The early emergence of publisher co-ops in France underlines the appetite for programmatic display advertising in the market; although issues around audience fragmentation and the treatment of consumers' personal data cloud the way ahead. All these issues and more will be debated today at ATS Paris as ExchangeWire probes delegates and presenters on their opinions.

According to a report from France’s Syndicat des Régies Internet and PricewaterhouseCoopers, programmatic investments in the market tripled between the first half of 2012 and 2013, before rising a further 49% in the first half of last year.

This desire has been spurred by the emergence of the country's two publisher co-ops, Audience Square and La Place Media, which initially let publishers sell unsold inventory via a central hub for advertisers to find added value.

Although, such a model of selling inventory has brought with it historic concerns from media owners over price-erosion. Plus, the challenges posed by the rise of mobile media consumption (namely issues around measurement and targeting on such devices), along with additional concerns over transparency, do continue to dampen the otherwise unbridled enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm for innovation

Fabien Magalon, La Place Media, managing director, and ATS Paris panellist, argues to the contrary. He confidently states that his publishers have seen a 70% increase in CPM rates since the inception of the co-op in late 2013.

Ironically, the online advertising industry has been way behind other industry verticals when it comes to adopting disruptive models and automated technology; just look at Uber in transport, or Airbnb in accommodation. Rubicon Project, which powers La Place Media, wants to show how automation can do the same with the online advertising industry, according to Julien Gardes, the outfit's country manager, France, and ATS presenter.

He adds: “We are trying to make it clear to publishers that there is an equation between automation and value. One of the things we try to assure publishers is that the more complex and sophisticated the technology becomes, the more people it takes to run it [thus the adoption of such technologies doesn’t threaten jobs].

"Cannibalisation [where automated sale may have 'taken' budgets from publishers' direct sales businesses] may have happened in the past, but we are trying to show how, with things like automated guaranteed, it means that won't happen."

For instance, the adoption of this technology has helped French publishers monetise traffic from across the Francophone world, according to Jardes. This is an example of how premium publishers in smaller countries (i.e. those that don't have a population of hundreds of millions) can achieve the scale necessary to compete against web-based media owners, such as Facebook and Google.

"In many ways, countries such as France are leading their US counterparts in the use of such technologies," adds Gardes. "The smaller the country, the more innovative you have to be."

Guidance still needed

Jason Keller, Ve Interactive, head of digital advertising, France, whose company is in the midst of building a media trading team in the country, recounted the proceedings of a recent IAB France meeting where the "collective conscious" was to invest more in programmatic advertising.

He added: "Many advertisers you speak to here want to build their own DMP [data management platform], or outsource it to a third party. In one of the meetings recently, the IAB discussed a study that revealed that 50% of advertisers want to invest more in programmatic [and ad tech in general], but 65% said they don't have a strategy to do so."

Keller went on to say: "A quarter of display advertising last year was sold using programmatic, and in France that's expected to rise to about 35-40% in 2015. That doesn't mean that ad [price] rates won't go up too much, of course they will, in fact the term 'unsold' [inventory] here means very little now."

Anne-Sophie Lizzani, a journalist of OffreMedia's 100% Media, and ATS Paris panellist, says the emergence of Deal-IDs is helping publishers to sell more premium ad formats (such as homepage takeovers) via the publisher co-ops.

Erik Marie Bion, Microsoft Advertising, general manager, France, and ATS Paris panellist, agrees with Lizzanni's assertion. He says: "In the last year we have considerably expanded our activity using deals and deal ID technology to offer and increased range of services, and have become more transparent on our inventory within the Exchange at the domain level. We enable contextual deals, and a range of other data opportunities. We have also being experimenting with access to formats in the Nordics, and look forward to bring this opportunity to France in the coming months.

"Technology and data give advertisers real-time visibility, use of their own data, greater mastery of their media purchases and an increasing variety of formats, they are willing to pay higher CPM for this.

"In the last two-to-three years, the quality of inventory has increased. We are no longer dealing with the distinction between premium and long-tail, but in a distinction between open auction and deal id’s. We continue to enrich our offering with formats and additional inventory sources and developing our offering programmatically."

Data regulation

However, this enthusiasm for enhanced data has been accompanied by increased scrutiny from the country's data protection body, the CNIL; which implemented pan-European data-privacy laws that require the consent of users before cookies can be used to target them.

The implementation of these laws kicked off last September with the advent of the 'Cookie Sweep Day', something that spread a degree of panic, according to market sources, as the CNIL reserved the right to issue on-the-spot inspections to ensure publishers were compliant with regulations.

This drive (in-part) prompted the publication of a guidance document by the country's IAB chapter, which aimed to assure the public on how their online browsing habits were being used.

Despite concerns of a potentially overzealous privacy enforcement, voiced to ExchangeWire by sources based in the US and UK, Ve Interactive's Keller describes the regime there as: "not that bad".

He adds: "Yes, you need to be completely transparent [with consumers and advertisers] I think everyone realises that if you don't act like that then data will become increasingly expensive and it will be that much tougher to get."