Last week we were lucky enough to participate in three excellent online industry events taking place in Warsaw:

• Internet Poland Conference & Expo
• Forum IAB Poland
• MIXX Awards Ceremony

Internet Poland is the “biggest event in Poland presenting interactive marketing companies and issues,” and this year there were more than 800 conference attendees and over 3000 expo visitors and 90 exhibitors – quite a turnout for the first online industry expo ever in Poland. During the Internet Poland event, the fifth Forum IAB conference was held in Hall B, where lectures about various aspects of the Polish online industry were delivered by top industry speakers. In the evening, the MIXX Awards were presented in the same location for categories ranging from best Branded Content to best Direct Response.

One conclusion I can draw from these events is that the Polish online industry is experiencing exceptional growth. This is perfectly in-line with a recent article I read, Poland leads European e-Commerce growth. This article explains that the number of online shops operating in Poland is increasing by 30% per year, with 10,000 online shops counted at the end of 2010. This means that a surge in online marketing spend is sure to follow, and we are excited about serving both Poland and the greater Central and Eastern European markets with the most advanced display advertising solutions created for eCommerce marketers. 

Real-time bidding is sure to be an integral part of the continued growth of the online industry in Poland in 2012. We are prepared to be a major catalyst for that growth!

See more pictures of the event on our Facebook page.

Forum IAB Conference Overview

The conference was full of great presentations, but I wanted to take a moment to highlight a few that really stood out:

Keynote: Thank You Economy
Gary Veynerchuk

This keynote was primarily about social marketing and entrepreneurship. Gary drove home the point that “social media is the new decision influencer in our purchase decisions.” He spoke about the social graph as a collection of wisdom – Twitter as a cocktail party where everyone is listening to others to help determine their own opinions, because “we are not very good in knowing what we want, and we’re very quick to say ‘this sucks’.” This is where the opportunity lies for marketers.

Just as with social media, real-time bidding is about seizing a real-time marketing opportunity – taking advantage of a moment in time when a customer’s mind is open to have their opinion, and ultimately their purchase intent, influenced by what is in front of them on the screen.

The Polish Media Market – Offline vs. online
Tomasz Lis

Tomasz Lis is a famous polish journalist, TV presenter, and Chief Editor of the Wprost Magazine. He is opening a news portal, http://cosnowego.pl/. Though he comes from the offline world (print, TV), his investment into online media is an important development to demonstrate the growing influence of the online sphere in Poland.

Today and Tomorrow in Polish Online Advertising
Panel discussion
Robert Bednarski, Wiceprezes, COO Grupa Onet.pl
Artur Waliszewski, Regional Business Director Poland & CEE, Google
Anna Kaczmarska, Prezes, IDM Net
Dominik Czarnota, Prezes, NK.pl
Jakub Benke, Prezes, Starcom
Artur Gortych, Prezes, Artegence

The key point to this panel was that data will become more and more important.  The data is there, and the winners will be those who learn how to monetize that data. Polish online ad spending is still growing, but there is a lot to do in order to measure the online marketing reach in real-time. The big branding spenders are for the most part still taking their budget to TV. Some Internet companies in Poland are already tackling this challenge to grow the online slice of the advertising pie: Nk.pl (Dominik Czarnota) is working on individual user advertising for their community (like Facebook is already doing). IDMnet (Anna Kaczmarska) is evaluating new ways of monetization, including not just ad inventory but data monetization as well.

The Game Change: How Real-time Bidding is Revolutionizing Online Advertising

In the afternoon of Day 2, sociomantic had the honor of sending our Managing Director Thomas Brandhoff to speak on our favorite subject, real-time bidding, alongside Admeld’s Frederic Lamoulie. Many of the industry experts were waiting for these RTB slots, because this is a subject that is growing in interest to online marketers across the globe. Lamoulie presented details on the sell-side of the RTB equation and how publishers can earn higher eCPMs by incorporating real-time bidding into their yield strategy. Naturally, Brandhoff focused on the buy-side, explaining the bidding and personalization process, as well as why RTB is truly a “game changer” for advertisers in terms of transparency, efficiency, simplicity, and more. He also shared some recent projections from IDC reserach which forecasts that the RTB industry will swell to be a $6.5 billion industry in the U.S. and Europe by 2015.

