ExchangeWire rounds up some of the biggest stories in the European digital advertising space. In this week’s edition: Rocket Fuel belongs to Sizmek; Quantcast provides Audience Insights; Mindshare launches ANNA; Sublime Skinz introduces new ad format; S4M-Factual partnership; Funding for mediarithmics; and ID5 tackles cookie synchronisation.

Sizmek’s acquisition of Rocket Fuel completed

After announcing the acquisition of Rocket Fuel two months ago, Sizmek has now closed the transaction, creating a full-stack solution that aligns Sizmek’s creative-optimisation and data-activation capabilities with Rocket Fuel's AI-powered predictive marketing platform.

As part of the acquisition, leadership changes involve Mark Grether, previously the company’s executive chairman, who will now act as CEO. Essentially continuing his previous role, he will spearhead the execution of Sizmek’s strategy and growth. Rocket Fuel CEO Randy Wootton will change into a ‘special advisor’ role to Sizmek, focusing on transitioning Rocket Fuel into Sizmek’s organisation.

“Sizmek’s unique ability to centralise data components in one place, across the entirety of the media plan, combined with Rocket Fuel’s AI-enabled decisioning, provides our clients with robust data on the campaign, the consumer, the context, the creative, and the cost”, says Mark Grether, CEO at Sizmek. “Together, our renewed focus on data enablement, creative optimisation, and media execution means we can deliver advertising that is deeply personal, precisely when it matters most to a consumer.”

According to Sizmek, the combined companies service more than 20,000 advertisers and 3,600 agencies to global audiences in over 70 countries. Additionally, Sizmek’s footprint will be expanded as well, with Rocket Fuel’s engineering, sales talent, and service teams around the world.

Quantcast launches Audience Insights

Quantcast provides new insights into live audiences to digital advertising. The consumer insights tool is aimed at advertisers and campaign planners. Currently in beta, Quantcast advertisers can access a dataset of online consumer behaviour that provides real-time insights into their audience for more relevant targeting.

Ben Murphy, UK MD, Quantcast

Ben Murphy, UK managing director, Quantcast, says: “This launch directly tackles one of the biggest flaws in campaign planning today: bad data. Traditional audience planning techniques, including panels, capture a fraction of consumer behaviour and are often out of date. This results in budgets going to waste through poorly targeted campaigns. Good data, driven by live insights, enables brands to create much more meaningful and relevant experiences for consumers and engages them earlier in their buying journey, where they can have greater impact. Today’s announcement is the first in a series of moves Quantcast is making to put live insights into the hands of agency planners and brands worldwide.”

The new tool is available for advertisers in the US, UK, France, and Australia. It draws data from 150 million online destinations measured by Quantcast. According to the company, the data represents the 70% of time consumers spend online, outside of search engines and social networks.

Access to the data is via keyword search, which best describes the interests of the respective advertisers’ target audiences. The data is represented in a visual overview of that specific audience, including demographics (e.g. gender, age, household income, education). Thanks to AI capabilities, the tool will also suggest ‘lookalike’ audiences across the internet.

Mindshare collaborates with AppNexus & Jivox to create ANNA

Mindshare has developed ‘ANNA' – a combination of people, process, and technology – that creates code to configure DSPs and DCOs. Aimed at enabling scaled implementation of Mindshare’s targeting and creative capabilities, human-controlled DSP and DCO web interfaces are replaced by a technological solution to operate programmatic targeting.

The initial launch is supported by AppNexus and Jivox, who adjusted their platforms to facilitate ‘ANNA’. Adam Ray, global chief innovation officer, Mindshare FAST, explains the concept: "This one change from human-based DSP/DCO configuration to an integrated code-based DSP/DCO configuration will have profound implications for the industry. What’s beautiful about ANNA is not only the automation of the
legwork associated with campaign configuration through the DSP/DCO, but also that it enables new levels of complexity to be easily included in the design of both the media and creative elements of the campaign – something previously out of reach of manual configuration. This, in turn, leads to new and significant opportunities in how clients choose to communicate with their audiences and frees up the human element to spend more time ‘upstream’ with the data, uncovering insights, turning these into strategic actions and providing the rules that can be recoded through ANNA directly back into both the DSP and DCO technology at the same time. The introduction of the AppNexus Programmable Bidder and the Jivox DCO decision engine allows ANNA to deliver unprecedented scale globally for our clients.”

ANNA has also been developed to seamlessly integrate with GroupM’s mPlatform.

