New York (May 14, 2013) – Sociomantic, the leader in intelligent display solutions for e-commerce marketers, today announced its sponsorship of the Fashion Digital LA conference to be held at the Director’s Guild of America Theater in Los Angeles on May 16, 2013.

News Facts:

• Fashion Digital LA is the first and only conference dedicated exclusively to apparel and fashion e-commerce. The event provides a unique opportunity for online retailers to hear industry leaders share best practices and strategies for addressing the opportunities and challenges specific to fashion e-commerce. With so many digital executives from leading fashion brands in one place, Fashion Digital LA provides unparalleled networking and information sharing.

• Rob Sopkic, vice president of sales for North America for Sociomantic, will introduce the panel, “Growing Your Business in a Rapidly-Changing Customer Acquisition Landscape,” at 11:45am on Thursday, May 16th. The panel will discuss how new technologies from startups such as Sociomantic are taking a fresh approach to improving customer acquisition efforts to give retailers more bang for their marketing buck. Participants include executives from ShoeDazzle and HauteLook.

• Additional speakers include senior executives from Guess?, Threadless.com and Sole Society among others. Companies in attendance include AG Jeans, American Apparel, DailyLook, Ebay, Forever21, HSN, Macy’s, Nasty Gal, Pacific Sunwear, Sephora and many other brands.

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Press Contacts

Greg Peverill-Conti
InkHouse for Sociomantic
sociomantic@inkhouse.com
+1.781.966.4114

About Sociomantic:

Sociomantic Labs empowers advertisers in more than 50 markets worldwide with an intelligent display platform that drives incremental sales for sustainable revenue growth. As a market leader in real-time bidding (RTB) and personalized display advertising, Sociomantic helps marketers reach new and existing customers and grow Customer Lifetime Value using today’s most advanced display advertising solutions, including RTB retargeting and prospecting, real-time data management, dynamic ad personalization, custom segmentation and real-time reporting. These solutions are delivered hand-in-hand with full-service local expertise delivered from Berlin, London, Warsaw, Paris, Amsterdam, Sao Paulo, Moscow, Madrid, New York City, Chicago and San Francisco.

Berlin (May 7th, 2013) – Sociomantic Labs, the leader in intelligent display solutions for eCommerce marketers, today announced that Robert Bosch will be joining company in the newly created role of chief sales officer EMEA. With more than 12 years of leadership experience at leading online companies such as Google, Groupon and Axel Springer, Bosch is well positioned to assume responsibility for driving Sociomantic’s revenue strategy in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Key Facts:

• Bosch was most recently at Google Germany, where he steered the company’s agency business as a director on the German management team. Prior to Google, Bosch served as senior vice president of business development EMEA at Groupon. Before that he held a number of senior management positions at Axel Springer.
• At Sociomantic Bosch will be responsible for leading the ongoing expansion of the company in EMEA starting in August 2013. He will report to co-founder and Managing Director, Thomas Brandhoff.
• Bosch joins Sociomantic at a time of rapid growth for the company:
  • Last year Sociomantic grew from 20 to 100 employees.
  • The company launched operations in Sao Paulo, Moscow, New York, London and Madrid in 2012, in addition to their existing European offices in Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw, and Berlin.
  • The company expects to more than double its headcount in the next 12 months.
  • Sociomantic currently serves eCommerce advertisers in more than 50 markets worldwide.
• Bosch’s hire as CSO EMEA follows Sociomantic’s recent appointment of another key executive, JB Brokaw, as the company’s North American president. The strength of Sociomantic’s leadership team demonstrates the company’s commitment to acquiring top talent to drive continued revenue growth.

Quotes:

• “Real-time, data-based advertising will be the standard in the media landscape of the future,” said Robert Bosch. “Sociomantic enables a new level of transparency to better help our clients understand the true market price of capturing and keeping their customers. This makes the process more efficient and effective. Sociomantic is uniquely positioned in the advertising ecosystem and I am very excited to be a part of this outstanding team.”
• “In Robert we have gained an experienced manager for the expansion of Sociomantic in Europe,” said Thomas Brandhoff, Sociomantic co-founder and Managing Director. “He has the knowledge and the network to guide our expansion and to forge strong partnerships with our eCommerce customers and partners in the EMEA region.”
• “Sociomantic’s growth has been incredibly rapid over the past two years. This is thanks in part to our technology, but more importantly it is due to our exceptional team,” said Jason Kelly, chief executive officer of Sociomantic. “We are thrilled to welcome Robert on board as we continue to expand our team and our customer base worldwide.”

