying the Taboola module we saw more than 50% uptake in video plays on certain sites.”

The partnership shows Taboola’s growing presence outside the U.S., where customers include publishing giants such as Wallstreet Journal, Bloomberg, CNN, BusinessWeek, The Washington Post, Hearst, the New York Times, USA Today, IGN, The Hollywood Reporter, Thompson Reuters and many others.

Adam Singolda, founder and CEO at Taboola, adds: “We’re thrilled to be working with OMS, a leading online marketing specialist in Germany. By showing personalised videos across the various pages, users across the OMS network will discover new videos they are interested in and stay on the site longer. At the same time, OMS will have full editorial control to ensure that every recommendation reflects the freshness and quality required by the various publications.”

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.

Retargeting companies have been incredibly successful in display. How are Struq going to remain competitive as more companies seek to own the bottom-of-the-funnel budget?

The real time advertising market is evolving extremely fast, and there are many success stories we note and respect amongst our peers. Our real competitive strength comes from understanding the behavioural patterns which makes users likely to purchase. This enables Struq to deliver relevant, personalised video and display ads to consumers as well as post click performance for advertisers.

We have also invested heavily in building out a talented team within the company. Genuine, competitive advantage is being able to have a team that can adapt and innovate as fast as the ever changing needs of the market. At Struq we will continue to seek out the best talent to meet and exceed the evolving needs of our clients and consumers.

Does Struq need to move more up the purchase funnel, and look at prospecting instead of retargeting a client’s data set?

Yes – and we offer this now. We apply our core piece of technology – understanding the behavioural patterns which makes users likely to purchase – across the purchase funnel for advertisers.

Struq’s Ad Personalization platform enables an advertiser to persuade an audience at any stage of the purchase funnel. This extends beyond retargeting to delivering personalised ads to prospective users at the top of the funnel.

Advertisers using Struq across the purchase funnel benefit from unique insight into which combination of ad elements, products, placements and content persuaded users to perform an advertiser’s desired action. This insight provided by Struq provides advertisers with information on what persuaded a user to buy their products. Marketers can then apply that knowledge across their marketing channels to make their budget work more effectively.

How are Struq going to work with agencies? Can you really work with agency holding groups? Is it possible?

We have significant relationships with many of the largest agencies and holding groups where we provide the tools for agencies to personalize display and video ads for new and existing users. Agencies want to use the best of breed technologies to deliver the greatest post click ROI for their advertisers, and we are really fortunate to work with so many great agencies.

Is Struq looking to move into video retargeting? Is this a huge area for growth?

We are active in online video advertising. We’re focused on delivering personalized ads against audiences, and this includes audiences who are found on video inventory. We want to deliver personalized ads across any format and on any device to persuade that individual to click and buy an advertiser’s products – video is a big part of that.

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.

Ironically, just about every ‘Big Data’ platform borrows a process called ‘MapReduce’, which was released into the wild by Google’s own Labs division back in 2004. This technology underpins Big Data systems’ ability to break big problems into very many, much smaller, problems (the ‘Map’) that can each be sent out to individual servers. The ‘Reduce’ step subsequently matches up all of the results into a single response. This is the not-so-secret-sauce of Big Data – with enough servers, even the biggest queries can be trivial. With the core mechanics of Big Data largely understood, the question becomes where to keep data, and where to run the analytics. This is where “The Cloud” comes in.

Cloud-based services continue to generate a lot of hype. Why? The ability to simply throw problems at massive pools of servers ‘somewhere else’ definitely has its charms! The main benefit from services like Google’s and Amazon’s helps two types of businesses – those that need to avoid up front capex costs, and those that have highly variable or short term needs. An example of the former would include digital startups like a DSP; while an example of the latter would be a small animation studio that needs a high number of machines to render animation on a variable basis. In cases like this, the economics of cloud services are hard to challenge – but this is only part of the story.

In the case of businesses like Havas, our Artemis™ platform has massive long term data requirements that are continually growing. We store historical data for every individual touch point between consumers and our clients’ advertising, which can date back years. We also hold summarised performance data running back ten years. This amounts to a LOT of data. In addition, analytics – the process of creating insights through data queries – is endemic throughout our data. In cases like this, the economics of paying cloud services for data storage over time, and paying compute time or data access charges for analytics is not such an easy sell.

