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

1. Facebook acquires LiveRail 

The big news this week was Facebook’s purchase of video SSP LiveRail for an undisclosed sum with the pairing of the two indicating the social network’s desire to invest further into video and mobile. 

Brian Boland, Facebook,VP of ads product marketing and Atlas, made the announcement via a blog post.

It reads: "Today we’re announcing that we have agreed to acquire LiveRail, an advertising technology company that helps companies likeABC, A&E Networks, Gannett, and Dailymotion serve better ads in the videos that appear on their websites and apps….What LiveRail ultimately offers is a complete advertising solution for video publishers.

“We’re just getting started with our partnership with LiveRail, but we’re very excited about the future for video publishers and marketers. We believe that LiveRail’s excellent product – known in the industry as a video supply-side platform or SSP – and Facebook’s expertise with relevancy, delivery and measurement will help us make video advertising much better for everyone.”

San Francisco-based LiveRail was founded in 2007, offers a comprehensive platform for online video publishers that helps them serve more targeted ads, and is headed-up by its UK-born CEO and co-founder Mark Tregfarne.

Tregfarne confirmed the announcement via a separate blog post. It reads: “When Andrei [Dunca] and I started LiveRail seven years ago, it was with the vision of creating a next generation advertising platform designed specifically for digital video. 

“We believed that over the coming years, television would increasingly move to the Internet, and that both broadcasters and advertisers would follow viewers into this new digital TV age.”

There is little more publicly available information on how LiveRail will be integrated into the Facebook offering, but what is clear is that Facebook aims to make video and mobile a more comprehensive part of its offering. 

“We believe that LiveRail, Facebook and the premium publishers it serves have an opportunity to make video ads better and more relevant for the hundreds of millions of people who watch digital video every month,” reads Boland’s post. 

“More relevant ads will be more interesting and engaging to people watching online video, and more effective for marketers too. Publishers will benefit as well because more relevant ads will help them make the most out of every opportunity they have to show an ad.”

LiveRail, which had previously been rumoured to be eyeing an IPO next year, has recently been shoring up its credentials in the European market having recently opened an office in Germany and    participated in numerous ExchangeWire Europe-based events. 

LiveRail is 100% publisher-focused and doesn’t actually sell any product to the buy side, their purpose being to help publishers monetise video across channels. They do this with two approaches: direct-sold premium (their ad server solution) and managing programmatic selling.

Yoav Arnestein, LiveRail, managing director, EMEA, explains more about their proposition here. 

2. Facebook (again) faces scrutiny from UK data regulator 

The UK’s data protection regulator the ICO this week announced its is investigating Facebook over whether or not it broke data protection laws during an experiment conducted by the social network that manipulated users’ emotions, which also attracted criticism from brands here. 

The ICO has confirmed it it will be speaking with Facebook about the issue but did not comment on whether the social network has broken any laws, after it emerged that Facebook conducted an experiment in which it altered the news feed of up to 700,000 accounts to make it more or less positive, without them knowing.

An ICO statement reads: “We're aware of this issue and will be speaking to Facebook, as well as liaising with the Irish data protection authority, to learn more about the circumstances,” the regulator said in a statement.”

The news prompted ISBA, the UK trade body representing brand-side marketers, issued a statement which reads: “Facebook will have to work hard to retain public trust if it wants to maintain commitment from the advertisers that represent the majority of its income.” 

ISBA believes that the public outrage that followed news that the social networking giant had experimented in changing the behaviour of its users (by secretly altering their news feeds) may have a negative impact on the brands that appear on its pages.

David Ellison, ISBA’s Marketing Services Manager, adds: “Facebook has done the right thing by accepting responsibility quickly. But revelations about this ‘social experiment’ could be damaging to the way many of its users view the service.”

 The emergence of the news has prompted popular outcry among Facebook users, and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO, has since apologised for the conduct of secret psychological tests. Talks between the ICO and Facebook continue.

The news comes the same week as the UK also saw the launch of CitizenMe, a personal identity management service that aims to give consumers control over how their data has been shared publicly on social networks, as well as a centralised view of the terms of service agreements they have already signed up to. 

3. Weve lines up for greater share of £2bn UK ad market

Weve, the UK mobile operator joint venture this week formally announced its display ad service’s full roll out, as researches tip the UK advertising sector to hit the £2bn mark this year. 

Weve is eager to point out how its ad targeting and measurement capabilities (based on its vast swathes of customer data), along with the rise of mobile-optimised websites built using responsive design software will significantly alter the dynamics of the market here. 

Presently, the mobile advertising market is widely believed to be dominated by Facebook and Google’s app-install units (Twitter is also eager to cash-in on this lucrative market). But Weve, a joint venture between EE, O2, and Vodafone, maintains its masses of first-party verifiable data will make it  a serious player. 

4. UK ad tech players hailed by ISBA keynote speakers

ISBA this week hosted its annual luncheon where members (predominantly brand-side marketers) discuss the biggest trends in the market, where ad tech players were given a special mention. 

Here, the keynote speaker and Tech City CEO Gerard Grech told attendees that number of tech sector employees in London and the South East, outnumbers the amount in all of California and that: ’Programmatic trading was given a 'single handed has brought about more changes in advertising than another technology.’

Grech went on to mention how UK-based companies with StrikeAd, Outbrain, and Struq all occupied an instrumental role in this growth.

Infectious Media, DataSift, were also mentioned when looking at AI, and big data, as well as DMP's, etc.

Grech also reminded brands that services such as Collider IO, which aims to encourage brands to invest in start ups, are also available to help build UK-based ad tech companies. 

Nigel Clarkson, Weve’s commercial director, also told ExchangeWire the joint venture was about to introduce a service called Weve Sync an “industrialised data matching service” that will let advertisers cross-reference their CRM databases with Weve’s targeting data to improve the efficiency of their campaigns.  

This will enable the joint venture company to attract brand spend as it will be better able to perform prospecting and  lookalike modelling, according to Weve. 

“A lot of people out there are using probabilistic modelling, whereas we have verified first party data,” he adds.  

5. Adform Enters Data Market

Adform, the Nordic ad tech company, this week announced it was entering the data management market with the launch of an integrated DMP that lets publishers to monetise their audience data and advertisers to target niche audiences. 

Both publishers and advertisers can use the DMP to collect massive datasets from numerous data sources, including first-party and third-party, campaign, and publisher data and then purchase inventory using the Adform digital ad-tech stack.

The DMP helps publishers collect and analyze information about their audiences, so they can better understand and segment them. The richer insights available via the Adform DMP enable them to justify premium CPMs, as well as ensure a better brand experience for their readers.

Martin Stockfleth Larsen, Adform. CMO, says: “By providing publishers with turnkey tools to monetise their audience data, we could help them open new and highly premium revenue streams.

At the same time, advertisers benefit from the ability to understand who their customers are, and target them at scale.”