The second edition of ATS was organized by Exchange Wire a couple of days ago in Paris, providing the opportunity of gathering the main actors of Real Time Advertising in France (Demand Partners, Trading Desks, Supply Side Platforms, Data Management Platforms & more) and also reviewing the main evolutions of Digital Advertising in France in 2014.
Programmatic advertising overview
Programmatic is the most dramatic evolution of digital advertising in France in 2014.
It has redesigned French advertising market: as Emmanuel Crego from Adaptv put it, there is 3 times more Private Market Places (PMP) in 2014. Even ad networks who were endangered by the rise of automated advertising, as manually operated men-in-the middle actors, are using programmatic as an additional sales channel.
Real Time Advertising is not limited to Display: Digital advertising is already mostly programmatic, noticed Yahoo’s Benoit Cochet: with Search included, 60% of digital spending in France is already programmatic, if we include Search. Mobile,Display, Video, Native advertising are also being automated.
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” lang=”en”><p><a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/ATSP14?src=hash”>#ATSP14</a> Benoit Cochet Search = 1er levier programmatique, ce qui fait que 60% des investissements digitaux sont déjà programmatiques</p>— Ratecard.fr (@Ratecard_fr) <a href=”https://twitter.com/Ratecard_fr/status/532833875547140096″>November 13, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src=”//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>#ATSP14 Benoit Cochet Search = 1er levier programmatique, ce qui fait que 60% des investissements digitaux sont déjà programmatiques— Ratecard.fr (@Ratecard_fr) November 13, 2014
- On Supply Side, the roundtable between LaPLaceMedia, Smart AdServer and 24/7 Media was the occasion to get meaningful figures about this topic. Publishers have increasingly opened their inventory to real time demand (both remnant & guaranteed inventory) at some point programmatic already accounts for over 50% of first-mover publishers revenue (Source: Smart AdServer).
Programmatic CPM’s are definitevely on the rise. David Pironon (Smart AdServer) said: on Desktop, publishers’ CPM top 1€, are in average of 50 cts on Mobile, the most expensive CPM is reached by mobile interstitial which can be up to 3€.
Private deals (privileged access to a specific first-choice inventory that publishers can grant to their programmatic advertisers, possibly combining data to maximize its value) are soaring this year (between +100% and +300%, says La Place Media) and represent a significant part of programmatic revenues. The PMP Place La Place Media did over 2000 deals, accounting in good months, for over 50 % of La Place Media Revenues.
Des chiffres impressionnants sur les DealsID en France : +100% à +300% Congrat @RubiconProject #ATSP14 pic.twitter.com/vaTZaFa36v — Ad-exchange.fr (@Adexchange1) November 13, 2014
Plus de 2000 DealsID opérés par @LaPlaceMedia et 32% du CA above the fold > 3€ CPM #ATSP14 good job @fabmag pic.twitter.com/zIyhsfxOoD — Ad-exchange.fr (@Adexchange1) November 13, 2014
- On Buy Side, less figures were shared (Grégoire Peiron, from Google, said Doubleclick Bid Manager represents around 80 Billion auctions a month, including from 2 to 3 Billion Video auctions), keynotes and panels dealt more with the structuration of the ecosystem.
One avant-garde question stands out of the crowd about the organization of programmatic buying: Should programmatic media buying be internalized (by advertisers)?
Trading desks were trying to protect their wall-garden, arguing it make no sense yet for most advertisers to take on risk (such as managing a fast-face moving technology) while programmatic is not a core-topic.
#ATSP14 #WPP “Does not make sense internalising programmatic display Only 1% of media spend.” — vincent potier (@vincentinlondon) November 13, 2014
It has become so for Air France, one of the biggest French advertisers, which has decided since 2013 to reshape its organization, and to seize the programmatic opportunity to internalize its global media buying. Several conditions were gathered to manage this change: critical size (a digital advertising budget of several Millions € per year), competent staff to take over and external consultancy (Makazi). Beyond centralizing media buying of 75 countries in one office in Paris, with a 7-people team (3 ad-ops + 4 people in liaison with foreign offices) and being able to optimize its media plans impression per impression and € per €, Sebastien Thomas says Air France has taken back control of its 1st-party data, gained transparency and technological skills.
