But that is a fraction of the platform’s overall revenue, led by retail sales.
At the nexus of those two channels, Criteo, an advertising technology platform best known for offering retargeting capabilities, is trying to help smaller retailers compete with Goliath.
Following a series of acquisitions, the company recently began rolling its services in to a new offering, designed to give rival retailers a leg-up.
“Over the past couple of months, Criteo has begun launching a platform called Criteo Audience Activation Platform, or CAAP for short,” Criteo EVP for Criteo Brand Solutions John Roswech in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“This platform will really allow our retail partners to go after national media dollars, really to compete with Amazon for those dollars.”
CAAP has four pillars:
The whole thing is premised on Criteo having a global database of products listed by thousands of retailers, as well as the means to make ads for them tick.
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>Against new regulatory limits, that brings untold complexity. So, could artificial intelligence help move marketing forward?
Ad-tech firm MediaMath thinks so. That is why, a year ago, it struck a partnership to work collaboratively with IBM’s Watson AI division on developing AI application for ad-tech,
In this video interview with Beet.TV, MediaMath international MD Dave Reed explains how machines could help target humans.
“If you think about the thousands of decisions that any marketer has to make for any one consumer per day just in paid media, and then if the ideal is to actually take it not just paid but owned and earned, you get to a quantity of decisions and number of complexities and variables that is impossible to pre-sort and rule-base off of,” he says.
“That’s where we think AI comes in. Certain things, to me at least, that we’re working on are that by leveraging that AI to really think about, ‘How do we take inputs like application behavior for brands that have applications or site behavior or past purchases or purchases from other brands or any of this wealth of information that’s exogenous to the media world?’, right?
“It has nothing to do with CPMs or CPCs or any of that. And leverage that to deliver better, more tailored, messaging. I think that’s really exciting.”
The excitement becomes particularly pertinent in a digital world beyond desktops.
Many of the devices consumers use to do their digital business are not trackable using conventional cookies, but marketers still need to develop a holistic understanding of a single consumer, regardless the devices she uses.
Says Reed: “To get full profiles of people, you really need to have an identity that is persistent and able to track across things like marketing tech like CRM email and SMS and push and things like that as well as paid media.
“The cookie is increasingly less relevant for tracking, and it becomes more so as device manufacturers like Apple increasingly don’t accept it by default, with Mozilla’s effort to get rid of the cookie and just, in general, people not allowing themselves to be tracked.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>But, by 2022, Russian consumers’ ecommerce spending is set to reach the equivalent of $403.91 a year.
One company in prime position to benefit is OZON.ru, the 2o-year-old online retailer that has partnered with ad retargeting company Criteo to find a 33% hike in Facebook sales and a 60% jump in sales from in-app mobile campaigns.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, OZON.ru commercial director Konstantin Bayandin explains why retargeting helps OZON.ru relocate consumers who seemed initially to be interested in listed products.
He also explains the fascinating way in which OZON.ru had to think differently to gain market share, and what the road ahead looks like.
“Historically, Russia was really hard market for e-commerce because of lack of really good delivery service,” he says. “The players on the market had to develop their own delivery in order to compete with each other, so did us.
“So we have our own delivery infrastructure in Russia which is quite good and goes well, so we want to open up our infrastructure for other players for the market and to create a marketplace with our own website and our own fulfilment and logistics.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>“I have seen the future of TV and it is called ‘Zeebox’,” I wrote, breaking news of the new mobile app which helped TV viewers chat and learn more around the shows they were watching.
Little did I expect that Zeebox’s future would, one day, end up rubbing shoulders with skincare and haircare products.
Long since renamed Beamly, having attracted funding from several global TV operators, the company was, in 2015, acquired by cosmetics holding group Coty – part of a move to address the accelerating consumer shift from traditional to real-time digital and social media, especially for millennial shoppers. Now the second-screen darling self-declares as a “product and mar-tech agency”.
So, what on earth is a social TV app doing for a cosmetics company? In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jason Forbes, the Beamly CEO who also became Coty’s chief digital officer in the acquisition, says it’s about addressing an industry “irony”…
“For 20, 30, 50 years, consumer packaged goods has never had a direct relationship with the end consumer,” he says. “What we found is, with digital, we have a knowledge of our consumers in ways we never did before.”
Forbes says 88% of beauty brands now sell directly to consumers through Instagram or Facebook.