Data requirements in digital are constantly evolving; there seems to be literally no limit to the data that can be used for marketing analytics and reporting. Services like Google’s BigQuery and Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce offering are brilliant, as they offer firmly established, stable ways for companies to find advantage in data. Cloud based analytics also drives innovation by massively altering the economics of Big Data for startups and those businesses with heavily fluctuating analytical demands.

Is Google BigQuery a revolution or an evolution then? I’d say that it’s simply an evolutionary step forwards, yet a very welcome one that re-aligns Google within the Big Data space. The broader emerging ability to extract value from Big Data however – that is most certainly a revolution driving change throughout organisations within and far outside of marketing. It’s very early days and the potential can only be imagined today.

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.

- Your phone as your wallet – O2 Wallet enables consumers to digitise their existing debit and credit cards to pay for things via their mobile. Customers can load money into their O2 Wallet account via one of their debit cards, by receiving a Money Message or with cash at more than 30,000 locations including O2 stores, PayPoint and epay retail outlets. O2 Wallet’s transaction history helps consumers keep on top of their expenditure with texts alerts when the account balance changes; a 30-day payment history on the app; and a 12-month history online.

- O2 Money Account Card – O2 Wallet offers both a physical and a virtual O2 Money Account Card. Both are based on a Visa prepaid account. The virtual O2 Money Visa Account Card can be used for online shopping. Consumers can also apply for the physical O2 Money Visa Account Card to pay for things on the high street or withdraw cash from ATMs. This is a contactless card allowing tap-and-go payments.

James Le Brocq, Managing Director at O2 Money, coments: “O2 Wallet delivers the benefits of mobile money to more UK consumers than any other product or service currently available. With O2 Wallet, it’s easier to transfer money, track expenditure and pay swiftly and securely, all using your mobile. We believe it will transform the way people manage their finances and spend money.”

Additional functionality will soon enable consumers to use O2 Wallet to top-up mobile airtime, and buy train tickets.

Le Brocq continues: “We recognise that security is absolutely key. O2 Wallet has been trialled internally for months and has undergone extensive ‘stress-testing’ with security experts. In addition to PINs and passwords, all personal details and financial data are held on remote central servers rather than on the mobile device itself. This, we believe, is the safest and most secure way to deliver mobile payment services.”

Sandra Alzetta, Senior Vice President of Mobile at Visa Europe, adds: “We welcome the launch of O2 Wallet and are delighted to be enabling the m-commerce experience with a Visa prepaid card. The new service creates an easy and efficient online payment experience for mobile device users, supporting the continued growth of m-commerce in the UK, as well as encouraging contactless payments among those users who choose to take a physical card. This announcement is another step towards an integrated future where the way we pay reflects the full potential of these new technologies.”

Bub-bye! FT Switching Off iOS App

The Financial Times is preparing to kill off its iPad and iPhone app for good, signalling its final conversion from executable-app to web-app publishing.

The news publisher launched a HTML5 web app and pulled its iOS app off iTunes Store in mid-2011 but left the iOS version usable by subscribers with it already installed.

Now, however, the FT will render the iOS app unusable by its remaining users over the next month, as it completes its HTML5 migration. It is taking the step because only a relative handful of users remain and because it can no longer continue to maintain features inside the app. The publisher recently acquired Assanka, the development house which coded its HTML5 web app, and this week announced it had been rebranded “FT Labs”.

The outfit will “bring the FT further into the web development community”, according to founder Andrew Betts’ press release, and is staging an FT hack day on May 23 and 24. The web app user-base overtook that of the iOS app within three months of launch.

Rubicon Project Continues to Grow European Team

Rubicon Project is continuing to expand its European operations. New recruits Valerie Latronche and Alexandra Jarry, will support premium online publishers in Europe to monetise their digital advertising inventory using REVV, Rubicon Project’s real-time trading platform. REVV enables publishers to connect with buyers and sell ad inventory in real time through the best channel for the highest price possible, while protecting their brand.

In addition, after a year of working for Rubicon Project as director of publisher development, Julien Gardes is promoted to Country Manager, France.

His additional responsibilities will include managing and growing the Rubicon Project team in Paris and working with demand partners, such as agency trading desks, demand side platforms and online advertising networks. Gardes will continue to develop Rubicon Project’s client base in Southern Europe as well as recruiting further account managers for the France office and relocating the team to larger premises.

