Get the slides here.
Condé Nast wanted to automate manual processes in order to have more time for strategy and analysis. With support from MediaCom, they adopted a new approach based around programmatic guaranteed, which eliminated the need to exchange endless emails, invoices and documents with clients. “It’s exactly what a publisher like us needs in a digital environment that is always more and more demanding,” explains Condé Nast's Elia Blei.
Watch the video HERE.
Condé Nast wanted to offer its advertising clients programmatic access to inventory, maintain a premium look and feel and deliver more native, creative and custom solutions to both new and existing customers. Adopting DoubleClick Ad Exchange gave Condé Nast the ability to segment premium placements, develop private marketplaces, gain exposure to new clients, expand available inventory and drive revenue.
Watch it here.
Jubii is a publisher and media network that covers over 60% of the Danish internet population. The company wanted to monetise both premium and low value space in the most efficient way possible to foster further growth. A combination of direct and programmatic sales has seen an increase not only of the eCPM but also the fill rate for inventory across its portfolio. DoubleClick platforms have been instrumental in enabling this transformation.
Discover it here.
Milliyet is a leading Turkish news provider that sells 260,000 print copies daily and attracts over 3 million unique users to its online properties every day. In recent years it has seen both users and ad spend switch to digital. In this context, online monetisation is a critical area of focus. As a way of driving return on investment for its advertising clients, Milliyet turned to the powerful features of DoubleClick for Publishers Premium.
Discover it here.
Get the slides here.
In 2015, programmatic advertising was at the centre of discussions and events across the advertising industry. From Advertising Week in London and Interact in Berlin to the Festival of Creativity in Cannes, it has never been far from the headlines. With 2016 underway and a comprehensive schedule of outputs planned, we asked some of our Programmatic Trading Committee members to reflect on the challenges and achievements of 2015 and what we can expect from the year ahead. This blog is part of a Programmatic Future Trends series.
This blog includes contributions from Nigel Gilbert, VP Strategic Development EMEA at AppNexus, Andres Ferrate, AdSpam Team at Google, Anthony Rhind, Chief Strategy Officer at Adform, Andy McNab, UK Managing Director at RocketFuel and Paul Coffey, Director, Customer Solutions and Innovation, Platforms EMEA at Google.
"Advertisers and publishers, alike, have demanded a renewed focus on reducing invalid traffic, improving viewability, and navigating the ad blocking debate. As a result the industry had to escalate efforts and collaborate more on all fronts. These common challenges have raised awareness of the interconnected interests of different actors in the larger ecosystem.
"2015 was marked by the convergence of industry-sponsored policy and additional investment in technology. One key achievement is stronger collaboration in the industry via TAG to increase transparency both through the sharing of Data Center IP Blacklists and Payment IDs. These efforts kept (and will continue to keep) millions of bad actors out of the advertising ecosystem, while raising the tide for good players. Given the shift to programmatic, another key achievement was broader investment in automated defenses to combat common ad fraud scenarios such as ad injection and hidden ads. The prevention of ads from appearing on pages that serve malware and unwanted software further prevented advertisers’ spend from being diluted, while directing this revenue to responsible publishers and improving consumer safety. Read this blog post to find out more how Google fought bad ads in 2015."
"Trading desks were initially necessary and effective; they concentrated expertise, accelerated knowledge development and enabled a high volume of campaigns to be managed effectively. As programmatic evolves from a narrow buying discipline to an operating system that optimises all touchpoints and messaging dynamically, the trading desk innovators must be absorbed into the heart of the media, creative and strategy teams. Today most media agency heads have built their reputation in digital, but the next wave will need a programmatic foundation to define service excellence and drive innovation. All insights will be refined by real-time data and all implementation will be enhanced by the speed and variance benefits of automation."
"Agency groups are continually re-shaping themselves to ensure they stay relevant, one outcome of this has been the agency trading desk. Agencies are in a position of closer proximity to client data and as such are intrinsically linked to that ecosystem, naturally they are best placed to advise on strategy. We are seeing agency groups embracing best in class technology providers to power these strategies. We are seeing far more of a collaborative relationship between trading desks, tech providers and advertisers. This is demonstrated by Cadreon partnering with Rocket Fuel’s programmatic marketing platform to enhance IPG Mediabrands’ Audience Measurement Platform. We expect to see more of this in the future."
"Change is happening across the ecosystem, not just in the trading desk space. The disruptive nature of programmatic means that all players across the industry are having to adapt their business models.The research that Google has conducted with BCG shows that in order to make efficiency and effectiveness gains, it’s necessary to make significant changes to the way that marketing and agency teams are organised. It requires all players to be more nimble, to focus on collaboration and to understand data in driving effective campaigns. There are three building blocks that will underpin trading desks’ success:
By Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President, Ads & Commerce at Google.
