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ExchangeWire European Weekly Round-Up

ExchangeWire rounds up some of the top stories in the European ad tech scene, and in this week's edition: Google's Euro woes continue in Europe; ExchangeWire Research division unveiled; AppNexus mans up in Europe to woo publishers. 

Google's pain falls mainly in Spain (for this week at least) 

It's been another week of European woe for the world's biggest digital advertising firm, with this week's announcement that it is to shut its Google News service in Spain prior to the introduction of the introduction of new intellectual property laws there.

Google is to shut its news service, which lets users search aggregated news coverage from the world's publishers, there on 16 December, 2014, ahead of the introduction of legislation that would allow Spanish publishers to charge Google for using their content in such a fashion from next month.

In a blog post announcing the update, Richard Gingras, Head of Google News, said: "This new legislation requires every Spanish publication to charge services like Google News for showing even the smallest snippet from their publications, whether they want to or not. As Google News itself makes no money (we do not show any advertising on the site) this new approach is simply not sustainable."

The development tops a year of regulatory hardship for Google in Europe, where it has come under fire on multiple fronts, most recently with lawmakers in the Central European Parliament proposing that Google's search business is deconstructed across the 27 EU Member States. This call runs concurrently with a four-year-long anti-trust investigation into Google's dominance of the search industry in Europe, plus various tussles with individual European States across the Continent.

ExchangeWire Research to delve deeper into Euro ad tech scene

ExchangeWire is launching a new research division of the company, reflecting the growing prominence of programmatic advertising among ‘mainstream marketers’, by helping them better understand how it fits into the wider marketing mix, with Rebecca Muir (formerly of Google, Marin Software, and Quantcast) heading up the new unit.

Rebecca Muir, ExchangeWire, head of research and analysis, will head up the new division, called ExchangeWire Research, which will provide exclusive, global and localised research, plus analysis of media buying trends, in both the ad tech and marketing technology sectors. ExchangeWire Research will be available to members of the advertising and media industries on a subscription basis, where they can access exclusive content, as well as partner with ExchangeWire Research to produce bespoke market-leading content focusing on specific markets.

ExchangeWire unveiled research earlier this year with its inaugural European Programmatic Survey, which identified a huge latent demand for data-led strategies, but that a lack of skills and awareness of the appropriate technologies was holding up the uptake of such strategies (see below).

If you are interested in learning more about the services offered by ExchangeWire Research, please send your queries to research@exchangewire.com.

AppNexus steps up Euro publisher business with senior hire

AppNexus this week announced the appointment of European ad tech veteran Jean-Christophe Conti to run its pan-European publisher sales business as it seeks to curry favour with premium publishers here post its purchase of Open AdStream from Xaxis.

Conti, a long-time Yahoo and Right Media executive, has been appointed as VP publishers sales, EMEA, and will report to Ryan Christensen, AppNexus, GM, publishers, and joins the team as it is rumoured to be heading for a 2015 flotation (although the company itself has yet to comment on these rumours publicly).

Christensen said: "AppNexus is making a substantial, multi-year investment in the global publisher ad technology market, including the acquisition of the Open Ad Stream® premium publisher ad server, major upgrades to our Deals and Packages capabilities, and the creation of a dedicated Publishers business unit.  JC’s experience will be an incredible asset to AppNexus in Europe and to the publisher clients we service.”

Pixalate releases 'Trust Index' 

PixalateIndexPixalate this week unveiled its Global Seller Trust Index in a bid to boost confidence in the industry sector by clearly pointing out those who can be trusted, as the ad tech sector comes under even greater scrutiny.

Google, OpenX and Rubicon Project have been named as the top-three inventory sources in the top-20 list, which indicates inventory quality and ad performance, along with classic reach ranking based on the visibility of over 100 billion monthly impressions and delivers ratings based upon inventory quality and ad performance it has visibility of (see chart).

Jalal Nasir, founder and CEO, Pixalate, said: “Trust is fundamental to the success of this market, and that calls for evaluation of sellers based on quality measures that go beyond traditional reach metrics.”

Nasir has contributed a number of headlines exposing the intricacies of some of the more nefarious elements of the ad tech industry to ExchangeWire in the last 12 months.

In an earlier article on the various types of 'bot traffic' he commented: "Forecasts suggest ad fraud could cost marketers as much as $11bn in 2014, a 22% increase over 2013. Notwithstanding any unintentional inflation in these stats, it’s clear that ad fraud is running amok.

"This leaves both marketers and end users at risk, because the fraudsters are able to stay one step ahead. In order to solve the ad fraud problem, we need to first understand its complexity, diversity and sophistication. Here’s a comprehensive look at ad fraud techniques that web security experts have discovered." Read more here.

Europe languishes in ad spend growth predictions

Zenith Optimedia this week announced its latest forecasts for ad spend figures in 2015, predicting a 6% year-on-year growth rate to hit $545bn for the 12-month period, representing a slight decline in advertiser confidence, stemming mainly from Europe.

Advertising growth in Latin America (13%) will lead the global advertising economy, whereas adspend in Western Europe will languish at a mere 2.4% by comparison. "For the last few years the ad markets at the periphery of the Eurozone have been by far the worst‐performing in Europe, which was why we separated them out in a bloc called the Peripheral Eurozone. Between 2007 and 2013, adspend fell 28% in Italy, 41% in Ireland, 43% in Portugal, 47% in Spain and 62% in Greece. Over this period the Eurozone’s core markets remained stable: adspend shrank by just 2% in France and by 3% in Germany, reads the study.  

Zenith.Forecasts