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Struq’s Andrew Morsy On The Company’s Place In The Eco-System, Its Relationship With Agencies, & Staying Ahead Of Retargeting Commoditisation

Friday, February 24th, 2012

Andrew Morsy is Sales Director at Struq. Here he discusses the Struq personalised targeting solution, the company’s relationship with agencies and how Struq is staying ahead of the comoditisation of the retargeting market.

Agencies are beginning to adopt retargeting now as part of their model. What is Struq’s view on this adopted agency business model?

Retargeting is critical for advertisers as it converts browsers into paying customers, lengthens customer lifetime value and increases revenue per user. Agency adoption helps educate clients about the power of ad personalisation – that in order to persuade users to buy your product or service, it is imperative you deliver a personalised relevant ad to persuade that user. That has fuelled the adoption of Personalized Video and Personalized Pretargeting (advertisers acquiring new users) by advertisers and agencies.

Can companies like Struq really work with agencies? You clearly have client direct relationships in the ecom space? Aren’t you competition for the agencies?

Agencies are experts at what they do – they are aligned to plan and buy media as effectively as possible for advertisers.

Struq’s technology enables advertisers to acquire users at half the cost of any other retargeting provider.

As a result, the majority of Struq’s business is through media agencies as they seek to provide the most efficient means to spend money that results in post-click revenue for their clients.

Does Struq really need to work with agencies? Clearly the client direct relationship has paid serious dividends? Why would Struq need to work with agencies?

Struq powers post-click performance across the marketing funnel for Marketing Directors and Media Buyers alike. Both the Media Buyer and the Marketing Director have the same objective, to persuade users to buy products at the lowest possible cost.

Struq enables media agencies and clients direct to buy Personalized Video and Personalized Display advertising that delivers lucrative post-click revenue.

Retargeting is becoming an increasingly commoditised product – how is Struq differentiating itself from the competition?

Struq works solely with the largest brands in the verticals of ecommerce, retail, finance and travel across 19 markets. All of these brands have tried multiple vendors and continue to work with Struq solely because Struq automates the delivery of a post-click CPA because we understand the value of a user and what makes a user click and buy.

Struq ascertains which users are valuable to an advertiser. We then target the right users to hit an advertiser’s post-click CPA/COS/ROI target with fully personalised creative. Struq then provides unique insight to clients, enabling advertisers to understand which products, creative elements, publishers, etc. drove post-click performance for them (which they then frequently leverage across their other marketing activity).

Struq has applied our core targeting technology across display and video to deliver lucrative post-click performance across the marketing funnel for advertisers.

Is Struq’s technology proprietary and how do you compete against the growing number of DSPs offering dynamic creative solutions – particularly Invite which, according to rumours, will have a dynamic creative component (Teracent) built into its new iteration?

Unlike the majority of the RTB market, Struq has built its own DSP, Bid Optimisation Engine, Recommendation Engine and Dynamic Creative Optimisation Engine. These needed to be proprietary to enable the data to be extensible so that we could extract the value out of data to make user level decisions. Struq determines the display ad content, media placement, targeting criteria and bid price in real time based on data intelligence. The result is that Struq acquires a user at half the cost of any other video, display or retargeting provider.

Struq is looking to position itself as the leading Ad Personalization Company in the market. Can you talk to us in more detail what ad Personalization really is?

Advertising is a communication to persuade users to buy a product or service. Struq is transforming that communication from a generic push communication to a relevant personalised communication.

Personalised Retargeting by Struq showed that by delivering relevant ads to consumers, they were 12 times more likely to click and buy a product or service. Ad personalization breaks the one-size-fits-all paradigm, it is about making each ad both personal and relevant to each user. Ultimately, it leads to greater post-click revenue for advertisers, higher quality of ads for publishers and a much better experience for end users.

Struq is now bringing that level of performance to advertisers across a user’s entire decision making process.

You are rolling new products around video. Can you tell us a more about these new products? Are you simply launching these products in response to what Brainient has starting offering in the market?

Struq’s core purpose is serving personalized, relevant, performance-driven ads to users.

Struq is a single point for advertisers to persuade users at every stage of the buying process across any channel. Struq is able to both identify new prospective customers and convert prospective customers at scale through personalised display and video. Advertisers need to use an integrated offering across channels to gain understanding and insight into what drives customers to buy their products.

We have applied our core targeting technology across these mediums to deliver lucrative post-click performance across the marketing funnel for advertisers.

How have you seen the market evolve over the past 12 months and where do you see it heading in 2012?

