Marco Klimkeit is the Managing Director & Founder of Yieldlab - a sell-side technology provider. Here Klimkeit discusses the Yieldlab proposition, the growth of the German RTB market and the crucial role sales houses play in the local display market.

How would you describe Yieldlab’s offering in the Germany market?

Yieldlab offers technology, consulting aund service for media sales houses and publishers helping them to build up a real time advertising offer for their clients and increase their CPM.

We developed our own technology here in Germany to achieve these goals. Our team includes Big Data experts coming from the United States and senior software engineers we have worked together with for years in our former company.

We have a long history in demand technology, having developed the first retargeting and adserver systems speciliasing in performance marketing for the German market. Our systems are used by leading ecommerce companies, and we know the demand side and their needs very well. This was an ideal basis for founding a company to help publishers obtain their best results.

Would you describe Yieldlab as a SSP? And if so how are differentiating your offering from the numerous sell-side platforms active in the German market?

Part of our Service is a SSP. But with our Platform, the Sales Houses and Publishers can decide whether to set-up a private exchange or a SSP offering. In every case, our customers have full control about their inventory. The basic difference between SSP and private exchange is that Invoicing will go directly from the supply partner to the demand partner, and the inventory is only available on invitation.

From the conversations I’ve had with German publishers, they really don’t care about unsold, and are prepared to restrict supply in order to keep premium CPMs high? How does Yieldlab work with these publishers?

We have no unsold inventory is an answer you get from nearly all german publishers. And that’s the truth from their point of view. Most companies have their own teams for yield optimization and performance campaigns that help monetize impressions not sold for a high cpm. These teams work with a manageable number of partners, including adnetworks or performance agencies, and optimize those partnerships manually. The number of partners will increase when the optimization is done automatically.

Yieldlab has a complete Yield Optimization offering that transforms all existing partnerships for unsold-inventory into an automated trading system and combines NON-RTB (e.g. Google AdSense, Ligatus) with RTB-Partnerships (e.g. Turn, Invite Media). The result is an increase in the overall CPM and a more efficient workflow.

Is there a perception among German publishers that RTB might hurt their business?

Yes, some are afraid that RTB might hurt their business, but we also see more and more publishers who identify the benefits of RTB and realize that it has nothing to do with guaranteed deals. The publishers get more control, transparency and efficient performance campaigns.

How does Yieldlab address this negativity in the market? Do you think that private exchanges will assuage these fears and allow publishers to control pricing while making supply available in real-time?

We offer a step-by-step migration to RTB for our Publishers. First, we start with automated yield optimization of NON-RTB Buyers while adding more and more RTB enabled partners. Another good starting point is using our system just for a specific market segment like Re-Targeting. At the moment we have all relevant re-Targeting-Networks connected to our system.

Has Yieldlab built a RTB platform for publsihers? Are you making publisher inventory available in real-time?

Yes, our core is a RTB platform that can be used by customers to setup their own private exchange, SSP or however they like to call it. We have nearly 1 Billion Impressions connected to our system today. Most of the inventory is traded directly between agencies and publishers.

How important are sales houses in the general make-up of the display market in Germany?

There’s a strong mature relationship between agencies and sales houses, and most of the display advertising is traded between these two parties. As performance display advertising gains in importance, these two parties will integrate such performance deals into their agreements. Sales Houses are doing a kind of aggregation and create tailor-made solutions for the advertisers, containing booth High-CPM-Inventory for classical marketing goals and Inventory for Performance or Targeting.

Are you seeing much growth of automated buying on the buy-side? Are big agency desks active in the German market? Will the growth come from agencies or client
direct?

There are several Trading-Desks entering the German market these days. And some local players are developing their own solutions. But at the moment, we see a gap between the market requirements on the buy side and the demand-technologies offered here in the market.

What are we likely to see from Yieldlab in 2012?

In 2012 we will see publishers enabling their whole inventory for RTB using the Yieldlab Technology and our smart integration into the publishers adserver system. We believe this will be key for the success of RTB in the German market.

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