In order to respond to the changes and needs of the market, while continuing to help players in the online ecosystem comply with certain requirements of the ePrivacy Directive and the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”), the Transparency and Consent Framework needs to be updated on a regular basis. In particular, constant evolutions in case law as well as in guidelines of Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) place ever higher demands on market participants in terms of data protection requirements. The TCF instances have therefore drawn inspiration from them to bring some new iterations to the Framework, including some changes related to the Action Plan that was submitted to and validated by the Belgian Data Protection Authority (more information here).
These new iterations will be released as part of the Transparency & Consent Framework v2.2 in the next few weeks, and TCF participants will have until the end of Q3 2023 to make the necessary changes to their respective implementations. All iterations have been developed to avoid breaking changes to the existing v2.1 Technical Specifications and facilitate adoption in a timely manner by CMPs and Vendors.
In the run up to the launch of TCF v2.2, IAB Europe will publish background material and host a series of webinars to offer full support and guidance to CMPs, Vendors and Publishers. Registration links can be found below.
Session 1: Overview of the main differences between the TCF policy 3.5 & 4.0
Thursday 20th April| 15:00 CET – Register here
An overview of the main differences in policies between v2.1 & v2.2. This session is for all TCF stakeholders.
Speakers
Session 2: Overview of the changes to the TCF technical specifications between v2.1 & v2.2
Thursday 20th April| 16:00 CET – Register here
An overview of the changes to the TCF technical specifications between v2.1 & v2.2. This session is to help CMPs and Vendors navigate the different technical resources.
Speakers
We’re teaming up with GroupM Nexus to invite you to participate in an exclusive survey that aims to understand consumption habits and the development of Digital Audio Advertising in Europe.
Have your say before 12th May and be in with a chance of winning a €200 Euro Voucher!
Back in 2019, we conducted a survey in partnership with Xaxis to understand the changing landscape of Digital Audio Advertising in Europe. Now, four years on, we’re keen to see how the landscape has evolved and if key challenges and barriers have been overcome and we are inviting those involved in audio media buying, planning, and selling to get involved!
The survey will take less than ten minutes to complete and all responses will be treated with the strictest confidence. All respondents will receive the research results directly to their email if provided.
The results will be used to showcase the audio opportunity and how audio can be used to enrich media strategies. Take part in the survey here today.
We will be selecting a participant, at random, to win a €200 Amazon voucher. So what are you waiting for? Share your expertise and enter for your chance to win.
The impending termination of support for third-party cookies on Google Chrome means that many of the metrics that marketers use today to measure their digital media performance will soon become obsolete. So how will we measure in a cookie-less future?
Josephine Howe, Sr. Marketing Manager, MSA, Daniel Godoy, Microsoft Global Programmatic Evangelist, MSA: There is no silver bullet solution for measuring programmatic outcomes. However, industry ID solutions will add a valuable layer to measurement of digital campaigns with authenticated IDs. Advertisers will also need to rely on non-addressable signals, for example how website visits changed during the campaign, and metrics like attention measurement.
Raman Sidhu, SVP at Verve Group: The objective of third-party cookies was to enable cross-channel (multi-touch) tracking and measurement. However, they have not been perfect for a while as the environment in which they run is already limited, most notably for Apple users. So we need to remember that cookies are already not doing what they were designed to accomplish.
As a result, new models must be considered:
When we’re talking about conversions, we need to think about the type of conversion and where it’s taking place. Whether it be ecommerce, leads, sales, app downloads, etc. All of these have alternatives without cookies, IDs or PII which are proven & measurable. One of the main differences is that it’s focused on the last touch or via a data-driven model.
Alex Berger, Senior Product Marketing Director, Adform: The third-party cookie is already a shadow of what it once was. New solutions have been introduced and scaled that are ready to cover the majority of targeting and measurement use cases. At times they’re more precise; in other situations, more complex. But, the key is that advertisers retain the ability to be strategic. Today, they have to navigate a more complex and strategic technology landscape to do that while the industry goes through a period of unbundling. As the third-party cookie further erodes, and technologies continue to come online I think we will see the trendline bottom out and reverse towards a re-bundling which will translate into significant scale 2–5 years from now. Ad performance for branding doesn't really change radically from third-party cookies. Measurement for Branding campaigns is a matter of quality of exposure with the right reach and frequency. Quality of exposure doesn't need third-party cookies. To measure reach and frequency, you need cross-identity measurement to unpack the effectiveness of your strategies. But this is generally the same regardless of if they are based on contextual, cohorts, first- or third-party IDs. For Performance you need an approach that still relies on real-time decisioning, but further validates that against longer-term, deeper reference and additional data.
Louise Mbugua, Sr. Product Manager & Go-To-Market Lead, Teads: We must first acknowledge two realities. The first being that with over 50% of web supply today missing 3P cookies (3PCs), cookieless is not near, it’s here. Secondly, not all cookies are equal, with 1st Party cookies (1PCs - created and stored by the website a user visits) surviving into the “post-cookie” future. So how do we define whether ads are working in a post-cookie world? Let’s first define success. The success of an ad can be viewed through two lenses: “engagement” (user interaction with the ad) and “outcomes” (post ad engagement value such as brand uplift & sales). Ad engagement, as measured with traditional media metrics including ad viewability, completion rate and clicks, is minimally impacted by the deprecation of 3PCs. As an aside, however, with up to 20% of programmatic ad spend distributed to Made For Advertising (MFA) supply, it’s increasingly vital for marketers to evolve these metrics to include attention-based measurement - e.g., ‘dwell time’, ‘attentive seconds’, ‘attention CPM’ - with studies proving attention to be strongly correlated to outcomes and 3x more effective than viewability as a predictor of consumer behaviour. Unlike ad engagement, outcome measurement, specifically attribution measurement that relies on 3P consumer-level data, will be challenged by the deprecation of 3PCs. Here the industry is still in an experimentation phase and there is no single replacement solution, but key options marketers are likely to explore include:
With a broad range of post-cookie measurement initiatives - complexified by nuances in the way different types of media and devices are measured - it will be key for the industry to collaborate to facilitate cohesive, effective and efficient measurement in a post-cookie world.
How do we think about using post-cookie solutions for campaign targeting and optimisation and looking across the consumer journey? Not just display, but mobile + CTV as well?
Josephine Howe, Sr. Marketing Manager, MSA, Daniel Godoy, Microsoft Global Programmatic Evangelist, MSA: In the post-cookie world, there will be two groups of users on the internet: identifiable and unidentifiable. For identifiable users, first-party data combined with consent is key to precise measurement and modeling. For unidentifiable, or anonymous users, contextual targeting through keywords, topics, and moments is optimal. Curated deals are a powerful way for buyers to benefit from these solutions at scale. With the population of identifiable users shrinking, there will be more emphasis on first-party data, especially in channels like Connected TV. There are innovative tools to address this shift, for example advanced frequency management. It is crucial for marketers to balance identifiable and unidentifiable groups and understand the opportunity to target and optimize towards each.
Raman Sidhu, SVP at Verve Group: At Verve Group, we often talk about how moments are the new cookies. Brands know the moments that matter to them, especially those which drive interest, intent and sales. We help brands deliver omnichannel campaigns which include web, app, CTV and DooH in meaningful moments across the consumer journey. Furthermore, through a real-time feedback loop we can optimise performance towards specific outcome goals. That forms the basis of our strategy. With the availability of first- party data or cohort data, we can further improve performance.
Alex Berger, Senior Product Marketing Director, Adform: Marketers need to embrace dual thought streams; real-time and long-term. Nothing new here, but the focus and importance has been amplified by third-party cookie deprecation. Real-time decisioning and strong algos don’t replace the need for a robust planning phase or deep post-campaign effectiveness analysis. You’ll still need strong media mix modeling to study the effects of omnichannel advertising. This hasn’t been replaced - quite the contrary, a hybrid approach is now more important than ever. Skip the real-time and you miss out on the value of programmatic. Skip the analysis, and you break the flywheel, which is driving incremental value creation.
Louise Mbugua, Sr. Product Manager & Go-To-Market Lead, Teads: There are many ways to answer this question and they are timing dependent. Any targeting powered by addressable identity will extend targeting reach capabilities across multiple mediums (web, CTV etc). Some of these solutions, however, will take a long time to create significant scale. As an alternative, there are other forms of targeting using contextual and panel based intelligence and those solutions will perform across several mediums.
Other alternatives include:
Digital advertising campaigns in environments devoid of third-party cookies will run on a mix of emerging alternatives, including first-party data, consent, contextual approaches, cohorts, identifiers, and more. How can we ensure that these solutions still align with user preferences and future regulations? With data privacy legislation becoming more complex, how can we future-proof?
Josephine Howe, Sr. Marketing Manager, MSA, Daniel Godoy, Microsoft Global Programmatic Evangelist, MSA: Microsoft Advertising is focused on an audience first approach and iteratively building to prepare for the next chapter of digital advertising. Technology platforms must enable the industry to build and connect solutions in a compliant way. Looking ahead, we think that there will be a shift from client-side solutions to more server-side solutions, increased employment of data clean rooms and consolidation of Identity solutions. Multiple identity solutions will be needed as long as they are interoperable. The limited number of ID’s, based on the direct relationship with the user, means that there will be less reach but better authenticated traffic, better controls on consumer data, and maintenance of targeting and measurement use cases.
Raman Sidhu, SVP at Verve Group: As digital advertising campaigns move away from third-party cookies and towards alternative solutions using first-party data, consent, contextual approaches, and cohorts, it is important to ensure that these solutions align with user preferences and future regulations. Very often, I hear the same feedback from expert buyers, product and strategy leaders at brands and agencies. The future will be a mixture of first-party data and context. That means mapping 1st party data, for example to advertising ecosystems/walled gardens. Whilst creating audience lookalikes using contextual signals and predictive models in the instances where no identifiers exist. Consent must be explicit in all cases where any form of identifier or PII is involved. Ensuring double opt-in is imperative for brands and advertisers. For sellers, the ecosystems with the largest addressable consented audiences will benefit from buyers looking to engage with current or prospective customers.
For buyers, capturing of consent should include the channels where they want to activate.
Clean rooms aim to help here with the movement of data. However, there is still some way to go in scaling the network.
Alex Berger, Senior Product Marketing Director, Adform: While this is a major concern for the industry, it’s much less of an issue for technologies that were already thinking in a consented / localized way. We started pivoting our tech stack to support this approach as GDPR was starting to gain momentum and found that a focus on transparency, interoperability, and clear consent signals really paves the way for scaling post-cookie without major issues. At the end of the day, it’s about choosing technology that gives you a lot of transparency, ownership of your data, and that clearly supports delivering consented value to the end user. If you work back from that, you’ll consistently find these changes are more a case of fine-tuning vs ground-up reinvention with exorbitant switching costs.
Louise Mbugua, Sr. Product Manager & Go-To-Market Lead, Teads: The impending deprecation of 3P Cookies, set against a backdrop of increasing data privacy legislation, is rightfully forcing a re-examination & redress of the balance between user privacy and ad performance, which has often tilted in favour of the latter. The most important variable here is that the consumer must be involved in the consent process and permission obtained to use their personally identifiable data. Any form of identity or targeting/measurement that relies on inference of identity will be subject to scrutiny for the simple reason that consumers can’t opt-out of said mechanism.For contextual based and technographic based solutions, these have longevity as they don’t target any individual or PII. In doing so they provide a privacy safe scale that we - at Teads - have found performs as well as, if not better. The key will be the balance of finding a strong enough ‘truth set’ of known information from consumers who have opted-in to their data being used to power models and AI to find scale into identity-less environments.
Finally, what conversations are you having with media buyers and brands? What advice would you give them to get ready for programmatic outcomes without the cookie?
Josephine Howe, Sr. Marketing Manager, MSA, Daniel Godoy, Microsoft Global Programmatic Evangelist, MSA: As an end-to-end technology provider, we advise buyers and brands that relevant advertising will increasingly rely on contextual solutions for unidentifiable users. Investment in first-party data assets and partnerships will be needed. Advertisers should seek out data platforms and tech providers equipped to work with authenticated user IDs. It is important to think about how to leverage proprietary data assets while ensuring privacy compliance.
Raman Sidhu, SVP at Verve Group: We encourage brands and media buyers to consider the moments that are important to their business. We help them plan media to capture the largest share of these moments, whilst always identifying interest and intent. It is crucial for companies to comprehend their target markets and pinpoint the meaningful moments when those audiences are most likely to interact with their goods or services. Avoid focusing on cookies and instead focus on audiences and moments to drive demand to your products and services. Redesign your media planning strategy and concentrate on the moments that matter most to your business. This will support your efforts to increase sales and succeed in your marketing campaigns.
Alex Berger, Senior Product Marketing Director, Adform: What’s needed for media buyers and brands is more control, more transparency and ownership, and solutions that can bridge the gap in a consented way. Your activation on CTV or DOOH is going to be a bit different from premium display or mobile. You’re also going to have different IDs that are better suited to certain geographies or channel types. We’re already seeing and working with 40+ IDs on a regular basis, and I think it’s the job of the technology to create tools and solutions that really elevate and solve this complexity for buyers. Of course, the buyers also have to embrace these new approaches, and will need to re-train and re-prioritize workflows somewhat to make this happen.
Louise Mbugua, Sr. Product Manager & Go-To-Market Lead, Teads: Firstly, don’t wait to act! Delays to the deprecation of 3PCs on Chrome belie the fact that a predominantly cookieless environment is a reality today across many major markets. Secondly, understand your exposure by identifying the volume of media budgets dependent on marketing capabilities such as cross-site tracking that rely on 3P cookies. Thirdly, develop a plan to test and integrate cookieless-ready solutions into your marketing strategy.
IAB Europe have worked with the teams at CIMM, egta, EACA and WFA to curate this International Knowledge Exchange on Audience Measurement. The Exchange of knowledge will help to stimulate collaboration and better understanding in an increasingly international, interconnected marketplace.
The International Knowledge Exchange provides an opportunity for the international media and advertising industries to share insights about the latest measurement innovations, initiatives and solutions in the US and European markets. This meeting will take place on the 11th April at 15:00 CET.
In this week’s member guest blog post we caught up with Samantha Stetson, VP, Client Council and Industry Trade Relations at Meta. Samantha announces Meta’s new inventory filters and discusses how AI can give advertisers more control, Third-party brand suitability, and how to remain committed to transparency and accountability. For a great piece with great insight into new developments at Meta and how they can help you, keep reading below.
We’re proud to announce that Meta’s new inventory filters for Facebook and Instagram Feeds are now rolling out to advertisers in English- and Spanish-speaking markets. Our third-party verification solution for Facebook Feed is also now available through Zefr and additional Meta Business Partners will onboard in the coming months. These developments highlight our ongoing collaboration with industry partners and the critical work we’re doing to meet the needs of advertisers today. Please see video here.
Using AI to give advertisers more control
We previously announced our commitment to building tools that give advertisers more control over the proximity of their ads to suitable content. AI is one of the driving forces behind these industry-leading solutions. We built a multi-stage AI review system to classify content for advertisers to ensure brand suitability controls are in place. These models will complement our existing technology, which already identifies content that violates or potentially violates our Community Standards and Guidelines. This system learns to classify content in Facebook and Instagram Feeds – not only text but also video and images – to determine if it meets our monetisation policies; if it does not, the content is not eligible to have ads appear above or below it. When content is found to be eligible for ad adjacency, the models assign it to a suitability category.
We’ve spent many years working closely with partners in the industry, including the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), an industry trade organisation created to ensure that harmful content is not monetised. We’ve developed controls that align with GARM’s Suitability Framework, which defines high, medium, and low-risk content. Advertisers can now choose from the following three settings to control the type of monetisable content that can appear above and below an ad:
Later this year, we’ll expand these controls to support additional languages and make them available to advertisers in more countries. We’ll also start testing them on additional placements including Reels, Stories, Video Feeds and other surfaces across Facebook and Instagram as we learn more about advertiser preferences to improve and enhance this technology.
Third-party brand suitability verification is available for Facebook Feed
We’ve also been working with Zefr to test and build an independent AI-powered solution to report the context in which ads appear on Facebook Feed. In early testing, we found through third-party verification with Zefr, that less than one percent of content on Facebook Feed falls into the high-risk GARM suitability category.
Zefr’s AI product assesses video, image, text, and audio to label Feed content based on the GARM suitability standards. The solution allows advertisers to measure, verify and understand the suitability of content near their ads to help them make informed decisions in order to reach their marketing goals.
Meta will be rolling out this verification and measurement solution to additional badged Meta Business Partners this year.
Remaining committed to transparency and accountability
Beyond our suitability controls, we take action on content that violates our Community Standards and Guidelines. Each quarter, we publish the Community Standards Enforcement Report, which shows how we’re doing at enforcing our policies. This report was independently assessed by EY last year and we’re proud to be the first social platform to have our metrics assessed by a third party, demonstrating our commitment to transparency and accountability.
Last November, we received accreditation from the Media Ratings Council (MRC) for our Partner Monetisation Policies, Content Monetisation Policies, and associated content-level brand safety and suitability controls applied to Facebook In-Stream Video. We will be expanding the scope of MRC’s audit to include additional advertiser-facing controls (like the inventory filters for Facebook and Instagram Feeds) as we make them more widely available.
These solutions are important milestones in our ongoing brand safety and suitability efforts. We are committed to giving advertisers more control and transparency and will continue ensuring our work has independent oversight.
For more detail on Meta’s brand safety and suitability methodology, please visit our brand safety and suitability hub.
IAB Europe is pleased to announce the launch of its new Research & Insights Forum, which is an evolution of its long-standing Research Committee. The group will meet once per quarter and will comprise of research, insights and measurement experts from across the Digital Advertising and Marketing industry.
The Forum’s core focus will be to receive and share key industry stats and insights and provide strategic oversight and direction on all of IAB Europe’s research activities. Each meeting will feature insights updates from the IAB Europe team, member-led discussions on key industry trends, plus a roundtable discussion on IAB Europe’s research agenda and calendar.
The group is currently Chaired by Mike Mullholland, Partner Measurement & reporting at Mindshare Worldwide who is supported by the Vice-Chair Gilles Giudicelli, representing IAB France and Head of Customer Experience at Criteo.
