ExchangeWire is proud of another stellar event with ATS Paris, featuring the best and brightest of the driving force in French digital advertising. Here's a quick summary of the day in case you weren't able to make it or you would like to revisit key points.

SECTION I: DATA - POWERING THE EVOLUTION OF MEDIA BUYING

KEYNOTE 1 (en Français): Our first keynote speaker of the day was Alain Levy, CEO, Weborama, who posed the question: “Are we entering a new age of glory?” and cautioned: not yet. Technology platforms are not stable yet, but are ad networks dead? Not at all. They are valuable partners who give publishers the visibility they need. The light at the end of the tunnel is data. KPIs need to be optimised to the brand and advertisers need to work together using all the data assets available, embracing big data. Sometimes we over-complicate the space: back to basics. Right person, right place, right time. If publishers and tech providers can allocate and use data effectively, and agencies use data to build their KPIs, the industry as a whole can enter the next stage in evolution.

KEYNOTE 2 (in English): Erich Wasserman, Co-Founder and GM EMEA, MediaMath delivered the second keynote of the day explaining that technology doesn’t just change advertising – it has a history of changing everything in our lives. With technology consumption growing exponentially, infrastructure needs to scale accordingly, and it necessitates the frequent adoption of different skills.

SECTION II: THE REAL-TIME PREMIUM OPPORTUNITY

PANEL 2 (in English):“Programmatic Premium:Will French Brands Embrace Real-Time Advertising?”

Our next panel, moderated by ExchangeWire CSO Paul Silver, was comprised of Tim Geenen, VP Business Solutions, Improve Digital; Nerissa McDonald, Director of Trading, EMEA, MediaMind; Andrew Moore, Managing Director, SpotXchange; Jean-Claude Muratore, Sales Director for France, Italy and Iberia,Turn and Laurent Duverney-Guichard, VP Product Marketing, Gamned.

Laurent Duverney-Guichard, Gamned: “Premium inventory can be used for both performance and branding objectives. We want more brand spend in exchanges, but transparency is still an issue in private marketplaces.”

Nerissa McDonald, MediaMind: “We need to get the right reach with brand, but pay the right price for premium.”

Andrew Moore, SpotXchange: “Our experience in the French market is there is an appetite for using automated trading for branding. Overwhelmingly, advertisers measure campaign success against reach and frequency objectives. We need to serve them. Let’s have a dialogue with advertisers to find out what they need to invest more brand Euros. In video, we talk about engagement metrics, not clicks or conversions, brand in video doesn't just want lowest CPM.

KEYNOTE 3 (en Français): Anne de Kerckhove, Managing Director, France and Southern Europe, Videology Video advertising is about storytelling across multiple screens. A premium platform manages addressability, timing and context, appropriate formats and interactivity/sharing seamlessly to deliver an optimal consumer experience. Today we control time, but not context, with indirect broad reach buys. Tomorrow we will see true synergistic behaviour between publishers & advertisers via direct private exchanges & greater content contextualisation: beyond entertainment, news, sports. Transparency is essential. We're getting there, but we’re not there yet, and we will only get there if work together. Mobile videos should be 10-15 seconds max. What's preventing growth in the premium space? Quality inventory at scale and data. Our target for 2013 is to standardise data and go to "cookieless targeting".

PANEL 3 (en Français): “Building a Sustainable French Publisher Model in the Data-Driven Era”

The third panel was moderated by independent consultant Erwan Le Page, who was joined by Fabien Magalon, Managing Director, La Place Media; Cyril Zimmerman, CEO, Hi-Media; Grégory Gazagne, Managing Director France, Southern Europe and Latam, Criteo; Thierry Prignaud, Head of Orange Ad Market and Pierre-Anthony Dugor, Director of Advertising, Caradisiac.

Fabian Magalon, La Place Media: “30% of impressions are monetised in RTB. For now, e-CPM remains stable, we currently have high demand to automate our inventory. Publishers need to be transparent and have faith in RTB and look at our full value to get the maximum price possible.”

Cyril Zimmerman, Hi-Media: “There has been a structural and technological change in our company once we moved the majority of our inventory into the automated channel. There are processes and insights that can not be managed by an algorithm.”

KEYNOTE 4 (en Français): Julien Gardes, Country Manager, France, Rubicon Project There has been an explosion in RTB in France in the past year; very healthy ecosystem, but 72% of investment comes from top 10% of publishers. Traditional display advertising market faces three problems: inventory's fragmented, it’s very complicated and it takes too long. Private marketplaces can be established in a variety of ways to work best for the publisher; publishers can package their inventory to work for both sides and remove advertisers from the block lists. Revv connect supports deal ID and Revv connect for mobile is expected by January 2013.

SECTION III: TECHNOLOGY & PLATFORMS - AN ENABLE FOR THE AD ECOSYSTEM

5sur5/Cinq sur Cinq (en Français): This fast-paced section gave five companies a chance to share data-driven case studies presented in under five minutes. Moderated by Mike Nolet, CTO and Co-Founder of AppNexus, he held the stopwatch and alarm for:

1. Stéphane Gorre, Founder and Managing Partner, AGENCE79 & UN1T: Demonstrated that data improves cost per group for branding campaigns, data doesn't have to be DR only.

2. Frederic Grelier, Marketing Leader France, Acxiom: ‘The Future is Now'. Addressable advertising = 360 customer view based on all customer interactions.

3. Nicolas Kruchten, Head of Product Engineering, Datacratic: Discussed how machine learning can be used to create audience cloning systems for lookalike modelling purposes but also the ability to iteratively individually score individual segments - thus creating more revenue and more opportunity from initial base of audience.

4. Alain Sanjaume, Senior European Consultant, eXelate Media: Gathering data is the easy part, then what? Data is like riding a bike--the more you practice the better you get. He also went on to show the conversion rate improvements that can be driven via 3rd party data versus running untargeted campaigns.

5. Yann Le Roux, Co-Founder and CEO, Matiro: Matiro discussed the importance of ad viewabilty and how this data can be segmented into different segments of ‘time in view’. This can also be applied across the entire purchase funnel. They also shared 3 key steps: Step 1: magic threshold of 10 seconds for branding and DR Step 2: Leverage visibility tracking Step 3: Eliminate non-views

KEYNOTE 5 (en Français): Our next keynote was delivered by Vincent Karachira, Founder and CEO, Next Performance, exploring technology and platforms accelerating into one ecosystem -- a paradigm shift resulting in profound changes and added complexity in the value chain. This can create new risks for clients, but also new opportunities.

Top Tweets:

Romany Reagan ‏@msromany
Levy: sometimes we over-complicate the space: back to basics. Right person, right place, right time. #atsp

Ratecard.fr ‏@Ratecard_fr
#ATSP: si on veut travailler les clients d'un annonceur, la 1st party data est essentielle. Pour les prospects, on analyse des bases CRM.
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weborama ‏@weborama
#ATSP Le"premium" est une notion subjective. Il s'agit d'un mix format / emplacement / contenu éditeur / création pub / technologie / KPIs.

Luke Fenney ‏@lukefenney
Transparency in RTB is not generally the publishers fault. The bid stream needs to improve and DSPs need to accept more placement info #ATSP

Simon Halstead ‏@Simonfesta
brand is about reach of target audience not scale or total reach of online #atsp

ONESIXTY2 ‏@ONESIXTY2
Publisher trading desk, agency trading desk, advertiser trading desk, independant trading desk... everyone is a trading desk #atsp

Paul Silver ‏@thepaulsilver
Its now cool to be a geek in Paris #atsp