The economic climate is bleak for 2012. Advertisers need people to click and buy products through their advertising to justify spending money on marketing in a tough economic climate. Struq’s Personalised Video and Display ads make ads relevant to consumers, which enables advertisers to make on average £20 in post click revenue for every pound spent. Struq’s Personalized products seek to meet the needs of advertisers in a tough economic climate.

Posted in Ad Network, Ad Trading, Agency, Agency Trading Desk, Behavioral Targeting, Demand Side Platform, Marketer, Online Advertising | No Comments »

Euro Round-Up: Data On European Web Usage; StrikeAd Partners With Cognitive Match; 24/7 Media Reps French Foodie Site To Enhance Lifestyle Proposition

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

comScore Releases Latest Report on Internet Usage Across 49 European Markets

comScore recently released an overview of internet usage in Europe, showing 381.5 million unique visitors went online in December 2011 for an average of 27.5 hours per person. This release highlights internet usage in 49 European markets aggregated into the European region and provides individual reporting on 18 markets.

Two out of three internet users in the Netherlands accessed online banking sites, making it not only the top penetration market in Europe, but in all global markets, with France coming in second and Sweden coming in third for online banking access.

The growth of Russian social network Fotostrana.ru which belongs to the Hamborner Holdings property, made it the fastest growing property (up 52 per cent) from November to December, followed by software company Opera Software (up 36 per cent).

In terms of the most popular sites in Europe, Google Sites continued to rank first with 350.2 million unique visitors. Facebook, which ranked third in audience size with 258.1 million visitors, had the highest overall engagement at 93.3 billion minutes spent on the site in total. Interestingly, Vkontakte had the highest average user engagement at 7.9 hours per visitor during the month.

The Russian internet audience continued to be the largest audience by users in Europe with nearly 53.3 million users accessing the internet in December 2011. The UK continued to show the highest engagement, with users spending an average of 35.6 hours online during the month. Turkey overtook the Netherlands to rank second for engagement with users spending an average of 33.7 hours online during the month.

StrikeAd partners with Cognitive Match to Eliminate Generic Ads on Mobile

StrikeAd, the London and New York based mobile advertising specialist, and the developer of the industry’s first mobile-specific demand-side platform (DSP), announced this week it is to partner with Cognitive Match, developer of market-leading Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO) solutions, to deliver powerful personalised mobile ad campaigns eliminating generic ads and creating content that is tailored to individuals.

The partnership will now enable StrikeAd to offer advertisers the opportunity to place real-time mobile-specific DCO ads in front of the right consumers with the goal of increasing engagement, reach and overall mobile ad campaign ROI. StrikeAd Fusion is a proprietary mobile-specific platform, providing a single console through which agencies can plan, execute and evaluate hundreds of mobile campaigns on a global basis in real-time.

Alex Rahaman, CEO of StrikeAd feels they are embarking on something unique. “This partnership is one of the first of its kind in the industry, and is going to dramatically change the way the mobile ad market develops. Using our platform, combined with Cognitive Match’s learning engine designed to deliver creatives that visually inspire the individual to action, advertisers will be able to see the effectiveness of their mobile ad campaigns, all in real-time.”

The Cognitive Match software uses a blend of artificial intelligence, psychology and semantic technologies, to build hundreds of data points to make split-second decisions about what content to display at every impression. The partnership with Cognitive Match will enable StrikeAd to provide advertisers with increased acquisition and reach for mobile ad campaigns by matching elements of a campaign which appeal to individual consumers – based on consumer data collected in real-time – and deliver them on to their mobile.

“By optimising every stage of a mobile ad campaign with our DCO solution, advertisers can achieve much more from each individual campaign, and learn more about their audience as a result”, commented Alex Kelleher, CEO and Founder of Cognitive Match.

GaultMillau.fr Joins 24/7 Media’s “Lifestyle Pack”, Offering Advertisers a Lux Audience

Prominent French gastronomy and lifestyle website GaultMillau.fr, has selected 24/7 Real Media as their ad sales partner. With nearly 200,000 unique visitors each month, the site draws an audience interested in a lush lifestyle of travel, wine and fine dining. Gault Millau is a 40 year-old food and wine brand in which the French have confidence and is especially popular in Paris. This new partnership enables 24/7 Real Media to expand its package of lifestyle sites already on offer, which include AtelierDesChefs.fr and Gustave.com. The “Lifestyle Pack” curated by 24/7 Real Media has 2.2 million unique visitors.