The Forum is open to all IAB Europe members.If you are interested in joining then please contact Marie-Clare Puffett, Marketing & Insights Director.
IAB Europe is excited to release the new Digital People's Poll.
The Digital People’s Poll reveals what's really happening in the digital advertising industry by asking you, the digital people, a short set of questions to gain your thoughts and expertise.
Every quarter, we will poll the digital advertising industry on a hot topic of the moment.
To wrap up Q1, we are looking at Retail Media and asking you whether you see it as a key growth area for digital ad investment? Let us know your thoughts in the short poll below.
On the 28th of March, IAB Europe hosted the first Great Debate of 2023 where we saw over 250 attendees tune in as we discussed and debated how we can advance and achieve sustainability in digital advertising.
This virtual event brought industry experts together to discuss the state of readiness of our industry today. Speakers explored what is currently available to help drive the reduction of carbon emissions produced by the delivery of digital advertising and dived into what else needs to be done in order to achieve a sustainable future for our industry.
In this post, you will find an overview of each of the sessions as well as links to the video recordings for you to view in your own time. Enjoy!
Keynote Presentation: Sustainability in Digital Advertising – Andrew Hayward-Wright, Programmatic & Sustainability Advisor, IAB Europe
In this keynote presentation, Andrew Hayward-Wright, IAB Europe's Programmatic & Sustainability Advisor shared an overview of our industry to see where we are and how far we have progressed in our journey toward sustainable digital advertising. He also revealed why the time for us to act is now.
View the State of Readiness Report here and watch the session recording here
Panel Discussion with Audience Q&A: What’s Happening at a Local Level? Current Initiatives from National IABs
A panel of National IAB representatives shared some of the latest initiatives worked on at a local market level and discussed how we can bring these initiatives to a European and Global level.
Watch the session recording here
Panel Discussion with Audience Q&A: State of Play: What Are Corporate Companies Doing Today?
In this session industry experts shared some of the great work and initiatives they have seen in our industry to ensure sustainable digital advertising to date. They discussed current examples and different advertising techniques & technologies that are or are working towards being environmentally and socially responsible, while also being economically viable.
Watch the session recording here
Keynote Presentation – Confronting the Climate Emergency: How can the Media do Better – James Fleetham, Head of Client Sales, The Guardian
Watch the session recording here
Panel Discussion with Audience Q&A – How Do We Advance Sustainability in Digital Advertising
A panel of industry experts rounded up the above-mentioned initiatives and discussed what needs to happen next as we aim to advance and achieve sustainability in digital advertising.
Watch the session recording here
If you're keen to learn more about sustainability in digital advertising and want a quick 101 overview from those most in the know why not check out our new Explainer Video here.
Ever wondered how you can discover everything you need to know about the hottest topics in digital advertising today, in a matter of minutes? Well with the help of experts from our Programmatic Trading, Brand Advertising, Policy, Research and Sustainability Standards Committees you can.
The ‘IAB Europe Explains’ video series has been created by industry experts from our membership to provide you with simple explanations on different industry topics, challenges and emerging trends from those most in the know.
The short videos share key overviews and explanations that will help you make sense of the latest topics and trends in our ever evolving and changing ecosystem. From Retail Media and Sustainability to CTV and Disinformation dive into the hottest topics and trends and become an industry expert today.
The MIXX Awards Europe recognises and showcases the best digital advertising campaigns in Europe. The winners will be celebrated at IAB Europe’s flagship event, Interact on 23rd-24th May, in Madrid.
Meet a key member of the MIXX Awards Europe Jury, Kate MacKenzie
Kate MacKenzie leads TikTok’s European B2B Marketing & Communications function and is responsible for building the TikTok for Business brand in the region through innovative and creative marketing content, channels and campaigns.
Kate is a strategic marketing leader with extensive experience in entertainment and tech marketing, working for major media brands and high-growth startups, like 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures Television and the viral Hooked app. Her expertise is in digital & brand marketing and building high-performing teams.
We caught up with Kate to get her thoughts on our 2023 MIXX Awards Europe competition and what she is looking for in winning entries.
Q1. Tell us about you and your role
I lead B2B MarComms for TikTok across Europe and Israel, so my team is responsible for building the TikTok for Business brand in market through content, owned channels and campaigns. My background is in entertainment and tech marketing, having worked for over a decade at major media brands/studios and high-growth startups. Outside of work, I'm a Canadian transplant in London so love getting outdoors whenever I can.
Q2. Why did you join the MIXX Awards Europe Jury?
One of my professional resolutions for 2023 was to spend less time focused on my concrete to-do list and more time on big picture education and inspiration. Being a juror is a great way to keep my finger on the pulse of industry best practice, see and celebrate some incredible work, and ultimately bring that inspiration back to my team to elevate our approach.
Q3. What are you looking for in terms of creative execution?
I'm looking for ideas that feel very current and culturally relevant, and where there's a clear connection between the creative concept and the strategy. Ideas can sometimes be a dime a dozen. The real magic is in how they were executed and whether they worked.
Q4. Did you attend the Gala Dinner last year and if so what was your highlight?
This is my first year as a judge and will be my first time attending the Gala but I'm really looking forward to it and to celebrating all the great winners.
Taide Guajardo, Senior Vice-President Brand, Europe, Procter & Gamble and Alexis Marcombe, Managing Director, Carrefour Links are among the first speakers to be announced for IAB Europe’s flagship Digital Advertising and Marketing Conference, Interact.
IAB Europe has announced the first confirmed speakers for its flagship annual event Interact 2023. In partnership with IAB Spain the latest edition of Interact will take place on the 23rd - 24th May in Madrid, Spain. Leading European advertisers, industry experts, agencies & media owners will gather to inspire and share best practices on the hottest digital advertising topics of today.
Over the two days, speakers from Axel Springer, Carrefour Links, Google, Integral Ad Science, Magnite, Microsoft Advertising, Meta, P&G, PMX Global (Piblicis Groupe), Samsung Ads,Teads and many more will take to the stage to address Innovation, Sustainability and Growth, as the industry looks to become privacy first, tackle sustainability, and drive growth through innovation in the digital advertising.
Taide Guajardo, Senior Vice-President Brand, Europe, Procter & Gamble, will take to the stage on Day one to share how P&G is advancing and leading key marketing innovations and driving sustainable solutions in Europe and beyond. Gujardo has over three decades of experience working in marketing for P&G where she leads a team of over 1,300 talented marketers and partner agencies across 49 countries, investing amongst the top advertising spenders in Europe.
Alexis Marcombe, Managing Director, Carrefour Links will also take to the stage on day one to discuss how as a leading Retailer in Europe they are advancing the Retail Media phenomenon Globally. With over 10 years of experience working in digital sales, Marcombe runs the digital sales house of Carrefour in 9 countries to develop its retail services and to improve the ability for its partners to leverage its data through an omnichannel precision marketing approach.
The two-day conference will consist of keynote speeches and panel discussions from outstanding industry experts, agency representatives and publishers who will share their experiences, inspirations and solutions on the Interact conference stage.
Join to hear from the following speakers and more:
Alexis Marcombe, Managing Director, Carrefour Links
Michelle Perelman, Standards & Partnerships Director, PMX Global (Publicis Groupe)
For more information on Interact 2023 and to view the first line up speakers, please visit the event website here.
Registration for the event is available here. Tickets are selling quickly so secure your place today!
Opportunity to Get Your Work recognised at a Pan-European Level
IAB Europe will also celebrate the winners of our annual MIXX and Research Awards at Interact during the Gala Dinner on the evening of 23rd of May. The awards offer a unique opportunity to gain pan-European exposure in front of industry leaders. Find out more about both competitions and enter here.
IAB Europe is pleased to announce the election of Arthur Millet, Director General, Alliance Digitale (IAB France) as the new Chair and Steffen Hubert, Associate Director & Sustainability Lead, ProSiebenSat.1 as the Vice-Chair of the Sustainability Standards Committee. The committee elected Arthur and Steffen in the most recent meeting on 8th March 2023. In their newly appointed roles, they will lead the new committee’s work to help reduce the amount of energy consumed and emissions produced by the delivery of digital advertising and will focus on the demand for ESG standards for the industry.
Representing IAB France, Arthur has extensive digital advertising experience and has been actively involved in the sustainability agenda for several years. Even more so since the French government published a new "Climate and Resilience Law” in August 2021, which obliges the advertising sector to respond to the challenges of the climate transition. Commenting on his newly appointed role and vision for the committee, Arthur said “I am grateful to be elected and trusted by fellow members to Chair the new Sustainability Standards Committee. The climate crisis is now impossible to ignore and with new and upcoming regulations coming into action it is imperative that the digital advertising industry acts to tackle key issues of sustainability. For over a year, IAB France has been working collectively with our members and other trade bodies to produce a common measurement framework, and I’m excited to bring this experience to the committee. We have a vital role to play as a committee and I look forward to working closely and collaboratively with the diverse members of this group to ensure we deliver key and valuable outputs that help to reduce the overall impact our industry has on the planet.”
Steffen Hubert represents the Seven.One Entertainment Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE, and also brings great knowledge on the topic of Sustainability, having led and evolved ProSiebenSat.1´s well-established Corporate Sustainability Strategy into the digital advertising side of the business. Sharing how he will support Arthur in his role and the work of the committee, Steffen commented, “If the interfaces of the digital advertising industry are to meet high ecological, but also social and societal demands, there is still a lot of discussion and exchange required between all market participants. With the background of several years to accompany the sustainable transformation of a large publisher, I am well aware of many of the small hurdles and Gordian knots that need to be overcome. I am very grateful to be elected Vice Chair and looking forward to contributing my experience and to openly debating solutions.”
The Sustainability Standards Committee is a multi-stakeholder group that aims to bring the industry together to create new standards for the delivery of sustainable digital advertising. Both are active members of the Sustainability Standards Committee. Now, as Chair and Vice-Chair, they will help drive the agenda and create connections that enable all committee members to contribute their knowledge and expertise.
Information on the committee can be found here. For any members of IAB Europe that would like to get involved in the committee, please contact Lauren Wakefield – wakefield@iabeurope.eu
About Arthur Millet, Director General, Alliance Digitale (IAB France)
Arthur Millet is an expert in digital advertising. Since the early 2000s, Arthur Millet has mainly worked in the media world. He was notably the Director of Digital Advertising at Le Monde and for Amaury Media Group, and Managing Director of La Place Media, before becoming Director of Operations at Realytics (RTL Adconnect). He joined IAB France at the beginning of 2022 to take over the general management.
About Steffen Hubert, Associate Director & Sustainability Lead, ProSiebenSat.1
Steffen Hubert has spent his entire professional career in various facets of communication. The spectrum ranges from own copywriting & editing to political communication, to comprehensive media responsibility in the spirits industry, to the Seven.One Entertainment Group, where he has been employed for six years and has been anticipating the sustainability concerns and demands of the advertising market and translating them into business for years now.
The IAB Europe Research Awards recognise and showcase the great European digital research projects and the contribution they have made to the development of the digital advertising industry. The winners will be celebrated at IAB Europe’s flagship event, Interact on 23rd-24th May, in Madrid.
Meet our Research Awards Jury Chair, Kristanne Roberts
Kristanne is a Product Management Director for Kantar. She has over 10 years’ experience in marketing, PR and research, managing global clients and measurement practices. In the last 9 years with Kantar Kristanne has held various roles from project management to sales, and is currently responsible for the development of media and creative solutions on Kantar’s automated research platform Kantar Marketplace.
We caught up with Kristanne to get her thoughts on our 2023 IAB Europe Research Awards competition.
Q. After judging the awards in previous years, what made you want to get involved again?
The awards are a great way to look back on the previous year and all the great work that has been done. It's a really positive thing to be involved in, and great to see so many teams wanting to share all of their hard work.
Sometimes it can feel like we are so focused as an industry on what's next, and how to improve, that we forget to take stock and celebrate what has been achieved. The IAB Research Awards are a great way to take that step back and celebrate with peers.
It's also really nice to be able to get together with the other judges, collaborate, and share views on the work submitted. It helps to promote conversation around best practices, and around new and emerging methodologies, to make sure we are focused on progress as an industry.
Q.What are you most excited to see in the 2023 IAB Europe Research Awards competition?
It's really exciting to see some of the new ways of thinking and approaches which come through each year, as well as some of the innovative campaigns which are measured.
Q.In your opinion, why should people consider entering?
The IAB Research Awards are a great platform for agencies and teams to showcase the hard work and expertise from the past year. The awards can provide industry recognition to the winners and runners up that the work achieved is best in class.
Q.Given your expertise, what are you hoping to see from entries this year?
It's always great to see the variety in the entries and the new and emerging methodologies. Mostly I'm hoping to see some entries which clearly show the value added by the research, and how brands have used the results to inform decision making. It's so important that we focus on the outcomes of the research, and don't get too caught up in the complex designs which may not have practical outcomes.
Don’t miss the chance to get your work recognised at IAB Europe's awards on a European level.
Key Dates
| Early Bird Deadline | Final Deadline | Shortlist Announced | Winners Announced |
| Friday 17th March | Friday 14th April | W/C 15th May | 23rd May at Interact in Madrid |
Entry Links
Enter now to inspire others, reward your team and gain pan-European recognition for your digital advertising campaigns or research projects.
IAB Europe Research Awards Entry Link
Outstanding Contribution Entry Link
Get in touch with us via email if you have any questions:
Back by popular demand! We are excited to announce the opportunity to purchase Interact 2023 tickets and submit entries for the MIXX Awards Europe & IAB Europe Research Awards at a discounted rate has been extended to Friday 17th March. Check out the details below and secure your discount today.
About Interact 2023
Meet leading European advertisers, industry experts, agencies & media owners on 23rd-24th May in Madrid, Spain for Interact 2023. In partnership with IAB Spain, we will be hosting two days of unmissable keynote speeches, panel discussions, and networking opportunities, as we focus on ‘Innovation, Sustainability & Growth,’.
A must-attend event for everyone in the digital advertising and marketing industry, it’s the perfect place to meet, discuss and debate the most pressing topics in our industry today.
Key topics on this year’s agenda include, but are not limited to:
Plus we have some fantastic speakers lined up too, so keep your eyes peeled for more details on that coming soon.
Find out more about Interact 2023 here and get your Early Bird tickets here.
About MIXX Awards Europe & IAB Europe Research Awards
On the evening of 23rd May, we will also reveal the winners of our MIXX Awards Europe and IAB Europe Research Awards. Both are open and accepting entries from talented and hard-working teams that have created some of the best digital campaigns and research projects in Europe.
This year, we are excited to introduce a new Outstanding Contribution Award, dedicated to a team or an individual who has demonstrated an outstanding contribution to the digital advertising industry over the last 12 months, along with new Retail Media and Sustainability categories.
If you think you’ve got what it takes, why not take advantage of the early bird discount rate to enter?
For more information on the awards and to make the most of the early bird offer, submit your entries here for MIXX Awards Europe and here for Research Awards.
In Celebration of International Women’s Day, we caught up with key female leaders from the Women in Programmatic Network and our network to understand what it ‘s like to be a woman in digital advertising, what some of the biggest opportunities and challenges are and how they look to inspire the next generation of women in our industry.
Contributors:
Alice Miller, Head of Programmatic & Display, MGOMD
Alison Harding, VP Data Solutions EMEA, Lotame
Paige Power, Client Partner, Kepler
Isabella Benayoun, Account Director, Kepler
Federica Migliardi, EMEA Senior Sales Partner, Semasio
Stacey Delaney, Regional Director, Northern Europe, Taboola
Carolyn Watt, Vice President Global Client Partnerships, Double Verify
Q1. What does International Women’s Day mean to you?
Alice - “IWD provides an opportunity to acknowledge the progress we’ve made towards gender equality while still recognising the ongoing challenges faced by women worldwide. I think it’s important to take the time to reflect on the contributions that women have made and, for me personally, it’s always such a wonderful opportunity to celebrate the importance of gender diversity within our workplace and wider industry.”
Alison - “It means a great deal to have a dedicated day to stop and celebrate the achievements of women across the social, economic, cultural and political landscape. Of course, there is much progress yet to be made on both a local, country-wide and global level. Women’s rights are far from equitable in many places around the world. I hope that the day serves as a platform for women to confidently raise their voices on the issues that matter to their livelihoods — economic, health, and otherwise — and even more so, moves organisations to take concrete actions to empower and support women.”
Paige - “Every year, IWD would come around and whilst I have an appreciation for a day to recognise the past and continued efforts made, the day has always been a reminder that the work is not yet done and we are different in more ways than recognised. It is a celebration of successful, accomplished and inspiring women for me. With a focus on women who have not only been successful within their career but done so while bringing up a family of their own. The day reminds me that the work is still there to understand that showing up, doing your best and positively impacting others both men and women can make you a remarkable woman and we are defined by societal elements of what makes a woman great.”
Isabella - “IWD gives us an opportunity to celebrate how far we’ve come as an industry and recognise all the amazing women who have helped us get here. I am constantly inspired by all the women I work with on a day-to-day basis and love to use IWD as a day to thank them for their support, encouragement, and hard work! There’s definitely still much work to be done to create a truly equal and safe work environment for all women, but it’s nice to take some time to reflect.”
Federica - “IWD is an opportunity to remember the importance women have in our society, not just in the professional but also in the personal sphere, as well as across the globe.
To me, it is an opportunity to recognise and celebrate all the great women in my life - from my mum to my close friends - and to reflect on what I can do to make myself and them more and more proud of being a woman every day. In my opinion, Women should be celebrated every day - not just on IWD - because they accomplish little miracles every day, without most people even noticing.”
Stacey - “IWD is an opportunity to look around and acknowledge and appreciate all the incredible women around us who are constantly working to make things happen. They often don’t get the appreciation or the limelight they deserve, and International Women’s Day is a reminder to celebrate them, acknowledge their accomplishments and consider what can be done to make their lives better.”
Carolyn - “IWD is a chance to reflect on my personal journey working in the industry for over 25 years. It is an opportunity to consider my own experiences, challenges and opportunities and to ask myself:
Today is an opportunity to remember all the women who have supported and inspired me along the way and to ensure I ‘pass it on’. “
Q2. Can you tell us what it’s like to be a woman in digital advertising?
