There is a lot of noise around data trading at the minute. There are a stack of VC-backed ad tech vendors partnering with publishers and other data sources to capture user intent so that they can sell it on to third parties. But in the rush to build out this new revenue stream, the value of data in terms of business intelligence can be sometimes overlooked. Analytics still matters a lot. Burt, a Swedish-based analytics specialist, is one European company looking to deliver better BI for publishers, ad networks and advertisers. ExchangeWire recently spoke to Gustav Von Sydow, CEO & Co-founder at Burt, about the company's core offering, the complexities of display buying, and the critical importance of the creative.

Can you give an overview of the Burt offering?

GVS: Burt develops real-time analytics and data management software to enable more clever, creative and profitable advertising.

We're neutral in the sense that our technology works for advertisers, agencies, networks and publishers. And oh, we don't do media sales or managed services, focusing 100% of our energy on building great infrastructure supporting the whole delivery chain.

Our first products, Meme Machine and Copybox, made it easier for marketers to aggregate, store and leverage audience, media and creative data. I guess you could say we built one of the first Data Management Platforms (DMPs), if that phrase means what I think it means.

However, right now our most popular product is Rich, an advertising analytics tool that lets our customers better understand the display advertising environment and how to maximize the impact/revenue from each impression. Since Rich provides metrics and insights beyond tags, impressions and clicks, many of our customers are focused on brand advertising rather than direct response.

How would a typical publisher use your analytics tool? Is it wholly focused on inventory management?

GVS: It seems media owners look at Rich for Media (RFM) to replace Omniture, Webtrends and other site analytics products, that were built for e-commerce rather than advertising. So we use "web analytics for advertising" as a metaphor to describe what RFM does, which is to enable media owners to better learn about their visitors from an advertising perspective, understand the environment for their ad inventory and see what actions they can take to sell more inventory for higher eCPMs.

How is Burt delivering better BI for publishers?

GVS: Right now we’re building our competitive edge around capturing the world’s most complete and accurate set of media and creative data, far beyond what's currently available from ad servers and/or site analytics. This data set is crunched with our home grown data platform (outperforming Hadoop and the likes by +100x) to provide real-time monitoring and lovely reports full of meaningful metrics that result in action.

We end up solving overlooked and fundamental issues for media owners, for instance tweaking how the advertising environment is designed or giving the sales team data and arguments to support higher eCPMs.

In some cases we share customers with our publishers on the advertiser or agency side, giving everyone a common language to talk about qualitative aspects of the ad environment and creative. Being delivery chain neutral and effectively removing arbitrage is a very powerful idea.

From a buy-side perspective, how would a typical media buyer use your offering?

GVS: Rich for Advertisers/Agencies (RFA) is mostly being used for the same purposes publishers are using us; to gain insights about the advertising environment and learn how to make display advertising more profitable - basically we do ad verification, campaign benchmarking and in-depth analytics.

Our happiest “buy side” customers are those discovering that by paying attention to the quality of the ad environment and giving ad agencies better analytical support, display ads can actually be a highly viable alternative to print and TV.

Can ad networks work with you? And are you covering similar ground to ad verification vendors in this space?

GVS: Yes. Our view on ad verification is that it's a feature rather than a product. Access to accurate impression level data and being able to layer geographic/content/audience/etc data on top of this will be part of any competitive analytics and data management platform down the road.

Burt seems to be focused on “simplifying display buying”. Has display become too complex? And how is Burt making it a less cumbersome process?

GVS: Actually, we’re about simplifying display from a broader perspective. Reducing the administrative pain of media buying is naturally part of this, but it's also a matter of making online display advertising quicker and easier to understand and evaluate. The flaws of display advertising go far beyond planning, pricing and ad ops.

We want to enable a simpler delivery chain, with less people and more direct relationships between buyers and sellers. It's ironic that everyone is talking about online media's potential to disrupt and disintermediate, while we often see 10 companies involved in delivering ads to a browser. There's gotta be a better way.

Our mission is fairly straight forward - to create a market where advertisers know what they're buying, publishers understand what they're selling and agencies know what they're doing. The strategy to achieve this is to create tools that make data accessible, actionable and auditable.

Why would advertisers and agencies use your tool when buy-side ad servers like DFA have analytics as a standard? Are you able to offer better workflow management?

GVS: Just to set the record straight, DFA and the likes have delivery *reporting* as a standard feature, not *analytics*.

Delivery metrics (tags, price, impressions, clicks, conversions) may be cheap to collect and compute, but are often misunderstood and at best incomplete metrics. In most cases, they're flat out wrong or even hazardous to use for learning about how display advertising works and how to improve.

Pretty much everyone that we meet with are unhappy with their ad server reporting beyond delivery stats... and if you add channel fragmentation to the mix of challenges it's even less flattering. How many ad servers play nice with with search, email, social, mobile, video etc? And last time I checked, no site analytics products were even half decent alternatives for managing advertising touch points.

Also, it's now becoming obvious that privacy trends will make it much harder to collect data and deliver accurate metrics. As I said at the conference, I think that we'll look back at the time when we could track users how we wanted and laugh. I have a hard time seeing that ad servers will solve both the technical challenges of moving from counting in raw log files to statistical modeling *and* the marketing challenge of gaining trust in what they report.

Clearly, creating a great analytics and data management for online advertising that people trust is very, very, very hard (and it's not getting any easier), worthy of it's own product category.

At the recent Data Economy event, you emphasised the importance of the creative. How is Burt helping in this area?

GVS: We're delivering the same basic value proposition to all our customers, which is to allow them to leverage analytics and data management without having to add new skill sets or change the way they work.

And make no mistake, these technologies are just as important in developing great creative as they are in doing media planning. Our products are plug-and-play with how our customers already work and like any good tool (be it Photoshop or a power drill) we’re all about empowering people to expand their capabilities.

What are we likely to see from Burt in the European market over the coming twelve months?

GVS: Our emphasis throughout 2011 will be to continue building amazing products that customers enjoy using every day. 90% of our team are still engineers, quants and designers.

We're really excited about some Rich releases that are coming up - brand performance metrics, better audience data, data management integration, privacy lunacy stuff and some other goodies. Rich is really changing how our publishers design, package and sell their inventory, and how brands plan, make and measure their campaigns together with their agencies. It’s very exciting to see the theory working in practice!

Everyone in the team are also looking forward to releasing public versions of Burt's data management products. +4000 users have already requested invites for Copybox and Meme Machine, and they don’t know half of what we have going on under the hood.

A couple of weeks back we also decided to setup sales/marketing in New York and start building out marketing and sales across Europe to be able to accept customers at a faster rate. Right now we literally have 100x more opportunities than we can possibly manage, so how fast we ramp up is not a function of demand but of how fast we can recruit awesome talent and access capital to fund our growth.

One thing we’re hoping for in 2011 is that Burt will contribute to a tighter ad tech eco system in Europe and boost European innovation in the space. And naturally, we’re wishing for the data discussion to move beyond that of audience planning to involve media and creative, in which case we’re in an even better position to do something great.