When ads are good, they connect you to products or services you’re interested in and make it easier to get stuff you want. They also keep a lot of what you love about the web—like news sites or mobile apps—free.
But some ads are just plain bad—like ads that carry malware, cover up content you’re trying to see, or promote fake goods. Bad ads can ruin your entire online experience, a problem we take very seriously. That’s why we have a strict set of policies for the kinds of ads businesses can run with Google—and why we’ve invested in sophisticated technology and a global team of 1,000+ people dedicated to fighting bad ads. Last year alone we disabled more than 780 million ads for violating our policies—a number that's increased over the years thanks to new protections we've put in place. If you spent one second looking at each of these ads, it’d take you nearly 25 years to see them all!
Read the full blog here!
IAB Romania and Agora Project, with the support of Quantix Marketing Consulting and PageFair have conducted an extensive study in which they found that the exact percentage of adblock users from the main local websites is 13.9% of the total visitors.
The study was conducted between October 2015 - January 2016, on 80 websites with the highest traffic in Romania (according to the local traffic monitoring institution), on which, the content and / or advertising is coordinated by 7 leading publishers or sales houses, all being members of IAB Romania.
The website categories that registered the highest percentage of AdBlock use are: sports (21.8% of visitors have AdBlocker installed), TV Guides (19.9%), General News (18.2%) and Economic & financial (16.4%). In contrast, the categories Hobby & Kids have the lowest percentage of visitors with AdBlocker installed (7.2%).
"The fact that one browser out of seven has blocked the access to advertising is a warning message that users wish to address to the entire online advertising industry in Romania. The study shows that they refuse advertising priori, although they rather find it useful, but its utility is closely related to context, refusing intrusive formats and hindering access to content.
Solutions should provide a better targeting of users, using quality data to address the right message, to the right person at the right time, native ads and quality & creative formats, with the lowest intrusive degree, as are those stated by IAB standards" says Adrian Moţîrlichie, Business Development Director Project Agora / Tailwind EMEA and coordinator of the project.
The study results highlight the need for a higher responsibility in the industry towards the user interaction with online advertising, say the representatives of IAB Romania.
"Unlike many other countries where the percentage of Adblock users escalated quickly to numbers of a few tens of percent, according to other studies, in Romania we are in a somewhat privileged position, but that’s why we must do everything possible to keep this percentage under control.
Not only the publishers, but also the entire digital ecosystem, must show a deeper interest towards brand experiences and the way advertising is perceived by the user, to slow down or even stop the growth of this percentage. The most recent actions of IAB Romania on this issue, for example The Digital Decalogue, are a good starting point for improving relations with Romanian Internet users, "said Ionut Oprea, President of IAB Romania.
These results are the preliminary data emerged from a broader study, that observed the behavior of Internet users who use AdBlocker and their attitudes towards advertising, adblocking generally and against specific elements and intent / openness accessing paid content.
IAB Romania and Agora Project initiative seek to define which are the main reasons for using adblocking and to work with the entire industry to improve online advertising in Romania.
The full version of the study, which includes a thorough analysis of the resulting data and the real reason why users have installed an ad blocker program will be available in February 2016.
The study has two components. A technical measuring system for the number of browsers that have installed adblocking applications. This approach uses PageFair tags implemented in every page of every site measured. There were measured only desktop versions of sites, mobile versions of Adblock being affected only marginally (less than 3% - PageFair data).
The second component of the study consists of a survey regarding Internet users, conducted by online collections, based on a structured questionnaire. The main purpose is to explore the reasons why users install Adblock. The sample size was conducted with 1,300 respondents, representative for Romanian online Internet environment. The margin of error is +/- whole sample at 2.6% for a level of trust of 95%.
This blog article was originally published on the TYPES Blog. TYPES is a EU-funded programme under Horizon 2020 whose aim is to support growth in the online advertising industry through trust-enhancing tools and technologies, in the face of the growing popularity of advertising mitigation software such as ad blockers. IAB Europe plays a critical role in this programme, by providing insights and inputs from the digital advertising industry perspective.
There’s a lot of talk these days about the so-called “Safe Harbour” agreement between the United States and the European Union, which the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) unexpectedly struck down in October 2015. Over 4,000 U.S.-based companies were relying on Safe Harbour to legally process the personal data of EU citizens on servers based in the United States. The surprise ruling seemed to render those data transfers illegal overnight and expose the companies to the possibility of legal liability if a European data protection authority decided to challenge them.
