Agenda

Display advertising has been fundamentally transformed in recent years by complex (and costly) technologies around real-time bidding, demand-side audience targeting and the integration of massive amounts of data for targeting people rather than places online. But has all of this investment and stifling complexity paid off as promised – by increasing ad effectiveness and luring online the branding budgets that have eluded digital advertising for almost two decades? We start OMMA Display Europe with a buy-side gut check. We ask the buyers and planners working in the new machine to kick its tires. Do the new data points really move the needle of campaign success? Is tech-enhanced display the “new search” in its ability to locate interested customers? And is all of this technology really getting these platforms beyond the direct marketing models that have dominated display since the mid-nineties?

As display budgets move quickly to programmatic buying where everyone promises transparency, high quality inventory, and branding, what does “premium” mean in this market? Is there a role anymore for that “clean, well-lit place” crafted by brand name media? How does high quality content position itself against the robot hordes of demand side, mechanized buying? If a publisher’s audience can be had elsewhere on the Web for a relative pittance, then how do publishers defend their traditional value proposition – audience, context, impact? We complement our first panel’s look at tech-driven display by bringing together buyers, sellers and tech solutions providers to ask what is “premium” is an ad economy where everyone claims to have it?

Suddenly, display advertising has a new 800-pound gorilla. Among all of the streams of interactive data now available, social media casts off the biggest gusher. But has social media, as a source of targeting data and as an environment for targeted advertising really panned out? Since we started talking about social as data and “social graph targeting” three years ago, what best practices have emerged for mapping the right data to your brand’s needs, for integrating the social data into the rest of your targeting mix?  When are tweets, profiles, comments, Likes and friends of friends real signals worth pursuing and when are they noise in need of filtering? And where is this social data most effective – within the notoriously unresponsive social network environments themselves or everywhere (anywhere) else on and off the Web?

Only months after one of the highest world standards in consumer privacy protection was deployed, we assemble the major players for an early check on how the display value chain is complying with the EU Cookie Directive. What costs and complexities are publishers, ad solutions providers and agencies encountering? Is the new model proving to be the ad killer some always feared? But more to the point, how are these new rules altering for better or for worse media and marketing’s relationship with consumers? Can privacy become a feature rather than a hurdle? Is this a better way for the marketing industry to build more honest and ultimately more effective ways of exchanging with consumers data for value?

Meet the ‘Viewable Impression.’ Finally awakening to the reality that online advertising needs to be ‘seen,’ not just ‘served,’ the ad economy may finally be taking seriously the actual environments into which billions of display ads are shown each day. When and what effect will all of this have on pricing, scarcity, and the art of buying and selling? But even more, will the new focus on viewability also help the ad economy rethink even deeper issues of clutter and appearance? Shouldn’t share of voice and ownership of the page be a greater part of the display story, whether it involves premium high impact placements or hyper-targeted RTB campaigns against sub-prime inventory? Haven’t the increased engagement metrics from cleaner, leaner mobile and tablet environments taught us anything about the role of user experience in ad effectiveness? We bring together both buyers and sellers to discuss measuring and maximizing real engagement.

In a multi-channel world of relentless and very different data inputs, the name of the game in buying and planning is assigning credit and blame to components in that last plan. Everyone knows that “last click attribution” is metrics at its dumbest, and it often undervalues the display component. Still last-click remains the dominant model. The hunt for the right algorithm goes on and it has spawned another layers of solutions. In this edition of the classic OMMA Grill the Vendors session we call in the companies that claim to be cracking the code on attribution. How are they different? How are they valuing their service? Is interactive attribution ultimately evolving into a feature of Web analytics? And what can we learn from these vendors now about the real state of assessing the complex impact of offline efforts with online campaigns, branding, earned media, social outreach and search?