About Sociomantic Labs:

Sociomantic Labs empowers eCommerce advertisers in more than 50 markets worldwide with an intelligent display platform that drives incremental sales for sustainable revenue growth. As a market leader in real-time bidding (RTB) and personalized display advertising, Sociomantic helps marketers reach new and existing customers and grow Customer Lifetime Value using today’s most advanced display advertising solutions, including RTB retargeting and prospecting, real-time data management, dynamic ad personalization, custom segmentation and real-time reporting. These solutions are delivered hand-in-hand with full-service local expertise delivered from Berlin, London, Warsaw, Paris, Amsterdam, Sao Paulo, Moscow, Madrid and New York City, Chicago and San Francisco.

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Sarah Joy Murray
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[PRESS RELEASE]

NEW YORK (APRIL 2, 2013) – Sociomantic Labs, the leader in intelligent demand solutions for ecommerce companies, today announced that digital marketing veteran JB Brokaw has joined the company as president of its North American operations. Brokaw brings more than 15 years of experience in digital marketing and search technology, and is the former chief revenue officer, and chief client officer, of iProspect. At Sociomantic, he will lead the charge on sales and revenue operations and further develop the company’s advisory and services teams.

Sociomantic made an aggressive push to expand its presence in the U.S. by naming Jason Kelly as their New York City-based chief executive officer in the fall of 2012. The addition of Brokaw signals Sociomantic’s ongoing commitment to hand selecting a powerful team of senior industry leaders to support the next stage of the company’s global growth.

“As someone who has executed campaigns through nearly every platform, I was blown away by Sociomantic’s performance and deep user-level integrations with first-party and CRM data,” said Brokaw. “Sociomantic is truly at the forefront of this next wave of capabilities delivering transparent results on behalf of marketers. When you combine Sociomantic’s global scale with the sheer horsepower and elegance of the technology stack, you truly have something special.”

“Retail and eCommerce marketers need a consultative approach when it comes to the display advertising ecosystem,” said Kelly who was previously at Google, Admeld, the digital divisions of Time, Inc. and Virgin America. “At Sociomantic, we believe that transparent, technology-driven media companies will drive the evolution of display as a marketing channel. We’re excited to have JB onboard as he brings a keen understanding of advertiser challenges, and will supercharge current developments we’re excited to bring to our customers.”

Throughout Brokaw’s career he has been passionate about gaining a strong understanding of buyer behavior for clients across verticals ranging from retail and travel to CPG, technology, auto and financial services. At iProspect, Brokaw was responsible for securing new business as well as the growth and development of the agency’s 400-plus person client services organization and a client roster consisting of more than 100 of the world’s leading retail brands. In these capacities, Brokaw was ultimately responsible for the successful management of performance marketing spend across the client roster. He also served on the Global Steering Board, which was responsible for aligning offices across 49 regions worldwide under one global brand. Before iProspect, he was executive director of market development at Mindset Media, which went on to be acquired by Meebo.

About Sociomantic Labs

Founded in 2009, Sociomantic Labs empowers advertisers in more than 50 markets worldwide with a suite of intelligent demand tools that drive incremental sales for sustainable revenue growth. As a market leader in real-time bidding (RTB) and personalized marketing, Sociomantic helps marketers reach new and existing customers and grow Customer Lifetime Value using today’s most advanced display advertising solutions, including RTB retargeting and prospecting, real-time data management, dynamic ad personalization, custom segmentation, and real-time reporting. These solutions are delivered hand-in-hand with full-service local expertise delivered from Berlin, London, Warsaw, Paris, Amsterdam, Sao Paulo, Moscow, Madrid, and New York City.

# # #

The Facebook Exchange (FBX) has been big news since it launched in September 2012. Advertisers all over the world want to understand more about how FBX differs from the standard Facebook ad products, what type of advertising is possible with FBX, and how it performs compared to other display advertising channels. As a FBX Preferred Marketing Developer, Sociomantic is helping advertisers to boost incremental sales with this new RTB channel.

The biggest difference between FBX and other Facebook advertising products is that FBX allows advertisers to use their own data from outside of the platform to reach users with personalized display ads on Facebook using a buying methodology called Real-time Bidding (RTB) to pay individual prices for each ad impression. Sociomantic’s advertisers have the opportunity to  use RTB retargeting with Dynamic Creative Optimization to reach users on FBX with display ads that are individually personalized based on users’ previous interactions with the advertiser website.