Not only American companies are affected: European companies using U.S.-based cloud services may not be immune. And the basis on which the Court rejected Safe Harbour seemed also to leave the legality of other data transfer tools – “binding corporate rules” and “model clauses” – vulnerable to legal challenge, though they were not specifically addressed in the judgment.
So, with an estimated EUR 250 billion of trade in digital services at stake between the EU and its biggest commercial partner, how is it that the CJEU could suddenly tear up such a critical legal instrument? And more importantly, what comes next?
Under the EU data protection Directive 95/46/EC, personal data may not be sent outside of the Union for processing unless the country to which it is sent has a legal framework for data protection that is essentially equivalent to that prevailing in Europe. As the US was not considered to provide comparable protection in the 1990s, the European Commission adopted a Decision in 2000 declaring that companies who signed up to the “Safe Harbour Principles” and “Frequently Asked Questions” issued by the US Department of Commerce for the purpose (see here), could in effect create a virtual space that did provide enough protection for such transfers to be considered safe. Companies who signed up could start processing the personal data of EU citizens as from the moment they declared their adherence to the Safe Harbour principles. Enforcement of the rules was vested in the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
In the years immediately following the adoption of the Safe Harbour Decision, in 2002 and 2004, the European Commission issued two reports on the functioning of the regime (see here and here). Both reports expressed reservations about the transparency of US signatory companies’ privacy policies, and the second one also at least implicitly questioned whether the enforcement by the FTC was assiduous enough. However, neither proposed any concrete modifications. In 2013, following the revelations by Edward Snowden about broad U.S. government access to electronic communications, including those of EU citizens, for anti-terrorism purposes, the Commission issued a Communication calling out such access as potentially incompatible with the requirements of EU data protection rules, and determined to negotiate changes to the Safe Harbour regime to address the issue. In early 2014, the European Parliament adopted a resolution calling for the suspension of Safe Harbour. Negotiations between the EU and the U.S. continued during 2014 and 2015, but had stalled on the issue of judicial redress for European citizens. A bill pending before the US Congress would go some way to addressing this final sticking point.
This is where things stood when the CJEU issued its October 2015 ruling in Maximillian Schrems v Data Protection Commissioner. Mr. Schrems, an Austrian law student, had asked the Irish data protection authority (DPA) to force Facebook to stop transferring his personal data to the US, on the basis that the U.S. rules on law enforcement access were incompatible with European data protection law. Data processed by Facebook in connection with Mr. Schrems’ Facebook account could thus indirectly be shared with the US authorities without his knowledge and without any recourse being available to him. The Irish DPA declined to hear the case, taking the view that it was beyond its competence to second-guess the legality of Facebook’s data transfers, since (1) the European Commission had duly found in its 2000 Decision that companies signed up to Safe Harbour in effect complied with EU rules, (2) the Decision was binding on all EU Member States, and (3) FB was a Safe Harbour signatory. Schrems appealed the DPA’s decision to the Irish High Court. The High Court was sympathetic to Schrems’s view that access by U.S. law enforcement authorities was incoherent with the EU data protection Directive and the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, which guarantees a right to the protection of personal data as well as rights to access and correction. The High Court felt that the Irish DPA ought to have been prepared at least to hear the case, and, going further, also queried the compatibility of the Safe Harbour Decision itself with EU law, including the Charter. The High Court submitted a request for a preliminary ruling to the CJEU, the European Union’s highest court, asking whether the fact of the Commission having adopted its Safe Harbour Decision in 2000 deprived national DPAs of any role in hearing complaints brought by their citizens in connection with its operation.
The CJEU ruled that the Safe Harbour Decision should not be construed as depriving DPAs of the right to hear complaints from their citizens, and that not only do they retain the right to hear such complaints, they have anobligation to do so. But the most striking aspect of the ruling was the Court’s finding that the European Commission had erred in adopting an “adequacy” decision in 2000 without actually finding the U.S. itself to provide an adequate legal environment, quite apart from whatever requirements and safeguards were built into the Safe Harbour Principles. So without even examining the Principles, the CJEU declared the Safe Harbour Decision invalid. No transition period was announced.
As of the time of writing, there is hope that agreement on a “safer Safe Harbour” will be reached shortly by U.S. and EU negotiators. An informal grace period of three months laid down by the 28 national DPAs comes to an end this week (1st February 2016). DPAs are also expected shortly to issue guidance on the validity (or otherwise) of binding corporate rules and model clauses, instruments approved by individual Member States that appear not to require an explicit finding of adequacy but do not in and of themselves address the law enforcement access issue identified by the CJEU and the Irish High Court.
All of which is making the first few weeks of 2016 more fraught than usual for online advertising and other companies that had been watching the post-Snowden US-EU negotiations with cautious optimism, but are now having to cope with a curve ball from the EU courts.