ExchangeWire rounds up some of the biggest stories in the European digital advertising space. And in this week’s edition: Amazon's videogame move; Facebook tweeks ad offering;  IPONWEB buys in Europe; Rubicon Project partners with Future; Alibaba and WPP's telling filings.  

Amazon stomps into video ad group with $1bn buy

Amazon this week agreed to acquire videogame-streaming site Twitch Interactive in a deal purported to be worth $1bn, as the ecommerce giant further attempts to shore-up its premium advertising revenues.

The purchase, announced earlier this week, gives Amazon access to an audience of over 55 million monthly viewers in the highly lucrative gaming sector, as Twitch Interactive is often dubbed ‘YouTube for gamers’, and lets users (including individual gamers, media owners) upload clips to the platform.

Twitch Interactive has a rapidly growing audience (over 15 billion minutes of content were viewed last month) and is already used by over a million broadcasters, according to the platform’s new owners.

The gaming platform, which also lets users chat about the content online, saw its broadcaster partner numbers triple in 2013, and had earlier been rumoured to be in talks with Google over a similar deal.

Emmett Shear, Twitch, CEO, said:  “Being part of Amazon will let us do even more for our community. We will be able to create tools and services faster than we could have independently. This change will mean great things for our community, and will let us bring Twitch to even more people around the world.”

The move marks another significant step for Amazon’s ambitions to build up its Amazon Media Group operations as Twitch lets brands advertise to its audience via a dashboard offering pre-roll, in-stream ad units.  Earlier this year, Amazon also announced a tie-up with video ad server FreeWheel to power content for its ecommerce ads.

Amazon is also reputed to be aggressively pushing its data-driven bidder to most of the big trading desks globally. The new self-serve solution will be enthusiastically used by the agencies, as they look to leverage all that Amazon first party data. The catch here though is that inventory and data within the Amazon domain can only be accessed through its own bidder – no outside integrations allowed. The move towards such closed ad ecosystems is further discussed here.

Multiple Facebook snippets

Several Facebook developments made their way into the headlines this week with the social network announcing that it is to offer the ability to target mobile phone users based on their network connection, inflated its frequency cap, and was also rumoured to be developing a ‘mobile cookie’.

The social network this week announced its bandwidth targeting solution, which means that advertisers can tailor their creative based on whether they have a 2G, 3G, or 4G mobile network connection.

The move means advertisers can serve users with the content that is best suited to their device, plus connection, and serves as a boost for brands looking to target tens of millions of mobile phone users in developing – or “high growth” – markets.

Similarly, Facebook was also reported to be developing a cross-device user ID – or ‘Facebook ID’ - that would be effectively become a ‘mobile cookie’ and accessed via its Atlas ad server, which would doubtless buoy its already impressive mobile advertising revenues.

Elsewhere, it also emerged that Facebook had quietly raised the number of times advertisers can pay to appear in the newsfeed of a Facebook user that does not follow them, after DigiDay noticed this subtle difference.

Meanwhile, MediaMath also announced that it was enabling advertisers to access inventory on the Facebook Ad Exchange (FBX) via its  Terminal One T1 Platform API. 

IPONWEB buys into Germany

IPONWEB, this week announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire the Adternity, as it seeks to further its ability to offer existing and potentially new clients an end-to-end programmatic advertising stack.

The purchase was made for an undisclosed sum, and means that Russia’s IPONWEB now has improved abilities to offer its clients user-interface and workflow packages, as well as its existing suite of digital advertising services, as well as a further base in Germany (where Adternity is based).

Adternity has already worked with multiple stakeholders in the digital publishing sector – including RTB and other ad tech players – having built user-interface systems, dashboards that help its clients manage their ad campaigns in Europe and the USA.

Tobias Wolff, Adternity, managing director, said: “As a long-term partner and with many shared clients that also utilise IPONWEB’s customised back-end suit of technologies, this represents an obvious evolution for both of us.”

Dr. Boris Mouzykantskii, IPONWEB CEO, said: “The marriage of IPONWEB’s customized media trading technology, with Adternity’s front-end capabilities is an extremely powerful one and helps us execute on our vision of providing a one-stop, best-of-breed service to enterprise-level advertising companies, looking to deeply customize a real-time marketing solution for their business.”

Adternity will retain its existing clients but will rebrand as IPONWEB, as the Russia-based company prepares to open up a new Berlin office it intends to build out a second engineering centre in order to service that market.

Rubicon Project pairs with Future for global ad exchange

Rubicon Project this week announced a partnership with Future Publishing to launch a real-time ad exchange that lets advertisers select inventory on titles such as T3, Total Film and Tech Radar.

The deal will let advertisers reach Future’s global audiences (over 50 million a month according to the pair) on desktop, tablet and smartphones, with the ability to target audience specific geographic location.

Rubicon Project says the new ad exchange will be equipped with technology specifically engineered to reduce the time between when media is bought, and when the advertiser’s brand is actually served on it.

Gerson Barnett, Future’s director of programmatic and third Party Revenues, said: “We see automated advertising as one of the most important trends facing media groups, and are glad to be working with Rubicon Project to offer audience-based, data rich inventory to premium buyers.”

Jay Stevens, Rubicon Project, general manager, international, said: “Like News Corp and Turner before them, Future’s launch of a global marketplace on our platform is another example of sellers taking increased control of their inventory, and organising their sales offering to maximise revenues, regardless of the location of their audiences.”

Alibaba reveals roaring revenues, WPP credits media trading

With Alibaba on the precipice of its impending IPO on the NASDAQ, the Chinese ecommerce behemoth issued an F-1 filing revealing that its Q2 revenue of $2.54 billion, a 46.4% increase year-on-year.

With many theorising that Alibaba’s impending float has led to a vacuum in the stock price of ad tech companies (i.e. investors are holding out on buying ad tech stocks in favour of buying big into Alibaba) the above figures are likely to further fuel this speculation.

Alibaba’s not also revealed positive growth figures in the all- important mobile category (remember how Facebook was pilloried in the aftermath of its IPO for its lack of mobile revenue).

The figures revealed that average mobile monthly active users increased from 163 million in March to 188 million at the end of June.

Whether this filing will draw any lucrative valuations from ad tech firms is still the subject of speculation. But in the interim, recently listed TubeMogul this week beat analysts expectation reporting a 127% annual increase in revenues which hit $28.7 million in revenue for the second quarter.

Meanwhile, WPP (the biggest advertising group in the world) this week posted a revenue rise of 2.7% to reach $9bn for the quarter, with the company keen to drop the ‘agency trading desk’ tag of its Xaxis unit.

In the aftermath of the results analysts have been keen to highlight the importance of programmatic media buying on WPP’s bottom line, with some keen to highlight that many of the key milestones WPP achieved this year were Xaxis-related.

The fact that Xaxis is keen to drop the ‘trading desk’ tag may have something to do with the ongoing ‘transparency debate’ in the programmatic sector, an issue keenly discussed here.