Brussels, 21st June 2016 – advertisers are experimenting with hybrid models but still relying on agencies whilst publishers are developing in-house models, the second IAB Europe Attitudes towards Programmatic Advertising survey1 reveals.
Based on a survey of more than 900 advertisers, agencies and publishers from across 29 markets, the study provides clarity on the current status of programmatic adoption and stakeholders’ perspectives on its potential for strategic competitive advantage.
With the majority of stakeholders in the digital advertising industry now undertaking some form of programmatic advertising (87% of advertisers, 92% of publishers and 93% of media agencies), it is interesting to note that there is a clear evolution of programmatic strategies across markets of different maturity levels.
Advertisers start out on their programmatic journey with an independent specialist, then move to an agency of DSP and then in mature markets adopt an agency or hybrid model. Similarly, publisher strategies are evolving; they start out with a hybrid model, then lean more heavily on their SSP and finally bring the expertise in-house. For agencies, the in-house agency trading desk remains dominant.
For some, the drivers for developing an in-house programmatic model are clear. Although less advertisers are considering in-house than last year, those that are, are looking to gain more control, increase transparency, integrate across channels and reduce cost. Agencies are increasingly driven by a need for audience insight to deliver more value for their clients and control. Publishers are driven by the ability to better monetise their inventory and efficiency in the sales process.
Meanwhile, hiring people with the right skill set and training people adequately is the biggest challenge for developing an in-house model.
Henrik Schulte, Media Strategy Manager EMEA at Schneider Electric said: "Bringing programmatic in-house means full control over what happens with our most valuable good: the data of our customers. Setting up an in-house solution first and foremost requires education on programmatic, in order to get the various functions that need to be involved on board. Once the set-up is complete, it is a great way to foster cross-functional collaboration while providing our customers with personalised advertising."
The research was initiated and designed by IAB Europe’s Programmatic Trading Committee. The Committee is a multi-stakeholder initiative helping publishers, agencies and advertisers increase their understanding of the programmatic ecosystem and the impact it is having on digital advertising. It is focused on producing educational white papers, thought-leadership webinars and blogs and industry insights.
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Media please contact:
Marie-Clare Puffett – puffett@iabeurope.eu
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1 IAB Europe Attitudes towards Programmatic Advertising survey
The survey illustrates the attitudes towards programmatic display advertising, current adoption and strategies, on both the buy-side and sell-side of the digital advertising industry. The 2015 report can be accessed here.
Recently I had the privilege to speak at IAB Europe Interact in Lisbon, where I reflected on the observations I made a year prior at IAB Europe Interact Berlin. Not too much has changed since then in terms of our industry’s challenges, only a growing consensus that programmatic is not delivering on its potential. On the one hand, our industry has brought scale and efficiency to digital marketing. The programmatic story over the last decade has been one of high excitement, rapid adoption and huge investment. But with so much emphasis on growth, there’s been little time for exploratory innovation and refinement.
Back during my Berlin speech in 2015, I emphasized that the money flowing into programmatic was not new or incremental budget, but rather shifted away from traditional digital. However, the rise of ad blocking suggests that everyone in the digital ecosystem played a part in overloading web pages with ads, slowing down the experience and annoying end-users.
I also cautioned a year ago that there is no “magic button” in ad tech and this is still true. Everyone wants a silver bullet, but many of the solutions out there are too one-dimensional. A majority of DSPs in 2016 are still optimised to the days of 2007, with media price and efficiency ranked above all other considerations. Even the most highly sophisticated companies with end-to-end solutions like AppNexus require world-class talent working exceptionally hard every day to execute a finely-honed, long-term winning strategy, and not everyone can make that commitment. Finally, I stressed the need for simplicity in an increasingly complex supply chain, and I’m sure there are few serious players left who would disagree.
So, what should the focus be as we adapt? I shared a quote from Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, who said “If you don’t have a competitive edge don’t compete” and it’s my strong belief that there are three areas of untapped potential: product, process, and people.
Product is the “what” – the media package, the data, the service. You should be asking yourselves “how can we deliver additional value that marginalises the competition?” It’s important to note that by product, you should be thinking in terms of platforms, not point solutions. Platforms that can power the entire market and don’t just address a singular challenge are rising to the top. The ecosystem is tired of stitching together a myriad of solutions – it’s just too inefficient and it’s too expensive. They want simplicity, efficiency, transparency, and most of all, an open market that provides broad choice and optionality.