Edward Dinichert, Director of Governance for 24/7 Real Media, welcomes the addition. “GaultMillaut.fr represents a real opportunity for advertisers to communicate on a very specific theme and in a positive environment : the art of living and pleasure. We aim to continue growing this package with the addition of many famous brands within this topic.”

Chérisey of Como, CEO of Gault Millau, is equally happy with the partnership. “We are very happy we chose 24/7 Real Media for our advertising. The pack of which we are a part is dedicated to the world of the art of living and is a digital solution to convince AB +.”

24/7 Media was bought by WPP for $649 million in 2007 and is used as its ad server technology within the WPP operation. 24/7 Media also works directly with a number of European publishers as their ad server partner – and in some markets still operates an ad net business.

Posted in Ad Exchange, Ad Network, Ad Server, Ad Trading, Mobile Display, Mobile RTB, Online Advertising, RTB | No Comments »

The PostView: The Race For “First Look” Access To Premium Publisher Inventory

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

The PostView is a new column written by senior execs working in the European online advertising industry.

The supply chain has always been in a permanent state of disruption. From ad networks to retargeting networks to SSPs to the Trading Desks – there has always been demand for a publisher’s inventory. But now, fuelled by the growth of RTB, is it becoming even more competitive and territorial?

The battle lines are being drawn for “first look” at premium inventory, which is going to result in the major disruption of the existing publisher revenue monetisation model.

For those not in the know, the “first look” is effectively a process where publishers pass inventory to a buyer or set of buyers before the rest of the market. Retargeters have profited from this for a while now. Not necessarily in real time, but taking the first ad calls on a lot of premium publisher’s inventory. Ask yourself, when you leave a retailer’s site and continue surfing the web, how quickly do you see a personalised ad? Skip from a well-known ecom site without purchasing and there is a high chance you will see a personalised ad about a product on the first pages of a premium publisher.

The “first look” market is opening up. The SSPs have now enabled the trading desks to start getting a sniff of this first impression before anyone else.

The question of who should get the first is no doubt being heavily analysed and assessed within the big publishers. But why would a publisher even enable “first look” access? Well, it helps with automation. Publishers want to automate standard inventory selling. It makes sense for them to do so from a work flow efficiency perspective.

The question remains: are they leaving money on the table? Can RTB buyers sustain the fill rates required for these publishers? Are they able to fulfil this at the higher yields, making this supply channel more profitable for publishers than their direct sales channels? The jury is still out. Publishers want to work closer with the trading desks and agencies. And “first look” (particularly with the trading desks) facilitates and strengthens trading relationships and deals. Securing “first look” from key publishers could well be a key function of the agency side trading team going forward.

There’s an argument to be made though that looks at why a publisher wouldn’t give “first look”? The reality is if the inventory is looked at by an RTB bidder and passed back, then it can be monetised into an open exchange. No risk in that case (if the publisher already sells inventory on the exchange).

The only issues are whether a) the inventory that has been allocated on a “first look” basis could have been fulfilled at higher yield and/or revenue via a direct channel or b) whether other bidders would have helped inflate the price by stimulating more competition and demand on the auction. And this is a big point. Is “first look” limiting the yield publishers could be creating?

It’s about supply and demand and publishers need to be manipulating this in their favour. If they are reliant on one trading desk, they could be setting themselves up for failure.

Regardless of industry opinion on whether “first look” RTB access to publishers is a viable, sustainable model, there is a lot of momentum being built from the trading desks. Private Exchanges are popping everywhere up, giving trading desks with “first look” access, ahead of ad networks. With the emergence of this trend, some ad networks simply are no longer getting “first look” at premium publishers. But just because a handful of deals have been done by the trading desks doesn’t mean they have locked down the “first look” access. Retargeters armed with affiliate money and client direct relationships continue to sign some big deals with publishers.

Why are they able to do this? Retargeters are arguably in a stronger position than the trading desks to monetise inventory more effectively for a publisher. Depending on the margin they are making, they have the ability to drive eCPMs higher, purely based on the CTR performance they’re currently driving. They may also have more spend flowing through them than the trading desks. For these reasons alone, they could be a more lucrative partner for publishers looking to better monetise those first look impressions.

Publishers understand the opportunity available. But the trading desks have still to play their trump card: namely, brand spend. In addition to retargeting budget, trading desks are also in a position to leverage brand spend, which could ultimately outweigh the yields the retargeting networks can deliver and probably also top their scale too.