Alice - “I’ve always felt very empowered working as a woman in digital advertising. It’s a traditionally male dominated environment so in my opinion you have the opportunity to stand out!”
Alison - “I love it! Ad tech is well known as a male-dominated industry, therefore it gives me a great sense of pride whenever I am invited to contribute to articles or I am one of only a handful of women at a senior event. Women in the industry have the opportunity to make a positive impact and pave the way for future generations to succeed in this field.”
Paige - “It’s been a rollercoaster in both the best and some terrible ways. I am grateful to be a part of an industry which has recognised the systemic gender inequality it fostered in the past and collectively chose to do something about it. However, being a part of an industry which is still struggling to rid itself of historic trauma it imposed on both men and women, is also hard as you can find yourself constantly struggling to see ways to help. Incredible safe networks exist like ‘women in programmatic’ & ‘women in tech’ which are so unique in their supportive and inclusive design for a group which historically cultivated an overly competitive culture.”
Isabella - “I’ve been fortunate enough to work at an agency that’s always surrounded me with strong female leaders and mentors, so from my early days, I already had role models of who I might want to be. This made being a woman in digital advertising fun! While there have been challenges I’ve had to overcome that my male counterparts may not have had to, tackling them alongside my strong support system of women (both above and below) has made it rewarding.”
Federica - “ Advertising is a very dynamic and ever-changing industry and in my almost 10 years’ experience in the sector I have always had the chance to not only work with progressive companies (with strong D&I policies) but also with stakeholders who respected my opinion, even though I am a European, non-UK native woman.
I feel the advertising sector offers more flexibility to women in comparison to other male-dominated sectors (such as Finance) and has improved in recent years, notably with the work flexibility brought by the COVID Pandemic.
Kudos to women’s networks such as TWIPN or Bloom that foster and empower all women in advertising from a young age. I feel immensely proud to be part of these communities!”
Stacey - I’m proud that in the advertising industry in the UK, there are many incredible groups and thought leaders who both acknowledge how much the industry has to work on, and how far we have already come. Even though our industry isn’t perfect, I think the fact that those conversations can be had openly and regularly, and are encouraged by leadership teams across many companies, makes it a great industry to work in. Joining in on the conversations being had within the TWIPN, Bloom, NABS and others is a must.
Carolyn - “It’s a privilege. I love the industry and I am proud to work with the very best, most progressive brands in the world as part of a team that is collaborative, inclusive, diverse and constantly striving to serve our brand and agency partners.
The industry has changed hugely in the last 25 years in terms of providing equal opportunities for women.
And in this post COVID world it’s great that so many companies offer flexible working practices; this is hugely beneficial to women (and men) with young families. .”
Q3. Are there any leaders in the industry that have inspired you to get to where you are today?
Alice - “One of my very first managers was a lady called Kate Byrne who is now a media manager at Tourism Ireland. She was the first manager I had who wasn’t afraid to give me tricky feedback, and I really credit her in helping me to elevate my career. I found the way she was able to navigate tough situations with the rest of the (all male) senior leadership team very inspiring.
I am loving that in my new role at MGOMD I get to work under my first female CEO - Natalie Bell! She is widely recognised as an inspiring leader in our industry, and I feel very fortunate to be under such fantastic female leadership. You can really tell that she leads the agency with empathy and a people first mindset, those values are very apparent at MGOMD.”
Paige - “I’m now in a fortunate position where I can choose roles within businesses that have strong leaders either men or women. Joining Kepler was in no small part a testament to the leadership we have and the strong female examples in both Mal Simmonds & Marie Turk.
Through my interviews with them both, we talked openly about DE&I at Kepler and how they have a passion for building a strong leadership team of women and men.
They both uniquely, are examples of women in leadership who are unapologetically remarkable in their own ways whether in or out of social norms and celebrate that.”
Isabella - “From my very first internship in advertising to my almost 6 years at Kepler, I’ve had the privilege of working with amazing women, each of whom has left me with a different message of what being a woman in advertising is. My shoutouts go to Dina Bank, who got me my first media internship as SVP of Finance at Havas as well as some of the many inspiring women I’ve worked with at Kepler both in the US and the UK - Carli Jurczynski, Liz Meola, Remy Stiles, Marie Turk, Mallory Simmonds, and my current manager Jess Haley!”
Federica - “I had the chance to meet a lot of inspiring women throughout my career in advertising.
Just to name a few: Tiama Hanson Drury (Founding Chief Member of Chief) and Debi Hart (VP Product at Forsta) because they mentored and encouraged me to make my first public speech at an important Conference a few years ago.
More recently, Kate Herbert (Senior Director Strategy at Oracle and Mentor at The Forem) who was my inspiring mentor and taught me how to apply the “extreme ownership” principles to every walk of life.
I am also more and more inspired by the co-founders of Bloom and TWIPN, always coming up with brilliant initiatives to empower us.”
Stacey - “I’m constantly inspired by the women around me at Taboola - we’re proud that our EMEA leadership is made up of 50% women, and I just have to look around the room to see half a dozen amazing role models. The women on our team step up to the plate every day, juggling, managing large teams, meeting clients and answering to the business. Many of them are doing this alongside their roles as mothers and partners. They inspire me on a daily basis.
Carolyn - “Honestly, in the first stages of my career there were very few women in leadership roles. Those that were present tended to adopt rather dominant and ‘traditionally male characteristics’ - something I didn’t relate to.
There are many women who inspire me, not necessarily in advertising - Sharon White, Anne Boden, the BBC journalist Orla Guerin, the climber Alison Hargreaves. I generally love stories of people who triumph in the face of adversity from all walks of life.”
Q4. Do you think there is something we could do as an industry to open up opportunities for female leaders in digital advertising? Or Encourage more Women to this industry?
Alice - “Firstly I would say that companies need to address their unconscious bias and increase overall diversity in hiring. Strategies such as blind hiring practices at the assessment stage can be effective to reset the gender balance within interviews. Also ensuring we have a diverse group of interviewers, both to make the candidates feel more comfortable and also to ensure varied viewpoints when assessing candidates.
Outside of work, I am a mum to an 18 month old boy, Freddie, and now more than ever I understand the importance of promoting flexible work arrangements – particularly for women who still (typically) take on more of the parental load. I am extremely fortunate that MGOMD is incredibly flexible for parents, and I have felt very supported since joining. On top of my own personal experience, OMG have just expanded their parental leave policies and at MGOMD we’re working on an enhanced program for women coming back from maternity leave.”
Alison - “Women are more likely to enter a male-dominated industry if they can see other women who have been successful in that field. Therefore, it's important to highlight female leaders and provide them with opportunities to share their stories. We need to address bias: it's important to identify and address any biases that may be preventing women from entering or advancing in the industry. This can be bias in recruitment, performance evaluations or leadership development opportunities. Companies need to create a workplace culture that values and supports diversity and also offers flexible work arrangements. Women are often responsible for caregiving and may require more flexibility in their work schedules; this shouldn’t put employers off as often the same outputs of work apply just done to different timescales.”
Paige - “Starting with statistics and having more businesses share data publicly so, we as an industry and as businesses can be held accountable for the change we make.
At a more human level, we do need to recognise that women in leadership positions now, are statistically more likely to have ‘generational trauma’ impacting how they act as women. Recognising our leaders had to fight to get where they are through the male dominated industry at some of its worst points. This means that these behaviours may still exist; we're ultimately trying to remove from our industry, so change really does start at the top.
Encouraging more women should be done in the right way as ultimately, we have improved but are by no means done with what we need to change. Having honest leaders that can mentor women who join is important to ensure we teach the new generation the history but also, how we can create a better future.”
Isabella - “Representation and nurture.
Seeing women in leadership roles can signal to other women that our industry is progressive and open, and that growing in this field as a woman is possible. This type of message can encourage women to join, knowing that they have a bright and fair future ahead of them.
Nurturing women in digital advertising with the proper support systems, networks, and mentors is also key to ensure they have what they need to grow. Receiving this type of support is what helped me grow in this career and giving the support back to newer team members is what has helped me stay in this career. It may not be easy work, but it is extremely rewarding and fun!”
Federica - “What is stopping us, women, from breaking the glass ceiling? Statistically women are “less bold” than men.
For instance, women apply to a job only if their qualifications 100% match the job description, as opposed to men who apply when there is a 60% match.
Therefore, we need to be bolder, for ourselves but also for the overall ecosystem, because DE&I has a real business impact for companies.
Some stats: Companies with Women as Board Directors show 53% greater performance and 35% greater financial returns vs Companies that do not.
How can we open up more opportunities for female leaders? Start by removing any gender bias in every company process, create mentoring programs, encourage participation in networks such as TWIPN, offer flexible work practices and environments and attend/spread the knowledge of programs such as #IAM REMARKABLE.”
Stacey - “Firstly, I think it’s important we continue to have open conversations about our experiences and what needs to be done - not just during Women’s History Month, but consistently.
But talking isn’t enough. Every company needs to take a good hard look at where their shortcomings currently are, and set specific goals to improve on these, making ourselves accountable on a quarterly or annual basis, just like any other business goal.
For example, at Taboola we acknowledged that we weren’t always getting a diverse set of candidates to interview for all our positions, so we launched a campaign to ensure that 50% of candidates being interviewed for all roles are women.
Finally, one of the best things we can do to encourage women to join and stay in our industry is put in place inclusive policies that enable women to grow their families without sacrificing their careers. This doesn’t only mean giving paid maternity leave and supporting flexible working schedules, but crucially, also enabling men to be able to take parental leave and take on their share of childcare responsibilities. We’re super proud to have revamped our parental leave policy last year to give primary caregivers 26 weeks of paid leave and secondary caregivers to take 8 weeks – globally.”
Carolyn - “Absolutely. Together we should do more.
We know that women are underrepresented in leadership positions. Only 1 in 4 C-suite leaders are women and only 1 in 20 are women of colour (Source: McKinsey Women in the Workforce 2022).
We know that women leaders are leaving their companies at a higher rate than men. There is also increased churn after women have children.
In the US 43% of women leave the workforce after having a baby. In the UK 27.6% women dropped out of the labour market last year (ONS). Of the 1.75m people who dropped out of the labour market in 2022, 84% were women citing child care as the reason.
We also know that women want to advance but they face stronger headwinds than men.
Women leaders are more likely to report that personal characteristics such as their gender or being a parent have played a role in them being denied or passed over for a raise or promotion (Source: McKinsey 2022)
Women are more likely to seek a meritocratic culture and flexible working. And the next generation of women care even more about the opportunity to advance.
Companies that don't take action may struggle to recruit and retain the next generation of women leaders.
Diversity and inclusion is part of DV’s DNA. But we never rest on our laurels.
Listening and understanding the challenges and obstacles women face is key.
Here at DoubleVerify, we also work hard to foster a culture of support and connectedness between the women of DV across all geos and all teams - top to bottom. We also offer very flexible working practices for all our teams.
We strive to ensure that women have a support network - particularly when they return from work after maternity leave which I know from personal experience can be a challenging transition.
We also focus on education. So much of gender bias is subconscious and positive discrimination is often unwelcomed (and in Europe unlike the US it's illegal).
But we need to keep talking and educating our teams to be aware and negate bias - of any kind.
It’s a great industry and I would also champion it. But we must always strive to make it better for everybody.”
Q5. How do you like to inspire and support other females and those entering our industry for the first time?
Alice - “I love seeing young women succeed in an arguably male dominated environment. Through my career I have been fortunate enough to mentor many young women starting in ad tech, and help them propel their careers forward, which has been hugely rewarding. This year I’ve joined the OMG Women’s Advisory Group so I am looking forward to working on many exciting events and projects to inspire Omnicom women! I am also a member of TWIPN, and I have loved being a part of such a collaborative group of women who are passionate about making change in our industry.”
Alison - “Inspiring and supporting other females is not just about promoting individual success, but about creating a more equitable and just society for all. I try to be a role model where possible in my career by setting an example of excellence, resilience, and compassion. I am always happy to share my story, along with the struggles I have faced and overcome along the way. One of the most valuable gifts you can give to another female is your time and expertise. I would recommend anyone joining the industry to become part of a supportive community such as TWIPN. Women often face isolation and discrimination in male-dominated fields or environments. By creating a supportive community of females, we can offer a safe space where women can share their experiences, learn from each other, and encourage each other to succeed.”
Paige - “I believe supporting others starts by supporting yourself so, showing up openly and proudly to everything I do but, also talking about the harder side. It may be as simple as a reaction to their Linkedin post or slack post but, doing my best to support everyone, but women historically have not been supported. Encouraging others to ask the right questions so they can find the right businesses with the right values so hopefully, more women can find environments like we have at Kepler and not have to learn through experiencing harder times in their career but, through hearing others experiences.”
Isabella - “The best form of mentorship is establishing a relationship that goes both ways. Keeping an open mind and listening actively when working with younger women has enabled a 2-way mentorship for me, where I can share my experience and knowledge, but often leave having learned something new about myself and my relationships. I’m a big believer in this and have found that it’s usually what makes the most out of the rapport for all parties involved.”
Federica - “Firstly, I believe every change starts from talking about it, so thanks to IAB Europe for giving us a chance to express our opinion on this important and often neglected topic.
Beyond that, I am a mentor for an ESCP EUROPE Master student based in Paris, an active member of Bloom and TWIPN and my next goal is to fulfil my role as new #IAM REMARKABLE facilitator to foster women empowerment in the workplace. “
Stacey - “As a woman in leadership, I have a seat at the table and have the power to push for change in big and small ways. I try to champion causes that will make things better for the next generation of female leaders, and to be honest with the men that I work with about the things we need to be doing better. Over the years I’ve also been really proud to be involved with mentoring schemes like Bloom, working with individual women to provide a sounding board and help them grow in their careers.”
Carolyn - “I have been lucky enough to work with a number of mentors throughout my career. I am both a mentor and a mentee and I encourage everyone - male or female - to find a mentor (or two) to help support their personal learning and development.
I have also found mentoring schemes in the workforce work really well and help foster that all important culture of support and connectedness between women.
Find a mentor - someone that inspires you. Someone that will help you become the very best version of yourself. That’s my advice.”
In this week’s member guest blog post we caught up with Anthony Lamy, VP of EMEA Client Partnerships at VidMob. Anthony discusses how making sure you have the right creative fit for a platform can make a digital advertising campaign more successful. With so many platforms needing to be considered in creative, Anthony helps you to navigate this challenge. Keep reading to find out how.
Brands are facing a double creative control headache. While adhering to their own brand and creative guidelines is challenging enough, ensuring assets align with different social media platforms’ best practices is an even harder task — and one that’s getting tougher as goalposts constantly shift.
Adding to these challenges is the prospect of economic uncertainty. Many brands are therefore under high pressure to use resources more wisely and fuel stronger ROI. Consequently, there is no room to waste precious budget on advertising creative that isn’t fit for its corresponding platform.
To get their creative house in order, marketers need a smarter approach that allows them to consistently find the fastest path to effective creative that’s on brand and fit for the platform. To do this, brands should embrace the practice of creative scoring to ensure their creative consistently performs by aligning it with platform and brand best practices.
Time to achieve creative excellence (effectiveness, efficiency, impact) at scale
Although marketers have no control over a platform’s algorithms, one area that falls within their remit is creative quality. To date, businesses’ tendency towards internal, manual processes around brand governance has driven varied inefficiencies, with content feedback, reviews and approvals absorbing hours of time for marketers.
The biggest drawback of manual monitoring though is that labour-intensive analysis can’t function at the scale needed to run effective cross-channel advertising or stay in sync with fickle platforms and user preferences. At a time when social trust is fragile, running out of touch with target audiences poses major hazards for brands aiming to forge meaningful engagement via social media. Thanks to advances in creative analytics technology, however, there is scope to streamline quality assurance techniques. Innovative new creative scoring processes can continuously assess content across a broad spectrum of criteria including — by brand, platform, market, and objective — and track adherence to best practices across every asset automatically, with any discrepancies instantly flagged so they can be quickly adjusted. This means marketing teams can hand over the complicated work of manual tracking and analysis to sophisticated technology, without losing the insights. And that’s just the start.
A deeper window into performance
Aside from saving valuable time, smart scoring tools ultimately enable marketers to leverage best practices. Automatically flagging discrepancies, marketers can now turn benchmarks into actionable metrics and automate fast, accurate, and always-on evaluation. The majority also provide similarly useful core functions including pre- and in-flight assessment, to help minimise wasted spend on ads that fall below key standards and prevent ads from underperforming.
More sophisticated platforms also harness subsets of artificial intelligence (AI) such as computer vision to offer comprehensive, real-time measurement. When it comes to scoring, this gives them the power to instantly analyse every creative element against unique standards: such as where brand logos are placed, objects in the foreground and background, colour use, the emotion expressed by featured talent, and the cadence of speech and edits.
In addition to determining whether assets adhere to brand standards, scoring assessment helps pinpoint the effect of specific creative elements on social ad performance; providing a clear view of which best practices to prioritise. For instance, Neutrogena has become one of many leading brands to apply intelligent scoring for slick monitoring and adjustment. Analysis of ad variations across Facebook and Instagram for their German campaign quickly identified that an emphasis on visuals was highly effective; especially imagery featuring celebrities and its Bright Boost product on a human hand. Optimising delivery to focus on creative including these elements fuelled a 30% rise in views past the first three seconds and a 188% hike in total viewability.
The key takeaway here for marketers is that deep-diving analysis not only helps keep tabs on their creative assets but also establishes how they should be best used on social platforms. As an additional advantage, the ongoing assessment also means they can gain a persistently refreshed understanding of what is driving performance and impact in their creative across channels.
The digital space isn’t due to get any less complicated. What sparks audience attention and inspiration will always be subject to change, especially on rapidly evolving social platforms. Savvy marketers will accept the uncertainty and ensure a firmer grip on the areas they can control. By embracing smart creative assessment, they can use best practices to protect and preserve brand governance, increase creative performance and effectiveness, and find the balance between what is the ideal fit for users, platforms, and their brand.