After product, focus on your process. Process refers to the “how” – how you build your product, and how you deliver it. Process of course becomes more of a focus once your company grows out of the start-up phase into a bigger company, but don’t think of it as a depressing bureaucratic inevitability. I mean process with a purpose, one that can give you a sharp competitive edge.
My favourite example of improving processes with incredible results is the British Cycling team, led by GM Dave Brailsford, who won the Tour De France in 2012 and followed that by winning seven Olympic Gold medals in London. These amazing wins were widely credited to Dave’s concept of “the aggregation of marginal gains.” He believed that if the team improved in every area, not just those directly related to cycling by just one percent, then those small gains would add up to notable collective improvement—and he was right. Our industry could take a page from his playbook and focus on making incremental improvements across the board to better rise to the technological and strategic challenges we all face today.
The last, but far from least, is people, or the “who” behind it all. It’s a point that I frequently make: invest in your people. Nothing is possible without skilled, passionate, amazing people. There’s a common misconception that technology is there to replace people. I don’t believe that, but I do believe that the skills of the people inside tomorrow’s successful publisher, agency, and marketer business need to fundamentally change so that we can put the machines to work for us. We are in a new golden age of marketing and planning but only our best PEOPLE can truly help us harness machine learning and big data. And sometimes that means looking in new places for talent, the kind that can bring fresh perspective and different energy to the table. Drawing on the same type of talent from the same talent pools year after year might mean you’re destined to become a circular firing squad. Or preaching to the choir—pick your metaphor.
Differentiating your products, processes and people are more important than ever as we enter a new era, one that AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley was first to label “The Programmable Age” and a concept that I’ve written about as well. Think about the ways users consume content and media today and how fragmented the landscape is. They’re on their mobiles on the train, or their laptops while watching TV. They’re fluidly emailing, texting and on social media—and they’re in a different frame of mind for almost every use case. Ad formats are different on every device. Basically, the interaction between brands and consumers has grown immensely more complex.
Media buyers and sellers now have to move mountains to differentiate their products because the interaction between brands and consumers has grown immensely more complex and must be increasingly more personalised. Real-time data, learning algorithms, and a partner ecosystem will be hallmarks of the interconnected programmable age.
To recap: a) programmatic is now the norm but it’s not enough b) you have to differentiate to win across product, processes and people c) the future is programmable; don’t get left behind. The brands and advertisers that win will be those that make smart use of their own market insights and data, plugging these into their communications planning in a way that allows them to individualise and empower buyers to move with the confidence and agility required today.
[slideshare id=63171508&doc=marketmapeu2016web-160617110818]
Download the document below!
Join this webinar to gain insight into best practice in consumer behaviour research and media planning
Tuesday 5th July 3pm CEST
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This is the second of two webinars showcasing the winners of our 2016 Research Awards which recognise and celebrate the research projects and the contribution they have made to the development of the digital advertising industry.
This complimentary live webinar will share winning case studies of the Consumer Attitudes and Behaviour, Consumer devices and Research and Data Innovaton categories. You will have the opportunity to learn about advertising effectiveness, mobile advertising effectiveness and cross-device measurement and planning for effective campaigns
The winning case studies to be presented are:
Here is the recording of the webinar!
You can watch the recording of the first research awards webinar here which shares best practice on ad effectiveness and cross-device measurement
Watch the recordings of our recent Programmatic Buy-side and Programmatic Sell-side webinars.
There's a lot of confusion about what full programmatic TV will bring.
Last month, while I was at TV Connect London, I noticed that while programmatic TV was the big buzz word on everyone’s lips, there was a lot misunderstanding about what it actually means. On the advertising side, there’s equal buzz – and equal confusion – about what terms like IPTV and OTT TV mean.
As someone who straddles both industries in my job as Video Product Manager at Improve Digital, I wanted to take the opportunity to clear up some of the confusion and offer an idea of what the future will bring.
What does full programmatic TV mean? It is a method of automating the process of buying and delivering ads that maximizes the monetisation of video content. Full automation will mean a wholly user-targeted, content-integrated viewing experience.
But that’s the future. What’s the situation now? While we’re waiting for the advent of full programmatic TV, video content is currently delivered via two methods: traditional TV using a set-top box (IPTV) and online video (OTT TV). Each one offers distinct advantages and challenges to advertising sales.
So which should we focus on when thinking about the development of full programmatic TV? Both. That’s because both of these methods will grow towards each other and lend their strengths to creating the holistic, integrated programmatic advertising viewing experience of the future.
Traditional TV offers audience, online offers cross-device marketing
Traditional TV advertisement budgets are shifting to online. The European total online advertisement surpasses TV to record €36.2bn in 2015. Online video is 16.7% of the Display ad spend (€13.9 bn in 2015) (source: IAB Europe ©2016 IHS).
