ATS Paris 2016, which took place on 13 April, was concluded by a panel discussion around the hot topic of how we make mobile work. Here, ExchangeWire recaps on the lively debate.

Moderated by Ciaran O’Kane, CEO, ExchangeWire, the panel saw Alexandra Jarry, director of Seller Cloud, southern Europe, Rubicon Project; Danny Hopwood, vice president solutions & platform operations, EMEA, Publicis Media (formerly VivaKi); Mathieu Rostamkolaei, vice president, Mozoo Group; and James Prudhomme, managing director EMEA, Index Exchange discuss how the industry can move past the challenges that exist throughout the ecosystem and match the advertising investment with mobile consumption.

Ciaran O’Kane, CEO, ExchangeWire kicked off the discussion with the bold statement that “mobile spend is a great joke in London as people don’t buy mobile, they buy Facebook”. He challenged that the idea of running mobile campaigns programmatically is riddled with issues and asked the panel: “How do we get things right?”

According to Danny Hopwood, vice president solutions & platform operations, EMEA, Publicis Media, Google and Facebook are primed for accepting mobile investment as they have been preparing themselves for years. He argued that many publishers have been handing off mobile inventory to ad networks for years and that we’re seeing stagnation on the publisher and agency side, primarily because marketers don’t have mobile KPIs: “It’s no-one’s fault, but it’s everyone’s fault.”

Mathieu Rostamkolaei, vice president, Mozoo Group thinks there’s not an issue with mobile spend. He qualified that if you look at programmatic figures from 2015, 60% of programmatic display spend was mobile, so he wasn’t really sure there is an issue. His argument was that GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) are gathering most of this.

James Prudhomme, managing director EMEA, Index Exchange, rebutted that it is a big issue for publishers: “60% of traffic is mobile, but 60% of revenue is not.”

Alexandra Jarry, director of SellerCloud, southern Europe, Rubicon Project, concurred that mobile spends just aren’t where they should be, arguing that there is growth, but it isn’t enough. Jarry made the point that mobile was born in a programmatic environment, so it’s definitely becoming bigger and faster and publishers understood they had to move away from standard banner formats and target formats like native instead. She argued that there is so much value with mobile in terms of targeting opportunities, location, rich data and that publishers are starting to understand where the gaps are and making efforts to improve them.

Ciaran O’Kane, ExchangeWire, moved the conversation along with the question: “Are agencies building mobile hubs?”

Danny Hopwood, Publicis Media responded, “To some degree, what we’re doing in TV is what we’re doing in mobile. Mobile-specific teams – planners and buyers are gone. It highlights what mobile is and isn’t doing for the advertiser. When O’Kane pointed out that many mobile ad networks are building significant business, Hopwood argued that agency mobile teams weren’t learning how to trade with these ad networks: “They were signing direct IOs, but they weren’t learning the trading mechanics."

James Prudhomme, Index Exchange put the onus on the sell side: “The answer is in cross device, but it’s being applied in the wrong direction. It should come from the sell side, not the buy side. If mobile user IDs were put into mobile bid requests, it would make more sense and would cause creative execution to be treated differently – large publishers would then get the confidence of the buying platforms.”

Mathieu Rostamkolaei, Mozoo Group agreed: “There are huge issues with cross-device attribution. We talk about convergence, but it’s hard.”

With a deep sigh, Ciaran O’Kane, ExchangeWire agreed, saying “real estate on mobile is limited, hence the use of ad blockers because of the poor user experience. But it’s difficult to believe that the desktop price is greater than that of mobile”. He asked whether agencies are measuring all of their campaigns with the wrong metrics.

James Prudhomme, Index Exchange, turned it back on the advertisers, asking how many of them can allow their customers to convert on mobile.

Alexandra Jarry, Rubicon Project, agreed, saying that when buyers meet with trading desks they are focusing on desktop, not mobile. She referred back to a comment made by La Place Media earlier in the day that only 15% of their business is mobile, with 85% display.

Mathieu Rostamkolaei, Mozoo Group, qualified that the huge gap in investment doesn’t come from CPMs; it comes from spends: “Advertisers are afraid.”

James Prudhomme, Index Exchange, confirmed that in their own exchange mobile CPMs are lower, but argued that it is a factor of bid density and liquidity: “The demand isn’t there.”

Ciaran O’Kane, ExchangeWire, posed the question of why demand isn’t following the audience.

“No KPI will solve the problem. The problems don’t just exist in the agency. Is the site ready for mobile traffic? Does it have mobile capabilities? Is mobile ad serving tracking in place?”, asked Danny Hopwood, Publicis Media. He went further to say that even after these questions have been answered, you then encounter problems across the supply chain: “Then the agency will have a mobile specialist who can’t implement tracking or doesn’t cater for cross device. Then the SSP won’t have the inventory source. I can categorically say that no-one is nailing 100% of it today.”

James Prudhomme, Index Exchange, wondered whether the answer lies in publishers giving up on their own mobile environment and investing more in AMP and Facebook Instant Articles.

“It’s been the 'year of mobile' since 2008, which is increasing our expectations”, argued Danny Hopwood, Publicis Media.

“Publishers are gathering together to share ideas and data to be stronger, as they know there’s an issue”, said Alexandra Jarry, Rubicon Project. “On the mobile front, we know that logged-in data is the best; but not many publishers have logged in data and the scale isn’t there.” Jarry argued that the concept of audience extensions is a potential way of dealing with this, but wasn’t sure if publishers are ready for it.

When asked by Ciaran O’Kane, ExchangeWire, whether native and video were two high-end areas ripe for monetisation, the panel had their doubts.

Mathieu Rostamkolaei, Mozoo Group, said of native advertising, that it may be good for brand awareness, but they are terrible for performance: “People aren’t clicking.”

Danny Hopwood, Publicis Media, furthered that with the argument that there isn’t a solution to the problem in the current confines of the landscape. “Reddit and Imgur are mobile-first. Kids will know those before the FT and The Telegraph. Maybe we can’t solve it now, but over time the generational shift will be the solution.”

Hopwood then said of video that he would rather go for that ahead of reading content, to which James Prudhomme, Index Exchange argued that he would rather have the walled garden than no content whatsoever.

Further to those statements, Alexandra Jarry, Rubicon Project, asked why it's so successful on the native platform of Facebook, but not across other platforms: “Publishers need to switch and use the same specifications as Facebook so that the buyer can implement campaigns across all platforms in one go; otherwise, it’s more work across the value chain.”

Moving the conversation along, Ciaran O’Kane, ExchangeWire, asked Danny Hopwood, Publicis Media, whether, in his agency capacity, he would be comfortable living in a first-party world?

“The day it becomes that simple that an advertiser can do it all themselves, I would go and work for one”, countered Hopwood, “but, so far, it doesn’t exist. Even if there are four main suppliers left, why would you pay more to do it with one person, when you can pay less for loads to do it for you?”

James Prudhomme, Index Exchange, agreed with Hopwood’s sentiment: “People have been praying that agencies are going away, but it’s not going to happen.”

ATS Singapore takes place on 4 July, 2016. Find more information here.