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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 »

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 »

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 »

Edgar Baudin Discusses The Gamned Model, Real-Time Media Buying In France. The Generalist Versus Specialist Argument And The Sapin Law

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

Edgar Baudin is Co-Founder & Managing Director at Gamned. Here he discusses the Gamned offering, the state of the French exchange marketplace, the generalist versus specialist argument and the effect of Sapin legislation on real-time media buying in France.

Is much of the data-driven ad spend in the French market still coming from DR budgets and are brands still avoiding automated channels?

Most of the spending in France is still related to DR campaigns, i.e. acquisition and retargeting. The first group to adopt this technology was composed of merchants who focused on ROI, and that explains why they drive the biggest parts of the investments.

Now that brands have access to transparency and ad verification, they’ve started to switch part of their budget over to RTB campaigns. There’s still a lot of work to be done, informing and educating marketers, for them to increase their budgets and go from the test campaign phase to long-term RTB integration in their media plans. Branding campaigns will need a strong increase in data offering which is a must-have for audience and targeting setups.

Today, trading desks have a key role to play explaining the new paradigm which allows marketers to consider Display Advertising as a much more powerful channel. By enabling total control of frequency and reach, brands can now consider GRP’s in their ad campaigns.

What’s Gamned’s position in the current ecosystem? How do you help advertisers?

Gamned has been a Real-Time Media Desk since 2009 and our clients are advertisers and agencies. One of our strengths is R&D, with six of our 20 employees devoted to developing in-house technology and tools which are at the service of our customers.

Our belief is that real-time trading is not enough: in order to properly benefit from real time advertising, we’ve worked on improving real-time messaging and segmentation. To that effect we have, for example, developed our own dynamic banner technology which enables us to deliver a personalized message to each unique impression which we purchase on exchanges.

Our approach helps advertisers to better understand the benefits offered by real-time advertising, and of course to generate better results.

These results should of course be measured using ROI-related KPI’s on DR campaigns, but also in terms of the teachings of segmentation, data usage and creatives. We work closely with all our customers to define the targets together before launching any campaign.

How are French marketers taking to data-driven media buying? Is there still a knowledge gap among French CMOs?

Some CMO’s consider data-driven buying to be one of the main advantages of RTB buying. “Don’t buy ad space, buy targeted audience”, is the magic motto.

It is, however, very complex to implement data-driven buying as there is no “one size fits all” method.

Most CMO’s will need to define in more detail their tactical and strategic needs concerning data, and to learn how to distinguish more precisely between transactional data, social data, intent data, behavioral data, occupational data and so forth. Gamned has chosen to work very closely with its customers in that department, as we know very well that automated buying by itself is not enough.

We have seen some excellent results when combining first and third party data, with impressive improvements in performance. The volumes are, however, often limited. Ultra-segmentation does work and can teach us priceless lessons, but the scalability of this technique remains difficult.

In your opinion, what are the trends going to be in the French data-driven display market?

In early 2011, the number of unique segmented cookies available was much too limited, but things are finally starting to evolve in a good way. Thanks to the great work done by data suppliers such as Exelate, Weborama or DataVantage, more and more publishers are realising the potential revenue which can be generated by monetizing their data.

Another very effective way to increase volume and relevancy is by leveraging Facebook data from ad campaigns and fan pages, like we have been doing for the past months.

What about the argument of specialists versus generalists in the new exchange eco-system? Do you think there is a need for ad traders with deep domain knowledge in the French market?

This is a recurring question which we discussed at the ATS in Paris last year! From our (pure player) point of view, the RTB ecosystem definitely requires specialists. The environment is changing so rapidly that the only way to efficiently address advertisers’ needs is to offer a proper setup. It’s not just a question of choosing a DSP, buying a bit of third party data and managing campaigns. Our entire trading desk has been developed with the aim of delivering real-time advertising and this is our one and only focus. With one third of our team dedicated to R&D this is the key to our success and efficiency.

How is the Sapin legislation affecting the new exchange eco-system? Is it an issue for new ad traders?

The aim of the Sapin legislation is to fight corruption by giving advertisers total transparency in regards to their ad investments. The entire Sapin process is however technically impossible to implement on RTB buying. As we already guarantee our advertisers full transparency on their media costs and margins, we consider ourselves to be Sapin-compliant. This legislation has however always been considered a complex issue in regards to internet advertising.

