Ahead of next week's Ad Trader Conference in Berlin, Jeff Green, The Trade Desk, CEO and co-founder, share his views on how adoption of programmatic trading in Europe could outpace its uptake in the US.

Looking ahead to Ad Trader next week, I am most enthusiastic for the challenging and substantive discussions we are sure to experience as the audience and as panelists in the programme. Experts in advertising and ad tech will come together in Berlin to celebrate the success of the healthy and growing RTB market and push for new ideas to lead Europe.

My fellow panelists and I are going to explore cross-device audience targeting in media buying. This digital marketing challenge predates programmatic, but there are certain aspects to the infrastructure the RTB industry has built that leads me to believe a solution is close at hand.

Technical expertise in Europe, particularly German engineering talent

As a global platform, we deal with agency clients and technologists in diverse markets. Nowhere more than in Germany do we find businesses building to our APIs to add value in programmatic decision-making. Across the central European market there is an emphasis on technological excellence, where many other regions focus on the service layer.

That convinces me that this market has something special to offer the cross-device targeting challenge. Look for the engineering talent in Germany to produce some of the most forward thinking on cross-device targeting the world has seen.

Stricter regulation on Personally Identifiable Information (PII)

While I believe that targeted advertising produces a better solution for browsing audiences, we are committed to achieving success in the respective markets we have been fortunate enough to enter over the last four years. Working within the restrictions of European advertising regulation, leaders in the industry will be pressed to develop solutions that respect the boundaries of PII while enhancing their offerings in an open marketplace.

What is next for programmatic in this market?

Ultimately, this open market is the key. An open market will unlock the engineering talent and the buy-side expertise that will yield true cross-device targeting – and reporting – that unifies the online and offline marketing worlds. This is starting to accelerate in this market.

Because ad demand is so much more consolidated in Central Europe, this acceleration makes it possible for the European market to fully adopt programmatic even faster than any other mature market in the US. In some cases, marketers in Europe have been able to experience the power of programmatic with less of the growing pains. Because of this, we find that the appetite for growth – particularly among clients in Germany – is huge. The powerful insights that can be culled from running campaigns at scale mean that efforts such as cross-device targeting carry less risk and more reward for the buyers who pursue it.

Additionally, programmatic guaranteed (or forward market) is more essential to growing programmatic in Central Europe than anywhere else in the world—but there is more to say about that at the conference.