ExchangeWire rounds up some of the biggest stories in the European digital advertising space.

1. Yahoo Parts Ways with COO De Castro Ahead Of Ad Exchange Roll-Out

Earlier this week it emerged that Yahoo has axed its former Chief Operating Officer Henrique De Castro (pictured), who headed up its display ad business, with speculation indicating that his exit is largely the result of his failure to significantly raise the company’s advertising revenues.

In a note obtained by press outlets, which has been accredited to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, it looks unlikely that De Castro will be directly replaced. Yahoo is currently preparing to roll out its recently overhauled suite of advertising tools in Europe, including a new self-serve bidder that will look to offer Yahoo segments (built from a myriad of data sources, including search and email) exclusively through the solution. Quite how the exit of such a high profile figure will influence Yahoo’s sales pitches to advertisers remains unclear, but it will make for an interesting backdrop.

2. Facebook & Yandex Ink Deal To Boost Social Network’s Russian Influence

Earlier this week Facebook penned a deal with Yandex that lets the Russian search engine display publicly available Facebook information in its “social search” results.

This means that Yandex will incorporate data from Facebook’s publicly available data – such as users’ public posts - into its own search algorithm to enhance search results, therefore increasing Facebook’s sphere of influence in the online ad tech market in both Russia and a large number of the ex-Soviet Republics.

The deal comes in the wake of a disagreement between the pair last year when developers at the Russian firm launched a ‘social search app’ Wonder that combined its own alogrithms with data from social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, which Facebook promptly blocked.

3. Twitter Tweeks Tailored Audiences Adding CRM Data Targetting

Advertisers can now target Twitter users on the social network by matching a Twitter account with email addresses on their CRM database, or from records stored on their ad tech partners’ records.

Kelton Lynn, Twitter product manager for revenues, says: “Let’s say a fashion retailer wants to advertise a spring clearance sale on Twitter, and they’d prefer to show their ad to current membership cardholders.

“To get the special offer to cardholders who are on Twitter, the retailer may create a tailored audience using unreadable scrambles (called hashes) of the email addresses of its card members, through an ads partner. We can then match that information to Twitter accounts in order to show the matched users a Promoted Tweet with the sale information.”

Twitter is also introducing the ability for advertisers to exclude selected CRM and Twitter ID audiences from the set of Twitter users that can be reached through its existing targeting options: interests, keywords and TV. Acxiom, Datalogix, Epsilon, Liveramp, Mailchimp, Merkle and Salesforce ExactTarget, are all preferred ad tech partners for the new product.

4. Google Defiant Over UK Legal Charges

Google this week announced its intention to challenge a UK legal charges claiming its T&Cs violated the privacy of users of the Safari web browser. The search giant is challenging a High Court ruling claiming that legal charges over it circumventing security features on Apple’s Safari web browser could be heard in the UK. Instead, the US company is reverting to its usual legal argument that it should only be judged under US law, as this jurisdiction is the base for much of its practices.

This in effect would mean that UK-based litigants would have to fund their legal arguments from across the Atlantic, and surely price many of them out of such a challenge. The case is just another chapter in the long-running saga of Google’s repeated legal grapples in Europe. ExchangeWire covered a similar legal dispute involving Google in this Week’s French market snapshot.

5. Adap.tv And Guardian Pair To Launch Video Ad Marketplace

Earlier this week it emerged that AOL-owned Adap.tv has signed a deal with UK-based premium publisher Guardian News & Media (GNM) to build a private video ad marketplace. The deal means GNM will sell video inventory programmatically to selected trading desks and agencies via its private marketplace. This further underlines GNM's commitment to keep its online editorial content free at the point of consumption, at a time when many of its peers – notably News UK – experiment with paywall strategies.