How important will the likes of Comscore be in this looming battle? New measurement metrics like the vCE could help demonstrate the value of a) premium publisher inventory but also b) ad calls further up the delivery chain. If these new metrics prove the value of premium inventory beyond what current click based performance metrics do, then we could see a real fight emerging. Xaxis, Audience on Demand, Accuen, Amnet, Cadreon will be looking to aggressively take on the likes Criteo, Struq, Next Performance, MyThings et al for that precious “first look” at premium publisher inventory. Things are going to get interesting.

Posted in Ad Network, Ad Trading, Agency, Agency Trading Desk, Online Advertising, Publisher, The PostView | No Comments »

What Would Steve Say?

Tuesday, February 21st, 2012

With the recent announcement by The Wall Street Journal and others that Google had bypassed the privacy settings on Apple's Safari web browser, it raises the question, what would Apple co-founder Steve Jobs say about all this? STEVE: Hi, everybody. First, let me say, I've got a new company cookin' here in the afterlife and [...]

Posted in Online Advertising | No Comments »

Euro Round-Up: Publicis And Dentsu Split With Buyback; Google Safari Tracking Muddying The Privacy Debate; And Skype Inventory In The Microsoft Ad Exchange

Tuesday, February 21st, 2012

Publicis Buyback Ends Dentsu Partnership

French advertising group Publicis has bought back 18 million of its own shares from Japan’s Dentsu for €644.4m, bringing an end to their nine-year partnership that analysts say has yielded little value.

The companies had been partners since the Japanese agency – the country’s largest marketing services group by revenues – teamed up with Elisabeth Badinter, a member of the founding family and the biggest shareholder in Publicis, to act in concert.

The buy-back strengthens Ms Badinter’s hold over Publicis, the world’s third-largest marketing services group. The daughter of the founder now owns 11 per cent of the shares and 20 per cent of the voting rights.

She will play a key role in appointing a successor to Maurice Lévy, the Publicis chief executive who was due to retire last year but was asked to stay on to see the company through the global economic downturn.

Mr Lévy said the relationship with Dentsu had been “amicable and exemplary” and that he would carry on with the two Tokyo-based joint ventures with the Japanese firm, Beacon Communications and Dentsu Razorfish – in which Publicis owns 66 per cent and 19.35 per cent respectively.

Dentsu said it would book an extraordinary gain of Y2.1bn ($27m) in its consolidated accounts in the financial year to March as a result of the share sale. Its president and chairman will resign from Publicis’ supervisory board.

The ending of the Publicis partnership had been predicted for more than a year after Dentsu sold down a portion of its stake in 2010. Mr Lévy has also stated previously that he needed to preserve funds in case Dentsu decided to sell its stake in Publicis.

Google+ On A Tracking Safari

Google and other advertising companies have been following iPhone and Apple users as they browse the Web, even though Apple’s Safari Web browser is set to block such tracking by default. How have they been able to do it?

By default, Apple’s Safari browser accepts cookies only from sites that a user visits and generally blocks cookies that come from elsewhere. However there are exceptions to this rule, including if you interact with an advertisement or form in certain ways, it’s allowed to set a cookie even if you aren’t technically visiting the site.

Google’s code, which was placed on certain ads that used the company’s DoubleClick ad server, was uncovered by Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer, took advantage of this loophole.

The code was part of a Google feature that allows its “+1” button to be embedded in advertisements which users would click to indicate that they liked the ad. However, Google faced a problem: Apple’s Web browser Safari blocks most tracking by default and is the most popular browser on mobile devices.

To put cookies onto Safari, Google’s ads used an “iframe,” an invisible container that allows content from one website to be embedded within another site, such as an ad on a blog. Through this iframe window, Google received data from the user’s browser and was able to tell whether the person was using Safari. If s/he were, Google then inserted an invisible form into the container. The user didn’t see or fill out the form – in fact, there was nothing to fill out. But the Google code submitted it automatically.

The cookies were temporary; the blank one was set to expire in 12 hours, and the cookie for logged-in users was set to expire in 24. Google said the company tried to design the +1 ad system to protect people’s privacy and did not anticipate that it would enable tracking cookies to be placed on user’s computers.

Google’s Rachel Whetstone said the temporary cookie served to create a “temporary communication link between Safari browsers and Google’s servers”. She said the goal was to ensure that information passing between the user’s Safari browser and Google’s servers was anonymous – effectively creating a barrier between a user’s personal information and the web content they browse.

But even the blank cookie could then result in extensive tracking of Safari users. This is because of a technical quirk in Safari that allows websites to easily add more cookies to a user’s computer once the site has installed at least one cookie. Safari allows this so that sites such as the Facebook and Google+ social networks can install cookies in widgets they place around the Web, as long as the user has visited the original site.