Overall, it was two days of great events for the Polish online industry, and we are already looking forward to participating again next year!

If you want learn more about real-time bidding solutions for eCommerce advertising in Poland or CEE, please don’t hesitate to contact me!

200 people were gathered yesterday in the center of Paris to exchange on Ad trading. Obviously RTB was on everybody’s lips.

It’s always amazing to see that what took 400 years in the financial market happened in just 17 years in total online.

Most of these 200 people were there to share information on this revolution that’s leading to increased ROI for advertisers and increased revenue for publishers. We’re still at early days and even though we are already able to provide volume and performance, there’s still a significant need for education of advertisers and publishers. Our ecosystem is generating scalability in a French market of only €600M display money.

The fact that there are many companies educating and innovating helps our market grow faster than in the US where a very few players are dominant. The key challenges for the future are going to be:

• Increased transparency between advertisers, service providers and publishers. Advertisers already clearly see the value of RTB, and most of the advertisers confirmed that they plan to increase their investment in RTB in the coming months. Education of more advertisers is key.
• Operational efficiency in managing campaigns. Managing not only pure retargeting but evolving to the management of advertisers marketing segmentation needs and offering users a richer experience when exposed to RTB display advertisement.
• Evolution on data

For us, the key success factors in this ecosystem will be:

1. People
2. Technology
3. Data

All of these factors have always been critical for us at sociomantic and we’re proud of being part of one of the fastest growing internet companies in Europe. As Pierre Emmanuel Cros, MD from Performics stated, it’s not about being specialists or generalists, it’s about who will provide the best performance for both the advertiser and the publishers. In our space, technology is critical — and that’s why we invested so much into it.

Beyond education, two areas of our ecosystem will need to evolve. The first one is Third party data. While at sociomantic we’re focus on customer first party data (for example CRM data) and our own data aggregation, there are several players on the market coming from offline or purely online offering third party data. They have great experience in aggregating social/demographic data and offer interest and purchase intent information. For a few players, those datas are aggregated on websites they’re working with, analyzing the content of the pages, creating clusters and defining target groups. For a few, those datas are aggregated offiline and historical players claim to offer up to 600 criteria per individual. There are still two questions around that. First is the lifetime value of purchase intent, for example. If I go to an e-shop, looking for a pair of shoes, how long will it take me to buy them on or offline? The other question which is critical to our industry is the business model that the data providers are offering to access the information. Interestingly enough, when the question about the business model was asked to the panel of four people at ATS, they looked at each other and didn’t really answer the question. Third party data is another milestone for our industry. The question is who will get this data — will it be the DSP like us, the SSP, the publishers?

The second area is the publishers themselves. Many publishers see already a significant increase of the display revenue coming from RTB. The vast majority of publishers still maintain a differenciation between a ”premium sales team” and what’s still called ”unsold inventory.”  They still differenciate based on what’s sold and what’s not, not analyzing the precise revenue generated and preferring not to generate revenue on what’s considered as ”premium placement.”  At the same time, publishers are expecting RTB to help them gain market share back from SEM and to attract back advertisers that have left the display side in the past years. They also recognize that there’s no cannibalization today between RTB and branding. We’re more in a unsellable by the internal sales team environment than a unsold environment. What RTB is achieving cannot be achieved by direct sales team with the traditional insertion order. RTB is bringing value in the display environment.

I used to run a publisher. At Bestofmedia, I had to outsource production of content to other countries due to the lower CPM achieved on display. Our ”unsold” inventory was sold at far less than what RTB is generating. The potential of the RTB market is too huge to prevent publishers from offering transparency on URL on the SSPs and adexchanges, and not to open their inventory, allowing us to start generating revenue for them. The coming year will be exciting. We should be entering back in a virtous circle in which publishers are able to invest more in content due to what RTB will generate. Direct sales teams will concentrate on special operations and special format that RTB technology cannot offer today.

ATS Paris was great. I hope that for the next session, even more advertisers will attend, leading to an event at which we can also exchange on customer performances and advertiser requirements.