But the future won’t be only direct-to-consumer, for the company whose many brands include Wella, Cover Girl, Max Factor, Sally Hansen and Rimmel. Coty wants to both advertise to end buyers and leverage its partnerships with existing CPG retailers like Boots, Walmart and Superdrug.
“By building a better feedback loop, we’re able to better understand what types of paid media is working,” he says. “Then the context of our owned media, whereby we obviously have a large number of brand sites, we’re actually activating consumer journeys – based on an unmet need, they’re going from social, for example, to a brand site, to a retailer site.
Case in point – Coty’s Cover Girl recently partnered with Walmart on an augmented reality experience that shows how s lipstick would look on its owner.
For the company which launched with plans to revolutionise TV, where does telly fit in anymore?
“TV continues to have a very important role,” Forbes adds, before continuing: “In as much as TV continues to be an awesome reach medium, we’re all about that. But actually, we’re increasingly partnering on the digital media side.
“We look at a balanced mix, depending on who the consumer is and where they spend their time.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>“Because for the first time commerce and communication are converging, we can really track performance along the entire journey. Leveraging new digital technologies, we are delivering solutions in a new space which we call real-time marketing,” Bonori says.
One of the industry’s earliest media agencies, Zenith rebranded itself in 2002 to assume an ROI positioning. About a year ago, it re-launched its network brand identity, proposition and platforms with the term ROI+, Bonori explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO conference.
In simple terms, ROI+ rests on three pillars, the first of which is the designing of a “digital transformation journey and agenda for the clients, helping them fix specific business challenges,” says Bonori. “It’s all about understanding what is the value.”
The second is a planning base where, among other insights that are surfaced, “we detect an expectation gap. Because Amazon is the new norm, the expectation level is very high. Unfortunately, brands are struggling. They really need to improve the way they are designing experiences.”
Third is one-to-one optimization using machine learning algorithms, something Zenith began to harness several years ago. “We are now scaling this solution and we have a very powerful platform for that, and it’s really helping clients to automate partially or completely the end-to-end customer journey.”
As media agencies have continued to evolve their offerings, they want to be seen less as vendors and more like partners, according to Bonori. “T he degree of cooperation has expanded a lot, clients are building more capabilities inside, which is good because we have more stakeholders challenging us, raising the bar, making sure we can really elevate the conversation. You need to partner in a different way.”
Agency clients still may foster barriers that can complicate the partnership, for example at companies where teams remain disconnected. “It’s a disaster because there’s no one single truth in terms of culture within the organization.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>“We’ve said for three years ago that Criteo will be one of the last stalwarts to stand strong and independent as this frankly brilliant arbitrager who has been selling on CPC buying on CPM because of tech, targets and talent.”
Those three T’s help advertisers and agencies make sense out of what still can be separate brand awareness and performance operations that should be melded. Prohaska alludes to a former client 2.5 years ago that had separate budgets, separate people and separate KPI’s for their brand awareness and performance activities.
“Just insane that they were totally siloed off,” says Prohaska. “Never shared data. It was almost a little too oil and water instead of chocolate and peanut butter like we always say in terms of those things mixing better.”
In terms of tech leadership, he says Criteo early on had its own dynamic creative optimizer. “The fact that there are major agencies who still do not have either their own, that they bought or built or even licensed at this point is crazy.”
He recalls that while working at BBDO in the mid 1990’s, creative and media staffers were separated by just one floor. “It was nice when you had media and creative together. Criteo has had media and creative together. That’s why their click-through rates were always one-plus and why conversion rates were always higher, because actually there are a lot of advertisers where that math still matters quite a bit.”
According to a recent release, Criteo is ranked #1 by IDC with a worldwide adtech market share of 7.4%. It was the first time IDC quantified the advertising software market at $12.7 billion, growing 38% year on year.
Speculating on Criteo’s future direction, Prohaska believes the more it can share its expertise “either with self-service tools or kind of empowering, maybe in a way that Xaxis became part of [m]PLATFORM. The more times that they do that and partner more with buyers and sellers, it might be less margin but of a much bigger pie and they’ll keep growing. It’s just symbolic of them doing very, very well, redefining performance marketing nailing it in this space and then expanding when it comes to video, mobile, in-app, ultimately television.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>He’s not alone, according to IAB Europe research about attitudes to programmatic advertising, Halstead explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO 2018 conference. The survey shows that 90% of advertisers, agencies and publishers across Europe are talking about investing more money in the coming months, says Halstead, who is Chair of the IAB Europe Programmatic Trading Committee.