Air France set up a brand trading desk to get more transparency, to control data/investments, and to fast-track access to new tech #ATSP14 — Video Ad News (VAN) (@videoadnews) November 13, 2014
Video advertising overview
The table roundup between Videology, Google & started with fresh figures about the French market. Traditional video budgets are definitively switching from TV to digital: Spending in video ads represents 23% of display advertising (+5 pts year-to-year) and 6,4% in all video spending (TV included) (source :SRI).
#ATSP14 Yann Le Roux : +7% de videonautes en France, la vidéo représente 23% des dépenses display, 6.4% des dépenses TV/Vidéo — Ratecard.fr (@Ratecard_fr) November 13, 2014
As TV audience is saturated, traditional TV advertisers are looking for incremental reach, second-screen strategies with 360-degree media plans or optimization of acquisition costs with top concerns such as: If an advertiser decides to invest 1 point less in TV advertising, what would be the ROI in digital video ads? When is optimal timing to switch advertising euros from TV to digital video? How to make sure the video ads will be viewed in a premium context (brand-safety)? This question matter more than formats:
#ATSP14 – Anne de Kerckhove Les annonceurs ne sont pas dans une problématique de format mais dans celle de la visibilité — Ratecard.fr (@Ratecard_fr) November 13, 2014
In a drive-to-web goal, how much digital traffic would be dragged by a TV Spot? How to analyze video plans, without unified KPIs between TVs (GRP) & Digital or unified audience measurement systems (panels versus user-centric measurement)?
Mobile advertising overview
Mobile spending has not made up for mobile usage yet, despite its growth. Traditional limitations are held acccountable such as tracking or complex trafficking [ED: even if, that's not so relevant anymore, lots of fast-programming technologies are available]
To Todd Tran, Nexage, there’s another reason. The thing is most of the time, top mobile publishers are not the same as Desktop. They are often mobile-apps only actors [ED:he was referring to gaming,etc..] and these top mobile advertisers that are spending the most on mobile apps are these same app-publishers that are earning the most money. There are new alternatives (such as probabilistic cross-device tracking) that traditional advertisers are reluctant to adopt since they would have to sit on their cookies infrastructure they spent time building.
Main hot topics/challenges of digital advertising and next trends?
The top 3 trends that help automated advertising grow in 2014 are :
- Data (France is a bit late compared to the US, where a whole ecosystem is built). Data was really the core topic of all keynotes, what Pierre Berendes, from Ad-exchange also noticed. The data ecosystem in France needs still underway with flexible technologies, open technologies communicating through APIs, facilitating data exchange between partners. Not much new was said, maybe this reminder of the true purpose of data, after reconciliation & data-crunching: providing advertisers with meaningful insights about their media plan.
- Attribution model of multi-channel/platform
Attribution model was another recurring keyword. Atlas notably introduced the Facebook deterministic cross-device tracking and attribution solution, enabling their advertisers to deduplicated cookies using Facebook logins. Since a single user (provided he is logged-in to the same FB account) can be identified on all his devices, advertisers will be able to collect multiple touch points with the same user, instead of getting multiple cookies). But it’s hard to guess how (long) Atlas will be managed independently from Facebook.
#ATSP14 “it’s our job at Atlas to be agnostic and not favor FB” -oh, that’s very reassuring then!!! #justanothergoogle — Mathieu Roche (@rochemathieu) November 13, 2014
2015 will be the year where cross-device tracking is going to scale, Todd Tran, Nexage #ATSP14 — Margarita Zlatkova (@maggy_zlatkova) November 13, 2014
- Brand Safety & fight against Fraud.
It’s the second hot topic most actors dealt with during the ATS (Videology, Appnexus, Google),…).
“@Ratecard_fr: #ATSP14 Anne de Kerckhove – Aux US, jusqu’à 33% du trafic était du Bot Traffic” #webmarketing
— Emmanuel Brunet (@ebrunet001) November 13, 2014
Display is more affected than Video advertising (Fraud is more complicated with Video despite Video CPM’s are higher and more tempting). Open-ad exchanges are more affected than premium market places (which have their quality charts and a limited number of publishers). TV Advertisers, especially, pay close attention to the context where their video instream will be delivered. Most players, if not all, have been fighting against fraud (some actors such as Videology clean their url-list of sites-submitted to Demand Side Partners for instance, assuming then a risk of being legally responsible of their listing).