An update to the software that underlies Safari has closed the loophole that allows cookies to be set after the automatic submission of invisible forms. Future public versions of Safari could incorporate that update. Paradoxically, the people who handled the proposed change, according to software documents, were two engineers at Google.

Does anyone really care? The WSJ tried to blow the story up but so far the mainstream media hasn’t really piled in. Maybe privacy fatigue has set in or the realisation that privacy is effectively dead anyway. Maybe. On the consumer front there seems to be little damage, but the fall out with regulators could be disastrous. We as an industry are already up-to-our necks in draconian legislation around privacy. This certainly hasn’t helped the cause for self-regulation.

Are Skype Ads Heading For The Microsoft Ad Exchange?

Microsoft Advertising will begin selling Skype advertising on PCs and mobile devices in international markets, including France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Taiwan, the UK and on PCs in Russia. Advertisements in Skype will first appear in the U.S., the UK and Germany next month, with initial advertisers including Groupon, Universal Pictures and Visa.

Microsoft acquired Skype in an $8.5bn deal that closed in October 2011. Microsoft Advertising is still working to determine what kind of advertising works best within Skype. It is now testing in-call advertising with several advertisers and getting feedback on user experience.

In a blog post, Skype assured users its plan was to only show ads from just one brand per day in each market where advertising was sold. It also said the ads would not disrupt users’ Skype experience with pop-ups or banners in the middle of calls.

The announcement will also see the roll out of mobile advertising, with sponsored ads appearing at the top of Skype’s home and message screens. Audio-in-call advertising is a new format being tested for roll out in new markets – ads will appear on Skype’s home and message screens during a one-to-one Skype-to-Skype audio call.

Andy Hart, general manager, advertising and online at Microsoft UK, said, “Skype is an exciting addition to the Microsoft Advertising portfolio. From today, our customers will be able to target more people in new ways, delivering innovative digital storytelling at a vast scale. Skype’s platform supports rich, interactive brand ads at the same time as giving advertisers a broad reach: combined with MSN homepage advertising, brands can now reach 18.4m or 43 per cent of the total UK online audience.”

The real question though is whether or not Microsoft will make these Skype ad impressions available through its ad exchange. That’s a lot of inventory for the European market, and would solidify Microsoft’s position as number one brand inventory source in the automated channel across Europe.

Posted in Ad Exchange, Ad Server, Ad Trading, Agency, Behavioral Targeting, CEE, France, Germany, Marketer, Online Advertising, RTB, Scandinavia | No Comments »

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 »

How “Real-Time” Is Your RTB Platform?

Friday, February 17th, 2012

Brian O’Kelley is CEO of AppNexus. Here he discusses cache update cycles, how shorter cycles are critical for buyers using real-time platforms, and why traders should be placing greater importance on it.

Last week, Right Media posted a blog entry stating that it has “slashed” their cache update cycle to 45 minutes. This is a great excuse for the industry to take a closer look at trafficking update cycles and understand why they’re so important.

A real-time ad platform is built around a trafficking database which stores all the campaigns, creatives and other targeting information. It also has thousands of servers in multiple datacentres which store an efficient representation, or “cache”, of this database. The cache update cycle is the amount of time it takes for a change you make in the primary trafficking database – for instance, a new creative – to be syndicated out to each of the servers. When the change is out on every server, we consider the cache update complete.

A cache update cycle of 30 to 45 minutes doesn’t sound very long (and in fact, I think it’s better than the industry average). However, in the world of ad exchanges and real-time bidding, it’s an eternity. In the blog post Right Media says that it serves 11 billion transactions a day. We can assume this has a peak volume of around 200,000 transactions per second. That means that in the 45 minutes that a cache update cycle takes, around 550 million transactions will occur.

Let’s imagine a worst-case scenario (one that happens all too often): a trafficker puts a campaign live and forgets to apply targeting. He quickly realises his mistake and fixes it, but it’s too late: the change is already en-route to the servers. If we assume a $0.60 global CPM, this campaign could spend $324,000 before it’s possible to fix it. That’s a lot of money on the line every time a trafficker hits “submit”.

It’s a lot like driving a car: at slow speeds, you have a long time to react without consequences. At high speeds, you need the ability to make split-second changes or you’re in real trouble – and the consequences are potentially immense.

