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Simplifying Display Buying: Why Ad Tech Should Be Listening More To People Like Richard Dance

Tuesday, February 21st, 2012

We are publishing another panel excerpt from the recent ATS London event. The panel in question focused on bringing brand budget into the automated channel. The panel was moderated by ExchangeWire editor, Ciaran O’Kane, and speakers included: Nathan Woodman, COO, Adnetik; Richard Dance, Director of Digital Innovation, Blue Hive; Alex Rahaman, CEO at StrikeAd; Andy Ellenthal, CEO, Peer39; and Bruce Journey, DataXu CRO.

It gave Richard Dance the opportunity to challenge some of the widely held views of our – sometimes – “navel-gazing” ad tech community. He provides some interesting commentary from the brand’s perspective, particularly around the complexities of the current display eco-system. He notes that Facebook has made it easy for marketers, and as such continues to suck up a lot of brand budget. Dance works closely with Ford on their digital strategy. He’s exactly the kind of person that should be canvassed by ad tech companies on where display is falling down. If you can’t sit through the entire panel session, you should skip to 11:25 on the video clip – where Dance suggests the simplicity of the Facebook proposition is one of the key reasons why it is attracting brand spend.

Posted in Ad Exchange, Ad Network, Ad Server, Ad Trading, Agency, Agency Trading Desk, Demand Side Platform, Facebook Display, Marketer, Online Advertising, RTB | No Comments »

Is Facebook About To Own The Mobile Channel With Sponsored Stories?

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

Damian Routley is Director at Glow Digital Media Limited, a Facebook-buying solution based in London. Here he discusses the possible roll out of sponsored stories on Facebook’s mobile channel – and why with 400 million active mobile users FB will end up owning the mobile ad channel.

It seems only right to preface this piece with the following: the only people who know for sure what Facebook’s plans on mobile are, are themselves. And they’re not telling. Every request for confirmation or comment has been ignored, but through informal sources (internal and external) we can make a couple of assumptions.

Firstly, Facebook will monetise their mobile channel. Along the IPO path, the company will need to put in large building blocks of revenue. One of the easiest ways for them to do this is to activate this channel.

Facebook’s mobile audience is huge. In the UK they command over half of all mobile traffic by time and user numbers. In certain Asian markets, mobile penetration massively outweighs fixed internet. And globally, as the S-1 filing attests, they have 425m monthly active mobile users.

Over the past few months, Facebook has been placing a greater emphasis on Sponsored Stories – the ad types surfaced to your friends, triggered by your action (a check-in, like, comment, etc). This format is really effective because it’s not seen as a contrived effort to market to people. The introduction of these in the news feed this year introduced the concept to users so as not to surprise them when ads start appearing on their mobile.

What we know about Sponsored Stories within the news feed is that they’re manipulated to cause minimum intrusion by frequency capping to 1 per day. Because of this, and also because they’re more tuned to the social environment, the feedback is overwhelmingly positive.

As for how they will perform, it’s likely to be positive here too. They’ll come with the rich targeting that Facebook offers now: likes & interest, defined intent as well as demographic. Given the accuracy and portability, we will likely see time & location sensitive ad formats, special offers and coupons. Another extension with a powerful impact could be members getting member-incentivised special offers.

Yes, this method of targeting will likely bring an additional level of complexity to the already difficult ad channel. But in many ways, it’s easier – there’s no need for an ad server, you can buy it through the Facebook ads platform or one of the Ads API vendors. And because it’s likely that your conversion action will be based on Facebook you won’t need to worry about tracking cookies.

This is not a network play either – it’s designed to be a core part of the ecosystem and so performance will suffer if the rest of the ecosystem isn’t included in the plan. So if you’re just offering mobile, you’re missing out on the promoted actions that users will be seeing on Facebook.com.

Facebook ads on mobile will be a game changer. They’ll be one of the largest mobile ads offerings globally, will introduce compelling new formats at such scale that it will shift new and existing mobile dollars to their platform, and because of this they’ll work better than standard mobile display. And they’ll get to this position pretty much overnight. That is, if they do indeed decide to launch mobile as we all predict.

Posted in Facebook Display, Mobile Display, Online Advertising | No Comments »

Euro Round-Up: Glow Digital Added to AppNexus Market; DoubleClick Sees European Publisher Uplift in AdX; Weborama Experiences 48% Growth in Q4

Monday, February 6th, 2012

This is the first post in our new column Euro Round-up. Please forward all Euro market stories and press releases to press@exchangewire.com.

Glow Machine Now Available In The AppNexus App Marketplace, Adding Facebook Ad Buying In The Ad Stack

If you were to believe the hype machine, Facebook is set to take over the ad world. Glow Digital Media, a European based ad tech vendor, is clearly responding to the market with its new Glow Machine® app for the AppNexus marketplace, announced this week. Glow Machine® integrates Facebook media buys into the AppNexus Console user interface. The new app gives advertisers the ability to access and control FB campaigns alongside display inventory. The goal is to make Facebook Ads more effective through advanced campaign management, automation and optimisation for AppNexus Console users. The app allows existing AppNexus users to buy across the Facebook channel. BannerConnect also launched its first app on the AppNexus marketplace, as the a la carte ad stack grows. The BannerConect app was built for Dutch-based Mark and Mini, who maintain 5 million Dutch online user profiles. It enables buyers in the AppNexus eco-system to enhance their campaigns with this data.

The DoubleClick Ad Exchange Delivers Revenue Uplift to EMEA Publishers

Google’s Ad Exchange, DoubleClick, released a whitepaper this week analysing their positive impact on publisher revenue in Europe. According to their internal report, 88% of display advertisers are planning to buy in real-time going forward. However, content remains critical and 74% of real-time bidding buyers will pay a premium for quality environments. In the survey, buyers also revealed that programmatic channels would see the biggest increase in investment over the next year.

For inventory that would have gone unsold, according to their study, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange demonstrated signiﬁcant success in monetising unsold inventory. For inventory for which there was no other demand, it delivered a ﬁll rate of greater than 90%.

One in every four times inventory goes on sale, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange claims to ﬁnd the best price against all other competing sales channels, both direct and indirect. And in these cases where the Ad Exchange wins, it delivers a price that’s 73% higher than other channels would have delivered.

Weborama: 46% Organic Growth in Q4, As Announced In Their Annual Report

The Weborama grew its business significant in Q4, adding more profiles (200Mn in Europe), more advertisers (adserving, branding and performance) and more publisher partners.

The full year revenue was 22,430 K€, a 46% rise over 2010. This strong growth can be compared to a 14% growth of the French display market (source SRI-Cap Gemini).

French business has been very good, with strong growth on the targeted media side and on the technology side. Rich Media sales have peaked, performance business was strong, as was targeted branding. Adserved volumes have grown substantially: 35 of top 100 advertisers in France are running on Weborama’s Adperf.

Behavioural targeting and the progression of automated ad trading were noted two two major trends of 2011 – and it continues to develop in these growth areas.

During the last quarter, Weborama interfaced its technology with Google’s DSP: Invite Media. Weborama is planning similar partnerships so that other European players (advertisers, agencies and publishers) can easily access and buy Weborama data.

It continues to grow in other markets too – with the Netherlands and Southern Europe highlighted as key markets. In the UK, the acquisition by Weborama of a 50% stake in Hi-Media UK is expected to accelerate the development of operations in targeted media, technology (Rich Media) and data.

Posted in Ad Exchange, Ad Server, Ad Trading, Behavioral Targeting, Facebook Display, France, Germany, Netherlands, Online Advertising, Private Exchange, Publisher, Spain | No Comments »