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16 Nov 2017

The thing about AdTech

Dmexco is one of the most important events in the digital advertising calendar with calls for 2018 exhibitors already being announced. We catch-up with Dan Wilson, Head of Data and Operations at Fetch to get his insight on this explosive sector.

Advertising is the greatest payment system ever invented. Consumers trade time, and some largely unquantifiable data, in return for access to content. Media owners in turn package this time and data up and sell it to advertisers. Eyeballs drive revenue. It is a beautiful model that is powering a vast, interconnected, ecosystem of startups, data companies, adtech vendors, agency trading desks and cloud hosting providers.

Nowhere in Europe is this more evident than Dmexco in Cologne. Not as glamorous as the other advertising venues but Dmexco is the preeminent event for all things Adtech related and a good event for getting deals done as well as industry watching.

Dmexco 2017

There were several notable trends this year, some more enjoyable than others.

On the plus side, there was the usual M&A rumours which are good-natured fun in Adtech. The AppNexus IPO timeline; SSP consolidation; and DSP acquisitions are all there. As are the ever-important strategic buyers – telcos – with heaps of consumer data that can be put to good use by savvy Adtech companies.

Fake news has been in the news from a consumer point of view recently, but behind all of this are some valid concerns in Adtech about fraud. Part of this is a technology solution and part of it is a process solution. The tech side clearly needs to get better at evaluating fraudulent traffic across trillions of ad impressions and flagging it as such and publishers need to get much better at implementing initiatives like ads.txt from the IAB. Great to see this being addressed this year as well.

On the new technologies, there are some good use cases for Blockchain coming out in Adtech. Whilst these are nascent I am expecting a lot of discussion post-Dmexco on these use cases – as a concept it makes sense to apply this distributed ledger to ad impressions to manage the parameters and I am hoping this goes a long way to definitively stamping out ad fraud given there will be proof of ownership. Assuming some big challenges can be overcome of course

Last year there were several large stands all with VR experiences – am hoping these will be updated to ARKit demos this year, but I am unsure of the creepiness factor of AR ads… I didn’t see any ARKit ad platforms at Dmexco, but a Techcrunch article yesterday on ARKit with ads got my attention.

And on the subject of privacy we have GDPR coming into force next May. A trade show in Germany would not be complete without data protection and privacy being mentioned and GDPR is a hefty piece of legislation that impacts any organisation handing data on EU citizens (the UK government have already confirmed that GDPR will remain after Brexit). Despite of the significant workload imposed on organisations, from a personal perspective with regards to location data I am quite a fan of GDPR as the legislation is incredibly prescriptive on what can and can’t be done with a DeviceID and Lat/Long and an IP address.

Lastly, this year there was a much bigger Startup area with some very impressive companies in the big data space, indoor navigation, x-as-a-service companies (I didn’t realise you could get a Backend-as-service, according to one startup there). Next year I will be spending much more time with the startup community than I did this year.

Proust. See you next year.

Written by Dan Wilson <confirm call to action / contact details > 

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