Like so many other online marketers from across the globe, we spent last week hopping between some of the biggest digital marketing events of the year. First stop, London, where we joined ExchangeWire’s Ad Trading Summit, the premier event for “Ad Trading Specialists” (aka ATS) from Europe and beyond. Then we headed off to Cologne, where we joined one of the largest meetings of online marketers in the world — the dmexco — where almost 20,000 visitors made their way between booths, keynotes, panels, seminars, and meetings. Needless to say it was a very busy and exciting week! Thanks to everyone we had the pleasure of reconnecting to as well as those we had the first time pleasure of meeting.

ATS London 2011

“I was really impressed with the range of opinions and expertise on the panels,” said Thomas Brandhoff, our Managing Director, of the #ATSL. “And needless to say the growth of the conference itself is a great litmus test for the growing interest in the topic of real-time display across the media industry in Europe — almost double the audience size from the conference earlier this year.”

There were many great thoughts shared at the conference from some of the industry’s most influential voices. The kick-off was a keynote from AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley, who took it upon himself to add one more TLA (that’s “three letter acronym”) to the already overflowing pool: ATS = Ad Trading Specialists. O’Kelley used this term to describe the bulk of the people in the audience: a new breed of digital marketers with specific focus on (real-time) biddable media, especially display. He also announced that AppNexus would be powering a new exchange for Hi-media, one of the biggest online media houses in Europe. This is certainly good news for advertisers as well as a great step forward in getting more European publishers on board the RTB train.

There were plenty of memorable moments throughout the conference. We couldn’t agree more with what Netezza’s Brad Terrell said about the importance of hiring world-class talent, and he was spot-on with his statement about never underestimating the importance of reducing data latency. According to Joe Zawadski from MediaMath, we are past the stage of installing the plumbing of marketing automation (ie, the “Liquidity” and “Automation” stages), and well on our way to the third phase: Optimisation (with an “S,” since we were in London).

One interesting suggestion from the panel titled “Moving Brand Spend to the Automated Channel” was for brands to use the digital channel as a testing ground for the messaging they would take to their preferred branding channels, such as television. Richard Dance, who works for an agency representing Ford, explained that using technologies like smart versioning and dynamic creative optimization, advertisers can use digital display to see which messaging consumers best respond to, then pass those learnings on to the other channels. Obviously most of the audience was keen to the fact that a whole new world of possibilities for both branding and DR will become possible as addressable TV comes to the market.

A message that came across loud and clear from the agencies and advertisers in the panels was “simplification!” To bring people across the bridge into the world of RTB, avoid talking shop in the purest sense. Leave the acronyms behind when possible, and make sure that customers and potentials understand the WHY before they try to wrap their minds around the HOW. It’s no easy task to educate the market about what’s so great about RTB, but if we all take a step back and try to make this simpler for the advertisers and publishers who can benefit from these solutions, they will be both excited and anxious to implement these technologies instead of intimidated by the mess of technical terms. Transparency was another key issue: one speaker said that now, because of these new models, it’s not good enough for a solution provider to show the advertiser the only “answer” to the question, but they must also “show their work,” that is, show how the end was achieved. Black box is not going to cut it anymore.

The moral of the story for the day: “If it’s digital, it will be traded.” We look forward to helping advertisers to add incremental value at an impression-by-impression level using RTB!

DMEXCO 2011

This was my second year attending the dmexco, and it was even more exciting than the first. This is truly a global gathering of some of the greatest minds in the business. I had the pleasure to meet and hear from many marketers that I admire a great deal, and share in the bubbling excitement that was flowing through the exhibition halls. This is an event that I would not want to miss any year!

“This is THE leading digital marketing conference for Europe,” says Lothar Krause, sociomantic VP Sales. “We were working hard on both the supply side by working with new and existing inventory partners, as well as growing the demand side by getting even more clients on board.”