The MIXX Awards Europe recognise and celebrate the best digital advertising campaigns in Europe. The winners will be celebrated at IAB Europe’s flagship event, Interact on 23rd-24th May, in Madrid.
Meet our MIXX Awards Europe Jury Chair, Eddie Adedeji.
Eddie is Global Trading & Investment Lead PMX Investment Managing Partner at Publicis. He has over 20 years of media experience, Eddie has worked across a wide range of clients and categories at a national, regional & global level. Outside of work, Eddie lives his life through the eyes of his 2 two daughters and the footballing skills of his son (a fellow long-suffering Newcastle United fan)
We caught up with Eddie to get his thoughts on our 2023 MIXX Awards Europe competition.
Q. What are you most excited to see in the 2023 MIXX Awards Europe competition?
I’m always excited to see entries across all categories of the competition – from big brand, multi-market executions to local, performance executions – it always surprises me to see the innovation right across the board. I think that the new Sustainability and Retail Media categories should be really interesting and I expect to see a real diversity not just in some of the challenges but how the entrants have developed and executed solutions in this space.
Q. After judging the awards last year, what made you want to get involved again?
All too often, we get locked into the ‘delivery’ of the day-to-day and have to really work hard to create the time to stop, take stock of what we have done and recognise good work. Being part of the panel, you get exposure to the very best of what we do as an industry and when looking at some of the winners, that work can be truly inspirational.
Q. In your opinion, why should people consider entering?
I think that if every piece of work was created with the mindset of , ‘How do I make this work award winning?’ and built campaigns with that clear focus on being able to articulate the key criteria that submissions are evaluated on (Strategy, Execution, Media Results, Creative, Innovation and Business Results) then not only would that improve the output but I think that it would make the end-to-end process more rewarding. Entering allows you to understand how clients potentially are evaluating our work or even gives a great framework to challenge as you go through that process from brief to post campaign analysis for future campaigns. And just like judging the awards, entering the awards gives you that time to pause and reflect on your own work
Q. Given your expertise, what are you hoping to see from entries this year?
Our landscape only ever evolves to become more complex, more interconnected and more accountable via an ever expanding sea of data. I’m hoping that the best entries will be able to demonstrate how they have navigated this with a powerful, simple narrative grounded by robust results. This is really important for the categories that have multiple channels in the mix but even for specific-channel categories, I’m hoping it's clearly articulated or easy to intuit the roles of those campaigns in that broader, interconnected context.
Don’t miss the chance to get your work recognised at IAB Europe's awards on a European level.
Key Dates
| Early Bird Deadline | Final Deadline | Shortlist Announced | Winners Announced |
| Friday 10th March | Friday 14th April | W/C 15th May | 23rd May at Interact in Madrid |
New for 2023 - Outstanding Contribution Award!
This year we have launched a new Outstanding Contribution Award to recognise the talent that exists in our industry! This award is for a team or an individual who has demonstrated an outstanding contribution to the digital advertising industry over the last 12 months. Find out more about this new award here.
Got a Great Research Project? Enter our IAB Europe Research Awards
IAB Europe’s 2023 Research Awards are also open for entries. These awards recognise and showcase the great European digital research projects and the contribution they have made to the development of the digital advertising industry. Find out more here.
Entry Links
Enter now to inspire others, reward your team and gain pan-European recognition for your digital advertising campaigns or research projects.
IAB Europe Research Awards Entry Link
Outstanding Contribution Entry Link
Entry Checklist
We have created a checklist to help you make sure your entry is on track for entry by the 10th of March to get Early Bird entry prices.
✔ Download the entry notes and FAQs
Our entry notes contain all the rules and entry info you need for entering the awards, including the judging criteria. The MIXX Awards Europe entry notes can be found here and the IAB Europe Research Awards entry notes here. Our new Award, Outstanding Contribution Award entry notes here.
✔ Plan your time
Make sure you have enough time to draft your submissions and get them reviewed before you submit them. Remember there are now less than 6 weeks until the final deadline.
Please get in touch if you think you might have any delays.
✔ Consider all of the categories
Consider entering your work into multiple categories to get maximum visibility for your project or campaign. There is a discounted rate for entering additional categories!
✔ Review the 2022 winning entries
Why not have a look at some of our winners from last year to inspire your entry?
MIXX Awards Europe & Research 2022 winners
✔ Ask the organisers
Get in touch with us via email if you have any questions:
Interact is back for 2023 and we are very excited to be heading to Madrid 23rd - 24th May to explore all things Innovation, Sustainability & Growth. In partnership with IAB Spain, across two-days we will be bringing industry experts together to discuss and debate how we become privacy first, tackle sustainability and drive growth through innovation in the digital advertising industry. Key topics on this year's agenda include, but are not limited to:
We have some fantastic speakers lined up too, so keep your eyes peeled for more information coming on this soon.
If you haven’t been to Interact before and want to know what all the hype is about, why not check out our 2022 wrap blog post here. It’s full of event highlights, videos and more to give you a sneak peek into what you can expect when you join us in Madrid.
If you want to take advantage of our Early Bird tickets for this year’s event be sure to get in quick as the deadline to purchase discounted tickets is just two weeks away. Get your tickets before 10th March to take advantage of the Early Bird rate.
We can't wait to see you in Madrid!
Buy your tickets here
In this week’s member guest blog post we caught up with Simon Lee, Audio Marketplace Operations Director at Triton Digital. Simon discusses the top 5 tactics you can use to get the most out of your digital audio advertising. He covers addressability, media kits. programmatic buyers and programmatic partners, keep reading to find out more.
Digital audio continues to evolve very quickly in today’s landscape as audiences tune into streaming radio, music playlists, and podcasts as their favourite ways to consume content, entertainment, and information. As we start 2023, Triton Digital, provider of the world’s leading programmatic audio marketplace, is seeing an increase of over 70% in programmatic audio impressions delivered compared to the same period 3 years ago in the European region. In 2022, the most popular live audio streaming format in Europe was Contemporary Hits, Pop, and Top 40. We saw Talk and News radio appear as the leading podcast formats for advertisers in 2022 and the top advertising categories were Shopping, Personal Finance, and Insurance.
While audio used to be a complimentary channel in media planning, it is now becoming an immensely popular format to use as podcast and streaming audio consumption continues to grow. The average time spent per day with digital audio is projected to reach 1 hour and 25 minutes in the UK alone in 2023. Marketers are leveraging programmatic audio as a hidden gem to communicate their messaging to a highly targeted audience.
Whether you are a radio broadcaster live streaming your stations digitally, a podcaster, music service, or in-game app developer, here are 5 programmatic advertising tactics you need to build revenue and successfully monetize your audio inventory.
Advertisers are looking to deliver impressions on quality inventory, and at scale. Creating and publishing outstanding audio content is time consuming and requires consistent effort behind the scenes. However, you can experiment with multiple stations, podcasts, or playlists across many genres to evaluate which ones can draw in a big audience. Remember, most audio ads are sold on their contextual value, so make sure the content you are building has a recognizable and distinct listener demographic. You will need to find the balance between trending content, experimental topics, and niche formats. Popular content with strong marketing can capture a large audience base, but also think about serving a specific group of listeners who are hungry for content that is relevant to them. Seasonal content, episodic podcasts, and pop-up stations are some ideas to capture new audiences while keeping existing listeners entertained. In the digital audio world, you can quickly switch, add, and drop formats. There are opportunities and audiences for whichever direction you choose, so experiment and be creative!
Where possible, you want to have addressable and targetable listeners in the programmatic bid request by passing advertising IDs (mobile device ad ID or web-based cookie). These ‘smart’ impressions are more valuable to the advertiser as they supply more data about the audience that significantly improves targeting capabilities from the DSP. CPM levels for smart impressions are up to three times higher than regular impressions. Speak to your technology partner and app developer to see how you can pass identifiers for your listeners.
A great media kit can tell in 10 slides or less the type of audio content you have, your audience demographics, what makes your content unique, example ads, how to access through programmatic channels, and supported audio ad formats. Remember your media kit will be evaluated along with other publishers and platforms, so make sure it is eye-catching and presentable! When you add content or new features to your platform, be sure to keep this document up to date as well. You want to spotlight your best content and if you have case studies or testimonials from advertisers highlighting campaigns you have worked on in the past, it is even better!
For your media sales team, it is best to appoint a point of contact or a team to lead conversations with interested programmatic buyers. This team should have a thorough understanding of your audio inventory and audience, and some background in programmatic advertising. Audio is a specialised field, but not too far-fetched from other digital ad formats available in the market today. Empower this team with the right resources, support, and platform for them to maximise your programmatic revenue. They should be familiar with setting up deals on your platform, monitoring performance, optimising yield, and generating reports. They will spearhead your programmatic strategy and will handle bringing in the money! The more proactive and up to date you are in the programmatic space, the more prepared you will be to field questions from potential advertisers.
With the constant shift in digital advertising technology and privacy, finding the right partners can be challenging. With programmatic buying, buyer diversity helps to raise auction floor prices and provides you with a higher clearing price. Make sure you have access to as many ad networks and DSPs as possible. You should have the flexibility to execute the best revenue strategy with the tools at hand. Evaluate your technology and commercial partners to ensure that you have the best integrations, expertise, sales representations, and ultimately revenue yield so you can keep maximising your monetization opportunities. Participate in industry events and conversations to stay up to date with the latest technology shifts and network with other publishers and specialists!
For more information or guidance on programmatic audio advertising, please contact us through solutions@tritondigital.com
Once a fairly niche topic in the world of digital advertising, sustainability has, in recent years, moved up the agenda to become one of the most talked-about topics in our industry today. As an industry, we have become increasingly aware of our impact on the environment and the responsibility we have to be more sustainable to help tackle the shared problem of the climate crisis.
But before we can start to drive real change, we need to be clear on what we mean by sustainable digital advertising when it comes to the supply chain. Whilst there is a lot of key work being done at a local level, right now, the industry lacks a clear and consistent overall European and Global definition of what the delivery of sustainable digital advertising actually means. And if we are to create valuable work and make meaningful change, it’s essential that we have a common definition and language in place.
As such, IAB Europe’s Sustainability Standards Committee has worked together to establish a definition for Sustainable Digital Advertising, as outlined below. This definition forms the basis of the key work and road map that the committee is working on.
Definition of Sustainable Digital Advertising
Sustainable digital advertising refers to the practice of using digital marketing and advertising techniques and technologies in a way that mitigates the negative impact on the environment and society, whilst also being economically viable.
This includes the digital supply chain, and the technologies used to deliver the ad from the agency or advertisers system to the end user’s screen, and covers the three pillars of sustainability. This does not encompass the creative production process, advertised emissions, or activities outside of this scope.
Environmental Sustainability in Digital Advertising
Environmental sustainability in digital advertising refers to delivering digital assets in a way that does not deplete the natural resources of our planet. This includes reducing the carbon emissions and unnecessary energy consumption associated with the delivery of digital ads and offsetting where reduction is not possible. It also includes minimising the environmental impact of the technologies and infrastructure used in the industry.
Social Sustainability in Digital Advertising
Social sustainability in digital advertising refers to the impact that the industry has on people and communities. This includes, but is not limited to, employment, diversity and inclusion, data privacy and ethics, brand and browsing safety, online veracity of information, and fraud and transparency, meaning that organisations consider the impact of their actions, products, and services on the wider society and not just on customers and suppliers.
Economic Sustainability in Digital Advertising
Economic sustainability in digital advertising refers to the ability of a company or industry to generate profits, and support itself, its employees, and its community financially over the long term. It can be impacted by factors such as the cost of delivering digital ads, the efficiency of operations, and the level of demand for digital advertising services.
It is important for companies to align their sustainability practices with the CSRD, which requires a growing number of companies to report on their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance.
By considering all three pillars of sustainability [environmental, social, economic] digital advertising companies and individuals can make choices that address the need for immediate action to tackle the climate crisis, whilst considering the needs of the future. In doing so organisations will help to ensure the long-term health and prosperity of the industry and the communities it serves.
The IAB Europe Sustainability Standards Committee recognises the great work being done across all sectors of our industry to drive the sustainability agenda and is actively engaged with other key initiatives such as IAB Tech Lab and Ad Net Zero. The committee work track is also open to input and guidance to ensure outputs are progressed with success. You can find more information on the committee and how you can get involved below.
About IAB Europe Sustainability Standards Committee
IAB Europe’s Sustainability Standards Committee was formed in October 2022 with the primary focus of bringing the industry together to create standards for the delivery of digital advertising and to help all industry participants to reduce the amount of energy consumed and carbon emissions produced through the use of digital media.
The committee is open to all IAB Europe members, including corporate companies and National IABs from across Europe. It is by Andrew Hayward-Wright, Programmatic & Sustainability Advisor for IAB Europe.
For more information and to join the committee please email communication@iabeurope.eu
Last week, we heard the devastating news that two deadly earthquakes, of magnitude 7.7 and 7.6, respectively, took over 6,400 multi-story buildings to the ground in both Turkey and neighbouring Syria, causing mass destruction and huge loss of life.
The latest figures show that across the two Nations over 33,000 fatalities have been reported, with that figure growing on a daily basis. In light of this, the Turkish Government has declared a state of emergency and a level 4 alert issuing an appeal to the international community to rush aid to help.
IAB Europe wishes to show support for all those affected, and share solidarity with our colleagues at IAB Turkey who have called upon our International IAB community and their corporate members to support in any way possible.
If you would like to send financial support, please consider the following two state-approved organisations that are coordinating aid in the affected area:
Your generosity can make a huge difference in the lives of those impacted by this tragedy.
IAB Turkey has asked if those making donations could please kindly inform them at iab@iabtr.org, so that they can acknowledge any donors.
Thank you in advance for your kind consideration and support.
| Entries for the prestigious annual MIXX Awards Europe and IAB Europe Research Awards are now open
New for 2023 - Outstanding Contribution Award! Europe’s biggest digital advertising awards are back! The MIXX Awards Europe and the IAB Europe Research Awards are now accepting entries from talented and hard-working teams to select the best digital campaigns and research projects in Europe. With a range of categories including retail media and sustainability, there is plenty of opportunity to showcase the breadth of your work across the last 12 months. The awards attract hundreds of entries every year from across Europe, offering a unique opportunity to gain pan-European exposure in front of industry leaders! This year, for the first time, there is a new Outstanding Contribution Award. This award is for a team or an individual who has demonstrated an outstanding contribution to the digital advertising industry over the last 12 months. Welcome the 2023 Judging panel! Entries will be reviewed by a jury of esteemed experts from across the digital advertising and research industry. With leaders from brands, agencies, media owners and leading technology companies, it’s a great opportunity to get your work in front of industry leaders from across Europe. A huge thank you to all of the judges who dedicate hours of their time to reviewing and discussing all entries. View the MIXX Awards Europe Jury here View the IAB Europe Research Awards Jury here Winners of the awards are renowned in the industry for having delivered some of the most impactful and innovative work that Europe has ever seen, so do not delay, enter today! Why enter?
Dedicated Gala To Celebrate Award Winners The winners will be announced at the Gala Dinner of IAB Europe’s flagship event, Interact. On the first night, 23rd of May, IAB Europe will host a dinner for over 200 people to celebrate the shortlisted campaigns and crown the 2023 winners. This is an unmissable night to celebrate the very best of our industry! Enter Now For Early Bird Discounts! Enter before the early bird deadline on Friday 10th March, to make the most of the discounted entry fee! Submit your entries here for MIXX Awards Europe, here for Research Awards, and here for Outstanding Contribution Awards. The final deadline for all entries is 14th April. IAB Europe looks forward to welcoming you to Madrid and can’t wait to see you there! Secure your Interact tickets here! |
Jill Briggs, Head of Policy, IAB Canada
Heading up the policy pillar at IAB Canada, Jill helps members navigate the complexities surrounding issues such as privacy, elections, cannabis advertising, iGaming, marketing to kids and any other legislative development impacting the digital advertising industry.
An interesting privacy case emerged last week in Canada involving a large local retailer. This monumental case provided some clear guidance on an area of vulnerability for most retailers around obtaining consent. While the focus was on consent at point of sale it has resulted in Canadian brands taking a closer look at their consent management practices as a whole and how they can provide at time of collection notice, outlining detailed purposes for collection and prompting clear option for opt in consent in a legitimate way to stay on the right side of the law – and more importantly build trust with their consumers.
Last week’s findings by the the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) revolved around a retailer not seeking and receiving appropriate consent to share customer data with another party. The ruling was a clear message to industry on its current reliance on implied consent for activity that is not in line with a consumer’s “reasonable expectations” for use of their personal data – particularly in the case of sharing with 3rd parties.
In speaking to the press, Commissioner Dufresne stated that the client in the case “treated customers’ choice to receive a receipt by email, instead of a paper copy, as “implicit consent” to share their data with a third-party.” He went on to say, “This practice is not consistent with privacy law and has to stop,” The message was loud and clear in that consumers need “clear information at key transaction points, empowering them to make decisions about how their personal information should be used.” His closing words sent a message to anyone else currently relying on similar practices to immediately come into compliance with the law. While the OPC does not currently have enforcement power he also made the case for the proposed C27 (a new federal Bill) to be passed so that those using bad practices can be fined appropriately.
Our current federal privacy legislation, PIPEDA, has guidance on what constitutes meaningful consent and outlines that not only do organisations need to demonstrate accountability (proof of consent), present the consumer with just in time notices and clear options and control they also need to “consider the reasonable expectations of the individual in the circumstances. For example, if there is a use or disclosure a user would not reasonably expect to be occurring, such as certain sharing of information with a third party, the downloading of photos or contact lists, or the tracking of location, express consent would likely be required.”
Since this news broke, we have been seeing an uptick in inquiries on CMPS and questions around viable options in our market. Coupled with the launch of TCF Canada we are encouraging all TCF V2.0 CMPs to register for our local framework so that Canadian brands can benefit from partnerships with trusted vendors.
We have also kicked off efforts to navigate this increasingly complex omnichannel retail environment and how we can expand our current privacy framework to solve this problem. With the use of consent banners at point of data collection being the only reliable way to obtain express consent we would like to explore ways to integrate the technology into a point of sale that would benefit all members of the supply chain.
