Andreas Schwibbe is the CEO of adnologies, a Hamburg-based ad technology company. Schwibbe recently spoke to ExchangeWire recently about the company's dynamic retargeting and data exchange solution.

Can you give an overview of the adnologies offering?

AS: adnologies is a German ad server technology vendor founded in 2006. We offer our real-time ad server HEIAS to agencies, publishers and networks. We can easily be extended using pluggable modules, adding special features like targeting. This allows us to provide our customers a tailored offering that fits our clients’ changing needs.

In the last two years we have had great success with our product-level real-time retargeting module.

How does your re-targeting tool work? Does it have dynamic creative element?

AS: Our retargeting technology combines four key elements. The first and most important is data collection. The technology collects different non-PII data attributes such as product information, pricing, ratings, delivery times, anonymous socio-demographics and many more from the advertiser’s webpage/online-shop. The advertiser is in control of this data and the data is stored in an isolated database.

The second element is a copy of the product database that the advertiser’s shop is built on. We use this for our dynamic creative piece.

The third element is a definable business logic, which can be added to retarget certain user-segments. We call this a business rule and it defines how you analyse user data (customer journey) in accordance with the advertiser’s aims.

A simple example is a shopping-cart “quitter”. A user puts an item in the cart, but doesn’t purchase. A simple business rule is: show a shopping-cart quitter the product(s) that the cart included. It’s a simple but effective rule. As the technology doesn`t limit you, we can improve this rule: show a shopping-cart quitter the product(s) that are similar/equal to the product(s) included in the cart, but are cheaper/top-selling/on-rebate.

The technology sets no limits for the rules. You also may setup different rules for the same user segment in parallel, while the automatic optimisation will choose the best performing rule identified by measured conversions. This is a powerful key element of the technology, because it adapts retargeting to the individual needs of the advertiser by vertical (retail, travel, finance), products (high/low price segement, non-/physical goods) or demand (one-time i.e. cars vs. constant i.e. copy paper) leading to a spike in performance.

The forth element is our dynamic creative element. It visualizes the result of the business rule, which is based on the collected data and the product database containing teasers, descriptions, deep links, product images, pricing, rebates etc.

Advertisers can layout a template and the technology adds content dynamically to the creatives depending on the user requesting an ad. The system generates a creative for each user on every ad-request.

Do you licence this technology? And who would be a typical user? Client direct? Agency? Ad Network? Publisher?

AS: Yes, we license the technology. Our customers are agencies, ad networks
and publishers. We don´t have a direct client relationship. They could afford our fair licensing fees – but they usually don´t have in-house staff to operate the system.

We don´t want to compete with our clients.

Do you take a position in the media? Or are you a pure technology play?

AS: No we don´t. We focus on providing effective online-marketing technology only.

You’ve just launched your data market. How does the market work? And what is the pricing model for data?

AS: We launched the adnologies Profile Data eXchange at the end of last year. Our success with our retargeting engine has helped us build a total of 150 million unique user profiles. These profiles include demographics, interests, brand affinities and buying intent from ecommerce pages.

The demand-side rents a set of profiles with definable attributes i.e. gender and age-information or buying intent for a product or brand. The set is dynamically generated and updated once a day, guaranteeing fresh data.

The demand-side pays an agreed CPM on a pay-as-you-use basis. In a set of one million users, the demand-side may find all or none of these users in the media. If for example only one hundred thousand users are identified and each one receives five creatives the CPM for five hundred thousand ad impressions is due.

In order to simplify the media buying process for the demand-side we’ve added remnant inventory from our clients using our publisher and network adserver to the eXchange. So the demand side is able to combine data and media on one platform.

Can you give some insight on the type of data you’re brokering on behalf of your client?

AS: The data within the eXchange is provided by our retargeting advertisers. They own the data and our eXchange platform provides the technology to share and rent this anonymous non-PII data. The data has been collected in a standardized way and has been used in the first place by the owner to retarget its own audiences.

This way the data has been already qualified by the data owner when offered in the eXchange. The main difference compared to other data sources is that 99% of this data comes from ecommerce, where users enter their real data for successful transaction, delivery and payment verification. Buying intenders collected from ecommerce delivers real, measured intent data in combination with ecommerce behaviours such as shopping frequency, high/low price interests and many more.

How can buyers integrate with the adnologies data market? Are there plans to integrate with DSPs and SSPs?

AS: Today you need a HEIAS AdServing License to get access to the data, because the eXchange and our ad serving technology work seamlessly together and you benefit from embedded reporting and optimization.

We’ve also certified 3rd party ad servers for ad delivery based on the eXchange’s data, but you tend to lose real-time capabilities. To add the function of RTB the data will soon be available in major DSPs and SSPs.

How would a typical buyer use data segments from the adnologies market in an ad campaign?

AS: You always start defining your audience by combining several data attributes into a profile set. When you agree on a CPM with the data owner(s) your defined segment is unlocked. Using our ad serving technology you are able to setup a campaign with audience-targeting. With just two additional clicks, you can add media for this campaign. Using 3rd party ad serving the information transfer can start. Depending on the vendor there might be a time lag and you might never know how many users you can find in your own media while our technology will give you an estimate.

Do you have any real-world case studies you can show on the success of using data in a campaign?

AS: Well, we are a tech company and we don´t have direct client relationships, so a real case study is hard to develop on our own. We worked with one of our clients to setup a proof-of-concept study to outline the impact of data in display advertising. The results proved our expectations. You can download the study here: http://www.profile-exchange.com/data_impact.pdf

How are you ensuring user privacy around data collected? Do you have any concerns about the new privacy directive?

AS: As a German-based, European-focused company our privacy policy and our products are bound to and based on the strict German privacy laws. No Personal-Identifiable-Information is used, collected or acquired at any time.

I think the industry needs to be transparent so that users understand what they give and what they get in return. The industry needs to respect privacy, the users need to understand that this data preserves their privacy by anonymity and politicians need to understand how the interests of the users and the industry can be served.

Personally I am not concerned about the privacy directive, because I think that the digital society and industry are responsible enough to deal with these issues without any external intrusion.

Are there plans to expand into other European markets this year?

AS: Yes, we will defenitely hit several European markets later this year. You will be the first to know when and where 😉