Yann Le Roux is the Co-Founder at Matiro. After his appearence at ATS Paris, Le Roux gives a high-level overview on the growth of the data-driven display marketplace in France.

How has the French data-driven display market evolved over the past 12 months?

A lot! Thanks to both the buzz and the actual results of ad trading display advertising has become a hot topic. Many e-commerce advertisers are now investing in display beyond re-targeting, based on the results they are seeing with solutions like ours. Likewise, attribution is progressing fast, and more and more advertisers and marketers are now able to fairly evaluate the ROI of display advertising. Most advertisers now understand that CPM pricing is a valid model for a direct response goal, when not so long ago only CPC and CPA were considered acceptable for direct response advertising.

The ad spend figure is in line with this renewed interest : the Display market has grown 15% in the first half of 2011, according to IREP (http://www.irep.asso.fr/actualites.php?id=115)

How is Matiro’s model suited for the new media buying landscape in France?

Quite simply, it is designed 100% for it!

We pioneered ad trading in France when we launched Matiro in spring last year, so we have been playing a significant role in this (r)evolution. Second, we designed Matiro, and continue to develop it, entirely for the future: we look at the technologies and data sources available out there, and adding strategy to the mix we design and build our product with the goal to maximise the benefit for the marketer.

We do not view RTB as a way to purchase media cheaply, like many do, but as a building block to deliver a smarter, more efficient and more transparent display advertising solution.

Last but not least, we focus entirely on the buy-side. While you can still serve both the buy-side and the sell-side in the evolving ecosystem, we strongly believe that to deliver maximum value to your customers you need to pick a side, and focus on it. Our internal mantra is to be a marketer's best friend in display advertising!

Are French marketers now realising the potential of RTB and automated buying? How are the likes of Matiro driving adoption in the market?

French marketers, especially the most savvy ones, have started to take advantage of the ad trading opportunity, and they are seeing great results. There is still a huge need for education though, and it looks like we will never be enough to reach out to marketers and explain why this matters to them. It is unfortunate that some of the larger agencies are pitching exchange-based offerings that actually are black-box ad networks. Not only does it usually fail to deliver any tangible ROI to advertisers, but it is creating unnecessary confusion in the market. Because of all the buzz, we are also seeing companies that have nothing to do with ad trading include RTB in their pitch decks, seminars, etc to remain relevant. That is understandable, but it does not help.

In any case, with some others we are dedicated to changing Display advertising for ever, and this is working!

Is much of the French demand in data-driven display coming from re-targeting and direct response? Or are French brand advertisers putting money into the automated channel?

Pretty much 100% of the ad trading budgets today are spent towards direct response goals. That does not mean that there are no brands: as an example many well established financial services advertisers have jumped in early. But it is true that this is primarily used to achieve Direct Response goals. Many factors are behind this fact: direct response advertisers are usually more sophisticated and more committed to digital, brand advertisers are often reluctant with network and exchange buys where they cannot select the sites they run on, standard formats are not ideal for branding, etc. It will evolve, but it will take time.

Has there still a lot of resistance from French publishers towards programmatic buying? Would you like to see more premium inventory made available through SSPs and exchanges?

There has been a lot of resistance or fear, but this is changing rapidly. A lot of education is done by the likes of The Rubicon Project, Google, Improve Digital, Hi-Media, etc, and we are getting more and more involved with publishers ourselves, to explain what we are doing and what is going on on the buy side. One sign that the publisher perception is changing is that with some SSPs no single premium publisher is blind: it definitely shows that these publishers believe they have enough controls to manage the risk of channel conflict without having to use the obfuscation.

More and more publishers understand that a major evolution is taking place, at a quite rapid pace.

Currently, most of the largest premium publishers are getting together to launch a common audience offering, which will also be buyable in RTB.

How is the data market evolving in France? Are we still at the early stage of development?

It is evolving rapidly, but from a very low base. Reach is often an issue, especially if you are looking at specific segments, and performance lift is another problem: you do not always see a performance lift that is large enough to offset the additional cost of using data. To make data work harder, and grow both the the performance for advertisers and the business for data providers, we need to work in a more sophisticated way: deploy expansive segment discovery in order to indentify the most promising segments before actually testing them. This is what we are currently doing with our data partners Weborama, Exelate and DatVantage.

We are also doing some R&D work with companies in the Facebook advertising segment: targeting fans of an advertiser's facebook page in the trading program of that same advertiser. This has proven to be very effective.

How will this space evolve over the coming twelve months in France? Will we see even more budget shift into the automated channel?

Definitely. The automated channel is building up rapidly.