“The optimism is there. There obviously have been some headwinds, particularly in the last eighteen months to two years around trust and transparency, and we are seeing some evolution in hybrid models,” says Halstead.
From the buy-side, he’s seeing “more engagement from advertisers and agencies in the decisions they make. Some more direct contracting. But this to me feels part of maturity of an industry reaching a grown up state.”
Part of that maturation is growing adoption of ads.text for brand safety, abiding by the new GDPR rules to protect consumers and “really try to shorten the supply chain or be clear about who has the right to sell this inventory and who has opportunity to position it.”
Under Oath Ad Platforms, the new stack includes a unified demand-side platform, a native and search marketplace and programmatic access to Oath inventory through its own supply-side platform and some 40 ad exchanges, as Martech Today reports.
In addition, the Oath Publishers Suite enables publishers to monetize their video “but also has additional tools like video syndication, so they can actually pass their content on to other partners and they can grow their pool of content and compete.”
Digital advertisers continue to move away from traditional last-click attribution models while seeking categories of buyers and their behaviors, according to Halstead.
“What a buyer is looking for is efficient pricing decisions, really well-driven machine learning and optimization and understanding, and the ability to build data segments to help address their audience. And I feel we’ve made really significant progress in that space.”
On the mobile side, Oath now has a combined supply-side platform for display and mobile inventory, mobile video and in-app, and a separate video platform “which can also take account of some of the needs of video syndication in the more complex video environments.”
This video is part of a series titled: “Finding Success in a Time of Transformation.” It is presented by PubMatic. For segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Adjust’s SDK resides within its customers’ apps and “we transfer the data to our platform and then help our customers to understand what kind of campaigns they are running, what kind of value they can get out of it,” Henschel says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO conference.
The data Henschel refers to is some 500 billion data points that it manages each month. “We basically created a fluid data system that hasn’t been there before.”
That data informs comparisons of campaigns and creative elements across various channels. “Plus we have all the data coming afterwards such as events, so we’re basically making sure that our customers have a complete transparency about the customer journey from acquisition down to churn,” Henschel says.
Adjust first partnered with retargeting provider Criteo about four years ago and has been expanding that partnership around the globe, according to Henschel.
“For Criteo specifically, mobile has become a significant part of their business and I think with our technology we’re helping them a lot to get more traction there and also to run better results for their customers.”
In terms of the evolution of digital advertising, Henschel notes the huge difference between the desktop world and mobile considering cookies versus device ID’s. “But what we see as the biggest change over the last couple of years that people are really focusing on other KPI’s than they did before.”
Five years ago, the whole industry “was basically focusing on CPC, getting the most effective CPC, the cheapest” before shifting to CPI and now to return on ad spend.
“This is when the retargeting companies came into the space, including Criteo, and now it’s really about incrementality,” Henschel says.
Henschel is a longtime attendee of DMEXCO, having represented “many companies over many years.” Given his German heritage, he’s pleased at the way DMEXCO has grown, citing a panel this year about German adtech companies that had managed to achieve global scale.
“Compared to the early days, we also have now German, relevant international companies and somehow that’s also reflected in the panels, in all the companies out there exhibiting and that’s something I’m actually really proud of.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>“Given this challenge there’s a real need to go beyond the install and go beyond the user acquisition and focus on engagement,” Jeger adds.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO conference, Jeger talks about the ways of measuring the value of app marketing campaigns and the role that companies like Criteo are playing in that effort.
AppsFlyer helps its app marketing customers collect and surface data “to understand, for example, the impressions and clicks and installs and then further down the funnel within the app all the events that happened and attribute these to a specific source.”
A typical example could be an advertiser running multiple campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat and some Tencent social apps in China, according to Jeger. It would want to try to make sense of the performance and how much each of the campaigns cost versus the revenue generated.
“We enable them to do that by having partnerships with all of these companies and being official measurement partners for those companies and putting revenue against cost,” says Jeger.
One of AppsFlyer’s more than 4,000 partners is retargeting specialist Criteo, which “focuses on one of the huge pain points of app marketers. Getting users into the app and then retaining them and keeping them engaged. There’s a huge retention issue when it comes to apps and Criteo is fighting that head on by providing campaigns to get users back into the app.”
