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Advertisers Benefit from Local Data Expertise & Cross-Country Consistency: Q&A with Paul Martin, Xaxis EMEA

In association with Xaxis

What does the changing face of data signal for the future of advertising? Are advertisers maximising data and how is it being utilised differently from market to market? What role will AI play? Paul Martin, vice president analytics and insight, EMEA, Xaxis, discusses this and more with ExchangeWire.

ExchangeWire: How is the way data is being utilised throughout Europe evolving?

Paul Martin: More data is becoming available throughout Europe to help plan and target advertising. I have also seen increasing recognition by marketers of the value that data can provide to inform smarter decisions for advertising. Both trends have been leading to increased data usage by brands, making their advertising more relevant with consumers and their investments more efficient. However, a recent study commissioned by Xaxis, in partnership with ExchangeWire, to better understand the data landscape across Europe, highlighted that data usage and availability is still relatively fragmented. According to the findings, some markets like the UK and France benefit from a wider range of data options, while in other markets, such as Poland and Denmark, fewer options are available.

The study also found that while most marketers (69%) seem to be able to source the data they desire, fewer stated they were using data for planning and targeting. The main reasons given for such a reduction appear to be poor data quality, a lack of time to prepare the data, data volumes being too small in some countries, and a lack of infrastructure to enable data usage in planning and targeting platforms.

At Xaxis, we have always recognised the value of having local teams across EMEA to identify not just high-quality local media, but also the best local datasets. We invested very early on into an audience DMP, which has allowed us to make user profiles more consistent across Europe and help mitigate data gaps observed across the region. Our approach not only benefits our local clients across 25 European countries, but we also see our global clients benefit from both our combined local data expertise, and cross-country consistency.

Looking ahead, I see growth in data utilisation continuing to rise. This may be tempered slightly by some uncertainty surrounding how Europe’s GDPR and revised ePrivacy Directive will be interpreted and enforced across our region.

How is advertisers’ own first-party data affecting this? Are advertisers more in tune with their own data and the insights/opportunities they can leverage from it?

Clients I have been working with are increasingly recognising how their own customer data can contribute, not just to improving advertising effectiveness and efficiency, but also informing their campaign strategy during planning stages.

I am seeing that sectors like e-commerce, travel, and telecommunications, where their online data tends to be rich, are most active and sophisticated with their own data. It seems that other sectors, like FMCG, have ambitions with their data but, in my experience, tend to be only just starting to learn how to use it.

For brands starting out on the journey to leverage their own data for advertising, there are certain points that need to be navigated: how to source and store data, connect it to advertising systems, comply with data protection laws, commercial related concerns, and the time and effort it takes to create segment selection and measurement programmes. For Xaxis, learnings from working with scores of these data activations over the last six years have shaped our audience DMP, [m]Insights, to easily handle different forms of brand data and scale them through lookalike algorithms ready for targeting. Our expertise means we know how, where, and when to use data to help our clients plan and execute their campaigns and optimise results.

How do walled gardens play into the challenges marketers face?

Brands want value. Working within a walled garden can help. Certainly, many of the large walled gardens (Google, Facebook, and Amazon) have been providing compelling products, reflected in their recent strong growth in market share – advertising dollars for Google and Facebook, and e-commerce sales for Amazon. The walled gardens’ direct consumer relationships can provide brands with precise targeting and cross-device measurement within their own ecosystems, which can add value to the brands’ advertising strategy.

However, challenges arise when brands try to obtain a more complete view of their advertising performance across walled gardens, as third-party measurement is often not allowed. Recent high-profile, data-related mishaps haven’t helped and have made brands a little more nervous about relying on these walled-garden solutions. Having said that, innovation in our industry is constant and rapid; non-walled garden operators are not ‘standing still’. Ad tech companies are creating universal IDs, such as [m]Platform’s [m]ID, so that they can provide a top-down holistic view of campaigns.

AI is becoming an increasingly trendy term. How will it benefit the data landscape and what should we expect from it in the future?

There is certainly a lot of talk on this topic lately, ranging from upbeat optimism promising perfect, relevant advertising, to gloomy, pessimistic predictions that automation will diminish the need for people in the workplace! I suspect the future lies somewhere in between.

Personally, I find Andrew Ng's (a leading figure in the AI community) '<1 second' adage a useful starting guide on what AI can and cannot do. What he says is that, for any given task, if it takes a person less than one second to do then it is probably something AI can automate, e.g. identifying a cat in multiple photos. Sure you can poke holes in this, but as a quick rule of thumb it’s a useful starting point.

With programmatic media buying occurring in milliseconds, AI (although really 'machine learning') techniques play a vital part in ensuring superior performance for advertising campaigns. It can automate a higher quantity of decisions to predict outcomes and price impressions optimally to drive those outcomes. However, not all media decision making takes less than one second! At Xaxis, we recognise the important role our media experts bring to each client’s campaign and believe that a combination of our AI techniques and top media talent helps us to achieve successful outcomes for our clients.

Nonetheless, I am continually surprised at the rapid progress of the world of AI. I recently came across the ‘click-o-tron’ website, the content of which is completely automated via a neural network. It’s light-hearted fun, but also quite thought provoking once you read the accompanying blog on how it has been constructed. Could a neural network automate clickbait?