Martin Kelly is Managing Partner at Infectious Media, an exchange-trading specialist based in London. Martin took time this week to speak to ExchangeWire about the company’s rebrand, the evolution of the UK exchange space and the continued growth of the data market.

You’ve recently went through a rebranding and a repositioning of the Infectious offering. Can you explain the Infectious Media proposition in more detail?

MK: Yes, it's simple, we make display advertising work for our clients. Clearly there's a lot more to our business in terms of how we do that but that is our proposition and how we sell our services. We operate exclusively in the ad exchange space and offer these services to both advertisers direct and to agencies. We've purpose built both a team and trading platform, Impression Desk, to service this opportunity in the UK and Europe.

The rebrand and new website was about reflecting this focus.

How in your view has the exchange market evolved in the UK since the launch of Infectious Media?

MK: There wasn't really one when we started so it's come a long way! Right Media was the only place we could trade and was in itself the preserve of a few very smart networks, it's incredible really that a whole new ecosystem has developed in the space of two year, the pace of change is staggering. The component areas of the value chain seem to be settling down a little now and both publishers and buyers are starting to do deals with and build infrastructure around DSP's and SSP's in order to service the opportunity. It's not yet clear how the traditional intermediary, ad networks, will respond to these changes.

Do you think there is still not enough quality inventory available through automated channels?

MK: I think there is quality inventory available at scale but an issue that buyers will find in this environment is that it's hard to find and the ways of doing this differ by platform. All supply sources take a different approach to defining quality as do all the DSP's so it's a minefield with no standardisation. We have chosen to tackle this issue head on and have invested a lot of time and effort in to devising our own manual vetting procedure for inventory sources. We are about to introduce our own transparent classification system for inventory that we vet ourselves so watch this space.

Has the arrival of the SSPs, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and now the Orange Ad market improved the buying opportunities offered through automated channels?

MK: There is momentum growing on the supply side and these intermediaries are driving things forward. Ultimately this makes sense for everyone involved, with lower transaction costs associated to this channel and CPM's increasing substantially in the last 6 months alone. Part of the education process for publishers is that the CPM's that they receive for their inventory are higher than those they receive from a network as the buyer has much more opportunity to recognise value in the platform environment than they do in a bulk network buy. We, on average, currently pay double the average CPM in the Doubleclick Exchange quite simply because we can see the value that our activity is driving for the advertiser and bid accordingly

Do you think this volume on the sell-side will attract a lot more display spend into the exchange eco-system?

MK: I don't think anyone on the demand side is under any illusion that this is the way that the market is going and needs persuading any more. The barrier is more around attaining the skills and technology to operate effectively and the speed with which this will happen.

Data plays a huge role in the automated buy. Do you think the absence of UK-specific data sets from the data exchanges and other platforms is hindering the development of the exchange eco-system?

MK: The data market has been slow to develop in the UK but there are now some companies entering the UK such as Quantcast and we welcome that development. I would also say that from an Infectious Media perspective this has meant we have had to focus our product development around data analysis and decisioning in the absence of 'off the shelf' target audiences.

We speak to many of the top UK publishers and they are keen to find ways to monetise their data so it will just be a matter of time before this market develops further and there is room for some big winners in the UK and European data market.

Is Infectious currently buying inventory through RTB? Would you say the buying process is different than a typical auction buy on the Rightmedia and Adx exchanges?

MK: Yes we are currently buying via RTB in the UK and across Europe. The buying process is no different in many respects, this is just the buying of display media after all. The difference is the amount and richness of data points that can be passed through to the buyers on each impression but I don't yet think this is being fully exploited by the supply side especially. The more information a publisher passes about an impression, the more of a chance that we will see value in that impression and bid higher accordingly. What has been a real game changer for Infectious is impression level reporting which is a huge volume of data that we take in to our data warehouse to analyse but has meant we can scrutinise performance to a new level of granularity and optimise accordingly.

Infectious is an exchange trading specialist – far removed from a traditional media buying agency. What kind of skills does Infectious, which puts technology and data at the heart of its business, look for in new hires?

MK: There is some cross over with media buying agencies in what we do but we're a very different type of company. Exchange trading is our only service and we offer this to both advertisers and agencies and because of this we have built a very specialist team and infrastructure. Our last three hires have been a statistician, a business information systems architect and an agency account manager. So some cross over with an agency in terms of personnel but in the main something completely different. Coming from large media agency backgrounds it's been a breath of fresh air for Andy (co-founder) and myself to be able to build the team from scratch with new skills and a company structure that is fit for purpose. To date we have not employed anyone from a pure media buying background.

Now that the DSPs have finally arrived and RTB inventory has come onto the market, how do you see the space developing in the coming months?

MK: The pace of change is rapid at the moment and will not be slowing down any time soon. The coming months will see the completion of the infrastructure for the UK platform trading revolution, new UK data centres opening, trading desk offerings appearing, SSP's hitting scale and we hope a more open debate around data and privacy that needs to happen if we are to successfully self regulate as an industry.

Oh, and loads more hype, as ever.