At 19,300 visitors, this was the biggest dmexco to date, and you could really feel the energy throughout the two-day event. On the first day of the conference, Tommorrow Focus highlighted a study done with comScore which showed that RTB is the main area of automation that advertisers expect to invest in over the next year. The prominence of companies like Admeld at the conference also demonstrated that RTB was one of the main topics of the event, a word (err… acronym) that really was on everyone’s lips! One problem with this of course is that a lot of companies were claiming expertise on the topic, when there is reason to believe that they may not have much experience with “real-time, for real” — but it’s a good sign in any case that the real-time concepts and performance improvements they can deliver are on their way to being adopted across the display industry at large. The biggest challenge for marketers will be to weed out the PR stories from the true real-time technology players. If you need any direction on this point, you can always get in touch with us.

We were also lucky enough to get to educate the market a bit on the topic of RTB for eCommerce advertisers. Lothar spoke on the second day in the Speakers’ Corner to an attentive crowd.

who

Thanks to everyone involved in these events for helping to make an awesome week in online marketing! We look forward to help even more advertisers rock RTB over the coming year!

• What is real-time bidding (RTB)?
• What’s so great about demand-side platforms (DSPs)?
• Why sociomantic?
• What exactly do you mean by real-time?
• What is the pricing model?
• Where will my ads appear?
• What is dynamic creative optimization (a.k.a. “dynamic ad personalization” or “dynamic bannering”)?
• What type of clients does sociomantic serve?
• What are the fees and recurring costs?
• What sort of setup does it take to get started?
• What do you do to ensure the safety of my data?
• Are you hiring?
• What sort of privacy controls do you offer for the end user?
• How does RTB eCommerce fit into my marketing mix?
• What if I have more questions?

Have more questions? Email us to learn more about how RTB eCommerce can drive incremental sales for your online shop.

What is most clear from the report is that CEE is a market full of incredible potential for online advertising growth. Gemius offers a fine summary on page 10:

The online market in Central and Eastern Europe is developing; therefore the dynamics of its growth is still one of the key factors indicating its great potential. Despite the fact that differences in the development of the internet in various CEE countries are visible, an increase in the number of new users in the whole region is not losing momentum. In this respect, the Central and Eastern European online market is growing from strength to strength and appears to be a forward-moving and extremely promising business sector.

Although our home base, Germany, is the largest internet market in Europe, with about 50 million unique visitors (according to comScore Media Matrix, March 2011), both Russia (~47MM  uniques) and Poland (~18MM uniques) are in the top ten European countries measured by unique visitors. According the Gemius report, across the whole of CEE (including Turkey), there were 117 million internet users as of the beginning of 2010 – not yet half of the region’s population of about 300 million people. That’s a growth of 9 million users since the beginning of 2009 –  more than the entire population of Slovakia

The internet penetration rates in these countries show that there is still room for massive growth in much of the region. While Germany already had 79.1% penetration in early 2010, penetration the CEE countries ranged from a low 21% in Ukraine to 71% in Estonia.  In Poland, the penetration grew 7 percentage points from 2009-2010 to 55%. At the beginning of 2010, the penetration average across the region was at a mere 49% — and it’s for this reason that the report describes the online market in CEE  as “something akin to a half-written book.”

But despite the low penetration numbers, the growth rates show that more people in these countries are getting online and advertisers are following them with budgets. “Currently, there is no need to convince anybody in the CEE region that online advertising is the future and the basis for commercial operations within digital media” (p. 18). In 2009, online advertising spend in CEE totaled 1.3 billion Euros, an 11% increase over the previous year. The greatest amount of online ad spend is found in the larger markets – Russia, Poland, and Czech Republic. Czech Republic saw a 32% year-over-year increase in online ad spend between 2008 and 2009, and in Ukraine the increase was 45%

The moral of this numbers story is that CEE is an online market that is growing incredibly quickly. As more of its users move on online, advertisers will be looking for easy, efficient ways to reach these users at scale. We hope to provide that scale for the display channel by working with our supply partners to access the increasing number of online users throughout the region, and by helping our advertisers to reach these users with personalized ads that boost eCommerce spending.

It’s clear that there is still a lot of room for research on the dynamics of this region – in fact we hope we can look forward to a third edition of the “Do you CEE?” report this year. In the meantime we can only wish the guys at Gemius good luck tonight for the IAB Research Awards!