You can find more information on TCF Canada here and if you have questions please reach out to policy@iabcanada.com
New Digital Age asked experts from all corners of the digital industry to look beyond the uncertain economic horizon, and point out areas where we can expect positive change in 2023. From the responses, it is clear that, thanks to technological advances, a renewed commitment to sustainability and an emphasis on efficiency, a brighter future for the sector is just around the corner. See our CEO Townsend Feehan’s prediction below:
“With Europe hit by its hottest summer on record, and a multitude of global natural disasters, 2022 hammered home that the time for aggressive action to cut CO2 emissions is now. With one calculation suggesting that the typical ad campaign emits around 5.4 tons of CO2, sustainability should no longer be viewed as a nice-to-have, but standard operating procedure.
“The industry’s carbon footprint is driven by a complex supply chain, with a large amount of energy consumed and emissions produced through the delivery and use of digital advertising. If the industry is to do its part to reduce this and help fight the climate crisis, then it will need to educate on, identify and enable significant efficiencies along the supply path. Thankfully, the sector is collaborating in this effort; the first step being to create harmonised sustainability standards and best practices, with specific focus on a consistent measurement framework and immediate action that all parties can take.
“If more industry stakeholders can educate and hold themselves and their partners accountable for the emissions produced in the delivery of digital advertising, in 2023 we will see the industry move toward more agreed practical standards. This includes better measurement and overall reduction of environmental impact.”
Townsend Feehan, CEO, IAB Europe
Read more expert predictions from the series here
If You Miss It, You Miss Out: EBE 2023 Agenda Released
With the E-commerce Berlin Expo being just a month away, the agenda for the event has recently been released. The one-day event will be packed with informative talks, presentations, workshops and panel discussions from notable industry players. It already appears to be the best agenda for this event that has ever been released and implemented.
Insightful knowledge hub and great networking platform is here for you! And while it might sound like an event that happens every single year, it's 2023 that brings a lot of new, fresh air to this well-established Expo and Conference.
The five stages at this year's event promise to deliver insight and entertainment in spades. With a huge multitude of presentations, discussions and demonstrations on offer, there's guaranteed something for everyone. The organizers strive to be the beacon of e-comm knowledge!
The agenda was put together in a very international spirit, but with a strong local factor, too. What also pleases the eye is gender diversification: out of 70 speakers, 30 of them are female.
Let's take a look at a few spots on the agenda – just to whet your appetite:
We could be listing presentations for days - the selection is simply too broad and diverse. Make sure to check out the full agenda on Expo website, as you don't want to miss out on any session.
The full agenda is available here: https://ecommerceberlin.com/schedule.
Panel discussions are a valuable way to share information and gain insights – that’s why you’ll get quite a few of them served straight to your table this year.
Examples? Here you go!
You can learn what it's like to combine fan-based e-commerce with working with an admired brand and selling tickets in a chaotic market from the above. You'll find out what the Metaverse is, who created it, and how to become a part of it - and it's all worth the effort, as you’ll see.
There's no time to get complacent, and the organizers work hard every year to surprise our audiences. As usual, this year is no different.
During E-commerce Berlin Expo 2023, there will be a special program block dedicated to the Metaverse and how it can benefit your business.
Starting at 1:10 p.m., the Creators of the Metaverse crew will facilitate a series of talks and panels. Any time is a good time to visit their section in Hall 8!
Nothing like a panel discussion to round out this experience, right? There will be a very interesting discussion between representatives of the web3 community and Meta's representatives on stage!
Seeking more interactivity? Sign up for FREE Masterclasses
With the E-commerce Berlin Expo right around the corner, Hall 2 is going to be abuzz with Masterclasses.
The organizers believe it is important to share knowledge for free, so the Masterclasses, along with the entire Conference, are free of charge. Simply choose the topic you're interested in and sign up on a special page to save your seat.
There will be two tracks of five sessions each. If you come in crowds, the EBE crew will prepare more Masterclasses next year!
Space is limited, so make sure you reserve your spot today here: https://ecommerceberlin.com/masterclasses
Leverage the opportunity to participate and deepen your knowledge of e-commerce: E-commerce Berlin Expo 2023 will be an amazing event that you won't want to miss!With five stages full of knowledge, Masterclasses to whet your appetite, and panel discussions, this agenda is packed with exciting topics and speakers that are sure to leave attendees with a much better understanding of e-commerce. It's a must-attend event for anyone interested in the e-commerce industry.
The EBE2023 is free to attend. Mark your calendars and book your tickets here: https://ecommerceberlin.com/visit
Find out more about the E-commerce Berlin Expo 2023
The E-Commerce Berlin Expo will be taking place for the seventh time on the 23rd of February, 2023, at Station Berlin. Doors will open at 10 AM, and EBE2023 is expected to welcome more than 9,000 visitors. The annual fair has become a leading e-commerce event in Berlin with representatives from Google, Meta, YouTube, Zalando, Otto Group, Amazon and Alibaba Group as past participants. Learn more at https://ecommerceberlin.com
For further questions, reach out on pr@ecommerceberlin.com
In this week’s member guest blog post we caught up with Julie Selman, SVP, Head of EMEA at Magnite. In this all-inclusive piece Julie looks at Sustainability, Privacy and Transparency. For more on what she expects from a year of ‘collaboration, innovation and transformation’ keep reading.
The new year is here and we’ve been busy at Magnite, excitedly looking forward to what we think is to come in 2023.
The media and advertising landscape that we all navigate is ever-changing, so as part of eMpower 2023 with Magnite, I asked some of our EMEA experts to reveal their key predictions and offer some insight.
A Greater Emphasis on Sustainability
There is a growing determination across our industry to make significant changes for the good of the planet. Over the next year, we expect to see a continuation and activation of initiatives that bring about greater awareness amongst brands and consumers.
In 2023, consumers will place an even greater demand for the brands they love to operate more climate-consciously. There will be a stronger focus on putting ESG policies into action, enabling brands to align with consumers' expectations.
Finally, sustainability will become less intimidating as our knowledge increases, which will pave the way for significant and positive change in behaviours.
Ad-Supported Streaming Becomes the Norm
Consumers are looking for ways to enjoy a wide variety of content while not taking on additional costs. This is clear from the sheer amount of consumers transitioning from paid-for streaming services to ad-supported ones.
Our MD, CTV in EMEA, Sam Wilson, says, ‘In the current environment, consumers don't want to give up watching quality content, but they are looking for ways to limit monthly outgoings. This shift will mean advertisers can find their audiences more easily in a premium environment in 2023.’
Sam believes 2023 will be the year of hybrid viewing. Media owners will offer more choice and flexibility through improving their ad offering, and audiences will have a wider variety of services and a better user experience.
This transition opens a whole world of opportunities for sellers and buyers to reach audiences who were once unreachable programmatically.
Transparency and Efficiency Will Remain Paramount
The industry is gaining a better understanding of Supply Path Optimisation and the value it brings, but there is still room to improve. 2023 will be a continuation of educating and implementation for agencies, clients and publishers.
By shifting the focus to transparency, and reducing tech partnerships to a carefully curated list, Graeme Lynch, Head of Demand, EMEA, believes agencies and brands will benefit from more control of their own supply management.
‘A stronger emphasis on determining costs will mean an increase in clients wanting a more direct relationship with tech partners so they can drive efficient media buying,’ Graeme says.
Higher Focus on Privacy-Centric Products
The eventual deprecation of third-party cookies means the focus on finding alternatives to identity resolution is higher than ever. The development of solutions like Seller Defined Audiences (SDA) and Magnite Audience Segment, demonstrate meaningful growth in privacy-centric identity products.
The industry has been talking about context for a while now, but with improved content classification, sessions can now be targeted with incredible detail, with reduced reliance on user data.
Pete Danks, VP of product, says, ‘I have two asks for the industry. Firstly, from the supply-side, lean into this tech. It’s important that we embrace it and work together. And for buyers, we need meaningful test budgets, because that’s what will drive success in 2023.’
There is plenty to look forward to in 2023. Sustainability will remain a top priority for the industry as a whole. The shift to ad-supported streaming services will continue, and the transparency that SPO brings will continue to benefit buyers. Finally, we can expect to see an increasing emphasis on privacy-centric products that put the power back in the hands of the publishers.
Wishing you all a happy, healthy and successful 2023!
If you’d like to see the full library of eMpower 2023 predictions click here
It’s that time of year again. Have your say in IAB Europe’s annual brand safety and suitability in the digital advertising industry poll.
Since numerous high-profile incidents occurred involving ads from major brands showing up next to unsuitable content back in 2017, brand safety and suitability has become a top priority for marketers and publishers alike.
But what tools do you find most helpful in helping to solve this problem? And which channels do you feel need more support to tackle brand safety? Have your say on these key questions and more in our brand safety poll, and enter for your chance to win a €200 Amazon voucher.
Whilst there are lots of studies available that look at consumer views, we want to find out what is actually happening from those most in the know - Digital advertising industry experts. We want your views on how brand safety and suitability has been tackled in 2022 and what action needs to be taken in 2023 to drive the industry forward.
Don’t miss out! The deadline to complete this survey is Friday 10th February, and it will take just 10 minutes to complete.
In this week’s member guest blog post we caught up with Michelle Urwin, VP Marketing at Skai (formerly Kenshoo) to talk about all things Retail Media. She discusses trends seen in 2022, how we can expect the economic climate to impact retail media in 2023, where retail media sits in the path to purchase and how retail media can drive brand experiences online.
What are the biggest trends you observed in retail media in 2022?
With investments quickly growing, retailers took the most significant steps in 2022.
Last year, every major retailer that hadn’t yet jumped on the retail media bandwagon either launched or announced plans to launch their offering. To continue their meteoric growth in the face of increased competition, retailers are banking on a multi-pronged strategy which we saw begin to form in 2022:
Retail media goes beyond search listings. The bulk of the first era of retail media has been keyword-triggered listings in the retailer search engine results pages. Much like paid search, it enables advertisers to reach consumers who are actively researching product decisions. But, unlike paid search, where user searches determine ad volume, retail media’s keyword-triggered ads are just the tip of the iceberg for the channel. Retailers are exploring more ad formats to help marketers move earlier in the path to purchase when users are more open to being swayed in their decision-making.
And retailers are not just offering new ad formats, but building tools to help marketers with ad creation. Amazon Ads, announced in its October unBoxed event a slew of innovations planned in this area. This included beefing up its Video Builder, which makes it easy for brands to create videos for their Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display campaigns through ready-to-use, customisable templates.
Retail media goes off-site. The treasure trove of first-party shopper data is no longer restricted to the retailer’s online store. These publishers are making moves to enable marketers to leverage their vast browser/buyer behavioural data across the web to drive them back to retailer product pages. This will also eventually extend to OOH (out-of-home) ad formats which practitioners will one day be able to purchase digitally alongside their retail media campaigns.
Retailers are heavily pitching their display, video, and programmatic (DSP) ad formats to reach consumers who aren’t yet searching for a brand’s keywords. One of the major areas of interest for retailers to grow their off-site inventory last year was with CTV. For example, Nectar360 announced a new data partnership with Channel 4 to revolutionise advertiser targeting on its streaming platform. And as recently as November, Boots, and Tesco revealed their own partnership with UK broadcaster, ITV.
Welcoming non-product advertisers. Retailers are also pitching the channel to brands that don’t even sell products. “Endemic” retail media are ads that drive users to product pages within those online stores. “Non-endemic” retail media are ads that drive users to destinations away from the online store. They still take advantage of retailer first-party data but do not necessarily sell products within the retailer.
An example of a non-endemic retail media campaign is an ear doctor who advertises to people researching hearing aid products within an online retailer. Clicking these ads would take them to the ear doctor’s website.
How will the current economic climate impact retail media in 2023?
It’s hard to say precisely how the current economic situation will play out. Some experts are expecting the worst, while others have a more tempered outlook. However, marketers are already planning how to optimise their programs if and when budgets are reduced.
How will this impact retail media? We can look back at two recent points in time for reference: the 2007 global recession and the 2020 pandemic. In both cases, marketers forced to cut budgets started with offline media, dramatically impacting spending on linear TV, print, and radio.
Regarding online media spending during an economic downturn, top-funnel ads (branding) are generally deprioritised for bottom-funnel (performance) ones. This bodes favourably for retail media, which—although it can be used across the funnel—works exceptionally well at the bottom because it’s the ad channel closest to the point of purchase. Look for advertisers to take money out of other channels and put it into retail media, which they can count on performing and has been a proven ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) winner since its inception.
Retail media will keep on its growth trajectory in 2023. The channel is in its high-growth stage, and incremental budgets are flowing in. According to our Q3 2022 Quarterly Trends Report, retail media grew 60% year-over-year vs. Q2. Digital advertising’s most popular channels grew at about half the pace, with paid search at 29% YoY and social advertising at 31% YoY. As of September 2022, retail media is now estimated to represent 18% of global digital advertising—which represents 11% of total worldwide advertising spend.
So, even if budgets stay flat or decrease in 2023, retail media should be one of the more insulated channels within the plan.
Where does retail media sit in the path to purchase?
Retail media reaches consumers at key inflection points in the path to purchase. Although 70-80% of sales still happen offline, the reality is that 90%+ of product discovery and research happen online. And, the more expensive the sales like homes, cars, luxury goods, and high-end electronics, the more purchase research and consideration occurs. Retail media is becoming a must-do channel.
But, of course, as a bottom-funnel channel, retail media is unmatched. And even as fast as this channel has grown, I don’t think marketers have fully grasped just how much of a game-changer it has been just yet. Marketer influence used to end at the online retailer’s homepage—completely missing the most essential part of the customer journey at the bottom of the funnel.
Before retail media, we could address 99% of the path to purchase with existing channels. But, it’s that last 1%—within the online store—where marketing exposure ended.
What are we missing out on when it comes to leveraging retail media as a way to drive brand experiences online and in-store?
With ecommerce representing around 30% of total retail sales in the UK in 2022, retailers didn’t hide their interest in crossing the digital gap.
Shopper marketing has been used in physical stores for decades, with nearly $100 billion in global spending going to the channel. Many retailers are exploring retail-media-powered digital billboards/OOH (out of home) within brick & mortar stores. Brands are extremely interested in how the combination of online retail media will complement shopper marketing’s in-store promotional shelves, end caps, and other retail fixtures.
This is especially true for the “omnichannel retailers” that offer both a massive footprint offline and large-scale online audiences. The opportunity to improve and monetise each customer's physical, in-store touchpoint from parking to pick up is enormous. The omnichannel retailer value proposition is unique compared to the online-only retailers as they can potentially provide rich measurement/attribution data on the relationship between online/offline advertising and sales.
In-store retail media will enable a more frictionless ad-buying process and allows brands to quickly launch, pause, and optimise their campaigns. Given the level of agility, marketers will be able to move budgets more fluidly into the opportunity.
Any final thoughts?
In Europe, retail media is already bigger than newspaper advertising. It will grow to €25 billion by 2026, eclipsing television advertising spending. And when you consider some of the ways retailers innovated in 2022, it’s not hard to see why some experts expect retail media to one day be bigger than paid search or social advertising.
In our recent webinar, Daniel Knapp, IAB Europe’s Chief Economist, hammered home the importance of retail media for brands.
“We must take it seriously,” Knapp urged. “It’s no longer a ‘nice to have anymore’ for brands, but requires serious strategic engagement at the C-level to really seize this opportunity.”
As part of IAB Europe’s key focus on topics of corporate responsibility in the digital advertising industry, The Programmatic Trading Committee has set up a mini-series to discuss diversity and inclusion in 2022. The latest blog post dives into the theme of partnerships in digital advertising.
In this blog, our contributors explore the biggest challenges when it comes to digital advertising partnerships, they look at what has worked well and what more can be done to ensure diversity and inclusion under this umbrella.
A Q&A with:
Phil Tolliday, VP Marketing Science, EMEA, Xaxis
Sara Vincent, Managing Director, UK & IE, Index Exchange
Shez Iqbal, Director of Publisher Partnerships, Criteo
Q1. In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges when you think about diversity and inclusion in digital advertising partnerships today?
Phil - “We need to put huge effort into unpicking systemic bad practices.
Whether it's renaming the use of terms like Blacklists, or blindly repeatedly using the same content block lists without revision; inadvertently denying diversely owned publications and creators ad revenue.
Lazy practices like these need overhauling through active management, training, and education across a variety of disciplines, otherwise, the endemic problems travel with individuals from company to company as careers are progressed across the industry.
At Xaxis and in wider GroupM, we aim to equip managers and business leaders with the education they need to truly understand the disparity and ultimately make them accountable for progress towards our need to reflect the diversity of society in the people that we employ.”
Sara - “An important Cannes Bias and Inclusion report highlights how, while characters of colour are well-represented at the Cannes Lions winning ads (38%)--a significant improvement since 2006–huge gaps remain, such as LGBTIQ+ characters being virtually nonexistent (1.8%). It showcases how systemic the issue is, but also how crucial representation in advertising is for influencing diversity in the culture at large.
Through the positioning and prioritising of these advertisements both in display and omni formats, digital advertising can play a crucial role in helping change this representation. Strategic partnerships and private marketplaces have exploded in recent years in digital advertising–and with good reason, as they strengthen human relationships while promising cost savings. But cost efficiency can't be the only metric of success and reason for building these partnerships. Rather, companies should prioritise partnerships with organisations that take diversity pledges seriously in order to ensure that advertisements appearing–across all digital channels–accurately reflect the diverse worlds we live in.”
Shez - “D&I is not just focused on one action or program, it is an ongoing effort to change historical standards that have been in place over many years.
To add some context, the All-In survey from the Advertising Association found that non-white representation in London (17%) is still a long way off the general London population (38%). Furthermore, nearly a third of Black respondents and over a quarter of Asian respondents report that they are likely to leave the industry due to a lack of inclusion and/or discrimination experienced.
Helping the situation requires a mindset and behavioural change that challenges some of the systemic structures that exist throughout the digital advertising ecosystem. For instance, the industry needs to deliver a larger piece of the pie to publishers catering for diverse audiences.
At Criteo we are making a conscious effort to use more inclusive language with our tools. Keyword and publisher exclusion lists are a constant battle, with the continued effort not to throw the baby out with the bathwater each time a significant news event occurs.