Posted in Ad Exchange, Ad Network, Ad Server, Ad Trading, Ad Verification, Agency, Agency Trading Desk, Behavioral Targeting, Brand, Data Exchange, Data Management Platform, Data Strategy, France, Online Advertising, Private Exchange, Publisher, Publisher Trading Desk, RTB | No Comments »

Euro Round Up: Criteo To Hit $400 Million In Revenue This Year; StrikeAd Informs On Mobile Ad Tracking; Hi-Media UK Inks New Deal With Thomas Cook

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

Criteo To Hit $400 Million In Revenue This Year

Criteo has become a colossus in the European ad tech space. The French company, founded by Jean-Baptiste Rudelle in 2005, has a client list which includes some of the biggest names in e-commerce (Office.co.uk, Zoopla, Glasses Direct, Boden, among others).

Last year the company generated $200m in turnover, compared with $60m in 2010 and $9m in 2009. If the trend continues, Criteo could double its revenues in 2012. There are already plans to hire 250 people this year, bringing the workforce to 750 employees. At this rate, Criteo could possibly become the largest Internet company in France.

Criteo is committed to continuing its big innovation push. Gazagne Gregory, General Manager for France, Southern Europe and Latin America explains: “We have been profitable since July 2009 and reinvest all our profits in R&D. Our offices in Paris are the second largest algorithmic research centre on advertising in Europe behind Google in Zurich.” R&D doubled last year and engineers represent 40% of the total workforce. Criteo now has over 2,000 customers in 30 countries and has 15 offices around the world. More on the Criteo growth story here.

StrikeAd Releases White Paper On Conversion Tracking In Mobile Advertising

London and New York-based mobile advertising DSP, StrikeAd, released its new white paper on ad tracking in mobile. The white paper looks to provide a guide for agencies seeking to understand how to track mobile ads and conversions in a transparent and safe way.

The report examines in detail the problems surrounding device identifiers (UDIDs) when it comes to tracking mobile app downloads. It goes on to explain how cookies can be the key to tying an ad impression to a particular download and consequently yielding better results for agencies in mobile ad campaigns. Although it is necessary for the process to be adopted by the triumvirate of advertiser, agency and media in order to utilise them to best effect.

Alex Rahaman, CEO of StrikeAd, explains why they are releasing this report now: “Since StrikeAd launched we’ve had many agencies ask for help with their tracking across phone and tablet ad campaigns. In direct response to this, we wrote this white paper based on our tools to try to clear up any confusion and clarify for agencies how to track mobile ads and conversions in a privacy-safe way.”

You can download the white paper in full here.

Thomas Cook Joins Hi-Media’s Premium Network In The UK

Thomas Cook, one of the best-known names in travel, has partnered with Hi-Media in the UK to increase its online advertising revenues from the market, it announced in a press release last week. Hi-Media, a European leader in monetising Internet audiences, will work with leading advertisers and their agencies to develop bespoke advertising solutions to reach Thomas Cook’s audience of travel intenders.

ThomasCook.com has millions of unique visitors per month. Stuart Adamson, Head of Media Solutions, Europe at Thomas Cook Online, explains their value: “We have a large and loyal customer base across Europe visiting our sites to research and book their travel options. We know this is a highly valuable audience, so partnering with Hi-Media helps us gain traction with major brands looking to reach purchase decision-makers. We selected Hi-Media as a partner because of their understanding of quality brands and online consumer behavior.”

Mathieu Roche, Managing Director of Hi-Media UK, is equally happy with the partnership: “Thomas Cook is a brand with an incredible heritage, delivering a highly engaged audience who visit the site with purchase intent. We will work with advertisers and their agencies to offer them a wide variety of branding and performance advertising solutions to reach this premium audience.”

Posted in Ad Exchange, Ad Network, Ad Trading, Agency, Agency Trading Desk, Behavioral Targeting, Mobile Display, Mobile RTB, Online Advertising, Private Exchange, Publisher, RTB | No Comments »

The PostView: Is Cutting Supply Really The Answer To The Current Malaise In Display Advertising?

Thursday, February 9th, 2012

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

There have been a lot of pieces recently putting forward the argument that reducing the volume of ads on a page could help salvage/preserve the growth of the online display advertising industry. While it would seem the most logical strategy, the issue might actually be more deep-rooted than that.

We exist in a digital world now where the overwhelming volume of ads are directly proportional to the overwhelming volume of content being created. In 2010, Eric Schmidt stated that we create as much information in two days as we have done since the dawn of man through to 2003. Schmidt might have been throwing another baseless fact out to the digieratti, but he was making an interesting point about the current content overload.