€3m funding for mediarithmics

After having been selected as technology partner for the launch of Gravity, a Data Alliance of 16 French media/telco companies, French full-stack platform mediarithmic is accelerating their European growth. The DMP has just announced a second funding round of €3m (£2.76m), backed by Ventech.

Grégoire Fremiot, VP Sales & Marketing, mediarithmics

Grégoire Fremiot, VP sales & marketing, mediarithmics reveals to ExchangeWire what the new funding is earmarked for: "The next step for mediarithmics is to replicate the success stories in France in the main European countries, especially in the retail and media sectors that need to leverage the value of their data assets. The Gravity Alliance is also a project that might be closely analysed outside of France, as it allows competitors to reach enough scale and compete with the largest American platforms while each member of the alliance keeps its data strictly private in compliance with the European legislation. The €3m will mainly be spent on recruiting (development, sales, marketing)."

After raising a first €1.2m (£1.1m) round from Jaïna Capital and Marc Simoncini (Meetic), mediarithmics will now invest the new capital into European expansion. Germany, UK, Spain, and Italy are on the list. Says Stéphane Hugely, CEO, mediarithmics: “We are really proud to propose our open platform, built and operated in Europe, on this highly competitive market dominated by American platforms and software companies. With Ventech on board, we have a premium partner to grow our business with serenity, by strengthening our technological lead and developing our sales teams.”

With their activity within the Gravity alliance, mediarithmics is providing the technology for an alternative to the large American platforms. Further alliance partners are Prisma Media, Condé Nast, FNAC, DARTY, L'Équipe, Lagardère Active, Les Echos, Le Parisien, M6, SFR, SoLocal etc.

ID5 wants to address the cookie-sync challenge

New player ID5 has been working on a new solution to enable independent ad tech vendors to remain competitive with integrated tech stacks. In their own words, ID5 is an "enabler", providing vendors with a way to connect with each other.

Focusing on the improvement of cookie synchronisation, ID5 wants to encourage a collective effort requiring the participation of all stakeholders and is, essentially, taking ownership of one of the key problems in the industry, for the benefit of all. ExchangeWire covers the launch of ID5 exclusively.

New mobile video ad format for Sublime Skinz

dmexco is casting its shadow with plenty of product news – such as Sublime Skinz’ video update to its mobile ad format. The new format will be updated with vertical video display to fit seamlessly with the user’s browsing experience.

Specifically designed with mobile web campaigns in mind, M-Skinz consists of two banners positioned at the top and bottom of the screen, as well as a panel displaying the video campaign that appears when the user swipes to see it.

Andrew Buckman, MD EMEA, Sublime Skinz

“We are delighted to launch the enhanced M-Skinz format, which meets the growing need for video content on mobile but – as with our other formats – continues to place the user first, delivering seamless advertising that is non-intrusive”, comments Andrew Buckman, managing director EMEA, Sublime Skinz. “It’s an exciting new area of development in digital advertising, and the new format has been optimised for vertical display, aligned with how users generally consume content on mobile.” Additionally, Sublime Skinz has developed another version of the mobile ad format for advertisers who may not yet have vertical capabilities, enabling the integration of more traditional video assets.

The enhanced formats will be available on Sublime Skinz’s mobile inventory.

S4M & Factual partner to measure in-store foot traffic

A new partnership between mobile ad tech provider S4M and location data provider Factual is aimed at opening access to Factual’s measurement offering. Factual’s location data, including more than 100 million local businesses and points of interest worldwide, is now fully integrated into S4M’s mobile-first DSP.

“Mobile is the only channel that can help brands bridge their online and offline marketing efforts – this partnership will give our clients a sophisticated level of location-based audience targeting capability, as well as live insights into their campaigns, and optimise budgets accordingly”, explains Christophe Collet, CEO of S4M. “Instead of extracting campaign learnings after the fact, advertisers can ensure their drive-to-store mobile campaigns are always successful and contribute to their overall business objectives.”

Advertisers can optimise campaigns in terms of foot traffic, as well as analyse post-campaign conversion and lift metrics for attribution – valuable insights for brands into how shoppers at various retail locations interact with mobile marketing campaigns.

“Factual’s location data is neutral and accessible, and continually validated against rigorous criteria”, said Mandeep Mason, managing director of Europe, Factual. “As advertisers invest increasing budgets into location-based mobile marketing, they need to ensure they're receiving access to high-quality and transparent targeting, optimisation and measurement capabilities, which this partnership will aim to provide.”

The partnership will also enable advertisers to access Factual's Geopulse Audience targeting solution within the FUSIO DSP. The new features will be fully available for clients via S4M’s platform from mid-October 2017.