There’s also the challenge of accountability for driving and sustaining improvement in diversity and inclusion. I think brands have it tough in this regard. Representation within advertising receives a mixed reception and I’m pleased to see brands are riding out the negative commentary and sticking to their values.”
Q2. Are you aware of how your partners recruit, support, and develop diverse talent? Have you seen any examples where this has worked well?
Phil - “I’m not aware of specific recruitment policies but at Xaxis we aim for roles to be both equitable and attainable; equality is the goal, equity is how we get there.
In the wider industry, many businesses still mandate that entry-level roles require a degree. That immediately rules out certain backgrounds, which then also establishes an elitist stigma that the industry is hard to break into.
The upshot of this is that more talent needs to be recruited through alternative pools that have not been traditionally prioritised.
A significantly noticeable increase in the last five years has been through the public support shown.
Many Xaxis partners show support through events and panels, all the way through to representation through their products. Google stands out in this regard with its excellent ‘I Am Remarkable’ initiative. This aims to empower women and other underrepresented groups to celebrate their achievements in the workplace and beyond.
This is also true in broader GroupM. A recent example that stands out for me is Channel 4's ‘Black to Front’ initiative with its efforts to improve Black representation on-screen and more widely in the TV industry.
But this is also culturally innate for Channel 4 - it would be good to see similar efforts from those without the same mandate”
Shez - “There is certainly more focus on the attraction, development, and internal support mechanisms across the industry towards under-represented and diverse talent pools. We’ve had a number of partners ask us about our DEI initiatives, including one large and reputable retailer. We were rightly grilled about our policies during the RFP process and we’re expecting this to be the norm. I should add, we won that RFP.”
Q3. Are D&I objectives incorporated into briefs you share with your partners or that your partners share with you? What more do you think can be done to encourage/adopt this?
Phil - “A great example in GroupM is that inclusivity is systemically built into Mindshare's Orchestration System, the Good Growth System. This is available to all employees worldwide.
It replicates the entire planning process in a digital environment to break down silos and encourage collaboration.
At every stage of the process, there are prompts to reflect and consider diversity in planning to overcome any biases, investigate inclusive innovation and outline inclusive investment plans.
It also holds all resources in one place for easy access at each stage, including a partnership with the Diversity Standards Collective.”
Shez - “We have built DEI focussed deals and curated marketplaces to help brands and agencies target inventory based on context. We are also currently working on a pilot in the US across our supply and publisher partnerships team to build an offering that supports incentives for black-owned partnerships.
Of course, I’d always like to see more. As experts on their audiences, publishers can be a fantastic help to brands unsure of how to bring their ideas to market when they’re in the planning stages. Sam Ajilore, the founder of That Grape Juice, a premier Urban Pop Culture website, told me he has yet to be approached by a brand looking for his consultation on how to engage his readership.”
Q4. What are the biggest opportunities available today for more diversity in digital advertising partnerships?
Phil -
In a more direct and practical sense, there are areas of governance that can be elevated more directly to the agencies and publishers;
Sara - “Collaboration is crucial to start seeing real industry transformation. Cross-industry initiatives–like the BRiM, devoted to improving the representation of Black people in marketing in the UK–can deliver frameworks and focus areas that might be less of a priority for individual companies. Meanwhile, industry bodies like the IAB offer platforms to highlight achievements in the industry to inspire other organisations. Partnering with these industry bodies will help to build a culture of change that will help make the industry more diverse, with the sort of coordination and encouragement that will also ultimately ensure that those changes are lasting.”
Shez - “The biggest opportunity as we see is elevating the voices and visibility of people that are generally under-represented. There is a significant benefit to reflecting the diversity of the populations and the markets we engage in; McKinsey research proves outputs are 35% higher on average among businesses that embrace diversity in the decision-making process. Through this, our industry has opportunities to become more creative and reflective of society in general.
Pharmaceutical companies are something of a benchmark here. They’re acutely aware of the discrepancies in healthcare provision and as such depend on building teams able to speak for each key audience. Whether it's the specialised hair and skin requirements or something universally relevant like common cold remedies, representation is woven into every creative.
As we look at our brand at a consumer level, our priority is to connect with our audiences, and this isn’t just about ticking a ‘diversity box’, it is about supporting a companywide ecosystem where we are aligned with the values of the partnerships we engage with.”
Online retailers and digital marketers look forward to the E-commerce Berlin Expo every year. This conference, which takes place every winter in the German capital, offers insights into the latest trends and technologies shaping our online world.
E-Commerce Berlin is thrilled to announce its first speakers today! For e-commerce enthusiasts everywhere, this is exciting news, as it means we're getting closer to the event.
About E-commerce Berlin Expo
A leading international e-commerce conference, E-commerce Berlin Expo is a gathering of digital leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs. The event will take place on the 23rd of February 2023 at STATION-Berlin. They have an impressive line-up of speakers from around Europe who are leading experts in their respective fields - so you can expect some fascinating insights.
What is the process for selecting our speakers?
They always seek speakers with considerable expertise in their fields, but at the same time - they must be dynamic and innovative. It is their goal to create a conference that goes beyond regular e-commerce strategies and discusses new technologies and future trends as well.
Attendees are always the focus of its efforts.
#1 Call for Papers winners
The first group of speakers announced for the E-commerce Berlin Expo 2023 are the winners of the Call for Papers. This is an annual event that invites e-commerce experts from all over the industry to submit their proposals for talks. Public voting, and then a panel of judges, decide which proposals are the most interesting and insightful, and these are the talks that get selected for the event. This year, there were over 500 submissions, and the judges had a tough time narrowing it down to the final selection. But they've done it, and we're very excited to announce the following talks as part of the E-commerce Berlin Expo 2023:
#2 Regular Presentation Slots
Every single year, they invite a wide range of speakers to cover the latest trends and developments within their specialist areas. These regular presentation slots form an essential part of the E-commerce Berlin Expo and help ensure that attendees gain actionable insights that they can take away and apply to their own businesses.
Some of the topics that will be covered in these regular presentation slots include:
#3 Keynote Speakers
Several keynote speakers will grace the stage next year. Among them, you’ll find:
We cannot wait!
More speakers to come - stay tuned!
We hope you enjoy this sneak peek of the E-commerce Berlin Expo 2023. Keep an eye out for updates in the coming weeks regarding more speakers and sessions. It's going to be so much fun seeing you there!
If you want to be up to date with the latest news, trends, and tricks for e-commerce in 2023 and beyond, you simply need to be there.
In addition, attendees can visit the booths and speak with many great exhibitors during the EBE 2023. To name a few, you can have your choice of ChannelAdvisor, Tradebyte, Nexi Group, Empactcom, felix1, Smarketer, Checkout.com, Deutsche Post or Shopware. They will be eager to exchange feedback and knowledge, as well as to see new tactics to implement in the world of e-commerce.
The EBE2023 is free to attend. Visitors can register for a ticket here.
Find out more about the E-commerce Berlin Expo 2023.
Audio, Retail media, CTV, DOOH.. Where will brands invest in 2023 and what developments will be made in these channels to attract both people and advertisers? We asked IAB Europe’s Brand Advertising Committee for their predictions on the trends and themes that will shape the industry over the next 12 months. Take a look below to see their insights, including 2023 buzzword predictions!
Maria Shcheglakova, EMEA Marketing Director, PubMatic - As digital content consumption has risen and digital advertising has delivered superior outcomes to advertisers, the scale and scope of the internet has increased. Globally, internet use accounts for 3.7% of global emissions, which is the equivalent of all the air traffic in the world. A decade ago, it was common to see questions about paper recycling initiatives in media or technology RFIs – today, the questions go much deeper. Brands want to know that the partners they work with are not just the best technology platforms for media optimization but also that they have tangible evidence of how they minimize their impact on the environment. Advertisers and agencies are increasingly focused on reducing the emissions resulting from their media campaigns and are considering three main approaches to do so: Making their data transfer more energy efficient; Reducing the amount of data used; Using clean energy to power the internet.
Lisa Kalyuzhny, RVP Advertiser Solutions, EMEA, PubMatic - Given the likelihood of a recession, programmatic budgets will continue to fluctuate. The benefit to programmatic has always been the flexibility of campaigns – the ability to set something up within minutes and set it live – no need for an upfront commitment. I believe that programmatic was set up for uncertain times like these. With uncertainty, we will continue to see consolidation by the key agencies and brands as they continue to optimise their supply chain and require their partners to provide full transparency and automation. With the consolidation should come efficiencies set around sustainability which will further drive consolidation – more like a full circle.
Emmanuel Josserand, Sr Director, Agency, Brand & Industry Relations at Freewheel - In the TV advertising space, the linear and digital convergence will accelerate as players continue to deploy new hybrid video on demand models (HVOD) and the battle for eyeballs intensify. As such, we expect strong growth in particular for ad-supported video on demand and streaming services (FASTs). Something that was evidenced in a recent research from AudienceXpress, FreeWheel’s Advanced TV and premium video media sales house, which found that nearly nine in ten marketers surveyed intend to increase their investment in these AVOD platforms in the coming year. In fact, Advanced TV more broadly, which includes video-on-demand, connected TV, over-the-top, and addressable linear TV, will experience tremendous growth as marketers, faced with a difficult economic situation, will seek to direct their media spend towards more transparent, qualitative and safe video environments. Additionally, other growth areas we anticipate in 2023 are DOOH (Digital Out Of Home) and audio, propelled with the adoption of podcasts. From a data perspective and the deprecation of third-party cookies, the resurgence of contextual advertising will become ever more apparent in 2023.
2023 buzzwords prediction: Stagflation. Contextual. Sustainability
Stephanie Donovan, Global Head of Revenue, Triton Digital - The growth in programmatic buying of audio inventory has grown substantially -- in the last 5 years we have seen it surge over 500%, in terms of Triton Digital’s gross revenue, due to the efficiency by which buyers can reach a targeted audience at scale. Advertisers have signaled with their media budgets their preference for programmatic buying, but if inventory is not available in a programmatic exchange, publishers will miss out on revenue opportunities. Over the next year, we expect audio to continue to be of high interest to buyers; thus, ad spend via programmatic exchanges will continue to show significant growth as brands aim to reach an engaged, mobile audience. 2023 will be another banner year for podcast advertising in terms of both volume and publisher CPM rates. Programmatic podcast advertising, projected to grow 30% year-over-year according to the Podcasting Global Market Report 2022, will once again lead all other audio channels. We’ll see dynamic ad insertion (DAI) continue to steal the spotlight from baked-in ads, building upon 2022 momentum. Couple the flexibility to precisely message intended audiences with potential revenue growth opportunities, and we can expect programmatic to remain at the forefront for advertisers and publishers in 2023.
2023 buzzwords: diversity (in content, in distribution, in talent), creative targeting, powerful fan engagement, all-audio programmatic packages
Gabriele Vileikyte, Product Manager, Eskimi - With more than three billion people playing games, including practically every demographic and advertisers’ target audience, making it a viable advertising vehicle. Gaming audience will be a focal point of digital advertising during 2023. As advertisers are losing ties with their traditional advertising platforms and consumers have trained themselves to ignore traditional banner advertising. Blended in-game ads offer a viable alternative. In-game will continue to dominate during 2023 because of the constant innovation. We will continue to see emerging new performance proxies alongside attention. New revenue streams will be opened through in-game advertising on AAA console and PC games. It is no wonder that the in-game advertising market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 16% between 2021 and 2025. However, with the growing demand for in-game advertising, the market can be hit with privacy, fraud challenges. Therefore, advertisers will have to take additional measures to identify platforms, partners to work with, who actually deliver quality at scale by ensuring a fraud free and brand safety environment.
Csaba Szabo, EMEA Managing Director, Integral Ad Science (IAS) - As the cost of living crisis hits the pockets of businesses and shoppers and a recession looms, it has become more urgent than ever for brands to maximise every media dollar spent effectively. Because of this, 2023 will see advertisers place a greater emphasis on streamlined supply paths and contextually targeted ads, but it will also sharpen demand for more precise metrics. This is especially true for ‘attention’. The effort to articulate a clear and industry-accepted definition of attention is not new, but the drive towards efficiency expected in 2023 will only intensify this hunt. From ‘on the page’ measurements, including viewability, time-in-view and full screen visibility, to nuanced interaction metrics that track whether a user has resized an ad, hit pause, turned up the volume or even track their scrolling or eye movements, the choices on offer can be overwhelming. Technological advancements will refine ways in which attention may be measured, and will be of fundamental importance within the industry as a way of understanding the reach and success of a campaign. These increasingly refined attention-related metrics, with or without consensus, should be considered a mark of quality for brands for one key reason: their direct correlation with outcomes. Ensuring that ads are not only measurable, but that all impressions drive better outcomes for brands. In 2023, every advertiser will be a performance-driven advertiser. Combine this with the depreciation of third-party cookies, and the challenge of measuring attention to gauge the effectiveness of these budgets will be a top priority in 2023.
Ilhan Zengin, CEO, ShowHeroes Group - Going into 2023, we’ll be seeing the deprecation of third-party cookies become more of a reality for advertisers, rather than something coming in the distant future. Anyone who hasn’t started making the switch yet will be under more pressure to consider privacy-compliant alternatives, namely contextual and semantic targeting technology – which, on top of protecting user privacy, are more efficient and effective. We’ll also be seeing sustainability becoming a key focus in the industry. The need for the whole industry to come together to reduce emissions across the whole value chain will be more apparent. Expect more carbon-neutral ad initiatives, such as ShowHeroes Green Media, and more partnerships with carbon management and measurement companies such as our partners Scope3 and Cedara. Attention-based metrics and their technologies, as opposed to plain viewability metrics, will continue to increase in relevancy – they’re becoming a necessity as brands increasingly want to know exactly how audiences are engaging with their messages. It allows brands to really optimize their campaigns. Finally, diversity, equity, and inclusion will cease to be a topic on the periphery – something to take into consideration on surface levels. Instead, they’re going to be increasingly integrated into all operations and ways of doing business.
As we near the end of 2022, we asked IAB Europe’s Programmatic Trading committee for their insights into what 2023 has in store for the programmatic industry. Will we be seeing similar developments from 2022? Will there be growth opportunities given the current economic current? And what buzzwords do industry folk think will hit the speaking circuits and industry publications? Take a look below at the insights shared from European leaders across the Programmatic ecosystem.
Nick Welch, Head of Programmatic, EMEA at IAS and Chair of IAB Europe’s Programmatic Trading Committee - As businesses look at their ad budgets with greater scrutiny in the midst of economic uncertainty, so will marketers look to extract the maximum value from their media spend in 2023. A concerning macroeconomic picture can hit budgets hard, so there will be an increased focus on solutions that maximise the balance between efficiency and outcomes whilst respecting the privacy of consumers. According to a Statista study in 2021, 46.6% of consumers ‘strongly disagreed’ with the statement that they consented to cookies. With the advancements in privacy compliant technology including contextual targeting, and an increasing interest in consumer attention, these areas will be more and more appealing for programmatic advertisers. Marketers who can understand and capitalise on the interplay between quality media, contextual and real ROI will navigate economic headwinds and even turn them into tailwinds.
Ben Geach, Consultancy Lead at Google - Through 2022, the industry has heard loud and clear that as consumers manage more & more of their life online, their expectations of privacy have also increased. The time for brands to demonstrate ‘trust’ is now & advertising must go beyond the basics and what’s legally required to exceed people’s expectations around data privacy. Into 2023, I see European brands recognising strong privacy practices build brand loyalty & make a real difference to engaging with their customer base - perhaps with the adoption of the ‘3M’ approach - meaningful (demonstrating what users get in return for sharing data), memorable (remind users what data is shared & when) & manageable (provide simple tools to manage your data).
Wayne Tassie, Group Director, Integrated Solutions, DoubleVerify - In 2023, we will see further diversification of revenue across programmatic. As budgets remain cautious due to economic uncertainty, brands and investment teams may continue to pull back from historic 'Big Tech' investment in favour of precision-based, performance enhancing, sustainable programmatic technologies and algorithms. As a result, there will be a greater focus on innovation across the industry. For instance, attention - offering insights into metrics like exposure and engagement, encompassing audibility, quartile completion, screen touches, screen real estate and more - will increasingly replace viewability. Having this intel will be crucial for brands to optimise ad campaigns moving forward. Attention metrics will make great strides next year as a mid-funnel solution that will fuel the halo effect feeding into lower-funnel programmatic attribution. Privacy regulations and the deprecation of cookies will undoubtedly accelerate the shift towards attention as the industry’s new currency. However, the shift isn’t only reactive but grows out of verification solutions. Advances in verification have improved transparency and measurement, in turn improving the baseline for media quality. Once quality has been established, measuring attention is the next step in understanding how campaigns will perform - helping to not only optimise, but protect media buys.
John Wittesaele, Global CEO at Xaxis - The advertising industry will see multichannel campaigns evolve as advertisers unlock true omnichannel capabilities. Whereas multichannel lets buyers reach consumers across screens, omnichannel strategies fill in the missing links between screens and platforms so that advertisers can purchase inventory, make in-flight optimisations, and measure performance in a unified way. This means advertisers can effectively frequency cap their campaigns across channels to reduce wastage and maximise their ad budgets, while also improving relevance for audiences. Omnichannel capabilities let advertisers fluidly adjust which channels they direct their budget towards in real time, boosting efficiency and supporting a test-and-learn mindset. Advertisers can then invest in the channel mix that best delivers against their objectives, ensuring all components of a campaign work together to exceed the sum of their parts.
Krzysztof Lis, Partnerships & Consultancy Expert, Yieldbird) - We expect further increase of demand for every non-standard ad formats, which exceed the standard, flat display ad formats. This trend is much stronger than in previous years and includes formats like "page takeover", intrusive display creatives and audio ads. In terms of transaction types, we expect that the demand for private auctions is going to decrease, and expect the campaigns to be moved to preferred and programmatic guaranteed deals, but also to the open exchange. In terms of the inventory availability, we see that more and more publishers start selling their impressions on the programmatic market and expect to generate additional revenue this way. However, due to the increased competition for the campaigns, simply being present there would not be enough, and the publishers must offer some unique, incremental value for advertisers, which is not available there.