First Experiences with FBX

Facebook is just the latest player to join the ad exchange game. To date, we’ve worked with advertisers in more than 50 markets around the world to help them leverage real-time bidding, retargeting, dynamic creative, and other intelligent display solutions to reach interested users all over the web with personalized ads. Although FBX is still relatively young by comparison to some of the other ad exchanges, we’ve spent the past weeks digging into the results from some of our largest and most advanced FBX campaigns. Here’s a peek at what we’ve seen so far.

First of all, the reach available via Facebook is substantial – comScore reports that Facebook accounts for more than a quarter of all online display ads. In the U.S. as well as many European markets, the percent of internet users on Facebook exceeds 50 percent, according to eMarketer. (The worldwide penetration averages roughly 40 percent). When it comes to FBX in particular, the impression volume we’ve seen to date varies depending on the market and the advertiser, but in most cases the additional impression volume is expansive. For the time being, the impressions come at a lower cost – often as much as four times less than the CPM costs of other RTB inventory.

Although on average the click-through rates on FBX are lower than we usually see outside of FBX, lower inventory costs combined with the substantial impression volume means that advertisers can generate significant return on investment for FBX campaigns, with costs-per-action that are on average lower than in other RTB inventory. One of our largest advertisers in France was able to generate 30% more sales from only a 19% increase in additional RTB spend via FBX, showing that when properly executed, RTB retargeting on FBX can be a profitable channel for driving new sales. At Sociomantic, we’re committed to delivering all of our RTB media purchases to our advertisers with full pricing transparency, so they can clearly see the costs and margin for FBX media spend compared to their other RTB campaigns and adjust investments according to their attribution model.

In terms of unique audience, we have seen that although FBX has overlap with other RTB inventory sources, in some markets Facebook can provide as much as an additional 30% unique reach. (Likewise, there is still a substantial percentage of unique audience that can be reached via other exchange inventory, but not yet found on FBX.) This varies dramatically per market, based largely on Facebook’s internet user penetration (higher in Western European and North American markets, but growing everywhere) and the number of users who access Facebook via mobile (FBX doesn’t offer mobile impressions yet). Additionally, the level of engagement on the Facebook platform throughout the day tends to be more consistent than in the non-FBX channels, with users staying active on Facebook from morning to late-night.

One of the most interesting things we’ve found so far is that the users who do convert after clicking a FBX retargeting ad tend to make their purchase faster than they would from non-FBX retargeting – looking at five of our largest FBX campaigns in Europe and the Americas, the time-to-conversion after a click is on average 2.5 times faster than in non-FBX retargeting.

The summary of these results demonstrates that best practice is to run FBX campaigns as a complement to existing RTB retargeting campaigns, using FBX as a supplemental inventory source to reach additional audience with highly personalized ads that drive incremental clicks and sales.

Advanced RTB Retargeting on Facebook Exchange

The best results we’ve generated on FBX so far have been with advertisers who are using advanced strategies for their RTB retargeting campaigns. The methods vary widely depending on the advertiser’s unique shop, audience, vertical, and data capabilities, but here are few key examples from the retail industry.

For a major fashion retailer in Germany, we were able to generate a significant increase in spend efficiency of FBX spend by segmenting the website visitors into “new” versus “existing” customers, much the same as we did for shopping club BrandAlley on non-FBX inventory. (Read the BrandAlley case study). When a user visits the advertiser site, we can determine whether or not this is an existing customer, and create separate bidding and banner creation logics for each segment (defined by the advertiser). This allows the retailer to invest more for the highest-value segments, such new customers or existing customers who might not have purchased in a long time.

Likewise, loyalty campaigns can help increase engagement from users who have recently completed a purchase. There’s no reason that an advertiser should burn budget on showing ads with the same products a user has already purchased, especially at the risk of frustrating the customer and at the cost of displaying ineffective ads. A loyalty campaign offers the advertiser one avenue to responsibly engage with their users after purchase without retargeting them for already purchased products. This is just one way that we help advertisers to address the customer lifetime value, helping to increase transaction amount and frequency beyond the next sale.

The beauty of these RTB retargeting strategies is that they help to improve budget efficiency and drive customer lifetime value not only on FBX, but can be used in tandem with campaigns across all of our standard RTB inventory to reach interested users with highly personalized display advertising.

We’re very excited to apply our suite of performance display tools to the RTB reach now available on the world’s most popular website.

Want to learn more about advertising on the Facebook Exchange?
Get in touch with us today.