Moving beyond user acquisition to focus on engagement, using very personalized and non-intrusive messaging, “is the holy grail of where we need to go as an industry,” Jeger says.
But there’s a learning curve that could be steepened if more people knew the kinds of data that are available and the most sophisticated ways of employing that data. “I think we should be seeing more and more apps in the next year being at the place where they can get to that kind of level of communication.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>Livingly seeks to attract “unconventional women” and help guide them through life stages, says Greta Lawn, VP, Head of Sales at Livingly Media. “We’ve really identified a unique audience for each of our brands.”
Those brands are StyleBistro for all things hair and the home décor site Lonny, which Livingly acquired in 2012.
In 2018 Livingly launched Mable+Moxie (for unconventional new moms) and It’s Rosy for moms over 50. “I think that’s very interesting for a digital pure play to come out to market with two new brands in such a competitive landscape as we see it today,” Lawn says. “We’re seeing a tremendous amount of success.”
Having designed all of its sites to be as responsive as possible for users, Livingly wants to be as easy as possible for advertisers. “We have no below-the-fold inventory and the user experience is remarkable,” Lawn adds.
Its two new brands were launched based on “where does the ad community want to buy inventory and what’s the best user experience and how do we find that balance and intersection.”
A 100% display publisher, two of Livingly’s priorities going forward are creating great mobile content experiences and “how do we build out our video landscape in the coming year and what does that look like.”
Lawn says no request from ad buyers in the premium programmatic space is too daunting for Livingly. “If that’s making unique sponsorships and hard to deliver, high-impact executions available in the RTB world, we’re focused on that.”
A core factor affecting further growth is delivering user experiences that provide duplication, meaning being able to deliver women from one Livingly site to another. That’s a choice of being either “a trusted publisher to a unique community of moms” or just an “in and out pop-in for different articles.”
This video is part of a series titled: “Finding Success in a Time of Transformation.” It is presented by PubMatic. For segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Driving scale for video is best done via programmatic ad sales, Newman explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO 2018 conference in which she also discusses the hurdles that are curtailing the growth of in-app advertising.
Because a majority of video content doesn’t represent significant scale, it’s typically sold directly by in-house sales staff. The challenge to achieving scalability for programmatic is having enough content and inventory, which entails choices.
“Do I put my video content not just on the home page but also in article pages for example? Or do I do some kind of content distribution deal where there’s a potential revenue share, so a publisher who has a similar audience to mine can license my video content, or maybe take my video content” and share the ad revenue it generates.
Quipping that it’s been “the year of mobile forever,” Newman believes apps are the growth area, but with limitations. PubMatic’s new Quarterly Mobile Index, based on clients’ traffic and spend, shows “year over year that app is the growth area both in inventory but also in spend. But I still think there’s a way to go for the spend to catch up to where the eyeballs are.”
Transparency is a key reason why brands haven’t fully embraced in-app ads even though they know that’s where their target audiences are. Newman calls the ads.text initiative “fabulous by the way, we totally support it” but it’s only applicable now to desktop and the mobile web.
“We’ve educated buyers to buy ads.txt so they’re very comfortable with that, but then you say ‘could you buy this in-app traffic as well’ and they’re like, ‘where’s the ads.txt file?’ There isn’t one yet.”
She believes the industry is catching up in the form of the IAB’s SDK. Then there is ads.cert, but it requires open RTB 3.0 integration “so that’s going to take some time to move. So I would say that comfortably in-app is definitely making some changes but there’s a lot of work around education.”
Further complicating in-app progress is the need for a consent management platform per the new GDPR regulations in the European Union, according to Newman.
As for publishers and their “frenemies” status with platforms like Facebook and Google, Newman points to joint ventures by publishers to take back control, among them The Ozone Project in the UK. Launched three months ago, it facilitates ad buying from The Guardian, News UK and Telegraph from one site, as The Guardian reports.
Publishers’ goal is to compete with the scale that advertisers enjoy with social media platforms “in a brand-safe, high-quality environment which also benefits us as publishers because we’re investing a lot of resource into developing this great content that brands actually want to be seen alongside,” Newman says.
This video is part of a series produced at DMEXCO 2018 in Cologne titled: “Finding Success in a Time of Transformation.” It is presented by PubMatic. For segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, Integral Ad Science CEO Scott Knoll says brands are pushing for a more granular understanding of which inventory is deemed viewable at different watch lengths.