We Are Becoming Overwhelmed By Content, Not Ads

The stats coming from the web’s biggest publisher are pointing to a serious content glut. Huffington Post is now publishing over 1,000 stories per day, and Tumblr creates 15 billion impressions per month (source: gigaom).

Not all of these impression-generating machines are monetised with standard advertising, but that’s not the point. They are creating an incredible amount of content that users feel compelled to consume. Like most ExchangeWire readers, I would not consider myself the average consumer or user of the internet. My line of work means I have to be immersed in every new piece of information that is produced from the Ad Tech information channel.

Due to the amount of information we are trying to consume on a daily basis, we are now getting into a habit of just scanning content. And not even scanning pages anymore but literally squarely focused on scanning the actual content. Consumption habits have changed to the extent that we now need sophisticated news aggregators and algo-powered content curation. Feed readers apps, like Pulse, now enable us to literally get snippets of information all day every day.

Advertising Created This Problem

The ad-funded model has meant that publishers were remunerated on the basis of how many impressions and eyeballs they could sell. More eyeballs meant more cash. More content meant more eyeballs and so it continued. All the while, across certain content owners, eCPMs are falling. So we feel inclined to create even more content in the hope it will create another page view, perhaps even adding another ad format for good measure.

As consumers, the problem we have now is an addiction to digital news and information presented by the web (across different devices and screens). This proliferation of content means advertising becomes less effective. We become less receptive to it – to the point where our engagement with individual pieces of content is declining.

Kill The CPM

What would happen if we killed the CPM model and didn’t trade impressions anymore – but traded user sessions?

What if we start placing more emphasis on creating deeper user engagement? Publishers would then focus less on the volume of eyeballs being created or the link-bait worthy content headlines that seems to infect the social media channels. Creating deeper user engagement would place more strategic focus on user understanding and user acquisition – and ultimately place less importance on the one hit wonders from social referrals.

The cost of a user sessions would depend on session length, but would enable marketers to start telling stories, using creative sequencing more intelligently. We might even get advertising back to what it should be about.

This doesn’t mean we have to take a departure from leveraging the innovations within data and technology that are available to all of us. We can still ensure we are engaging with our desired audience. Content overload is not healthy and perhaps even damaging to display advertising’s long-term future.

So to answer the recent question posed by senior industry observers: will cutting supply solve the inherent problems with display? The answer is no. We need to cut content, and look at the fundamentals of how we price display. Only then will publishers and advertisers be able to reap the true benefits.

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

Euro Round-Up: The French Get “Serieux” About RTB; mediascale Reports Strong 2011 Growth; Jemm Goes All-In With AppNexus

Thursday, February 9th, 2012

Le Trading Media

In an epic twenty-seven pages on the potential of RTB in the French market, IAB France has outlined an impressive overview of the entire market. The report goes into great detail on the emerging data-driven advertising market in France, with explainations of key constituents in the exchange eco-system. It even includes some Q&As with leading ad execs in France, including recent ATS Paris speaker, Arthur Millet, Directeur Commercial at Amaury Medias Digital. Further insight on the growth of automated buying and RTB is provided by industry heavyweights like Sébastien Robin, Directeur Des OpérationS, at AFFIPERF. You can download the IAB report on the growth of RTB in France here.

mediascale Reports Strong 2011 Growth

mediascale, one of Germany’s leading independent digital agencies, reported a gross income of €5.6m last year – an increase of 17 per cent compared to 2010. The billings for the same period rose 22 per cent from €59m to €72m.

mediascale uses its own cross-platform targeting tool NE.R.O, together with Plan.Net, to develop solutions for clients and agency partners. Julian Simon, managing director of mediascale, is bullish on future growth for mediascale:

Right now we are running about 35 per cent of all campaigns on NE.R.O. By the end of 2012, we want to increase that by 40 per cent or more. This targeting will aid not only in direct sales support but also image and brand communications. It’s more about planning for consumer-relevant criteria such as purchase decision stages, interests and attitudes of the user. There is great potential in targeting, especially for content and creative solutions. The system combines information from the user profile with the matching design, text, product or price for the dynamic creation of promotional materials. Thus, advertising effectiveness and efficiency of the campaigns increase significantly.

The company also opened a new office in Vienna last year to service the fast-growing Austrian market.

Jemm Goes All-In With AppNexus

Jemm Group has chosen AppNexus as its exclusive ad technology platform, the company publicly announced this week.