Are you an advertiser looking for traffic in CEE? Contact us today to find out how we can help you reach this quickly growing audience.

Note: To read more about online growth in the Polish market in particular, you can check out my blog entry, “Internet Poland 2010 – Facts, Trends and an Outlook into 2011“

At our last presentation in Hamburg at Online Marketing Rockstars in February, most of the audience seemed to be completely new to the topic of real-time bidding, so our presentation really stuck to the basics. At d3con we spoke to a room full of display experts, so the topics discussed were much closer to the heart of RTB. Despite this general level of expertise, perhaps future conferences around the topics of data driven display and RTB could consider starting with a small introduction to the basic principles of this complex universe – maybe 15 minutes of explanation to make sure everyone in the room is on the same page.

As in the display market itself, the presentations and panels could be divided into three distinct categories: supply-side, data, and demand-side.

Supply Side

Across the supply-side presentations it became clear that the supply side is a step ahead of the demand side in terms of market development in Germany– the opposite situation to what exists in the U.S., where demand outpaces supply. According to Oliver Whitten, sell-side platform Rubicon Project is serving 10 billion bid requests per day.

Much of the discussion around supply focused on the private exchange, which could be a good solution for many sales houses to generate their first experiences with RTB. (For more info on private exchanges, check out “Private Exchanges- The Key To Unlocking High Quality RTB Inventory or Just A Repeat of Vertical Ad Nets?” by Sara Livingston.) From our perspective, it’s not a problem to have many different private exchanges develop because a demand-side platform can integrate with any number of private exchanges. But I don’t necessarily think it’s always the right move for a publisher to go for the private exchange model instead of putting their inventory into the open RTB supply. After all, publishers can define the same controls via their SSP without starting a private exchange (e.g, pricing floors), and a private exchange limits the number of advertisers competing to buy your inventory, which could mean lower CPMs. Additionally, when a publisher runs a private exchange they are responsible for building up their own pool of advertisers, whereas plugging into an SSP’s general RTB supply offers them the pool of advertisers connected to every integrated DSP.

In any case, it was clear from the supply-side that RTB will be a relevant channel in the selling of online media alongside some existing ways of selling ad spaces. Of course sales houses (like Zeit Online, who was represented in the supply panel) will be testing the RTB channel against their other channels to find the right balance for their business.

Data

First and foremost, the presentations showed that there is still not enough high-quality third-party data available in Germany and Europe at large, especially compared to the U.S. (eXelate had no good data examples for Germany, and according to adyard not more than 20% of German audience is available via data exchanges.)  Of course, this topic will become more relevant as the data market grows, but for now the scarcity of high-quality data means that much of the RTB buying in Germany is still focused on retargeting (especially compared to the nearby U.K. market.) This point confirms our strategy of powering RTB efficiency using advertisers’ existing first-party data in the first instance. Which leads us to…

Demand Side

It was interesting that the demand-side panel didn’t actually have any demand-side platforms represented. (The panel included advertisers, digital agencies, an ad marketplace, a DEM agency, and a targeting company.) So in this conference, sociomantic was the only DSP presenting. Altogether I think the conference was a great confirmation our offering — that the best efficiency for the advertiser will be found by leveraging their first-party data first, and afterward we can look to 3rd party data for more expansive campaigns.  Here’s my presentation on the topic from the conference:

Conclusion

Big thank you to Thomas Promny for organizing such a great event. Every event in this area will help the development of RTB in Germany and across Europe, and we are already looking forward to the next event: the Ad Trader Conference in Hamburg on 28 June (where we will take part in a panel). We hope it was not the last event from Mr. Promny in RTB!

You can find pictures of the event and downloads of the presentations here.

Although there was a bit of controversy around the (current) efficacy of third-party data for the cost, it seemed like most panelists and audience members throughout the day could agree that advertisers are already sitting on some very important data indeed – their first party data, much of which is already sorted into internal databases, waiting to be tapped for new value.

How? Read on.