That is because different brands create ads with different focal durations for different campaigns.
“Brands tend to right away understand that viewability is not binary,” Knoll says. “We can’t say it’s good or bad, it’s in view, it’s not in view, that time is a really critical element.
“In Europe, there are more brands who are adopting this, and we have dozens of brands here who have decided that MRC standard is not enough. The Group M standard doesn’t fit their needs, and they’ve created their own custom standard that’s specific to not just their advertising, but in some cases actually their creative.”
Knoll walks Beet.TV through an example of why a brand would want more.
“Let’s say they have a campaign coming out,” he explains. “They do some tests. They recognize that their video is optimized to eight seconds, so then what they’ll do is, on every buy, they’ll measure how many seconds the ad was in view for, and they try to optimize to 8 seconds.
“So, they find the publishers who are giving them eight seconds or more, they work through programmatic where they can use signals from us or other companies to actually buy based on a high probability that they’re going to get eight seconds of view.
“Most of the market today is just counting it as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and these smart brands who are ahead of the curve are actually figuring out a lot of extra value for the same amount of money.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>“One of the biggest issues right now is trust and transparency across the ecosystem,” says Goel. “We’ve all seen over the last couple of years all sorts of horrible headlines about fraud, about bots, about fees, about auction dynamics. All of these different things that have led marketers to distrust the programmatic ecosystem.”
But he believes the ecosystem has worked hard over the past 18 months “to improve that on a dramatic scale,” Goel explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO 2018 conference.
As a result, publishers have enjoyed increases in revenue and CPM’s for their inventory. As header bidding has “exploded onto the scene,” more of that inventory is monetized programmatically.
“One of the key things that we are focused on is open source capabilities like our OpenWrap technology, which just won an award from Digiday, which is a very open and transparent header bidding solution for publishers,” Goel adds.
Even though PubMatic is on the sell-side, it knows that advertisers and buyers more and more want to know where is their ad spend is going and what they are getting in return.
“So we’re actually spending more time than ever with the agencies and with the advertisers alongside our publisher clients to help connect the two directly,” with PubMatic as the enabler “to execute their business strategy on top of our technology platform.”
Going forward, the company is putting considerable resources into growing its mobile app and video business. “These are now significant portions of our business and we see them becoming even bigger in 2019 and 2020. So we’re really excited about our omni-channel monetization capabilities,” Goel says.
As SSP take rates decline across the industry “we see that as a huge opportunity to make our own business more profitable but also to lower costs for publishers and marketers by continuously lowering the cost of our platform and the cost of delivering technology.”
This video is part of a series produced at DMEXCO 2018 in Cologne titled: “Finding Success in a Time of Transformation.” It is presented by PubMatic. For segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>So says Craig Ellis, Global COO of the IPG agency Reprise Digital, in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference in which he discusses pricing dynamics and measuring true ROI.
Not that long ago, the search discipline seemed to be structured around achieving the lowest cost per click, according to Ellis. “Now with understanding your audience and the targeting, it’s making sure you’re buying the right audience and therefore how does the cost work in not only the initial purchase but then also lifetime cycle, lifetime value.”
With innovations like voice search and the integration of image-based search, “All of this is becoming quite fundamental because it is demonstrating consumer intent,” Ellis adds. “There’s a lot of value in that intent. Tapping into that consumer and behavioral opportunity is really important for clients.”
Depending on the category, paid search can be prohibitively expenses for some marketers. Nonetheless, Ellis counsels going beyond the initial purchase “and start looking at lifetime value. I think that’s really important to start fundamentally getting the true ROI.”
Asked about performance benchmarks, he says some clients approach the process like a full acquisition budget. “I sell a computer, I’m prepared to pay seven percent of the sale. Go and sell me as many computers as you can for seven percent.”
Tweaking the percentage to 8% might yield extra volume, and it might not. “The challenge is going to trying to keep that margin. Search specifically is going up year on year. There’s more ways to spend your dollars,” Ellis says.
“There’s really challenging dynamics, which I think’s putting a lot of emphasis on the consumer journey. What happens after the click.”
Search also comes into play in digital re-targeting, with understanding consumer intent again being a major component and proper message sequencing key as well to the overall experience.
“What quality experience is a brand providing to ensure that consumers are feeling you understand me, that you’re listening to me, I’m valued and you’re taking note of what I’m saying and you’re giving me a sequential story that maybe helps me to action? I think that’s pretty important.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>“A lot of folks refer to us as the trade desk for walled gardens,” says Pixability CEO David George. “The next evolution for us is into OTT or CTV.”
