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

This week has proven exceptional in that major announcements from the ad tech sector were coming from marketing cloud providers, which could herald major disruption in the ad tech sector.

Does the emergence of marketing cloud services, point to stormy times ahead for ad tech?

One of the key trends in the ad tech sector this week was the growing emergence of full suite marketing automation services with Adobe using its annual European summit to announce several updates to its stack, and IBM lifting the lid on its unified ExperienceOne platform.

The software giant used the buzz to unveil various elements of Adobe’s Marketing Cloud services. Perhaps the most relevant of which to ExchangeWire readers was the update to its digital advertising platform Adobe Media Optimiser.

This update includes a renewed user interface, with Adobe claiming the update will increase performance by up to 25% through through new, “predictive modelling algorithms that forecast and optimise campaigns across search, social and display channels”.

The update also includes tools that let marketers evaluate their campaign optimisation models ahead of implementation (this includes dynamic campaign optimisation, including budget allocation), as well as unified campaign analysis, through tighter integration of Adobe Analytics.

Basically, it means that better integration between its media optimiser tool and the rest of its marketing cloud stack improves its efficiency, i.e. ‘spend more money with us, and your campaign metrics will improve’.

Industry sources have (in this publication’s opinion) correctly speculated that this is Adobe going more aggressively after spend in the social and display advertising sectors (it already helps brands manage their paid-for search targeting strategies).

Adobe’s pitch to the market also included an impassioned plea to boardroom bosses everywhere, by publishing “a wake-up call for business leaders” via a study suggesting that 73% of marketers felt they have to “reinvent themselves” in a bid to underline the depth of demand for its content marketing cloud services.

The report – dubbed ‘Digital Roadblock: Marketers Struggle to Reinvent Themselves – quizzed 350 marketing professionals in the UK, Germany and France, and with more than two-thirds of European marketers (68%) state that marketing has changed more in the last two years than in the previous 50.

But respondents cited organisational challenges over personal obstacles as barriers to becoming the marketers they aspire to be in the digital era. Over half (58%) of European marketers surveyed claimed marketing success is dependent on organisational change.

Speaking with ExchangeWire, Jonathan Beeston, Adobe, director of new product innovation, said the survey highlighted how companies “need to take their data our of silos”.

When discussing the aforementioned skills gap, and ‘organisational issues’ identified in the Adobe study, Beeston said: “Basically, when it comes to marketing functions, maybe the answers lie outside of the marketing department?

Arguably it’s down to the CEO, or HR person to look at how they can restructure, or incentivise their teams [to implement effective changes needed for the digital era]”.

This comes the same week as IBM announced it was to place all its customer engagement tools under one roof, with the unveiling of its ExperienceOne suite, which it claims to provide marketing, sales and services capabilities all within a single stack.

The new service effectively houses its existing Sterling Commerce, Tealeaf, Coremetrics, Unica, DemandTec, Xtify services, as well as the recently acquired email service Silverpop.

The software giant claims the new suite will help marketers to present personalised marketing campaigns through website, mobile, email, and other digital channels via a single software platform that can reach customers on multiple devices.

No new customers were publicly discussed at the announcements, but a huge vendor with such deep pockets won’t find it much of a stretch too move more aggressively into the ad serving world, and begin cutting out third-party vendors.

What’s more disturbing for third parties in this industry sector is that there’s no sign of sun ‘interlopers’ abating, with SalesForce likely to make several announcements at its SalesForce 1 event in London next week.

Of course, this comes in the wake of oracle’s purchase of data management platform BlueKai earlier in the year. With all this in mind, this points to further disruption in the ad tech sector, whether this spells out further consolidation in the industry, or existing ad tech companies falling by the wayside shall be an interesting to watch.

AOL lures SMG’s Jon Baylon amid roll out of consolidated at stack

StarCom MediaVest’s head of trading John Baylon is to join AOL UK head of UK and European trading, as the company hopes to step up its charm offensive on media agencies for the roll out of AOL One, its consolidated programmatic media trading platform.

Baylon, a 14-year veteran of the media and advertising sector, will focus on driving the relationships with major and independent holding companies as well as agency trading groups, and will report directly to Noel Penzer, AOL UK’s managing director.

AOL has promised to commit further premium inventory to advertisers booking campaigns via its programmatic channels, in the wake of its most promising financial filing in the last ten years, and it’s likely that AOL having someone with an extensive contacts book, who can say ‘when I was at an agency…’, is likely to have greater success in winning over media buyers’ budgets.

Denmark’s AdForm raises $5.5m in Series B Funding
AdForm this week announced it has raised $5.5m in a Series B funding round from new Via Venture Partners to lead its expansion into the US, signalling increased investor demand for European ad tech start-ups.

Peter Thorlund Haahr, a partner at Venture Partners, said: “We’ve been watching programmatic penetrate the digital advertising sector with great interest,” said “While its impact is certainly significant, we feel it has been held back by the lack of participation among brand marketers. That’s why we’re making this investment in Adform.”

Elsewhere in Europe, Sociomantic, which was recently acquired by Tesco-owned Dunhumby fora reputed $200m, recently announced it has restructured its management team to lead its growth in Europe with Robert Bosch to take up the role of chief sales officer of its global operations.

Formerly Sociomantic’s chief sales officer of EMEA, Bosch’s aim is to increase coherence across international borders. A knock-on effect of the appointment has been Gavin Wilson, previously Sociomantic’s managing director for the UK, has been promoted to MD for Northern and Southern Europe.