From the AdExchanger weekly comic series

First Party Data: Going Beyond Retargeting Cookies

Remarketing/retargeting data is one level of first-party data that most (if not all) demand-side platforms and agencies are already offering to their advertisers on some level. (“Remarketing vs. Retargeting: What’s the difference?”) But to drive maximum revenues from the real-time display channel, advertisers need the ability to go beyond retargeting, to intelligently apply the stores of information they already have.

That’s where we come in. Since our demand-side platform was built with eCommerce advertisers in mind, one of our first priorities was making sure that our clients could apply the two major data sources that are already in their hands:

1. CRM data: This is the data about People. eTailers know that knowing their customers pays off, so they have invested a lot into developing advanced “customer relationship management” databases that include info such as customer demographics, purchase history, preferences, newsletter subscriptions, next best buy prediction etc. And of course we help them build out these existing profiles by adding real-time remarketing data.
2. Shop data: This is a big umbrella term that encompasses those other P-words with which eTailers are concerned: Products, Performance, Placement, Promotion, and Pricing. Our advertisers usually have some level of analytics dedicated to understanding these elements, but we help them out by supplying real-time data such as top-performing products per category.

Accessing this data is the first step of the process. Analyzing and applying it is the next.

Real-time Bidding and Individually Personalized Ads

Once the CRM and shop data is routed into our platform, we help our clients apply their data in two dimensions of RTB eCommerce:

1. Determining the bid price: The “bidding” for individual ad impressions is, of course, what sets real-time bidding apart from traditional ways of buying display. But it’s a tough job to determine the value of an individual user in less than 50 milliseconds. Pulling an advertiser’s existing knowledge about a customer into the bidding equation can dramatically increase the accuracy of the bid (“accuracy” meaning that the bid we submit is high enough to win the auctions, but low enough that we’re not burning money). The more accurate our bids, the more efficiency we can bring to advertiser’s display campaigns.
2. Dynamic Ad Personalization: After we’ve won an auction, the next task is to build an individually tailored ad that perfectly reflects the user profile that the advertiser has already built (supplemented, of course, with real-time data we’ve helped them capture). It’s easy to understand how first party data feeds our dynamic bannering machine. Two quick examples:
   1. Let’s say the CRM database shows that a particular user is a post-holiday bargain shopper. A perfectly personalized ad would offer her the discounts she’s hoping for on items she’s already browsed.
   2. Let’s say a user has already completed a purchase (a line for the ole CRM bank). An ad personalized for him could show complimentary products after a certain time lapse to increase customer lifetime value.

If it sounds complex, it’s because it is, at least on our end. But the results are in, and they show that personalized ads really do drive more conversions. (Subscribe to our RSS feed to make sure you catch our upcoming feature on dynamic ad personalization.)

New Insights: Bringing the Real-Time Data Full Circle

At the end of the marketing day, the “first-party data party” shouldn’t end when the ad is served. A comprehensive RTB solution should be able to not only use the data an advertiser already has, but supplement it. That’s why we route real-time results back to the marketer, so they can apply these insights not only for future display campaigns, but also use them to inform their other marketing efforts and sales efforts – from CRM to shop optimizationto search marketing. It’s their data, after all.

Interested in bringing your first-party data to the real-time bidding party? Get in touch to find out how we can help.

According to an article published earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal (“In store marketing begins at home“), there’s a new trend in so-called shopper marketing, “the practice of trying to influence consumers’ buying decisions as they shop.” Although brands are still investing in flashy store displays and showy shelving units, they are also moving some of their shopper marketing budgets online, where they can find consumers squeezing in some pre-shopping research before they head in to the store.

Figures from consulting firm WSL Strategic Retail suggest that many consumers are researching everyday items like pet and baby products online, even though they ultimately tend to buy these items in stores.

And it looks like marketers — and their agencies — are following suit. Dina Howells of shopper marketing agency Saatchi & Saatchi X (a Publicis Groupe agency) said that today, almost all of their projects include an online component, whereas a few years ago less than 10% of their projects included digital. This statement falls right in line with a recent AdAge article which reports that, according to their 900-agency-strong survey for the Agency Report 2011, advertising agencies generated 28% of their 2010 revenues from digital, with a 16.9% increase in dollar value from 2009.