Pixability’s clients include the “big six agencies” plus smaller independents and some brands as well, George explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference.
The big six “tend to look at YouTube and Facebook in different groups where the independents and brands they really get value around our ability to do cross platform. We provide a lot of efficiencies and scale in that environment because we can move ads and budgets around to different platforms.”
Earlier this month, Pixability released a tool for automating analyses of what specific video iterations are working or not. The system uses machine learning to evaluate the different versions of the uploaded ads while measuring their performance, context and audience against the client’s KPIs, as MediaPost reports.
Part of the reason for Pixability’s presence at DMEXCO is its expansion to international markets. In addition to Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco, the company has an office in London.
While video consumption and advertising “is growing exponentially,” says George, what’s really exciting is what’s going on in OTT. I myself recently cut the cord. It’s a liberating experience.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>“We are in an absolute state of transformation. I’ll be kind, I used to say chaos. It’s controlled chaos,” Kassan says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference, where MediaLink is a longtime attendee.
A year and a half after its acquisition by Assential plc, “it’s been a wonderful experience so far,” says Kassan. MediaLink opened a London office last year and “we’re very serious about our foray into Asia Pacific and China. They’re great partners and they’ve been a tremendous boost to MediaLink in terms of our ability to really create that global scale.”
Kassan considers DMEXCO to be “one of the best places to bring the adtech and martech communities together,” although not necessarily a venue where one can interact with lots of brand advertisers.
“One of the challenges of DMEXCO has always been there’s not a lot of brands here,” he explains. “There’s a lot of sellers. If you look around the show flow you see all the bold faced names that matter in martech and adtech.”
He harkens back to his opening day at law school and the prevailing expression, “Look to your left, look to your right one of those people won’t be here when you graduate.” Fortunately, whoever was sitting on his right or left “looked at me and I still made it, but there was truth in what they said.
“I think if you look to your left and look to your right, in 2019 there’ll be a few different players here. They may be merged or they may be purged. One of the two.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>Amazon certainly isn’t just a book store anymore. These days, it has a large offering of ad products to help buyers advertise both on and off its platforms.
But the real secret sauce is in how retailers like Amazon can use both of their key pillars – ecommerce and advertising – to level up at each.
So says Torsten Ahlers, an ad agency executive from Germany. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Ahlers, who is MD at Otto Group Media, an ad agency working the connection between retail and media, says:
“What’s going on is that the retailers have two effects…”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, LiveRamp GM Jeff Smith notes a change in brands’ own sentiment.
“I used to walk in and try to convince marketers and agencies of the import … not just the importance of the technology, but the importance of the privacy controls that are built into the technology,” Smith explains. “Sometimes the eyes would glaze over. Sometimes there was interest.
What’s changed in the last six months is I don’t have to convince people about that anymore. They’re asking me how they should approach it and what they should do about it. So that is a refreshing change for us.”
Acxiom bought LiveRamp back in 2014, saying the move “will expand its capability to bridge the gap between offline data and the rapidly growing universe of online marketing applications with better matching, more connectivity and faster onboarding”.
“Onboarding” is Smith’s term for porting offline data about consumers to digital environments, part of LiveRamp’s approach to “identity resolution”.
In all, the company aims to help move offline data to online, to move online data around digital platforms and to help brands use online data in physical environments.
“When you combine those three things, you’ve got omnichannel marketing, which is what most of our clients are aiming for,” Smith adds. “It’s their holy grail, is to be able to engage the consumer irregardless of channel and just have a conversation with the consumer.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>Launched in 2015, Great Big Story is an independent digital studio owned by CNN and whose roots began in short-form videos. The majority of its content is distributed “outside of the CNN universe” across a range of channels, with social media having a huge role, says Pippa Scaife, Commercial Director, Great Big Story, CNN International.
“I think the majority of our distribution, particularly when we work with brand partners, happens on our social channels,” Scaife says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO conference.
“Facebook and YouTube are where we tend to guarantee our views and that’s where we see most of our audience engaging with the content.”
Launched with the intention of competing with the likes of VICE Media and BuzzFeed, Great Big Story secured an investment of $40 million from CNN in June of 2017, as The Hollywood Reporter notes. The funding was to expand into a 24-hour streaming network for long-form, non-scripted and acquired programming.
