Sylvain Deffay, Infectious Media's country manager, France, advises on how to best scrutinise the performance of ad budgets in a world of near constant technological change.

The latest figures from French regulator the SRI reveal programmatic buying is maintaining an upward trajectory in an overall advertising market that remains depressed. Along with this continued expansion into 2014, we’re seeing increasing appeals from advertisers for transparency into the workings of real time advertising.

Following on from ExchangeWire’s earlier post on the trend among brands to demand assurance that their budgets are being well spent, here we offer a clear approach for achieving such piece of mind.

For proactive vendors, the current climate in France represents an essential opportunity to prove value through head-to-head competitions with other real-time suppliers.

In France, digital advertising grew 3% in 2013 in an otherwise lacklustre advertising environment. While overall French advertising by the end of Q3 was at -6%, 2013 saw digital display grow 10% and RTB increase 125%. The share of display being traded programmatically in France is now 16% – higher than in the UK and second only to the US.

It’s been an incredible rate of change; programmatic buying only really got going in France in the last few years with the opening of the first trading desks. Now with French advertisers having diverted €117m into programmatic media buying last year, it comes as no surprise that they are giving more and more scrutiny to RTB methods in 2014. As overall advertising budgets are being compressed, understanding how to obtain better and better returns on investment is more important than ever.

Of course, advertisers have every right to be interested in gaining a better view into how programmatic buying works. Their demands for transparency tend to fall into four areas:

1) Which vendors are being used to provide the behind-the-scenes tools for my real-time media buying?
2) Which placements and positions are my ads going into?
3) What strategies are being used, and what audience segmentation is in place to ensure my ads are hitting the right targets?
4) What tactics are in place to optimise the viewability of my ads?

How best to answer these questions and provide the kind of transparency required? Head-to-head competitions, where suppliers pit one approach against another, provide an exceptional way to generate vivid illustrations of the relative merits of the different approaches to RTB.

This process can start with a request for information or a request for proposal. How it works is that two trading desks, agencies or independents agree to run an advertising campaign set to exactly the same parameters – same budget, same creative, same media, same length of time. At the end of the test, the advertiser is in a perfect position to assess in concrete terms the comparative value of each vendor’s execution of media buying.

The performance metrics tell only part of the story though. This is also a superb opportunity to compare vendors in terms of service and transparency. How good are they at getting information back to you? What exactly have they done on your behalf? Where are the ads running? How has the audience been segmented? What measures have been taken to ensure viewability of your ad?

We at Infectious Media were asked by Brasseries Kronenbourg to demonstrate our ability to maximise the viewability of banners around the launch of a new product. Another vendor was given the same task, and at the end the client was able to precisely compare outcomes in a way not possible before the advent of this kind of head-to-head competition. So what were the metrics? While the industry average score against the IAB viewability standard is 46% (comScore June 2013), our banners achieved 73% ad viewability. Brasseries Kronenbourg commissioned us to continue the work, and this metric is improving all the time as we optimise further. Read the full case study here.

Meanwhile, we’re seeing more and more of these competitions across verticals, from fast-moving consumer goods to the automotive industry to the gaming sector. Advertisers and brands should be ready to embrace opportunities to set up competitions, to make sure their providers are able to walk the walk as well as they talk the talk. As long as more advertisers are finding out what works best for their business the French digital market will continue to progress.