Customer Lifetime Value and Shopper Marketing

There’s no doubt that these marketers are seizing a great opportunity: reaching out to potential customers before they buy by engaging them during this research stage. And as consumers’ online time continues to rise, we can expect to see even more of consumers researching goods online before they buy — whether the final purchase is done online or in-store.

So a customer has visited your homepage (or Facebook page, or mobile app), they’ve learned about your product or discount, printed your coupon, and in the best case scenario proceeded to buy. What’s the best next step to keep the momentum going? Once you’ve made this online contact with one of your net-savvy customers, how can you continue to nurture that relationship in order to increase their customer lifetime value (CLV)? How can you target existing and new customers with individual messages?

These questions are central tenets of our business — helping advertisers harness the power of display advertising to increase sales and boost CLV. How? By delivering custom-tailored display messages to individuals based, at least in part, on their positions in the funnel.

Boosting Online Shop Sales

In today’s multi-channel world, many retailers are trying hard to increase the sales in their online shops, where the cost of sales is far lower than in the brick-and-mortar world. In an effort to grow their eCommerce channels, retail marketers face the challenge of teaching store-only buyers about the advantages of buying online, too.

One easy way to accomplish this is remarketing to those shoppers who did their shopping research online. After all, you spent the money to get them to your site when they went looking for answers. Why not entice them to try out your e-shop with a remarketing offer for free shipping or online exclusives? Many consumers only need a little nudge to take the leap of faith into online buying, and many online shops have  a lot to gain by teaching their customers about the ease of shopping online.

To make the most of each display impression, we help our advertisers harness their existing CRM data to deliver highly customized ads each and every time.  And real-time bidding means that they pay an individual price for each impression — a price determined, in part, by that particular person’s position in the funnel.

Feel free to get in touch to learn more about how to bring your offline shoppers online using RTB eCommerce,  and we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have.

That’s why we created our What is RTB eCommerce? presentation to help explain how our advertising technology works.

But there are loads of other helpful presentations listed on websites like Slideshare and Scribd. The following is collection of some of the industry presentations we have found most helpful for visually explaining complex topics like ad exchanges, demand-side platforms, real-time bidding, and the state of the display industry. We’ll try to keep the page updated as we come across new presentations that might be helpful for our readers. And of course we need your help: please feel free to suggest other presentations in the comments!

In the future, you can find a link to this entry listed in our Resources section.

Update April 2011: The multiple slideshow embeds were causing a load-time nightmare, so we’ve opted instead to provide you with the links to the presentations and small summary of each. Not as pleasing to the eye, but certainly nicer to your browser.

Slideshows listed in the order they were posted. (With the oldest presentations first, it’s interesting to see the industry’s developments over time in the context of the presentations.)

What is User Intent (in 30 Seconds) [+ Audio]

Another 30-second tutorial explaining how “user intent” to purchase is determined for behavioral advertising purposes.

Behavioral Targeting Webinar

Offers a overview of the behavioral targeting landscape, including slides that compare the characteristics of the various technology players (ad networks, media buying platforms, data platforms, etc.)

Terence Kawaja’s IAB Networks and Exchanges Keynote [+ Audio]

Includes his now-famous industry landscape chart, which he periodically updates.

Admeld Presentation from ExchangeWire’s Ad Trading Summit 2010

Overview of “how we got here” (where “here” is the modern world of ad trading), includes a nice peek into the initial growth of real-time bidding in Europe from the sell-side perspective.

The SCIENCE-ification of Media [+ Audio]

The presentation from whence the “Math Men” meme began. Terence Kawaja explains how online media is coming into its own as a data-driven media channel.

Rubicon Keynote: Matiro event: All About RTB

Sell-side platform the Rubicon Project offers their insight on the state of real-time bidding affairs in U.S. compared to in the U.K. and France. Highlights include list of ecosystem opportunities.

DSPs and Ad Exchanges: A Peek Inside the Black Box

Adam Cahill tries to make sense of the ad trading landscape via a personal survey of DSP and ad exchange personnel. You can find some nice commentary on AdExchanger.