When Mike Nolet and I started AppNexus, we wanted to build the ad technology equivalent of a precision driving machine: an ad server that could get cache updates out to thousands of servers fast. The engineering challenge is, as our team likes to say, “non-trivial”. In fact, this was my favorite interview question for new hires in the first year or two of AppNexus: “How do you build an ad server that can do fast cache updates at scale?”

What we came up with was a fundamental re-thinking of how an ad platform works. In the old days, when I was the CTO of Right Media (I have no knowledge of how the system works today), to do a cache update we would copy the entire database to a file, send the file to every box, and have them load it into memory. The problem with this approach is that the bigger the file gets, the longer the process takes. It would take a super-human engineering feat to get these massive cache files out to all of the Right Media servers in just 45 minutes.

At AppNexus, we do things a bit differently. Instead of sending the whole file out to each box on every update cycle, we only push out the changes. This dramatically reduces the amount of data that we have to send out each cache cycle, and means that we can update our caches as frequently as we want to. At the moment, any change you make through AppNexus Console or the AppNexus API is live on every server in three minutes or less. I’m making this sound a lot easier than it is, but hey, it’s nice to be the CEO, not the CTO!

Let’s calculate the economic impact this has. AppNexus processes around 15 billion impressions a day, so at peak we do around 275,000 transactions per second. In the three minutes that it takes to do a cache update cycle, we see 50 million impressions, meaning that the worst case trafficking error would cost $30,000. It’s still a lot of money for a trafficking error, but to use my driving analogy, we just dinged our Lamborghini instead of totaling it.

It’s a shame that most of the companies in the RTB space aren’t talking about this issue. The Forrester DSP analysis didn’t include cache update cycle (though it did include its siblings, reporting update cycle and optimisation update cycle) as an evaluation criterion. I think this is a major oversight. The volume available to real-time bidders is doubling each year, and with it, the amount of risk buyers take with every trafficking update.

When driving on the RTB superhighway, you need a fast car – but you also need precision steering. Kudos to Right Media for making big investments here, and I hope the rest of the industry follows suit.

Brain O’Kelley will be speaking at the Ad Trader Conference, Hamburg on April 19. Get your ticket today!

Posted in Ad Trading, Demand Side Platform, Online Advertising, RTB | No Comments »

Euro Round Up: Opera Shores Up Mobile Ad Business; Vodafone Picks Tagman; Tribal Fusion Launches AdChoices; And OpenX In Profit

Thursday, February 16th, 2012

Opera Acquires Mobile Theory and 4th Screen Advertising To Beef Up Mobile Ad Business

Norwegian-based browser powerhouse, Opera, announced it is acquiring Mobile Theory for $18m and 4th Screen for $8m, with potential earn-outs bringing in an additional $32m and $6.5m respectively in 2013 and 2014. The move comes at the same time Opera announced its latest quarterly earnings, in which revenues were up by 31 per cent to 253.1m Norwegian Kronor ($44m).

Mobile Theory and 4th Screen, which focus on rich-media advertising solutions, will help expand Opera’s existing mobile advertising business. Opera already offers a range of mobile ad services across many smartphone and feature-phone mobile platforms, which generated $200m in revenue for publisher partners last year. Opera reports 160 million monthly active users and 100 billion monthly page views, so it’s no surprise that it is making moves like this to better monetise that base.

The benefit of buying two ad networks instead of one lies in Mobile Theory being headquartered in San Francisco, with 4th Screen headquartered in London — thus giving Opera the option to span both the American and European markets.

Vodafone implements TagMan’s technology to create “unstoppable digital”

Vodafone UK has implemented real-time attribution and tag management technology from TagMan in what the mobile operator is calling its strategy for “unstoppable digital”. It says this will transform the company’s understanding of the digital marketing campaigns it runs, radically altering its approach to that investment as it expands activity in this area.

Vodafone online and telesales marketing manager Gareth Davies explains: “We truly know how paid search, natural search, email, display affiliates and such interact and support each other.” Davies added that using new providers would offer better value for money since TagMan will enable it to add new tags to its web pages in minutes rather than months.

TagMan announced a partnership with call-tracking specialist AdInsight in December 2011 that combines online with offline analytics. The companies said this would connect the dots between customers’ entire online journey, and any phone calls to a business, by housing AdInsight’s tracking inside the TagMan tag management system. 

At the time, the companies were investigating their client bases to develop a joint trial programme of the integration, for which Vodafone would seem to be a perfect candidate. With successful implementation of TagMan’s offering under its belt, it seems only a matter of time before the mobile operator joins the dots even further to include phone tracking as well.

