Simon Aurik is Co-Founder at MediaScience. Here he discusses the importance of specialist buyers, trends in the Dutch market, and why third parties like MediaScience can add value.

Where does MediaScience sit in the buying chain? Are you trading desk? Demand Side Network?

MediaScience positions itself as a unique Service Trading Desk. Service together with transparency and independency are our USP’s. So we are working for both full service agencies and advertisers. With the best specialists in the market, we serve our customers in a way that has no equal. We are working with the best DSP technology, ad-serving, research and insights.

How is MediaScience differentiating its product from other ad trading solutions?

We offer a complete product and - most importantly - complete overview to our clients. We are offering both acquisition and retention strategies on display, video and social media. So, it’s not necessary anymore to work with several companies and try to combine the different results to a complete overview. We deliver this in a realtime solution.

We strongly believe one of the most important things is service. Where others have focus on the Agency side (Agency Trading Desks) or mainly direct Advertisers (Trading Desks), we work for both. Also there’s a large trend of seeming to be transparent in costs, margins etc. MediaScience is only Service Trading Desk that shows complete transparency.

Regarding product differentiating, we use intelligent proprietary technology with our own UI which is filled with our “MediaScience fuel”. To maintain the lead, we work with exclusive data and insights, from which our clients benefit. We bring them experts in Automated Trading, SMART Retargeting, Optimization and much more.

Do you feel what you're offering will ultimately be disintermediated by the group agency trading desks? And how does a company like MediaScience future-proof its position as agencies take more of the media optimization in-house?

Of course we saw the trend where Agency groups developed or bought the technology to start an Agency Trading Desk over the last few years. Various large agencies are realising the complex expertise they need to understand the space.

Everyone can buy technology, but how you use it is a whole different ballgame. We’re convinced the market needs a real-time buying specialist within Display, Mobile, Social and Video on Data Driven Automated Trading.

Furthermore, many clients from big agencies do not want to depend on only one in-house ATD. So they use MediaScience as their own - or ATD extension. Also, you can make the decision to use two companies for several campaigns for the best benchmark and insights.

How are Dutch marketers taking to data-driven media buying? Do you find there to be a knowledge gap among Dutch CMOs?

They’re growing, both in knowledge as well as in interest. Early adopters benefit from success and failure from previous experiences. On the other hand, many CMOs still think in terms of website-level marketing.

Here is our challenge: to show them that they need to change the way digital marketing needs to be executed. The most important change will be overall adoption of the right message from the right brand in the right moment to the right consumer.

In what way is the Dutch market different than other countries in Europe?

The Dutch market is quite similar to other European countries such as Germany and the UK. All these countries have a head start. Also they’re the innovators for the rest of Europe. Regarding marketing budgets, the Dutch market is five times smaller than the German market. Most data is too expensive to meet clients’ goals, and from the publisher perspective, doesn’t bring the revenues they need.

What are your thoughts about agencies in-housing retargeting? Does this mean ad traders & ad networks will be just left with prospecting?

Again, there is a huge opportunity for us in being the extension for those agencies. And of course, also the advertiser will benefit by using us that way. You can only use retargeting with enough visits on your website. So it is essential to combine prospecting and retargeting to one campaign instead of several campaigns with several companies. There is always a lack of information when you have several reports.

Our experience is that the biggest competitor for retargeting is the Criteo solution. We’re winning ground on retargeting budgets because of how we’re working the marketspace. In fact, you need both – prospecting and retargeting budgets.

What trends do you foresee for 2012? Beyond?

- Publisher Trading desks will evolve
- Digital marketing budgets will move to ATD
- RTB in mobile and video, which is still small in the Dutch market, will go to the next level
- Data sellers will need to change their business models
- Top 200-500 will discover the benefits of an ATD

If there is anything you’d like to add you feel we haven’t covered?

It is all about data. We also see science as an important element responsible for success, what I mean by science is the use of the best exclusive data in a transparent way to advertiser and consumer. Automated Trading and Real Time Bidding are not successful without enough data and real-time insights. So, data will be more and more important to lock in your company. We have seen this from the beginning.