The Konrad Feldman Data Keynote Presentation, Ad Trading Summit 2010: Data and the Quantification of Advertising

Great “then vs. now” overview of the display industry, explanation of real-time bidding and what sort of technology it demands.

Digital Transformation or Disruption? – DSPs, Digital Advertising, and the Changing Role of the Agency
Presentation from a webinar that covered, in part, how display works as a “brand-demand” channel, delivering performance results with branding side effects. Includes Adobe case study: Adobe Puts Dynamic Personalization to the Test

What is RTB eCommerce?

The latest presentation from yours truly, offering a brief overview of our full-service offerings, including shopper remarketing, dynamic ad personalization, audience extension, and more.
View more presentations from sociomantic.

The Arrival of Real-time Bidding (IAB Webinar)
These are the slides from a webinar featuring input from the IAB, Google, and Forrester on the growth of real-time bidding. It starts with a great intro to technology as well as a healthy overview of the successes and challenges faced by both buyers and sellers of media in RTB. Lots of great input from Forrester on how advertisers can get started with RTB. View the video.

Originally published December 1, 2010.

Big thanks to all the companies and individuals who have taken the time to create and share these excellent presentations. Keep up the good work.

The newness of RTB was made especially clear at Tuesday’s dmexco Night Talk Munich, the first German event dedicated exclusively to the discussion of real-time bidding. The evening began with a keynote from Admeld co-founder Ben Barokas. (Admeld is a supply side platform – meaning that they help online publishers to maximize revenues for their remnant ad inventory via real-time bidding.) After offering an overview of the evolution of the ad trading ecosystem from the year 2000 up to today, Barokas highlighted the growth of RTB here in Germany, where growth rates are even higher than in the U.S. According to Barokas, Admeld has seen German advertiser spend through their platform double month to month.

After Barokas came the real-time bidding panel, featuring several representatives from the ad trading ecosystem here in Germany. Both moderator and audience were full of in-depth questions about this up-and-coming display technology. The panel was convinced that efficiency of trading for individual prices per impression/user has a lot of advantages compared to the existing “bulk-buying” methods of today’s display. The consensus was that it’s only a matter of time before RTB will become the dominant display technology in Germany as well – the “worst case” prediction being that in 10 years RTB would account for 50% of display advertising.

As always in a new market, some players will still need time to switch their business (or at least some parts of it) to accommodate RTB. From the publisher side, Christian Greisbach, Managing Director of Mediasports, explained the advantages he gains as by selling some of his inventory via RTB.

In any case, there were a lot of great questions and answers that show there is a keen interest in the topic here in Germany and that RTB is a subject which will merit much further discussion throughout the year.

Beyond the German Market

The mixed shades of understanding seen in Munich are a direct reflection of what has been published in several recent studies. Reports from IAB/IASH, IAB/PwC, and Google/Digiday have all indicated that although more advertisers and agencies are putting more budget into display via RTB in 2011, there is a still a disconnect in how many of these advertisers feel confident navigating RTB technology (whether through ad exchanges or demand-side platforms).

On the Econsultancy blog, Andy Betts begged the question “…do marketers and agencies really understand the new display environment?” According to numbers from the IAB/IASH (from September 2010), the answer for the many marketers is still “no” — at least 35% of agencies indicated that lack of understanding was a major challenge in RTB adoption.

Not surprisingly, understanding of both the technology and the ecosystem are key drivers of success in the world of real-time bidding. This is why we decided to offer our real-time bidding technologies as a full-service solution. That way, marketers get the chance to test-drive the effectiveness of this new channel without the need to navigate a complex interface, invest in building proprietary technology, or learn the ins-and-outs of a new display ecosystem. It’s all the benefits of RTB without the trouble.

So it seems that RTB is truly blossoming in Germany and abroad, but there is certainly still a lot of opportunity for growth. We’re happy to help nurture that growth by offering our technology supported by our team of real-time bidding experts. Betts summed up the phenomenon well in the title of his blog post, “Technology powers display growth, but people power its adoption.”

If you are interested in learning more about RTB, you can join us in Hamburg for the D3 (Data Driven Display) Conference in Hamburg, where I’ll be speaking on how we generate profitable sales for our customers using real-time bidding.