Amanda Cohrs, Global Head of Programmatic Consultancy, ShowHeroes - With the growing diversity of formats and solutions in Connected TV, Audio, DooH, and InGame, it is expected that composite approaches are needed to meet audience’s cross channel. Together with this omnichannel approach, it’s fundamental that technical standards and clear guidelines must be established and implemented across the board. Reaching audiences in a privacy-safe way has already brought alternative identifier solutions front and center on the adtech side, while contextual solutions are now becoming more attractive and necessary pieces to the cookieless puzzle for buyers and sellers. And last but not least, sustainability is no longer a “nice to have”. Sustainable practices are becoming interwoven in every major component of advertising and how digital media companies are evolving their business.
Ionut Ciobotaru, Chief Product Officer (co-CEO), Verve Group - If 2022 pushed horizons on consolidation and efficiency, then 2023 will be focused more on performance and holistic measurement. We believe that publishers will be looking for more controls and ways to increase the value of their inventory through seller-defined audiences, cohorts and enhanced creative units. We're expecting privacy enabling tech to grow from the toddler stage to a child, with greater focus on what Privacy Sandbox, Interoperable Private Attribution and others have to offer, and that there will be clear winners (and losers) as it relates to efforts such as universal identifiers. Lastly, we see performance and measurement being a big opportunity for CTV to become more widely utilized. Proving its value be hooks for largest digital screen in the household to continue to gain traction.
Piper Heitzler, Head of Growth, EMEA, Amobee - Over the past 3-5 years it was easy to categorise industry players into 4 quadrants, with "Linear" and "Digital" on the X axis and "Demand" and "Supply" on the Y axis. The peak trends of 2022: SVOD --> AVOD, retail media network proliferation, seller-defined audience strategies, etc illustrate how in 2023 we will see ad tech offerings pull closer to the centrepoint of this matrix – giving buyers and sellers a one-stop shop, end-to-end ecosystem for programmatic buying. With that said, we should gear up for a major year of consolidation as large players look to buy rather than build their own end-to-end stacks focused on delivering self-serve tools to advertisers, agencies, publishers and media owners alike.
David Bauckmann, CTO, ImpressionMedia - With the growing share of CTV, DOOH and programmatic audio advertising, more and more emphasis will be placed on controlling and evaluating these channels from one place in a holistic manner. At the same time, we expect more and more pressure to optimize the supply chain and the associated increase in all forms of programmatic deals and SPO optimization practices. Closely related to the supply chain issue is the topic of sustainability, which is sure to be highly debated in 2023. But we expect to see concrete steps in optimization more for economic reasons.
Frederic Lutt, VP Client Success, MediaMath - The year 2023 will mark a shift in a few topics that emerged in previous years: CTV buying will become more mainstream than ever in Europe. Previous years have been about building the ecosystem and the proposition on the publisher side. The entry of Netflix & Disney+, and advances from the FAST services like Samsung TV Plus will accelerate the evolution of buying behaviours from linear to connected TV. Measurement will improve. The two buying models will co-exist in 2023 and CTV will need to prove its advantages to the advertising industry. Another important topic for our industry and for the world is sustainability. All players in the programmatic advertising supply chain will need to do more to collectively achieve net zero. “Collectively” is an important word here as we all need to play our part if we want to be successful as an industry. Attention is another topic, which can be linked to sustainability and will rightly gain traction in 2023. Advertisers and their agencies will continue to focus on identity and prepare for a cookieless future. We will continue to talk about the metaverse, but I feel that it will still be too early by the end of 2023 to have a strong offering to advertise in metaverses. In-gaming advertising will continue to evolve and pave the way for metaverse strategies.
María Ramiro, HUAWEI Ads Head of Business Development Europe - As a Technology Company with innovation as our heart, cutting- edge technologies will contribute to the development of AdTech as to expand into the whole value chain on programmatic advertising. Integrating hardware & software will continue bringing key opportunities for first party data strategies, automation, as well as a more integrated consumer personalized experiences. In an uncertain social & macroeconomic situation, Innovation & Diversification will be key for advertisers and publishers looking for cost- effective solutions.
Austin Scott, Head of Video Marketplace Development. Xandr - Exciting changes have been a staple of this year within the digital video world and I expect to see this continue through 2023. New entrants at local market level are driving the progress and digitalisation of the TV space, while disruption, led by media owners, is contributing to rapid transformations. As consumer expectations and habits constantly evolve, the phrase ‘content is King’ could not be truer; automation and programmatic technology will become invaluable to marketers’ success. The flexibility of digital and the number of platforms through which viewers can access content is increasing, meaning brands must work even harder to reach them. However, the big budgets of studios and the costs of high-quality content creation is competitive. In the current economic climate, creators and viewers alike are looking at ways to cut back on costs. As such, savvy media owners are looking to advertising as a way to generate revenue for new content and lower costs for their audience. We are seeing big players lean into new ad supported subscription models to meet consumer demand as an effective way to make their content more accessible for all. Next year, I anticipate the biggest shift coming through the programmatic buying of Connected TV as broadcasters and media owners lean further into this offering recognising its’ benefits of supporting effective ad targeting and frequency management across premium environments.
Augustin Decré, Managing Director - Southern Europe, Index Exchange - Evolving economic concerns have wide-ranging implications for the future of our industry, but the good news is that there are still bright spots and significant opportunities ahead. One of the largest opportunities still lies in consumer trust, and how we’ll come together as an industry to build mechanisms allowing consumers to be confident while navigating the web. In today’s increasingly digital world, there’s an ongoing movement to give consumers more transparency and control over their personal data. We’ve seen this play out over the last decade, with rapid developments to phase out the third-party cookie. Luckily, tech platforms can move with greater speed than governments and can have a more decisive impact in innovating to solve the root issues in privacy and advertising. 2023 will be the year of action, with media owners and marketers leaning into innovation to help perfect alternative solutions and ensure the ecosystem can continue to monetise and reach new audiences no matter the screen.
Nick Welch, Head of Programmatic, EMEA at IAS and Chair of IAB Europe’s Programmatic Trading Committee - Attention-related
Ben Geach, Consultancy Lead at Google - Privacy By Design
Wayne Tassie, Group Director, Integrated Solutions, DoubleVerify - Technogenesis; relating to the maturity of the programmatic ecosystem and the evolution of its infrastructure to accommodate emerging buying/trading models.
John Wittesaele, Global CEO at Xaxis - Omnichannel, Fluidity, Flexibility
Krzysztof Lis, Partnerships & Consultancy Expert, Yieldbird) - CTV, DOOH, programmatic guaranteed, content to speech, vCPM, vCPV (viewable Cost-Per-View).
Amanda Cohrs, Global Head of Programmatic Consultancy, ShowHeroes - ○ Contextual targeting. Supply path transparency. CTV. Audibility. Netflix. Omnichannel. Sustainability. SaaS. OpenPath
Ionut Ciobotaru, Chief Product Officer (co-CEO), Verve Group - Zero-party cookies. "Sustainabull"--the idea that ad-tech companies are creating sustainable efforts that are either not measurable or merely headlines for press releases. "Ad-tech immersion"--going deep to know the utilization of one's ad-tech experiences.
Piper Heitzler, Head of Growth, EMEA, Amobee - Vertical integration: owning every step of the content creation, distribution and monetisation workflow.
David Bauckmann, CTO, ImpressionMedia - Supply chain / Supply path. Sustainability. CTV. Holistic
Frederic Lutt, VP Client Success, MediaMath - Metaverse. Sustainability & Attention. CTV
María Ramiro, HUAWEI Ads Head of Business Development Europe - On one side, some keywords that we have been hearing, will still be trending: “Quality Traffic & brand safety”, “Identity” (First Party Data, Contextual targeting, and others), “Omnichannel strategies”. On the other side, 5G, AI & Connected Devices development, that will generate new buzzwords such as “cross device advertising”, referring to the possibility to either use the data of the connected devices for a precise targeting strategy, or start delivering ads into new devices such as smartwatches, connected cars, etc. A completely new area that could be subject to pilot cases in the next.
Austin Scott, Head of Video Marketplace Development. Xandr - Carbon conscious media – sustainability is finally earning its place as top of mind, influencing the decision makers like never before. Consumers are looking to brands to make sustainability a part of their daily lives and are consequently spending more on brands that share their values. Since technology is one of the largest contributors to carbon emissions, it is even more critical that marketers evaluate their partners. Tech partners are going to be held accountable and an expectation for us all to be ‘carbon conscious’ will be more and more a part of our daily lives.
Augustin Decré, Managing Director - Southern Europe, Index Exchange - Privacy, CTV, Addressability.
Nick Welch, Head of Programmatic, EMEA at IAS and Chair of IAB Europe’s Programmatic Trading Committee - Efficiencies and Outcomes
Ben Geach, Consultancy Lead at Google - Innovation through change.
Wayne Tassie, Group Director, Integrated Solutions, DoubleVerify - A mixed-bag.
John Wittesaele, Global CEO at Xaxis - You’re on Mute (Still).
Krzysztof Lis, Partnerships & Consultancy Expert, Yieldbird) - Unpredictability (the war in Ukraine caused a huge increase of impressions, but some advertisers wanted to exclude content related to the war, on the other hand, a lot of publishers wanted to cease cooperation with advertisers that support Russia, also some demand providers wanted to cease cooperation with publishers from Russia).
Amanda Cohrs, Global Head of Programmatic Consultancy, ShowHeroes - Gaining momentum.
Ionut Ciobotaru, Chief Product Officer (co-CEO), Verve Group - Privacy (Re) Redefined
Piper Heitzler, Head of Growth, EMEA, Amobee - "In-person". It's been great to get everyone out of their homes and back to the office, industry events and live meetings.
Frederic Lutt, VP Client Success, MediaMath - New Reality.
María Ramiro, HUAWEI Ads Head of Business Development Europe - Saturation & Diversification.
Austin Scott, Head of Video Marketplace Development. Xandr - “What a ride!” 2022 was a great year for programmatic as the kinetic energy that had been building up all through 2020/2021 came into the mainstream. Programmers and broadcasters launched private marketplaces, FAST apps and new digital offerings focused on automation. However, emerging from a pandemic and with current world events having such huge impacts on consumers' lives, from ongoing situations in Ukraine and Iran to the cost of living crisis, we need to adapt our focus to keep pace with what’s important for the end consumer. Amidst financial uncertainty, advertisers will need to consider more than just basic sales figures as measurement for success. For the first year ‘post-pandemic’ we had a lot to do, but really the changes have only just begun and I’m curious to see what innovation and long-standing transformation comes out of this as a result. One thing is certain though, the TV revolution will be televised.
Augustin Decré, Managing Director - Southern Europe, Index Exchange - Innovation - economic uncertainty, will drive new thinking and further developments in our industry
In this week's member guest post we caught up with Ben Miller, Agency Success Director at IAS. Ben gained an abundance of agency-side experience working at WPP and Publicis. He shares his insights on how agencies and brands can cultivate brand safety and suitability technologies to drive more inclusivity in media placements.
A media planner is the voice of the advertiser within the agency
Of all the ways to capture the essence of the media planner, I’ve always found the most fitting to be the voice of the advertiser within the agency. Recently, more than ever - and perhaps for both altruistic and selfish reasons - these voices are being used to consider, discuss and deliver initiatives, projects and operational models that, speaking broadly, deliver more social good than previously. The zeitgeist is brimming with drives promoting diversity, inclusion, environmentalism, the need to fund quality, pluralistic journalism and more. Whether or not all of these efforts deliver more advantageous commercial returns is a debate hotly contested by many of our favourite marketing scientists and personalities but less debatable is that there is bountiful kudos in this space and it’s easy to see the argument that having outward-facing positions on many of these topics, backed up with rigorous action, is fast-becoming table-stakes in polite corporate society.
How we got here - Media planners will work with strategists and investment teams to infuse these ambitions into campaign plans and media choices and that’s as it should be. There is, however, the potential for a disconnect where brand safety and suitability settings are concerned if digital teams don’t get the full ‘social good memo’ and if planners aren’t fluent in all of the ways in which safety and suitability can be tailored. It started with keywords. At the dawn of programmatic, keyword exclusions were identified as a means of navigating risk by blocking inventory where ‘negative’ keywords were present. People got very excited; it became an instant modus operandi default and traders would collect keywords via lists like Pogs, or Beanie Babies. However, it didn’t take long for the limitations of keyword blocking to manifest and, more importantly, technology to progress.
The limitations of keyword-based technologies - Keywords are seldom just negative per se, and so not a good proxy for identifying and navigating unique suitability contexts. That they lack context is the essence of their limitation. Consequently there is a known issue with brand safe content getting blocked (false positives) and brand unsafe content not getting blocked (false negatives). The former comes with an opportunity cost; the latter a brand risk; both erode media budgets. Maintaining negative keyword exclusion lists is an arduous task and it’s practically impossible to do so comprehensively, objectively and at the speed of culture. Think of it as a sledgehammer. Fearful of sounding like a jaded ex let me be clear; keyword-based technologies have, and do, serve a purpose and certainly help brands to stay away from the darkest parts of the internet.
The coming of contextual understanding and classification - Surveying web pages by the entirety of their textual content makes a lot more sense and this is now possible thanks to technological advances in crawling and semantic analysis alongside the capability to understand objects - both in isolation and how they’re interconnected - resulting in comprehensive knowledge graphs from which to scale learnings as new content comes online. Some providers, including IAS (yep, I had to get in just one shameless plug), also detect the sentiment and emotion of a page which is crucial when we consider how the meaning of words vary between application. What’s even more exciting is that this methodology is jumping quickly from just text to multimedia, but that’s a story for another day. For now, though, we have a brilliant and precise rock hammer that allows advertisers to quickly and simply select buckets (segments) of content that they would rather avoid bidding on and/or block after a winning bid surfaces something unsafe or unsuitable. Note: if you’ve seen The Shawshank Redemption then you know what a rock hammer is!
Marketing Leaders are very busy; should they really care about this ‘little’ thing? - Many large - especially global - advertisers have now transitioned fully from solely brand safety (sledgehammer) to brand suitability (rock hammer) approaches. That is to say they have reduced their keyword lists from thousands or hundreds of terms to just a couple of dozen because they’ve adopted contextual avoidance pre and post-bid across topical, vertical and brand-specific segments. They’re more protected than they were with keywords but not overly so. One of the variables these advertisers have in common is capacity; they have teams or individuals dedicated to digital standards and so they can get into the weeds on this stuff and prioritise landing these projects with their agency counterparts. Not every advertiser or agency team has this at their disposal so what follows is a few anecdotes to bring to life why this matters; why smaller advertisers should pay attention.
So you see how entirely feasible it would be for a marketing leader to be on a stage at a conference, waxing lyrical about how the creative, audience and media choices they make are promulgating the social good without knowing that something as small - on the grand scheme of things, of course - as their brand safety setup is actively running counter to their stated agendas. This is an entirely understandable position to have arrived in; the modern CMO is busier than ever before. The good news is that it’s relatively quick and fairly straightforward to put the sledgehammer down and pick up the rock hammer.
Take action: it’s not a heavy lift - In my experience with these endeavours two is company and three is absolutely not a crowd, it’s perfect. If ever there was a time to get clients, planners and digital leads in one of those fancy agency rooms with a flipboard, this is it:-
Now, the magic happens. This hands-on collaboration will surface gaps, blind spots and opportunities galore and ultimately produce the stimulus for this crucial triumvirate to co-create and coalesce around a full and complete brand suitability profile that protects the brand whilst contributing more positively to the digital ecosystem and removing that CMO trip-hazard at the same time. Win, win, win.
“The move from brand safety to brand suitability is crucial to drive more inclusivity in media placements that were previously excluded due to how the technology worked. It is not easy but done right results in an increase in reach to placements which would have been excluded.” Samir Shah, Managing Partner - Data, Technology & Programmatic (Zenith WW)
Planners as leaders - As a former media planner myself I personally think this area represents a tremendous opportunity for planners to proactively approach clients; to surprise and delight them with enthusiasm, foresight and true partnership ethos. If this is an endeavour you’re inclined to lead on for the advertisers in your agency, or indeed you’re thinking about a suitability ‘floor’ for a multitude of clients, get in touch with me to kickstart this project; I will gladly be the ‘Red’ to your Andy Dufraine.
bmillar@integralads.com
The E-commerce Germany Awards are back and better than ever! This year, the contest starts on December 1st, so make sure you're prepared. The E-commerce Germany Awards recognise the best of the best in the industry, so it's definitely an honor to be nominated.
If you're not familiar with the contest, it's basically a way to recognize outstanding individuals and businesses in the e-commerce field in Germany. It's a great opportunity to get your name and your business out there, and you might even walk away with an award.
About E-commerce Germany Awards
The E-commerce Germany Awards is a yearly event that recognizes the achievements of e-commerce companies in the German market. The event is designed to serve as a platform for networking and sharing experiences and provides an informal opportunity for clients, competitors, and partners to meet. Additionally, the awards provide recognition for excellence and creativity in the e-commerce field. If you are involved in the e-commerce field, this is an event you don't want to miss!
Who can submit their entry to E-commerce Germany Awards?
Any company which is present & active in the German market and contributes to the e-commerce industry in the DACH region may take part in E-commerce German Awards (EGA) contest. There is no entry fee for taking part in the competition. All you have to do is fill out an online application form before the deadline.
The e-commerce industry caters to everyone, as evidenced by the 12 different categories in the E-commerce Germany Awards:
These Awards recognize excellence in e-commerce activities, from online retail to payments and logistics. Last year's winners include Sendcloud, Stripe, Channable, Bloomreach, Droppery, Ax Semantics, JTL, Storyblok, Link Mobility, Basecom, Everstox, and Xentral.
Stages of the E-commerce Germany Awards
In the first round, the public is invited to vote (via LinkedIn accounts) for their favorite companies in each category. The ten companies with the biggest amount of votes in each category will move on to the second round, where a panel of experts will choose the final winner in each of the twelve categories. This year's award is sure to be hotly contested, and it will be interesting to see which companies come out on top.