Online Advertising Provider Tribal Fusion launches the AdChoices Icon in Europe

Tribal Fusion published a statement this week announcing their adoption of an AdChoices icon, acting as user assurance the company is only serving ads in accordance with IAB’s Good Practice Principles.

“We are big believers in providing people with transparency and choice in how we use their data for Online Behavioural Advertising (“OBA”, to use the regulatory jargon)”, states Doug Conely, Senior Director for Global Data and Targeting at Tribal Fusion. “We were early signatories to the UK IAB’s Good Practice Principles and have been vocal advocates of the self-regulation process. That’s why we were also immediate signatories to the EU Framework and now the EASA Best Practice Recommendation on Online Behavioural Advertising. A major component of this is the requirement for 80% of behaviourally targeted online display ads across the European Union to carry the AdChoices icon by June 2012.”

As of Monday 13th of Feburary 2012, all new ad creatives loaded onto their system to run within any country in the European Union will carry the AdChoices icon, whether that campaign is using OBA or not. Clicking on the icon will direct the user to their relevant site within youronlinechoices.eu, where they can get more information about cookies and OBA as well as choosing whether to opt-out or not.

Conely feels implementation of the AdChoices icon is just the beginning. “This is not the end of the story for the AdChoices icon. Over time, companies will need to add ‘metadata’, which is information on all the companies working the chain causing that ad to be served, e.g. advertiser, agency, exchange, data exchange, ad network, etc. The icon on its own is not sufficient. Users need to be aware of what it means as a broad symbol of transparency and choice when using the internet. Lastly, right now, the paradox of the opt-out cookie is that if you clear your cookies you clear your opt-out preferences. The industry needs to move fast on a sensible browser-based solution.”

OpenX first full quarter of profitability (Q4 2011)

OpenX’s advertising technology services (including OpenX Enterprise) saw profitability last year with a Q4 year-over-year growth rate of 100%, compared with the same period in 2010. While OpenX Market saw year-over-year growth rate of nearly 700%, the company announced earlier this week.

OpenX has now exceeded an annualised revenue run rate of more than $100m, with over 1 trillion ads served last year and this year opening with more than 200 billion ad transactions per month — a trend they hope to increase as the year progresses.

Tim Cadogan, OpenX CEO, expects continued profitability for 2012: “Our focus is on helping publishers make more money by optimising all their ad revenue streams in one comprehensive platform so they can maximise revenue. In 2012, we’re extending our core mission by making OpenX’s platform fully device-agnostic so we can deliver the benefits of revenue serving across all screens: Smartphone, tablet, laptop, PC & Smart TVs.”

So is an IPO in the works?

“It’s premature to commit to it at this point, but it’s definitely something we’ve been thinking about.”

Posted in Ad Exchange, Ad Network, Ad Server, Ad Trading, Analytics, Attribution, Mobile Ad Network, Mobile Display, Mobile RTB, Online Advertising | No Comments »

Jason Bigler Discusses Google’s Bespoke Approach In Europe, The Cross-Channel Opportunity And How We Get To $200 Billion In Display

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012

Jason Bigler is Director, Product Management at Google and is the point man for all of the company’s display products in Europe. Here he discusses Google’s European display strategy, the bespoke approach that is required, the cross-channel opportunity, and how we get to that $200 billion figure.

We hear lots about Google’s display strategy in the US. Can you give some overview on the approach to Europe’s fragmented display market?

Our general approach actually isn’t very different on the core issues. Publishers look to us to help them maximise the value of every ad impression while advertisers look to us to help them achieve the best ROI on their advertising spend. If we aren’t delivering on either of those core concepts then we don’t have a business in any market.

However in Europe, as you point out, the market is more fragmented and each country can be in a different phase of product adoption. You really have to apply a country-specific lense when examining the best approach. As an example, we are seeing tremendous growth on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange in Europe. Spend has increased more than 130% year on year and the number of buyers and sellers has increased more than twofold over last year. This is going to be a big year for programmatic buying across most of the region. But is it exactly the same in every country across Europe? Not a chance. So in some countries we’re in full commercialisation mode and in others we’re still in the evangelising phase.

Will it be more of a bespoke approach given the huge differences between markets like the UK, France and Germany?

Much of the reason I’m here is to ensure we’re taking into account all of the nuances within each country when it comes to our overall display strategy. So yes, we’re most certainly going to tailor it to individual market needs by applying that country-specific lense I was talking about a moment ago.

Why did you make the move to Europe, and what experience have you of building products for European clients?

