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Google Extends €150m Olive Branch; Cuts Inventory Deals with Twitter & Baidu; Adobe buys Tumri

In this week’s ExchangeWire Weekly European Roundup: Google sets up £100m-plus fund for publishers; Inventory deals struck between Google, Twitter, and Baidu; Adobe buys Tumri.

Google plans €150m publisher partnership, and more…

Under scrutiny from European regulators for the alleged abuse of its dominance of the search market, Google this week conceded it had made mistakes in dealings with publisher 'partners', and announced it is to team with eight Europe-based publishers.

The Digital News Initiative is a tie-up with eight publishers including: The Financial Times, The Guardian, Les Echos in France, NRC Media in the Netherlands, El Pais in Spain, La Stampa in Italy and, Faz and Die Zeit in Germany.

The revelation was made by the search giant earlier this week when it admitted it was part of the same "information ecosystem", and pledged the sum of €150m to help identify more sustainable business models to increase revenue, "traffic and audience engagement”.

Carlo D’Asaro Biondo, Google, head of strategic relationships in Europe, added: "We are determined to play our part in ongoing dialogue and business partnership with the aim of building something more sustainable."

Elsewhere, Ad Week reported it is to launch a data management platform (DMP) that would complete the last piece of the jigsaw in the search giant's ad tech stack.

The DMP will help brands target ads at more relevant audiences, and is due to be called DoubleClick Audience Centre. Google confirmed the developments, but decline to comment further.

Inventory deals struck between Google, Twitter and Baidu

Also this week, news of a deal between Google and Twitter that would see the pair offer Twitter inventory available through DoubleClick Bid Manager, as well as offer a cross-device attribution model, helped round-off a mixed week for the social network.

As news of its (disappointing) quarterly revenue of $436m for the last quarter (analysts had expected $456m) leaked online, Twitter helped ease the blow by announcing the tie-up with Google. This involves Twitter inventory (i.e. Promoted Tweets) becoming available through DoubleClick Bid Manager, making it easier for advertisers who prefer to centralise their buying through DBM.

In addition, the pair have combined to make it possible for advertisers on the Twitter platform to use DoubelClick to measure when conversions result from views and other actions on Twitter.

Later this year, advertisers will be able to use a new attribution model in DoubleClick to get a fuller understanding of how Twitter ads served on mobile or desktop drive conversions for them across the web.

The same announcement also saw Twitter announce the purchase of cross-device targeting company TellApart in a deal reported to be worth $533m, making it one of the biggest in its history.

"Consumers now move fluidly between apps, devices and platforms, and we need measurement models that take this behavior into account. For marketers to truly understand the consumer path to conversion across multiple devices and platforms, measurement systems have to move beyond traditional attribution models," reads a Twitter blog post detailing its latest positioning.

Elsewhere, Google also announced a similar tie-up this week with Chinese search engine Baidu, agencies who use DoubleClick Search to manage ad campaigns across multiple search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo Japan—can extend their reach to Baidu users globally.

Adobe announces Tumri purchase

Meanwhile, Adobe this week used its European summit to announce it has acquired the Tumri advertising technology (also known as Ensemble) from Collective, to extend its programmatic advertising capabilities.

This technology will help advertisers scale the impact of their display ads by providing a missing link in the current advertising process: the ability to serve the most effective creative content during the programmatic ad buying process, according to the company.

With Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO), advertisers have a powerful tool to seamlessly build, personalise and deliver creative assets in real time to drive higher user engagement and conversion rates across devices. This will allow customers to scale and optimise ad creative through Adobe Media Optimiser in a way never before possible.