Andreas Schwibbe is the CEO of adnologies. Here Schwibbe discusses the recent fund raise, the adnologies positioning and the continued evolution in the European display marketplace.

Can you give some details on this new funding round?

We have recently raised our first funding round of several million €. With this investment, made by Viewpoint Capital Partners, we will speed up our growth maintaining our independence as a technology provider. Independence is a very important key element for technology providers especially when you act as a contractual data processor for Advertisers, Publishers and Agencies.

Will you be looking to build out tech – or opening new offices?

As a technology provider we offer products that enable our clients to develop a valuable business based on top of our products. We will use the investment to build out the development team to speed up the evolution of our products, which is another key element for success in our business. We will also scale out our international growth expanding into new markets opening new offices.

How is adnologies positioning itself in the European market? Data exchange? Ad server?

Our positioning changed a bit over the last years. We started as a pure ad server company, but we discovered that our clients were in need of additional tools that had to interact with their ad server. We changed our positioning to fulfill this demand by adding modules to our ad server technology HEIAS. This way we implemented additional functions and features seamlessly integrated into the existing graphical user interface. HEIAS today is still the core-technology, but we offer additional modules such as product-level retargeting engine, product-recommendation-engine, targeting as well as the euroDX 3rd-party-data exchange platform - all useable in one single graphical user interface.

Our clients benefit from this, because this seamless integration leads to a more efficient use of each single product compared to as if used as stand-alone product. Our positioning today is to minimze the complexity and fragmentation in the digital advertising landscape. We offer products on the same technological foundation to connect one side to the other in the Display LUMAscape by combining all our products together into a complete online marketing suite.

Is the data market evolved enough in Europe to grow a stand-alone data business?

In Europe we are still in the beginning of the data-driven advertising era but this market is rapidly growing. Compared to video advertising or the rise of advertising in social media where both businesses were in need to create a new infrastructure first and after that a significant amount of reach to be relevant, data will be applied to all existing advertising businesses adding more relevance almost instantaneously. So the time is right, it´s now or never.

Is the evolving European exchange marketplace helping adonologies grow its business? Will this be big area of growth for Adnologies – selling intent data to Europe’s ad traders?

Yes, it does help. With the rise of automatic buying through DSPs, where data is used for audience buying, and automatic selling through SSPs, where data is used to understand the value of your audience, adnologies offers quality 3rd-party-data to support the strategy of both supply and demand side. Providing data for both parties will be a big part of our growth especially when RTB wins additional shares.

How do you see the space evolving over the coming months? With the growth of pan-European dynamic inventory, are we going to see more scalable display businesses across Europe?

Automated buying of media inventory will gain a huge share of the total market except from premium segments. The advertising space is getting more like stock-exchanges. This includes some risks but also chances for many players. Data will lift the pricing of dynamic inventory of any size or placement by changing the point of view from the old placement-oriented model to a user-centric one.

Access to pan-European dynamic inventory will enable businesses to scale faster than ever before, because I believe in the value of data and what it can add to each individual business. Small businesses will have the chance to compete with big brands for the first time because data and technology enables them to efficiently buy their audiences.