The award ceremony is a major event on the e-commerce calendar. This year, the awards will be given to companies with the highest total number of points from the public and jury voting combined. The Award Ceremony and Networking Party will take place on 22.02.2023 in Berlin, and it promises to be a night to remember. So mark the date in your diary and make sure you're there to celebrate the success of the winners.
The jury of the E-commerce Germany Awards
The E-commerce Germany Awards are given out annually to honor excellence in the field of online retail. This year's jury is composed of industry leaders and experts from various companies, including BASF, Google, Zalando, HUGO BOSS AG, Meta, Mercedes-Benz, Infosys, and TUI. With such a diverse group of judges, the awards are sure to reflect the best of what the e-commerce industry has to offer. So be sure to keep an eye out for the winners when the awards are announced early next year.
Why should you submit your company to the E-commerce Germany Awards?
Being awarded as the best in e-commerce can help your company in several ways. Awarded companies enjoy additional visibility in their industries. The award can help develop brand awareness with potential clients and competitors. For companies with multiple products or services, an award can create a halo-effect that raises the perception of the company's other offerings. The award can also motivate team members and help an organization become the destination for top talent! Finally, an award can boost a company's bottom line by increasing sales and customers. For all these reasons, it makes sense to submit your company to the E-commerce Germany Awards!
E-commerce Germany Awards submissions are accepted until the 6th of January 2023.
Environment impact , Carbon reduction, Social justice. Sustainability is a key topic moving into 2023! IAB Europe’s Sustainability Standards Committee needs your help to gain insight into the state of readiness and how far our industry has progressed on its journey toward the delivery of sustainable digital advertising.
This survey asks for the most important aspects of sustainability to your company, as well as your views on the industry as a whole. It takes just 10 minutes to complete and you can also enter for a chance to win a €100 prize!
The deadline for this survey is Friday 23rd December.
In this week’s member guest blog post we caught up with Maria Ramiro of Huawei Ads. Following on from our Virtual Programmatic Day where Maria sat on a panel of experts ‘Tackling 2023 – The Big Themes Coming Up’ we wanted to get her indepth thoughts on the shape digital advertising will take in 2023.
The digital advertising sector, like virtually every other industry in Europe currently, is experiencing vast changes. From the deprecation of third-party cookies by some major browsers to the changes in consumer behaviour that characterize our post-pandemic world, advertisers and brands are being forced to adopt an agile, adaptable approach to reach their audiences.
I recently joined the Virtual Programmatic Day, an event hosted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Europe, sitting on a panel of experts in programmatic advertising. We discussed the past year, and shared our thoughts on the shape that we believe digital advertising will take in 2023.
We all agreed that 2022 had been a rollercoaster. Starting with optimism as workplaces re-opened, the preoccupation of advertisers then was about reaching consumers once again in an office environment. What became clear very quickly, however, was that the hybrid approach was here to stay and instead of reverting to using one or two devices, consumers could be found on multiple devices and in multiple places.
At Huawei we find that users are now are spread within smart scenarios not just on different devices but across multiple channels, too. The user churn rate of a single platform is too high, and we know that users are more likely to buy a product if they have been impacted on several channels. We have adapted our offer to incorporate personalized ads not just on laptops or tablets but on smartwatches or audio devices, and within news feeds or on the Assistant or Search pages for example. This allows advertisers to reach users in micro-moments and reinforce their engagement during their daily digital life.
Trends in measurement and personalization
The IAB panel acknowledged that the challenges of ‘cookie-less environments’ together with the current economic climate had caused advertisers uncertainty. What emerged over the past year, however, was greater focus on measurement and metrics, a trend they see extending into 2023. While one of my fellow panelists felt that there was no longer a single view of the customer, we all agreed that the way forward for brands was relevant, contextual ads that would automatically be more personalized.
Following a year of change in programmatic advertising, the panel felt there was more to come in the year ahead, but that brands were better prepared. One panel member pointed out that because of economic and technology flux brands had developed an appetite for a more holistic approach.
From my own perspective, I believe we must move away from the notion of third-party data and get used to working with consent platforms that instead give us user aggregated data and offer more holistic options to advertisers and brands.
An example of this is the HUAWEI Ads platform. It is now one of the main drivers of advertising client growth and will become more relevant to brands and advertisers in 2023. It is powered by both third party and first-party data that supports three forms of advertising (AppGallery, Display and Search Ads) and covers the entire Huawei user funnel.
Huawei has increased the number of advertisers it is working with by nine times in the past two years because of the platform’s ability to deliver innovative ad experiences. Users demand new experiences on the devices they are using every day in their digital lives, and this affects how advertising is received. We can offer image recognition that enables real-time item search and shopping; we use augmented and virtual reality together with Internet of Things hardware to devise new ways to display ads; and we even provide voice recognition and smart translations to improve online shopping experiences.
Sustainability will drive change
In the new year Huawei advertising partners will benefit from the company’s ability to retain users through deep, multi-touchpoint interactions across all smart devices and localization services, but the company recognizes that sustainability, which was an area highlighted by the IAB panel, also matters greatly to its advertising partners.
Huawei believes technology can contribute to a better, more sustainable world. We are facing changes on the supplier side (traffic side) to technologies such as header bidding, which reduces latency and improves the efficiency of platforms, websites, and apps. 5G will also improve data exchange and latency which again will improve sustainability. Moving forward, 5G will become essential to the value proposition and the sustainability credentials of any digital advertising platform.
Sustainability emerged as one of the priorities in an IAB poll which took place among the organization’s members following the panel session. When asked what the main priority for the programmatic industry would be in 2023, the option ‘solutions for third-party cookies’ was selected by 29% of the audience and ‘emerging channels’ by 20% but ‘sustainability’ was the choice for 13% of those that voted.
How to move the needle in 2023
As the IAB panel discussion found, there are many challenges for advertisers and brands when it comes to reaching and engaging with customers. Selling services and products online means competing not just with other brands in their own domestic markets, but internationally too and this has had an impact on the user acquisition cost. The preference for using multiple devices and channels is creating churn, which introduces problems with increasing user retention, and it is harder than ever to create long-term, successful partnerships.
For Huawei, these challenges are seen as an opportunity for innovation. The company is present in more than 170 countries, and it has efficient ways to reach users, particularly in Europe. HUAWEI Ads not only serves multiple devices and multiple channels as explained above, but it incorporates Huawei’s app store, AppGallery and the display network, plus Huawei’s own search engine Petal Search. By using the vast ecosystem behind the HUAWEI Ads platform and the support packages that Huawei puts in place, advertisers are reducing the loss of users by 10%.
By aggregating data from all the traffic that Huawei generates through its platform, its devices, and its IoT connected ecosystem, HUAWEI Ads is set up to deliver huge efficiencies and lower the cost of media buying for advertising partners in the year ahead. This is why from its launch outside China in 2020 more than 2000 advertisers in more than 200 different industries have joined the platform which has also attracted 360,000 publishers.
Huawei set out to differentiate the HUAWEI Ads platform from others and the results it is achieving for advertisers speak volumes. In an uncertain world with economic challenges ahead in 2023, it looks set to be the partner of choice for advertisers and brands who want to reach a mass audience on whatever device they are using with the most relevant and personalized ad experience.
Can you tell us what advertising within a gaming environment means and looks like?
In-game ads blend into the game environment so smoothly that they become a part of the game experience. For example, you can display ads on buildings or billboards. Because of that, in-game is compared with out-of-home advertising, but it happens in a digital world.
One of the main benefits of in-game advertising is that it can be non-intrusive, which results in a better user experience and brand perception.
How has the in-game advertising market developed over the past 12 months?
For the past 12 months, in-game has been dominating the advertising market. I would distinguish a few key moments that provide the vision for the future.
At the beginning of the year, Sony announced plans to put ads in PlayStation games which shows that AAA games (high-budget, high-profile games that are typically produced and distributed by large, well-known publishers) shifted their focus to in-game advertising.
IAB released in-game measurement guidelines which lay the foundation for in-game advertising unification. The year is also predicted to end with an alternative shift to how in-game performance should be measured, according to the recent Anzu and Lumen research.
In summary, the in-game advertising market is growing exponentially. Additionally, actions are being taken to unify it and new points of view are being brought to light when it comes to performance.
I’m really excited to see what the future holds.
How does in-game advertising deliver results for advertisers?
In the beginning, in-game advertising was fully focused on high viewability. However, as the market is growing, alternative proxy metrics are being brought to the table. For example, brand safety measurement through third-party platforms like MOAT and IAS which showed that in-game advertising IVT seeks 0.01%. Companies like Lumen show that in-game ads deliver 2 times higher attention rates than other digital channels. While we are seeing movement in app measurement space where in-game advertising attribution is tracked through a post-view model.
From your perspective, what are the key opportunities of in-game advertising?
What we see from the market and advertising demand, the biggest opportunity of advertising in an in-game environment is the ability to reach highly engaged users.
Players are a huge audience and it is also very diverse. Their lifestyle, communities, and interests are relevant to many advertisers. FMCG, telecoms, device manufacturers, retail, and fast food chains – all of them are tapping into in-game ads due to the audience they can reach.
It’s impossible to ignore the fact that users are getting frustrated about being bombarded with so many ads every day. That’s where in-game becomes a perfect alternative, being a non-intrusive way of advertising.
And what are the key challenges?
Even with the immense growth, in-game advertising is still a new digital channel. However, the market is demanding in-game to catch up with the advertising mediums everyone is already used to.
Currently, in-game faces a few particular challenges. First, ads are not clickable, which raises concerns about how to track the performance and what is the long-term impact of in-game advertising.
There are also still many myths about in-game advertising and the audience it can help to reach. Therefore, different parties have to invest time in educating the market. The in-game market is still fragmented and it requires clear buying guidelines.
Finally, what do you think the market will look like in 12 months time?
The future is bright. I see many great initiatives and innovations being rolled out both from the supply and demand side. Additionally, in-game is getting noticed by IAB, which shows social credibility. The in-game advertising market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 16% between 2021 and 2025. So I would think twice if somebody is still skeptical about the in-game advertising future.
Eskimi have worked closely with IAB Europe to create a One Sheet for In-Game Advertising access the one sheet here. For more information about this advertising channel please see IAB Europe's Guide to In-Gaming here.
On 9th November, IAB Europe hosted the H2 2022 Virtual Programmatic Day, and with almost 700 people in attendance, it was a huge success!
The Virtual Programmatic Day (VPD) brought together industry experts and thought leaders to explore the latest trends, drivers, and barriers impacting programmatic trading in Europe. From the latest attitudes to programmatic advertising stats and programmatic without cookies to diversity and inclusion and what to expect for 2023, our series of panel discussions and keynote presentations covered everything you need to know in programmatic today.
In this post, you will find an overview of each of the sessions, as well as the video recordings for you to view in your own time. Enjoy!
Keynote: The European Programmatic Advertising Landscape & Attitudes Towards Programmatic Advertising
In this keynote presentation, Nick Welch, Head of Programmatic, EMEA at IAS and Chair of IAB Europe’s Programmatic Trading Committee shared the latest insights on the development of programmatic in Europe and revealed the latest buy-side and sell-side drivers, barriers and strategies from the latest Attitudes to Programmatic Advertising Report.
Watch the session recording here
Panel Discussion with Audience Q&A: The European Programmatic Advertising Landscape
Following an overview of the key trends, drivers and challenges, this panel dove into the latest on the Programmatic Advertising landscape in Europe. The panel discussed how the industry is coming together to overcome the key barriers to investment and what the key opportunities are.
This panel was moderated by Nick Welch, Head of Programmatic, EMEA, IAS & Chair of IAB Europe’s Programmatic Trading Committee who was joined by:
Watch the session recording here
Panel Discussion with Audience Q&A: Programmatic Without Cookies
This panel dove into different stakeholders’ views on programmatic outcomes and the challenges faced with going into a cookieless world. It discussed the metrics that are being worked towards and how else we can educate on different metrics in our industry.
This panel was moderated by Travis Clinger, SVP, Addressability and Ecosystem, LiveRamp, who was joined by:
Watch the session recording here
Panel Discussion with Audience Q&A: Diversity & Inclusion: How can we help each other be more diverse and progress the conversation
This panel addressed how we can demand and drive more diversity and inclusion in the European digital advertising industry. It dove into how we are doing today and what we can do to support each other to continue to improve.
This panel was moderated by Maya Tank, Client Partner, DoubleVerify who was joined by:
Watch the session recording here
Panel Discussion with Audience Q&A – Tackling 2023 – The Big Themes Coming Up
This panel explored the big industry trends we need to be familiar with and the themes that we should be focusing on as we enter 2023 and beyond.
This panel was moderated by Andrew Hayward-Wright, Group Commercial Director Strategic Partnerships, SeenThis and Programmatic & Sustainability Advisor, IAB Europe who was joined by:
Watch the session recording here
What would you, our members, like to see more of from IAB Europe in 2023? More events, a focus on Sustainability, Retail Media or something else? This is your chance to have your say in our Annual 2022 Members Survey. We are inviting all of our members to give your valued feedback on the past year and help shape our 2023 plans.
Take part here for your chance to win a €200 Amazon voucher
IAB Europe's strength comes from our members whether a National IAB or a corporate organisation. Your contribution to our activities and outputs helps us to deliver quality industry knowledge, events and training. We are always looking to enhance and improve our offering, so we want to know from you what we are excelling at and where we can do better for you and your organisation in the future.
The deadline to complete this survey is Friday 2nd December, and it will take just 5 minutes to complete. Your valuable feedback will be used to help us deliver even better quality intel and help you increase productivity in 2023.
One respondent will be randomly selected to win a €200 Amazon voucher.
In this week's member guest blog post we caught up with Lisa Kalyuzhny, RVP, Advertiser Solutions, EMEA at PubMatic who takes a look at supply chain transparency and the key topic of sustainability.
Across the digital advertising industry, the conversation about sustainability is growing louder. The terms ‘carbon neutral’ and ‘net zero’ have made their way into our day-to-day vocabulary and as a result, we are more informed and better equipped to understand the steps we need to take to protect our planet. However, we’re still at the beginning of the quest to decarbonise the digital advertising industry and there is a lot of work to be done if we’re to reach net zero by 2030 as pledged by Ad Net Zero and its members.
What are the biggest problems facing the industry today?
Advertising has always been a blend of art and science, and sustainability is a redefinition of the science component of that equation. Sustainability is about creating a thriving economy and society for all, now and forever. Today, the digital advertising industry sits somewhat behind the curve and there is work to be done to ensure that advertising has a role in a net-zero society.
When we hold a mirror up to the digital advertising industry what we see is complexity - a plethora of technology and data companies intertwined with each other, trying to best serve the needs of publishers and advertisers. This complex web of interoperability has also, in the past, suffered from a lack of transparency and brand safety issues. Solving these issues has largely been shouldered by publishers leaving a legacy of ‘responsibility’ for the state of the supply chain.
Today, we need a mindset shift where there is a collective feeling of responsibility throughout the supply chain. We need all parties to work together to define how we can create new values and principles that best serve advertisers, publishers, consumers, and the environment. We need to learn from the past and ensure that no one party in the chain dictates the future and that there is a robust definition of what we’re trying to achieve; why we’re trying to achieve it; and most importantly, how we’re going to measure results consistently.
Steps we can all take now to make advertising more sustainable
First and foremost, we need to ensure we’re not wasting energy which is such a precious resource to society. There are simple rules that can be set such as not buying from one supply-side platform (SSP) via another that you already have a partnership with. This means that energy is not being wasted in an unnecessary hop in the supply chain thus making it more efficient both commercially and environmentally. Implementing changes like this that have a clear commercial and environmental benefit will accelerate the rate of change as there is clear value rather than altruism which is not a long-term solution.
There is a real need for education and understanding across the industry both globally and on a local level in different countries to cater for market nuances and ensure that the best possible approaches are being taken based on individual market circumstances. This education process needs to extend beyond the digital advertising industry and include consumer-focused communications. We need to explain what the issues are, what they mean, what we’re doing, and show the results. This will help build consumer confidence in advertising as a force for good.
The approach has to be systematic and pragmatic - like tidying a messy room. Optimise existing processes, scrutinise the path behind and ahead of you, and ensure that everything works in the most efficient way possible. Look at what you can do now, what you can do in six months' time, 12 months, 2 years, or even 5 years from now. Be realistic about what you can achieve and when and be transparent about it. No one is going to win in sustainability by covering up the truth or pretending to deliver change.
What happens next?
Cleaning up supply paths by reducing hops from advertiser to publisher, the removal of cookies, and responsible use of first-party data will help improve sustainability with near immediate impact. However, we also need to look to the future and what else we can do with a long-term lens.
New companies are entering this space with new tools and solutions designed specifically with sustainability in mind. As industry leaders, we need to ensure that we’re collaborating with these new companies to ensure that best practices are verified commitments and not a race to the bottom or profit-driven. Collectively, we need to keep in mind that no one has a silver bullet which is why we need a common end goal that is robustly defined and well-understood.
The digital advertising industry has been built on technology and more often than not technology companies have been the ones that have stepped up to solve the challenges marketers face. Sustainability is different. Any company that is creating emissions needs to be responsible for reducing them. Regulations similar to the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) designed to improve and increase reporting of climate-related financial information could well come into play in digital advertising and help guide the way forward.
How to set up for success
Each organisation will follow its own path towards a more sustainable future but there are some factors that will undoubtedly contribute to success regardless of the specific action plans laid out.
Investing in grassroots and engaging people on a personal level through initiatives such as beach or river clean-ups, removing plastics from office kitchens, or providing training on how to improve personal sustainability will help to foster a culture of responsibility and consideration throughout your organisation. Empowering people to think about how they can contribute to a more sustainable future no matter what their job role or level is will create long-term action rather than a tick-box attitude or laser focus only on specific climate awareness days.
Ultimately, the question we need to ask ourselves when it comes to thinking about the long-term is: “How do we make sure sustainability doesn’t become de-prioritised?” Two things are key here - 1) build sustainability and measurement into all business processes, and 2) hire people who care. Doing these two things will enable companies to deliver change both now and in the future. We’re only just getting started on our sustainability journey in digital advertising and there is a lot of hope and optimism that we need to nurture as we go through this radical transformation for good and work to become a net zero society.
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