ExchangeWire rounds up some of the biggest stories in the European digital advertising space.

StarCom MediaVest backs Facebook video ads roll out
Facebook announced the international rollout of its much-hyped auto play video ads this week, plus a further partnership with Publicis’ Starcom MediaVest, worth a reputed half a billion UD dollars.

The “premium video ad units” have been tested in the US since earlier this year, but will now be made available to advertisers in Europe and elsewhere, beginning in the UK, and will appear in users’ video feed.

The spots will last 15 seconds and can expanded into full-screen format – they will initially appear silent but audio content will be activated if a user scrolls over them – and have been widely likened to TV ads.

A blog post announcing the deal reads: “We’ll roll out Premium Video Ads slowly and monitor how people interact with them. This limited introduction allows us to concentrate our efforts on a smaller number of advertisers with high-quality campaigns to create the best possible experience on Facebook.”

Advertisers will also be better able to understand how users interact with their ad units via new video ad metrics, according to Facebook, which also announced that it would let advertisers see information such as the number of video views, unique video views, average duration of video view and audience retention.

The social network also this week jointly announced a “co-creation deal” with Starcom Mediavest over the ad units in the US (although there is a presumed agreement to roll this out to the wider market) in a deal that is reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to sources.

Despite the ad deal having the reflective Facebook halo-effect, it is also significant because it means that a major media-buying agency, whose clients include Coca-Cola and P&G, is now backing ‘mobile-social-video’, and can seriously be seen as a rival to TV budgets.

The deal also heralds a willingness for advertisers to truly consider multi-screen strategies – as opposed to TV, print, and outdoor, then throw what’s leftover from the budget online. This publication believes that as soon as multi-screen tracking, and attribution strategies are cracked that the world of ‘media neutral’ campaign planning will finally be here.

PubMatic joins acquisition trail wit Mocean Mobile purchase
PubMatic this week announced that it is to acquire ad serving company Mocean Mobile (formerly Mojiva) to increase its mobile web and in-app inventory in a reportedly worth $15m, making it the US company’s largest acquisition to date.

The newly-combined entity will operate under the PubMatic name, with the deal undoubtedly motivated by Pubmatic’s desire to win over publisher inventory across screen and quickly follows the announcement of the supply-side platform's deal with location-based platform firm xAd to further bolster its mobile capabilities.

The pair last week announced a “location-verified marketplace” and will have over 20 billion impressions per month, and enhances Pubmatic’s claim to operate premium inventory.

xAd differentiates itself from rival technology platforms as it combines first party data, and then uses it to help build “secondary insights”. For example, xAd uses its “SmartFence” technology to geo-target users within a designated area in real-time using an audience’s search intent and previous mobile ad behaviours as an indicator of a mobile user’s mindset.

Earlier in the year, xAd and out-of-home advertising firm Posterscope spoke to this publication about how they were participating in a trial to combine mobile and outdoor, where they dubbed “location as the new cookie for mobile”.

The Guardian Preps Mobile App Relaunch, Brings Programmatic To Its Core

Earlier this week this title revealed how the Guardian is preparing to relaunch its mobile app offering to help advertisers access its most engaged readers, as it also continues to place programmatic media trading at the core of its commercial operations.

The disclosure was made this week by Sam Henderson, Guardian News and Media, revenue operations director, speaking at an event hosted by the Association of Online Publishers (AOP), where he presented to attendees.

SalesForce commits to mobility
SalesForce this week continued its ongoing annual global tour with its London stop-off announcing a raft of product releases.

This is just the latest in a series of announcements, such as last week’s IBM ExperienceOne platform, plus updates for Adobe’s Media Optimiser, which are all indicative of the the intensifying competition in the enterprise marketing space.

The top lines form this week’s flagship event were delivered mainly in a keynote address by George Hu upcoming launch of a UK data centre (its first in Europe), which it claims reflects Salesforce’s understanding of “the European mindset’ – with further ones to follow in France and Germany next year.

Here the company also pitched a redesigned SalesForce 1 as a platform to help take customers into the ‘internet of customers’.

Although announced at its annual flagship event DreamForce last year the marketing cloud services giant announced its SalesForce 1 platform, but this week’s update included the announcement of a new app extension that lets companies ‘build 1:1 relationships with customers directly from a mobile device’.

This was brought out to reflect that mobile computing usage has now surpassed desktop, as borne out by its own recently released research, which claimed that 60% of British employees now use apps on mobile devices for work-related activity.

“Cloud-first is the new mantra in today’s world as it makes our world more efficient and easy to run, but the next wave is about social and mobility,” he said, adding that this meant many companies would have to change their business models.

Over the past few years the concept of the ‘marketing cloud’ has been talked to death by the big enterprise players. Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, IBM and Adobe have all got marketing platform strategies.

They see huge opportunity in helping marketers join up all their data sources, allowing them to execute against their goals by knitting together the likes of analytics, media execution and CRM functions.

These enterprise plays have been spending billions on an array of marketing/advertising technology companies over the past 24 months. And now ad tech is really in the cross-hairs of the big enterprise plays. Is there a possibility of the enterprise players dis-intermediating ad tech through one all-singing-all-dancing marketing stack?

So with efficiencies being the key mantra of the corporate world, wouldn’t it make sense for brands to clear many of the names from the multi-layered lumascape from your already stretched marketing budget?

Paul Smith, SalesForce, VP marketing, EMEA, said that big brand names that have originally forged their fortunes in the digital sphere – think Rovio with Angry Birds, and King.com (a widely acknowledged spender on mobile advertising) – were more likely to use the likes of their own ‘plug-and-play’ solutions, than more established brands, who still have their own legacy relationships.

To underlines the pace of change, Salesforce this week also reported financial results, for the fiscal first-quarter of 2015 with revenue of $1.23 billion, up 37% year over year at 11 cents per share, compare this to some of the turbulent stock price fluctuations of more traditional listed ad tech players and the threat is apparent.