PubliGroupe forms partnership with MediaMath

PubliGroupe, a Swiss-based provider of marketing and media sales services, signed a joint-venture agreement last week with MediaMath.

The partners have formed a new dedicated company in Berlin, Spree7 GmbH (aka LLC), to serve the markets of Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Spree7 will offer media buying services to advertisers and agencies based on MediaMath technology, launching its operations by mid-April. The underlying concept of programmatic media buying with Spree7 is RTB, which is currently powering nearly 10% of all display media transactions globally.

PubliGroupe owns 80% of the new entity, with MediaMath owning the remaining 20%. The independent research group Forrester recently identified MediaMath’s ‘TerminalOne’ technology as a leading DSP, bringing together digital media, data management and analytics to enable advertisers to drive better results for branding, direct response and full-funnel marketing.

Renato Martignoni, Chief Operating Officer at Digital & Marketing Services at PubliGroupe, comments: “MediaMath has developed the global leading demand-side platform and we are delighted that we can act as their preferred partner in the DACH region. With our sales network in these markets and the setup of a dedicated team of digital marketing professionals in Berlin, we will help marketing experts make more efficient and effective marketing decisions, thereby fully living up to our mission of making marketing more effective for our clients”.

Erich Wasserman, General Manager, MediaMath, EMEA, adds: “Advertisers are constantly seeking to optimise their marketing. With PubliGroupe and the dedicated joint-company Spree7, we will focus on helping customers in the DACH regions to profit from a technology that is all about driving business results. Our product will continue to support multiple and emerging media formats, and digital channels such as video, mobile and social. Whatever the channel, our DSP will optimise it while unifying metrics and enabling quick-to-market strategies.”

AdGent Digital Launches AdTouch with WWF’s Global Earth Hour Campaign

AdGent Digital, a global media and technology company, partnered with Mindshare UK and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to launch their new tablet-based advertising platform, AdTouch, with last weekend’s Earth Hour campaign.

WWF is the first brand to use AdGent Digital’s new tablet-based advertising platform. The WWF ad unit, AdTouch +Slide, gives visitors the ability to open ads by touching and sliding the ad from right to left, revealing new content on top of the existing page without interrupting the visitor’s experience on publisher sites.

AdTouch uses IAB standard HTML5-based ad sizes to serve touchable, non-intrusive rich media ads. With AdGent Digital partnering with leading publishers, it hopes to bring fun and engaging ads to global tablet audiences.

Currently the ads are only trafficked to iPads, but AdGent plans on releasing the technology to other tablets in the near future.

Cameron Yuill, CEO and founder of AdGent Digital comments: “WWF is the perfect brand to launch our new tablet-based ad unit with, especially because it is close to our hearts at AdGent. Tablet users are able to engage with the brand and publishers, as well as advertisers, have the chance to deliver interesting content creatively to their target audiences. With tablet sales increasing, creating ads solely for tablets is a logical step for us.”

WWF's Earth Hour was a global environmental initiative that invited individuals, businesses, governments and communities to turn out their lights for one hour this past Saturday March 31, to show their support for environmentally sustainable action.

Check out a video that showcases the campaign here.

Yahoo!/Bing Surpass Google in Ad Spend Growth

Coming off of a record Q4, the first quarter of 2012 brought with it continued and strong year-over-year growth for search advertising. Q1 2012 had a year-on-year growth in search spend in the U.S. of 30.3% – more than double the rate of both Q1 2011 and Q1 2010. Mobile search accounted for 12.3% of total search advertising spend in Q1. Mobile clicks were up 246.1% year-over-year, showing acceleration over the last quarter. Impressions were up 119.9% and ad spend was up 221.1% year-over-year.

Much of the mobile search activity can be attributed to tablet devices which accounted for 67.4% of the total mobile search advertising budget for the quarter. In addition, tablet click through rates of 3.1% were higher than PC rates of 2.5%.

With a strong Q1, Yahoo!/Bing saw a 46.4% increase in U.S. search advertising spend year-on-year compared to Google’s less aggressive 26.6% growth. This growth propelled Yahoo!/Bing to a 21.2% market share – their best quarter since before both companies combined forces.

Meanwhile in the UK, Yahoo!/Bing’s year-on-year search advertising spend growth was only 6% (compared with 46% in U.S.) – however Google’s year-over-year Growth was merely 3.5% (compared with 27% in U.S.) And while Q1 search spend is normally down quarter-over-quarter due to the spike in holiday spending in Q4, Yahoo!/Bing posted a 14.3% increase in spend versus Google’s decrease quarter-over-quarter of 5.4%.

Despite Yahoo!/Bing’s spend growth, their current market share in UK is still only 4% to Google’s 96%.

The reason behind the dramatic increase in the U.S. was the ability to bid on keywords by match-type (broad, phrase, exact). Yahoo!/Bing promoted the expanded use of broad match as part of their best practices to agencies and large clients. This quarter showed the results of that adoption year-over-year – which increased competition in auctions.

This new practice was only available after the full integration of the alliance – and is only coming to the UK fully this month. When it does, we can in all likelihood expect growth for Yahoo!/Bing to follow similar explosive patterns as it has in the U.S. when the search alliance takes full effect in UK, if marketers also adopt these best practices. U.S. figures can be a crystal ball as to what the market can expect when the migration is complete in UK.

Grapeshot launches Grapeshot Keywords App for the AppNexus App Marketplace™

Grapeshot, developed at Cambridge University, uses sophisticated search algorithms to serve ads targeted by content, as opposed to by user data, specialising in real-time automatic contextual and user keyword retargeting.

As of this week, Grapeshot will now be available directly in the workflow of display advertising buyers through the Grapeshot Keywords App in the AppNexus App Marketplace™.

Grapeshot uses collections of keywords to define custom channel segments, making sure the pages on which they bid for ads have appropriate conceptual content that matches the campaign brief. The use of keywords is akin to search engine targeting, except Grapeshot Keywords works on display advertising, much like an advertorial, with strong ad relevance for the consumer user.

Brands can use Grapeshot’s keyword targeting to avoid pages with content that would be dangerous for their brand values, exclude ads on pages with negative news content and target just those page contexts highly relevant to their target audiences.
The Grapeshot Keywords App has drag and drop tools to build clouds of targeting keywords. Since Grapeshot Keywords inspects every URL of every bid passed through the AppNexus platform to assess page context, the app also shows buyers the exact URLs and domains their new custom channel would match on AppNexus.

John Snyder, Grapeshot CEO, comments: “We looked at many platforms for our first integration of the Grapeshot Keywords buy-side tool, and found AppNexus to be an excellent technology partner for our strong engineering team based in Cambridge. The buy-side appetite for assessing AppNexus bids on the context of the page has taken us quite by surprise. Buyers can pre-screen the bid before they buy it.

“Grapeshot has dominance in the UK publisher market, where the sell-side packages up premium value channels for direct sales. Our platform has recently been been taken up by the buy-side trading desks who need to find safe content that is contextually relevant on RTB platforms. The ability to find millions of daily bid impressions that satisfy a custom target set of keywords, means buyers can use keywords strategies for display, much like the SEO industry kicked off in search. Finding relevant contexts at good bid prices can transform the performance of each campaign.”

The Grapeshot Keywords App is free to existing Grapeshot customers on the AppNexus platform. Grapeshot delivers contextual solutions across major US, UK and European markets in twelve European languages.