“I think the common denominator across all of the content that we create, whether it’s editorial or sponsored content, is that it really drives the idea of emotion and specifically the idea of positive emotion,” says Scaife. “I think that’s the kind of sweet spot that makes our content work very well with our consumers and also appeal to our brand partners.”
Those brands are seeking “a range of KPI’s,” including time time spent with their brand, engagement and brand recall. “And we deliver on all of those things through emotional storytelling, but we also use the in house data platforms that we have to ensure that once we’ve created that content we’re putting it in front of the right audience at the right time.”
Referencing the direct-to-consumer movement in which newer brands shun traditional advertising and distribution models, Sciafe believes establishing trust is paramount.
“By creating this positive emotional content on behalf of their brands, we’re really able to help them achieve that and I think that’s what’s very unique about Great Big Story and that’s why so many partners are coming to us.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>Videology filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in May, and was bought by Amobee in July for approximately $100 million.
So what is the next chapter for this video powerhouse? Jon Block, who was VP product and platform at Videology and now holds the same title at Amobee, discusses the next move in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“It’s an incredibly exciting acquisition from my point of view,” Block says. “Videology and Amobee are two companies that are really the pioneering bleeding edge of convergence.
“Amobee has been a company that’s been focused very much on programmatic and social and the converging world between those two mediums. Videology has been focusing on the convergence between TV and video, and applying video concepts to TV and TV concepts to video.”
Block was a veteran of ITV, the main UK free-to-air commercial broadcaster before he joined Videology.
Videology was a pioneer in offering technology helping broadcasters deliver digital advertising.
Block sees both Videology and Amobee is having excelled in the use of data – respectively, for TV ad inventory forecasting and for creating custom audience segments.
“You have Videology focused on applying data in the supply constrained world, and then you have Amobee that has been using data in a demand constrained world,” he says. “And what I think is really exciting about these two companies together is that I believe this is probably the first time that two companies with advanced data capabilities from the demand constrained and the supply constrained worlds are coming together to form a whole.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>But are they getting a piece of the revenue pie? That’s where FreeWheel international GM Thomas Bremond hopes his company can help.
The Comcast-owned tech company may more commonly be thought of as helping big networks monetize their ads using advanced targeting. But Bremond says smaller publishers need help, too.
“If you are a fan of mixed martial arts, you can find, on either your connected tv or an OTT app, a site, or an app dedicated to that form of content,” he explains.
“Of course, you still have the cuisine TV and those things that are very prevalent, but generally, because there are so many launching now, they have to find the right business model, right? Is it advertising first? Is it subscription first? We are also helping them to find that right business model.”
FreeWheel, which was acquired by Comcast, majors on offering technology to companies hoping to capitalize on digital distribution.
But Bremond says technology isn’t the only offer.
“We work very closely amongst our various business units here at Comcast present in Europe to help them find the right holistic monetization setup between their various revenue streams,” he explains.
“Our advisory team at FreeWheel, which has been very active both in the US and here, in helping our clients understand the business dynamics around things like addressable TV.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>Just ask Mike Shehan. He co-founded the company as a self-serve off-shoot of another company he was at.
Acquired by European broadcast group RTL in full last year, now Shehan is speaking from a vantage point at which he has seen tremendous growth. But the SpotX CEO feels like the whole industry is about to experience a whole lot more.
“If you looked at Spot X two years ago, we had no [ad] inventory in OTT, it was very nascent,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “But we started two or three years ago entering that space. Today, now 40% of our spend globally is through OTT, and actually a majority of that is via the big TV.
“No-one knows how big this market could be, but if we’d know that the linear market is $80 billion, I think it’s anyone’s guess that CTV or OTT could be say $10 billion in the next couple of years, $20 billion, it could be even more depending on that continued adoption of OTT by the consumer.”
That seems to stand in good stead any company offering technology for buying digital video and over-the-top TV ads, as SpotX does – though the market continues to swirl with competition and consolidation.
One of SpotX’s key strategies has been diversifying out of its native US market, starting with investment by RTL and, later, outright acquisition. North America now pulls in 60% of its revenue, but Europe represents 35% of the remainder.
The company sees market traction especially in Italy, Nordics, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK.
But that doesn’t mean Shehan isn’t seeing growth at home, too.
“Last year, we started seeing in the fall, we started seeing all these big spikes in [ad] calls and we’re like, ‘Why are we seeing this?’,” he explains.
