ExchangeWire rounds up some of the biggest stories in the European digital advertising space. In this week’s edition: IAB UK Ad Spend report; Appointments at The Trade Desk and Plista; StickyADS.tv tackles fraud; and Adform launches header bidding solution. 

UK ad spend tops £8.6bn

New record ad spend in the UK: the IAB UK Digital Adspend report has found that advertisers spent £8.61bn on digital advertising in 2015, in the UK alone. That is an increase of 16.4% year-on-year – the highest increase rate since 2008 (17.1%).

The big winner of ad spend growth is mobile: the amount spent on mobile advertising rose by a whopping 60% in the last year, the study found. The total ad spend came up to £2.63bn. Mobile now accounts for almost one-third of all digital advertising.

Video and content/native advertising increased by 50% year-on-year; with video raking in £711m in ad spend, while content/native is even surpassing video's ad spend with £776m.

“The increasing array of devices people use to go online has helped digital ad spend hit another gear as advertisers look to reach them and time spent online increases”, says Tim Elkington, chief strategy officer at UK Internet Advertising Bureau. “Smartphones are the major driving force behind this, as people increasingly use them for activities they used to do on desktop, from searching and shopping, to social and watching video.”
The number of internet-enabled devices rose by 12% in the last year, with connected TV the biggest winner, increasing by 27%, followed by smartphones (21%), and laptops (18%).

Programmatic is a beneficiary of the rising ad spend numbers, too. The majority of display ads are now traded programmatically, the IAB found. Its share rose from 47% in 2014, to 60% (£1.60bn) in 2015.

“There’s a shift in sales from networks to RTB exchanges, a shift from direct to programmatic direct, and from open to private marketplaces”, says Dan Bunyan, senior manager at PwC, who conducted the study. ”It’s almost gone full circle, in terms of the desire for a more controlled environment in which to sell. We predict programmatic will account for 80-90% of display ad sales by 2019.”

New European MD for The Trade Desk

US-based DSP The Trade Desk has appointed Sacha Berlik as new managing director EMEA. Berlik most recently served as general manager Europe at DSP provider DataXu.

The RT marketing pioneer founded mexad in 2008 and quickly expanded the platform to 50 staff and six offices worldwide and served as DataXu's general manager for Europe after mexad was acquired by DataXu in 2011.

After leaving DataXu in 2015, and taking a break, Berlik is now back to head up EMEA operations at US-platform The Trade Desk.

"Sacha has spent his career at the leading-edge of technology and has been a wonderful evangelist for the forward market in Europe”, said Rob Perdue, chief operating officer of The Trade Desk. “We're grateful to welcome his enthusiasm, expertise, and entrepreneurial spirit to the company."

Nicolas Bidon helms Plista

Media agency GroupM wants to boost the international business of its Berlin-based advertising technology subsidiary Plista. To this end, the company has filled the newly established position of a global CEO. Former UK head Nicolas Bidon takes on the new role, the company has announced.

Plista has been part of Group M since 2014 – or rather, its subsidiary Xaxis – and, as an ad tech company, provides and targets ads much like Taboola and Ligatus, for instance.

Starting in May, Bidon, who previously headed Plista and Xaxis in the UK, will take up his post as global CEO for Plista. Prior to Xaxis, Bidon was director brand display for Yahoo in the EMEA region.

Bidon will be not only be responsible for the overall business of Plista, but focus especially on the international expansion of the Berlin company. Concurrent with Bidon’s appointment, Plista is also opening a local office in Thailand, bringing the company to 11 markets in Europe and Asia in total. Expansion to the US is planned for later this year.

In Germany, Plista’s reporting structure is subsequently changing, too. Managing director Jana Kusick, who previously reported directly to Xaxis-CEO Brian Gleason, will now report to Bidon.

StickyADS preempts fraud with new feature

With its own plug and play pre-bid feature, designed to ensure efficient interoperability with top anti-fraud technologies, video ad tech provider StickyADS.tv is hoping to combat fraudulent traffic.

Partnering with Integral Ad Science, the StickyADS anti-fraud feature integrates Integral’s fraud detection script to identify and exclude bot traffic in real-time, even before trading ads.

“StickyADS.tv’s publisher-centric approach has led us to develop our proprietary pre-bid feature, ensuring that buyers only access valid inventory and to maximise the video inventory value”, explains Hervé Brunet, CEO and co-founder, StickyADS.tv.

Hence, the new feature nips invalid traffic in the bud by preemptively refusing to auction any invalidated impression across the global private video exchanges that work with StickyADS’ ad technology.

“According to our latest global Media Quality Report, ad fraud is a critical issue as it impacts up to 10% of global video ad impressions. Publishers need advanced tools to combat invalid traffic, particularly bot traffic, and to maintain and maximise the value of their video inventory”, says Niall Hogan, UK managing director at Integral Ad Science.

Additional anti-fraud technology partners will be brought into StickyADS’ platform at a later date.

Adform launches header bidding solution

Adform wants to simplify header bidding, and launches a new tech solution that is built on an open framework and scraps price tiers in favour of a real price system, the company has announced.

Built in modules that allow publishers to pick and choose from the Adform stack, the solution offers one simplified container tag for setup and installation, to make set-up and updates more efficient, and gives publishers greater control over demand while allowing advertisers access to a publisher’s entire inventory.

The new header bidding solution incorporates Adform’s Perfect Priority, which puts the best open RTB price drawn from header bidding in direct competition with the best guaranteed price, taking into account delivery requirements and deadlines to ensure publishers get the best price for their inventory.

“With the launch of header bidding, we are providing publishers with a simple, easy-to-implement solution that gives them complete access to the sum of the market’s demand for their inventory”, says Anthony Rhind, CSO, Adform. “They are able to gain exciting new controls and strip away limitations that have previously forced them to silo demand sources.”