Nigel Gilbert is the Head of Orange Ad Market, a leading European ad exchange. Here he speaks about the development of the Orange Ad Market since its roll-out last year, the non-conflict of owning an ad network and exchange, the opportunity around mobile display, RTB fill rates and the recent malware attack on Unanimis.

Can you give some insight on the progress of the Orange Ad Market in Europe since its launch last year?

NG: We launched it in the UK at the end of summer last year, and we surpassed a billion impressions per month by October. The focus is very much on quality and making sure that all of the customers on the supply or demand side have an efficient and successful experience. Everyone in the market has different requirements around pricing, transparency, and reporting, and as such we have scaled up progressively while making sure it meets all the different needs. Our goal is of course to work with as many publishers as possible – but we are agnostic – anyone can put their inventory into the market, publishers, networks, SSPs, anyone.

Are you seeing significant volumes being trading through the market?

NG: Yes. We now have more than 2 billion available impressions in the market on a monthly basis in the UK alone. Fill rates and pricing are therefore the other key variables that will affect trading velocity and there is no current standard for that. Of course for some sites yields are very high and fill rates are a little lower, and on others the fill rate is extremely high whereas the yield is a little lower. We make sure we talk to all the key partners on both sides regularly to quickly find the levels that are going to work and create the most revenue. The highest yield we have seen is over £4cpm, and the highest fill rate is over 30%.

The European sell-side has become very competitive – with lots of vendors offering similar yield optimisation/real-time trading to publishers. How are you differentiating yourself in the space?

NG: We are simplifying the process as much as possible. We are not necessarily looking to control all of our publishers’ inventory, we are giving them a true real time platform on which they can place as much or as little of their inventory as they wish. On this basis, they are not passing control to someone else (and paying for that), and they are having a truly direct relationship with the demand partners in this space.

We offer every level of control the publisher would want, of course (category of advertiser, price, volume, and reporting), and we also provide a single source of billing. On top of this, as we are a European market, we operate in local language and local currency, this is being a key point of difference. I don’t think that you can underestimate the strength of the Orange brand either, and the confidence that gives to customers knowing that they are in safe hands.

How is the roll-out of the Orange Ad Market developing across Europe?

NG: So we are of course live with web display in the UK now, and France will be live at the start of April. Clearly the French market is a very important one for us, and there is a huge amount of brand penetration there. We then plan to be live in Spain towards the beginning of summer.

Can buyers access inventory in real-time on the platform?

NG: Absolutely, we have been RTB enabled since day 1.

There’s a lot of heat around the data market at the moment. Will the Orange Ad Market look to broker data on behalf of its publisher partners?

NG: Yes. Clearly there is still an education piece to do with a lot of publishers, but we are not just talking about publishers who rely on ad revenue to support their business. There is a huge raft of online media owners who have explicit 1st party data, and are already extremely comfortable with the model, have been doing something similar offline for a while, and as such are ready to go.

This could therefore take the form of bespoke profiles or data qualified inventory, and can be made available to all demand partners on an RTB basis, or on a bespoke basis to advertisers looking for a particular segment. Naturally this is a very secure process, but we also understand a lot of customers will take baby steps here to begin with to ensure safety and privacy.

Given Orange’s massive footprint in mobile, will we see lots of mobile inventory being made available through the Orange Ad Market?

NG: Certainly mobile is going to be key to how our offering develops over the coming months, and there is definitely an expectation from us (of course) to provide mobile as part of this marketplace. The mobile market is currently performance led, and unfortunately flooded with inventory, which has already triggered the ‘race to the bottom’ from a pricing perspective. We want to ensure that when we bring our mobile offering forward that buyers and sellers can truly understand the value of what they are trading, and base it on actual user information that is pertinent to their objectives. Otherwise, with our scale, we could contribute to the problem and not add any value to the process.

In recent commentary on an ExchangeWire post you mentioned fill rates on RTB inventory of just 20%. What are the reasons for such low figures? Is it demand? Or are inventory floor price too high?

NG: My comment stems from the fact I keep reading comments and posts where people mention huge fill rates, which is eventually leading to disappointed publishers. I want to make sure that every new publisher we talk to has a genuinely accurate expectation of what RTB and exchanges can deliver for them. As a publisher linking directly into an exchange, you have around 5 or 6 variables that you can manipulate which can dramatically affect your yield and revenue. Certainly there is good revenue to be made, and good sites with well placed ads and appropriate page frequencies will do very well.

Fill rate is also a bit of a misnomer as it strongly relates to how big your site is in the first place of course.

Unanimis is still big part of Orange’s UK display offering? How is Unanimis evolving its current model to meet the new demands of the display market?

NG: Clearly it is a benefit to have access to all distribution channels in the market. Unanimis has been in this market for over 10 years, and so has built up some very long standing relationships with key publishers who are very keen to access RTB demand.

Working with sites that own a lot of very deep first party data also means that companies like Unanimis to some extent represent a very effective way to move forward in the 3rd party space. There is no need to go and buy Experian data like everyone else, they can create and monetise profiles and data segments which are arguably stronger, and certainly bespoke.

What’s your view on the current ad network model? Do you think ad nets need to evolve their offering to meet the changing needs of agencies, advertisers and indeed publishers?

NG: Yes definitely. There are clearly far too many, and more importantly far too many that do not add any value whatsoever. If we boil down the different types, my opinion is that networks that only focus on performance campaigns are clearly going to struggle. Once agencies remove their ability to re-target I think that is when we will see the domino affect kick in. The clear risk around only running performance campaigns is that ultimately you are now competing against the agency, not providing a service to them.

Unanimis manage inventory and sites under contract, and this sits comfortably alongside the demand partners, not in conflict with them. This is maintained, as a large part of the service offering is brand and integration revenues, as well as DR.

Does the ad network and exchange business within Orange complement one another? Is there any conflict of interest owning two divergent businesses?

NG: Based on the fact that the demand is quite well segmented, they complement each other. That doesn’t mean to say that you can just put them there and not expect there to be any cross-over, it will need to be managed appropriately. But it means a publisher can get a true full service, not just on their remnant, but on the whole site, from one place. What it also means is that France Telecom (who own the 2 businesses) can be very well prepared further down the line regardless of the nature of demand and the platforms advertisers want to run on. That is extremely rare, certainly in this market.

Can you give some overview on the recent Unanimis hack? How are you going to stop similar security breaches in the future? How serious is the malware issue?

NG: That wasn’t a good week in the office that’s for sure! It is an issue that the industry still unfortunately has to deal with. As Unanimis has quite a prominent position, they are a very understandable target for this type of attack. However all sites running our tags (including in house ones) were stopped on the same weekend, and on Monday, and even Tuesday, we were getting reports that other ad networks’ clients were seeing the same creative, Google Android was also affected forcing them to pull over 50 Android Apps – so it is fair to say this wasn’t an isolated incident.

As a result, Unanimis is taking extra measures to prevent this from happening again by partnering with a market-leading ad verification provider, which is due to be announced within the next few weeks.

What are we likely to see from the Orange Ad Market in the coming months?

NG: The focus over the coming months is simply to scale the business. We have the platform to support ‘true’ RTB, and we have a head-start on the media, branding, and market penetration. We have an extremely flexible approach in the sense that absolutely anyone can use it, and they could set themselves up in the time to takes to have lunch. No drawn out integration process, no multiple sources of invoicing and debt management, but yet all of the controls.