Sources indicate that data will be one of the hot topics of 2014, particularly as the French regulator begins to bear its teeth and advertisers begin to demand enhanced transparency. In short, the terms ‘privacy’ and ‘transparency’ could soon become as synonymous with France as its national rallying cry: ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’.

In the second instalment of a two-part examination of the French programmatic trading market, ExchangeWire consults sources who offer their opinions of what developments must take place if the sector is to fulfil its potential and defy an otherwise gloomy economic outlook there.

ExchangeWire’s earlier post in the series reported how sources within the programmatic media industry indicated the market was ripe for consolidation, especially in the wake of premium publisher alliances La Place Media and Audience Square significantly impacting the market in 2013.

CNIL bears its teeth

However, the second piece in the series strikes a more cautious tone as sources (while still upbeat) in their predictions lay out the measures needed to meet advertisers’ demands (i.e. improved accountability) while not falling foul of regulators there (i.e. France’s privacy regulator the CNIL).

Sebastien Robin, COO of online video trading specialist Affiperf, explains how the advertising industry’s desire to more intelligently use both third- and first-party data to improve their online ad delivery in 2014 comes against the backdrop of a new regulatory climate.

He says: “Back in December the CNIL released a best practice user guide for publishers. They are strongly recommended to inform website visitors they are dropping an advertising cookie and then propose a link to unsubscribe to that program. If the visitor does not unsubscribe, he is considered as having accepted those cookies.”

As we can garner from the recent debate surrounding the personal affairs of French President Francois Hollande - or more accurately how appropriate was it for celebrity magazine Closer to openly discuss said matters - the French take privacy very seriously. And this extends to personal data.

A demonstration of this came just last week when the CNIL’s sanction committee fined Google €150,000 as its unified privacy policy (which has been in place since March 2012) failed to comply with the French Data Protection Act.

The ruling reads: “In its decision, the Sanctions Committee considers that the data processed by the company about the users of its services in France must be qualified as personal data. It also judged that French law applies to the processing of personal data relating to Internet users established in France, contrary to the company's claim.”

It continues: “The company [Google] does not sufficiently inform its users of the conditions in which their personal data are processed, nor of the purposes of this processing… nor does it comply with its obligation to obtain user consent prior to the storage of cookies on their terminals.

“Finally, it permits itself to combine all the data it collects about its users across all of its services without any legal basis.”

At the time of publishing, Google has yet to publicly respond to the fine, which is the maximum permitted under French statue. But the financial penalty alone is hardly likely to cause Google any hardship, and Affiperf’s Robin calls for further equality of treatment.

He says: “It [the fine] ain't too binding, this rule was created in accordance with all the major market associations’ [guidelines]. Still, publishers and sales houses want big advertising US companies such as Google or Facebook to be treated the same way.”

Hence it appears as if US digital imports will continue to have their regulatory grapples with European regulatory bodies, with France as no exception, much to the chagrin of publishers there too.

Scrutiny from advertisers

While all sources approached by ExchangeWire were upbeat in their revenue forecasts for 2014, it appears clear that this boost in revenues will bring with it an accompanying need to show brands their money is being well spent on automated trading.

Mohamed Laaouissi, France country manager of DataXu, which is one of the preferred marketing partners for Facebook’s retargeting abilities via its ad exchange, says the increase in automated trading spend has come due to a number of reasons.

This is mainly due to an increased volume of ad inventory being made available via ad exchanges, plus “better” formats including interactive video, etc, as well as higher quality inventory – that is more likely to be seen by advertisers.

Laaouissi adds: “We have certainly seen an increase in budgets being invested in programmatic marketing in France… many are also starting to invest branding budget as opposed to ‘just’ performance budgets.”

But to increase clients’ confidence in programmatic channels, DataXu has devised a four-point plan - centred on price, tactics, management and media - for brands to ensure their ad tech partners are providing value see below in bold.

DataXu’s Transparency guidelines

1) Price

A core requirement should be dynamic CPM billing models from any media or ad tech vendor claiming to offer programmatic or DSP capabilities. Fixed CPM billing models misalign the incentives between you and your ad tech or media vendors, sacrificing your efficiency for their arbitrage margin opportunity.

2) Tactics

Advertisers as well as agency teams should use their third-party ad server trafficking setup to enable clear reporting of spend, impressions and actions by tactic. This way, advertisers learn more about how and why their campaigns are working, and it’ll be much more difficult for vendors to hide shady ad tech performance tricks.

3) Management

Brands and advertisers’ teams should require satisfactory confirmation that their campaign setup and delivery requirements are being met. If a vendor can’t show an advertiser user interface of some kind, they’re probably not working with a real DSP, or programmatic marketing company.

4) Media

Agency teams and brands should require full domain transparency, because media or ad tech vendors who refuse or resist media transparency have something to hide (most likely it’s the fact that they’re farming out impressions to cheap, unnamed sources).

Data. Who should brands partner with?

All parties approached by ExchangeWire disclosed how advertisers are increasingly willing to share their data with third-party providers to improve their online ad targeting (plus developments in the more effective mining of this data).

Mathieu Roche, managing director of France-based data solutions company Weborama, says the key to attracting further ad budgets down programmatic channels is data – a strategy he calls “audience-driven advertising”.

He adds: “In the early days of programmatic display advertising, data has been more of a concept than a reality: most programmatic advertising was driven by low CPMs and contextual optimisation, and the closest most advertisers got to data-driven strategies was through basic retargeting.”

Affiperf’s Robin says: “Many advertisers still miss market solutions to truly identify the uplift of performances brought by third-party data. We are releasing such a solution for our clients. We believe this tool will bring full transparency on which data provider and segments are useful for performance campaigns.”

However, Weborama’s Roche summarises the dilemma such opportunity poses advertisers with: “As always, advertisers and agencies will have to separate the wheat from the chaff of vendors offering the latest innovation of the month to focus on stable, long term, value-added partners. Data is the way forward. 2014 will be the year it becomes obvious to everyone."