“It was football, it was American football. It was college football, it was NFL football. We were seeing calls of 250-300,000 concurrent users where we’re just getting slammed because people were actually watching those games now on their mobile devices or the other Roku device. That’s just so cool to be part of.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>“Transparency still is a huge, huge issue,” OMD Global CEO Florian Adamski says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO conference.
“Whereas I believe that a lot of things happened and a lot of it improved, and a lot of new adtech providers helped to clean up the supply chain, clients still have an eerie feeling that they don’t have total control over it,” he says.
This leads to a second trend: clients taking control. “Basically they want to own their own data, they want to own their own contracts, they want to own their own adtech.”
Which leads to a third trend, the problem of talent. “Clients can recruit and hire, buy the adtech and the licensing. The problem is how long can they retain and nurture talent to, in the long run, do what in the past agencies used to do,” says Adamski. “Do I believe there is a place in the supply chain in the industry for media agencies still today? Absolutely, because we will be all about recruiting, identifying, nurturing, training those talents that actually need inspiration working across different client industries.”
About a year into his global role, Adamski finds it fascinating to track distinct differences between different marketplaces. He notes that many people might assume that everything in adtech and publishing is fully globalized.
“My verdict is it is absolutely not. And I don’t even have to start talking about China and BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) over there or a totally different landscape in Japan or South Korea.”
But more frustrating is working with clients to take the best possible approach to measuring the performance of the money they spend on advertising.
“I still believe in the value of building and creating and fostering a brand that at some point then will deliver sales, downloads, interactions, whatever you define as the key KPI,” says Adamski. “To understand the relationship between this rent-building effort and how it pays off in performance. Only if we tie that together we can see that full picture.”
He adds that it’s “daunting” to encounter marketers that have walled off brand and performance issues. “I think that’s a big problem. It needs to stop. It needs to be reintegrated.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>“We started really about a year and a half ago,” says OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan in this video interview with Beet.TV. “We went out to probably 10% of revenue. [Now] it’s growing north of 500% a year. It’s growing very quickly.”
OpenX is a relatively new entrant in the video space, having kicked off in 2017. But the company is not just facilitating video ads on the big screen.
“We’re doing a lot of video in mobile as well,” Cadogan adds. “[In opt-in video], where we’re creating video ad units for the publisher and the consumer to engage in a value exchange, which consumers find very powerful
“So it’s basically taking the notion of rewarded video for gaming and applying it to other kinds of app developers. It can be in the dating space where you’re going to get extra matches, or in the content space, you can get extra articles … That’s working really, really well.”
Already, OpenX is joining the clutch of mobile ad tech providers to eye a jump to lean-back video. Cadogan says the company is “starting to explore” connected TV opportunities.
Throughout OpenX’s big video push, a noise has been rattling in the air over ad-land – concerns over transparency, viewability, fraud and so on.
But Cadogan cites Ads.txt and the Trust Accountability Group as two examples of measures he says should have eased the concerns expressed by P&G’s Marc Pritchard nearly two years ago.
“We’re seeing, and I’d say really in the last 12 to 18 months, a significant change… brands reaching out to us, wanting to understand how do you do business,” he says.
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>Could the rise of new mobile web technologies put the web back at the heart of consumers’ digital behavior that is now all about mobile?
Criteo’s Alexander Gösswein thinks what will be will be – but that all the current trend lines suggest advertisers who want to be in mobile should be in apps for some time to come.
“Will the app sustain in the future?,” says Criteo’s regional MD for DACH, MEA and Russia, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Or will we have different ways of communicating with the users in the mobile environment?
“And our strong belief is you have now to invest in apps because the user is now there. No matter what is happening in five years, so even in five years there is no app anymore it doesn’t matter. Now there’s a user, you have to go for the app.”
Of course, Criteo wants to be in mobile, too. In fact, it’s working the nexus of mobile, advertising and ecommerce.
Back in Q4 2017, its Global Commerce Report found booming in-app retail sales, with Latin America seeing a 37% year-on-year bump in mobile commerce transactions.
But the extent to which everything is mobile is one thing on which emerging markets have the upper hand, Gösswein says.
“What we see now mainly in the Asian region and in East Africa is that the world becomes an app only world,” he adds.
“So all the business goes to app, and this is not yet the case for Europe. So Europe is lacking a bit behind there.
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
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