While the budgets are shifting traditional TV is where the audience still is. This guarantees brands wide audience exposure, while exposure on online video is fragmented because of the many different online video platforms.
But, although consumers often reach for the ease of accessing video content via their remote controls, they’re also accessing online video content anytime, anywhere. And with the amazing potential of user data and user tracking, online video offers the opportunity for the type of targeted, cross-device marketing that brands can only dream of now.
As we move towards programmatic TV, we should see the audience capabilities of traditional TV being applied to target more specific viewers. How?
By combining demographic targeting with online user data targeting
When we talk about demographic targeting in the traditional TV model, it means marketers look at programme category and timeslot to determine who in a household is likely watching. They might be guessing at a range of individuals, ages and other factors.
Obviously, this type of guess-work isn’t only lacking in precision, it also fails to reflect what is happening in real-time. As I’ve already mentioned, online video is able to track individual online behaviour in real-time, and track it over time to target users effectively.
Now think of combining information from both methods and you can start to imagine the targeting potential that full programmatic can unlock. We’re already seeing this in a few, select places in the industry, but we need to see more to create the personalized, frictionless ad experience of the future.
And we need a frictionless ad experience to monetize high-quality content
Quality is the last piece of the puzzle that should go into creating the future of programmatic TV.
In traditional TV, the two ground rules for maintaining viewers’ attention are “Content is King” and “Never Go Black”. That means that content providers and owners are skittish about ads being served up in real-time that they can’t view or test beforehand.
On the online video side, although there’s a lot of experience with the power of programmatic advertising, allowing ads to pay for high premium, long-form content isn’t built into business models, where subscriptions pay for content.
The solution to both these problems is to implement programmatic advertising in small steps and pilot projects, so that the results can be tested on both the traditional TV and online video side.
While TV has the biggest reach, the blueprint for programmatic TV has already been set by online video, so building further on that knowledge is the low-hanging fruit.
With all the strengths that both traditional TV and online video can bring to the ad ecosystem, they will slowly grow towards each other to form the kind of holistic, integrated viewing experience that consumers and advertisers want. When that happens the industry has to be ready to support the best of those two worlds – and the TV experience of the future.
Click the document below to download it.
The first study of BVDW for online audio shows the impact of digital audio advertising.
Campaign parameters
You can read or download the study below.
[slideshare id=62846921&doc=bvdwonlineaudioadvertisingeffectsstudy2015-160608100458]
An analysis of ROI and sales performance of online advertising on the basis of individual marketing mix modeling and database analysis.
Background and motivation
Advertising market: Uncertainty regarding sales effect and with it efficiency (ROI) of online advertising.
OVK, Circle of Online Marketers: Analysis of the offline sales effect of online advertising in general and in particular online display.
Focus for evaluating: Gross online ROI based on the sales performance.
You can read or download the study below.
At Interact 2016, IAB Europe announced the winners of its 2016 Research Awards. BBC won the Consumer Attitudes and Behaviour category and was highly commended in the Brand Advertising Effectiveness one for their research project entitled The Science of Engagement, which looks at answering two pivotal questions for boosting content-led marketing effectiveness:
How do consumers engage with content-led marketing?
What does this engagement mean for the brands involved?
To browse through the research, check the slideshare or download the document below!
At Interact 2016, IAB Europe announced the winners of its 2016 Research Awards, notably comScore as the winner of the Research and Data Innovation category with their research project: Project Footprint - Exploring Consumers’ Online & Offline Behaviours.
The new research study from comScore and their partners aims to quantify the correlation between what people read and their subsequent online behaviour, offline conversations and purchases to holistically understand the impact of advertising
To browse through the research, check the slideshare or download the document below!
At Interact 2016, IAB Europe announced the winners of its 2016 Research Awards, notably The Guardian as the winner of the Best Use of Research Budget category with their research project: The Guardian Guide to Context.
The research project focuses on the impact of context on ad effectiveness from a plethora of perspectives with intriguing findings.
To browse through the research, download it below.
At Interact 2016, IAB Europe announced the winners of its 2016 Research Awards, notably IAB UK as the winner of the Consumer Devices category with their research project: Real_Living: How devices compete for attention in the living room.
The widely media touted research project generated a series of groundbreaking findings, such as data that showed for the first time that ad breaks during TV broadcasts don't necessarily correlate with device usage, effectively dethroning the TV as the dominant living room screen.
To browse through the research, click the document below to download it.
