We sent out a mailer a few weeks ago to our GDPR-compliant subscriber list, titled ‘9 Reasons to Love the Industry. This was to highlight our optimism about the industry and encourage you (dear reader) to attend ATS London this year. Number seven on our upbeat list refers to the opportunity for the current crop of European madtech startups. Never have I seen a bigger opportunity. We are heading into a new epoch for digital marketing.

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2018 has been the most eventful year I have seen in this industry, since the great ad-tech panic buy of 2007. A number of factors have contributed to this. Firstly, the growing threat and power of the ‘BAT-FANG’ (China’s Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent [BAT], along with the USA’s Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google [FANG]) has forced the hand of big legacy telcos and TV companies globally. The realisation that these tech companies are out to destroy the business [...]

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Holding groups are under pressure. Their business model has been questioned and undermined by everyone over the past 12 months – from trade-press hacks, to auditors, to client bodies, to grandstanding FMCG CMOs. The relevancy of the agency function has never been under such intense scrutiny. Professor Galloway predicts hundreds of thousands of agency job losses in the coming years, as clients move more digital ad spend to the Facebook-Google-Amazon axis. So, is the agency model finished? [...]

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We are pretty opinionated at ExchangeWire, and we encourage opinionated conversation from our readership. We consider ourselves a forum for the industry to debate issues of the day, connected to the business of advertising and marketing technology. However, there’s one topic that you don’t hear much from ExchangeWire on – and that’s gender balance. I’m not saying we’re silent on the matter – Becca Muir wrote a great opinion piece on the issue in [...]

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For one week every year the global ad tech community descends on London and Cologne to feast on product releases, ad tech rumour, and granular content. This year, it all starts in London on Monday, 11 September, with the world’s most-respected and longest-running programmatic event, ATS London, now in its ninth year and almost sold out! Next comes dmexco, the biggest ad tech exhibition in the world. This two-day extravaganza takes place in Cologne and is described by [...]

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ATS London is now in its eighth year and I still remember our first event vividly. It took place in the old Centre Point building and, like all of our ATS events since, it was oversold. The great Mike Nolet, former AppNexus CTO, spoke. As did Ben Barokas. There was a joint keynote from Marco Bertozzi and the late great Kurt Hecht. Louisa Wong, then a publisher exec at Sky, was picking fights with everyone on the buy [...]

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