It’s certainly a great challenge for me personally. I’ve been in the display advertising technology business for over 10 years now and for a good portion of that time I was at DoubleClick leading our buy-side platform product, DoubleClick for Advertisers. That role was inherently a global role and I spent quite a bit of time in Europe making sure we were building a relevant product for the region. Recently, I also spent time at Collective Media as their head of product and strategy. During my time there, we not only launched Collective UK but we also acquired Web TV Enterprise, a UK-based video ad network. From a strategic perspective I was very much involved in the formation of their approach to the UK market. However, I think more than anything the scope of the role is what drew me back to Google. Our display ads business just hit a $5 billion run rate and as you can probably imagine the contribution from the European region to that number is not insignificant.

You recently released a report on publisher success on AdX. Can you give some insights on how European publishers are benefiting from automated selling compared to other sales channels?

In this particular report we demonstrated that for European publishers who make their inventory available in the Ad Exchange, automated selling beat competing sales channels 1 in 4 times. The competing channels included direct sales, other networks and backfills. And where it won over those alternatives, the revenue uplift was 73% higher. It also ended up delivering a fill rate greater than 90% for inventory where there was no other demand. I think this report demonstrates the importance of having a platform that can dynamically allocate across all types of buying relationships and deliver the best possible yield to the publisher.

How is the Admeld acquisition going to help European publishers? Can you outline some tangible benefits? Does the acquisition result in more Google-powered private exchanges popping across the continent this year?

It’s still quite early in this process to get into specifics here. We expect to be able to make Admeld’s services available to our DoubleClick Ad Exchange and DFP customers over time and to add to our publisher suite the functionality and services that Admeld provides. This will give publishers more control and flexibility in the way they manage their inventory and maximise their returns. However, it’s important to note that we will continue to invest in and evolve the current Admeld offering as we finalise our integration plan.

Google owns a DSP, an ad exchange, an SSP and both a buy-side and sell-side ad server. How do you respond to this “conflict of interest” argument – and the vagaries of the “end-to-end” ad stack?

The reality is we’ve built an open platform that we feel is the best in the business. For publishers, it helps them maximise the value of every single ad impression. For advertisers, it helps deliver the best ROI on their media spend. Long before today’s “app marketplace” plays and “neutrality” rhetoric we’ve had a platform where customers can integrate their own technologies or utilise their own point solutions should they make that choice. In fact, quite a few of our customers have made that choice. It is this inherent openness that makes the “conflict of interest” argument fatally flawed.

Your role at Google covers several channels, including video, display, rich media and mobile. How does this cross-platform perspective help Google’s clients in the European market?

At Google we have plenty of folks who are laser-focused on ensuring each of these channels is a best-of-breed solution, but I think it’s critical that we also have people thinking about how these channels can impact one another, how we can build complementary cross-product offerings, and most importantly, how these combined solutions can benefit our clients. In my role I’m certainly going to be influencing how we develop and commercialize these cross-platform solutions across Europe.

Your boss, Neal Mohan, reckons display could go to $200 billion in a matter of five years. Is this really possible, and how are we as an industry going to get to that figure?

What we know for certain is that there is still a significant imbalance between the amount of time users spend in a particular form of media and its associated ad spend. We’re betting that this imbalance is going to correct itself over the next several years while consumer consumption of digital media will continue to accelerate. As the line between online and offline blur, eventually we’ll see an entire reclassification of spend where there is no more offline versus online, it will simply be digital spend. That’s how we get to $200 billion.

In terms of how we’re going to get there, I don’t think it’s rocket science. Consumer behavior is what is driving the success of the industry and will continue to do so for the next decade. Think of all the types of devices/services we use today that didn’t exist 10 years ago. Think of what will exist a decade from now. That’s what makes our industry such an exciting place to be. Our goal is to help grow the industry to that $200 billion number.

Posted in Ad Exchange, Ad Network, Ad Server, Ad Trading, Agency, Agency Trading Desk, Brand, CEE, Demand Side Platform, France, Germany, Netherlands, Online Advertising, Publisher, RTB, Scandinavia | No Comments »

Microsoft Adding Social To Brand Display Ads For Guaranteed And Non-Guaranteed Inventory Says GM Creegan

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

As part of Social Media Week festivities in NYC, Microsoft Advertising announced what it's calling "People Powered Stories." Formally launching next month, the offering will begin by incorporating social commerce tech from Bazaarvoice and is the first step in Microsoft's social display strategy. Microsoft Advertising GM of Display Advertising Experiences, Jennifer Creegan said on the [...]

Posted in display advertising, microsoft, Online Advertising | Comments Off

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