Julia Smith, Global Communications Director at Jemm, is looking ahead:

By leveraging AppNexus’ technology platform, Jemm is able to deliver a strong proposition to buyers and sellers. We have moved away from a traditional ad network model and are now focused on working with other like-minded players in order to deliver a compelling offer for the publisher market.

Since migrating to the AppNexus platform, Jemm has seen click-through rates dramatically increase. In the first month alone, CTR tripled across campaigns delivered via the AppNexus platform. According to AppNexus’ proprietary reporting, the European market for RTB is growing rapidly, with an average of 25 billion advertising impressions served each month during Q4 2011 via the AppNexus platform. Over the last year the number of global impressions served via the AppNexus platform has increased by 859 per cent.

Posted in Ad Exchange, Ad Network, Ad Server, Ad Trading, Ad Verification, Ad Visibility, Agency, Agency Trading Desk, Analytics, Attribution, Behavioral Targeting, Data Exchange, Data Strategy, Demand Side Network, Demand Side Platform, France, Germany, Marketer, Online Advertising, RTB | No Comments »

Moving On From Retargeting: Why Prospecting In Display Is Good For The Industry

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

Lee Puri is Co-Founder at Media iQ Digital. Here he discusses the centralisation of re-targeting and why prospecting in display will be good for the industry.

Many advertising agencies and clients made moves in 2011 to take direct control of display buying, probably the most notable of which saw the move to centralise retargeting in-house. Many networks and media owners are seeing their budgets shrink as the agencies look to secure increasingly larger share of media budgets for internal trading; for many third parties their clients could ultimately prove to be their nemesis.

The ad network’s ability to continually re-invent itself has essentially guaranteed its survival over the years with ever constant demand side pressures at play. However, the challenge centralising retargeting poses to third-party trading companies is a far greater threat than ever before – and far more dangerous for those players that are not on top of their game. A good elevator pitch and an expensive media lunch will no longer ensure continued presence on a plan. It’s more and more about delivering those incremental results, and let’s be honest, this is what it needs to be.

The gulf between agencies/clients when it comes to display trading tactics is no longer insurmountable. The accessibility factor combined with RTB has seen to that. The reliance on retargeting for many ‘black box solutions’ or ‘killer data platforms’ appears to be uncomfortably apparent for all to see on a campaign basis. The simple fact is retargeting has papered over the cracks for many display trading businesses for years now and the client has found out.

So why is centralisation of retargeting a good thing for the market?

Centralisation of retargeting brings huge efficiencies on an advertiser level, the rationale of which speaks for itself. Reduced risk of bid inflation, reduced duplication, lower frequencies to users, higher conversion rates, tighter control of data, etc. Whatever way you look at it, centralisation is the natural and most efficient next step for the market. This doesn’t necessarily mean the end of display trading outside of the agency trading desk. Far from it. To co-exist on a media plan alongside the ATDs, third parties – ad networks or publishers direct – need to be able to prove their ability in delivering incremental value. In other words, focus on prospecting.

The agency move to centralise retargeting could actually be the making of digital display – as it might allow, for the first time, third-party buyers to collectively focus on growing advertisers’ businesses through innovation in trading/optimisation, attribution and measurement. We now find ourselves in a market that is in transition: value propositions that have defined this space for years are becoming redundant, with new innovative means of trading gradually gaining resonance within the space.

Working outside of retargeting is probably one of the biggest challenges to face the ad network model since its inception in the late 1990’s. Campaign-based pressures to identify performing user bases and domains outside of retargeting means trading models need to be air tight. The need for trading expertise and/or campaign analytics is paramount in delivering out incremental value.

Agencies and clients find themselves at an interesting place at this point in time. Campaign efficiencies can be hugely stimulated through internal centralisation of retargeting – but delivering performance at scale often means there needs to be fresh, new activity at the top of the purchase funnel to ensure continual growth of sales. Hence the rise of demand for the prospecting network.

So what exactly is prospecting? What part can ad networks play alongside ATDs who can also prospect? How does this enhance the publisher direct position? How do centralisation of retargeting, attribution, measurement and policing practices come together to aid online display in growing advertisers businesses? These issues and more are fully deserving of further discussion – and will doubtless be addressed by the industry in the coming weeks and months.

Posted in Ad Network, Ad Server, Ad Trading, Agency, Agency Trading Desk, Online Advertising, Prospecting, Publisher, RTB | No Comments »

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