Joining Rubicon Project as an Account Director based in Paris and reporting to Gardes, Valerie Latronche will advise premium publishers in France on their online monetisation strategies.

She spent three years at Microsoft in Paris specialising in performance marketing. This included managing the Microsoft Media Network for two years analysing and optimising key campaigns followed by a year as Targeting and Performance Display Specialist. Prior to Microsoft, Latronche spent three years at MIVA as a Publisher Account Manager and started her career at Referencement.com

A French national, Alexandra Jarry, brings two years of marketing agency experience and a masters degree in international business management and marketing to her new role as a Yield Manager. She will support premium publishers across Europe from Rubicon Project’s London office.

Jay Stevens, General Manager and Vice President International, comments: “Both Valerie and Alex bring excellent understanding of strategies for maximising yields for the publishers we work with across Europe. In particular Valerie has many years of experience working at Microsoft and MIVA.

“Julien Gardes brings over a decade of online advertising experience to Rubicon Project, including many years of working of the demand side of our industry. In the past year he has become a trusted advisor for publishers in France, Spain and The Netherlands and has been instrumental in bringing on more than thirty of France’s premium publishers onto the REVV platform, including TF1, Nouvel Observateur and Dailymotion. There’s simply no one better suited to driving the market towards real time trading in France.”

The Telegraph Signs up to AdGent Digital’s Tablet Ad Platform AdTouch

AdGent Digital, a global media and technology company, has signed up Telegraph Media Group to its recently launched tablet-based advertising platform, AdTouch. The newspaper is now running AdTouch ad units for users accessing their content via iPads.

The AdTouch +Slide unit, gives tablet users visiting www.telegraph.co.uk the ability to engage with ads “tablet-style” using all of the tactile functions of the iPad including tap, touch, slide, pinch and zoom to reveal new content. This experience enables users to engage with content without being forced to leave the page.

Cameron Yuill, CEO and founder of AdGent Digital, comments: “We created the AdTouch platform so publishers could fill their ad unit inventory with iPad compatible ads. We are firm believers in the future of the tablet as the premier device to view content. Research by Gartner predicted that there will be 665 million tablets in use by 2016. We created AdTouch for brands to tell their story in a much more creative way using all the functionality the iPad allows. We are excited that TMG has embraced AdTouch which enables their advertisers to use everything the iPad has to offer.”

James Brown, Digital Sales Director, TMG, adds: “At TMG we continuously strive to drive innovation and creativity. AdTouch ticks both these boxes through combining the use of highly impactful rich media creative and harnessing the power of touch screen handheld devices, this enables users to have an immersive experience and truly interact with the advertiser brand.”

AdTouch uses HTML5 IAB standard-size ads to serve touchable, non-intrusive rich media ads.
AdGent recently announced its AdTouch launch with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) “Earth Hour” campaign.

Criteo Launches “Code of Duty” Competition to Find Europe’s Finest Engineers

Criteo, a global leader in performance display advertising, announced last week the launch of its “Code of Duty” competition. Back for a second year, the initiative aims to attract engineers to the company by putting them through a series of complex algorithmic tests. The competition also highlights the company’s recruitment drive in line with continued business growth throughout 2012.

Criteo is looking for approximately 100 engineers to strengthen its Research and Development team based at CriteoLabs’ Paris office. This European R&D hub has already attracted researchers from all over the world, and aims to boost the performance of the predictive algorithms that Criteo applies to digital advertising. This technological progress is of fundamental importance for the company, which is dependent on innovation to ensure that its campaigns for advertisers are even more effective.

To attract brilliant and highly-motivated candidates, the company has set up a coding competition which invites participants to solve a complex algorithmic problem using any of the following computer programmes: Java, C++, C#, C, Javascript, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, VB.NET, Objective-C or Lua. The competition is open to applicants across the European Union.

Franck Le Ouay, Co-founder of Criteo, comments: “We’re proud of the success of last year’s ‘Code of Duty’ competition and are pleased to repeat this innovative contest, as it enables us to attract the best talent. This year, we’re looking for 250 people, including about 100 for R&D. Although our headquarters are in Palo Alto, we’ve chosen Paris as our research centre because France is a very attractive location in terms of innovation.”

To register and for more information about Code of Duty, visit www.code-of-duty.com