It is this time of year when we traditionally head to the BFI Southbank for ATS London; a day-long feast of madtech content. Most then hop on a plane the next day to Cologne for a 48-hour bonanza of networking and socialising.  Unfortunately due to Covid-19, both the Glastonbury of ad tech, namely ATS London, and the physical DMEXCO have been canceled.  Sure, virtual events fill a tiny slice of this empty void – but ultimately it’s a bit like eating dry [...]

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2019 marked a decade since the inaugural ATS London event, and the tenth anniversary edition of the conference certainly did not disappoint. A host of experts, ranging from ad tech aficionados to global publishers, addressed the focal challenges of the year, which are perhaps the most severe to have ever faced the industry. The day started strongly, with ExchangeWire CEO Ciaran O’Kane, in conversation with industry titan Sir Martin Sorrell. From S4 Capital’s mission to populism, Sorrell reserved his most stinging [...]

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The 10th year of ATS London will take place on 9th September and, as is the case every year, it’s been an exciting, yet challenging time crafting our agenda and finding experts to join us on stage. The biggest challenge: diversity. Holding a mirror up to the industry Ad tech is far from diverse. Google’s tech positions are 74.3% male, and 74.1% of leadership positions are also held by men. Similarly, at Facebook, 77% of tech roles are held by men, with [...]

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We are just three weeks away from Europe’s ad tech week. Our ten-year anniversary of ATS London kicks off the week on 9 September. As ever, we have a serious selection of big name Madtech speakers, including Sir Martin Sorrell, Insider Inc’s Jana Meron, ITV’s Lara Izlan, Xandr’s Michael Rubenstein, as well as the best minds from agencies, publishers and brands. We are very close to selling out – so make sure you get your ticket today. ATS London is followed by [...]

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As we approach the 10th anniversary of ATS London, ExchangeWire hosted a preview of what will be discussed and debated on the day. Paul Gubbins (pictured below), global programmatic strategy lead at Unruly, covers the hot topics at the preview, and teases what is set to come at ATS itself. I have been to eight out of the ten ATS events in London and I think it’s safe to say, each year it gets bigger and the debate more informative and [...]

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The industry is literally being held together with a thin layer of ad tech adhesive tape, namely the Chrome browser. Much of the current programmatic demand is being funnelled into Google Chrome – where cookie matching, frequency capping, retargeting and measurement is still possible. Safari has become the wasteland of programmatic buying with demand falling away. That can be seen in the disparity of eCPMs between Chrome and Safari. The industry was put on alert a few months back when it [...]

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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. The convergence of ad [...]

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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 of established [...]

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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? Absolutely not. Despite the [...]

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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 our third edition of The Wire, and [...]

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