Webwinkel Vakdagen, Utrecht (January 23- 24)

CRM + Display: Love at First Impression

This was our first year exhibiting at the Webwinkel Vakdagen (WWV) in Utrecht, where 10,075 visitors passed through the halls of this exciting two-day eCommerce trade show.

The Sociomantic booth was abuzz with curious visitors, asking questions about our way of buying media (benefits of buying display ads via real-time bidding versus fixed deals), the use of CRM or other supplemental data sources in display advertising, and the possibilities of dynamic creative optimization for many different sizes and types of online shops. We spoke with everyone from students to CEOs, boutique shops to the market’s biggest and most advanced players.

The advertisers we met on the floor are dealing with a range of challenges when it comes to their online marketing. The most frequently cited pain points seemed to be issues of de-duplication and conversion attribution (how much credit to give to different channels in the customer journey), frequency capping (how to avoid overexposing their customers to display ads) and the ability to go beyond basic retargeting for higher performance by using proprietary data stores such as CRM data. A large percentage of these advertisers already had some experience with performance display via retargeting, so they were interested to learn more about the next generation of display ads that are pushing the performance of display campaigns even further than they had been able to before with more advanced segmentation and customization methods.

The conference sessions of the WWV covered a range of eCommerce subjects, from smarter logistics to better performing online marketing, with presentations from some of the region’s top eCommerce marketers from retail and fashion, travel, and more.  Mobile and “m-Commerce” were popular topics for many of this year’s sessions, as well as lots of talk about customer feedback from social media. Most interesting for us of course was the introduction of topics such as the customer lifetime value (with regards to email marketing in this case), but in terms of display advertising we didn’t see too many presentations hit the topics of real-time performance display.

You can download or view many of the conference presentations online (Dutch) or check out more pictures from this event on our Facebook Page.

Salon e-Marketing, Paris (January 29-30)

While real-time marketing was a topic that seemed most popular in the conversations that took place on our our booth on the Webwinkel Vakdagen, this subject was the theme of this year’s entire program for the Salon e-Marketing in Paris, where more than 15,000 visitors passed through the conferences and exhibit halls of this two-day event.

Real-time marketing today can take many forms, from social media client relations to location-based mobile deals. Among all of these, real-time bidding was the most talked-about topic of the show, and indeed the conference sessions kicked off with a keynote about the ins and outs of RTB for some of France’s largest online marketers.

From the advertisers that took the stage, it became clear that real-time display advertising is on the top of many priority lists because of its ability to provide a truly one-to-one communication channel in which advertisers can reach individual users with customized messaging and offers.  For many marketers, the impression-by-impression pricing possible via RTB also makes it attractive channel to help push their performance marketing goals; on the other hand, some marketers we spoke to expressed concerns that intransparent pricing models offered by some of the RTB trading desks in the French market could be mudding the pricing benefits available from the channel.

Regardless of the channel – display, email, social-local-mobile or otherwise – it’s clear that real-time marketing is still in the early days for many marketers, but that they are finally getting their feet wet and generating deeper and broader experiences with these real-time channels. It was also clear that marketers in France are facing several key challenges when it comes to real-time marketing today. These were the ones we heard most often in our discussions at the Salon.

Technology

Real-time marketing requires real-time technology, and most advertisers don’t yet have the resources to develop these kinds of technologies in-house. This means vendor-tendering processes that can be difficult and time-consuming in the search to find the technology partner that can provide the best performance at a cost that fits within marketers’ performance goals. The most advanced pure-play online advertisers are seeking access to rich technology stacks that alow them to maximize the efficiencies and precision of the online world to drive more awareness and sales in a cost-effective manner. The big “clicks-and-mortar” (online-offline) companies are keen to be able apply their tried and tested offline marketing and customer relations logics within this real-time online world. This is only possible with the right technology solution and people who know how to use it.

“Big Data”

Big data was certainly the biggest keyword for the show – used again and again in the context of how much of it there is, the complexity of it, and just how scary it seems for marketers. But what most of the sessions failed to focus on is the opportunity and value that can be created with smart applications of big data, especially when it’s proprietary first party data like CRM or shop-specific performance data. When working with a data-savvy technology partner in a transparent business model, advertisers stand to gain from smarter segmentation and pricing logics and more personalized and higher-performing advertisements.

Attribution

One of the primary challenges that marketers are facing now more than ever before is the need to get a clearer understanding of their ROI from all these different channels – real-time or otherwise—through more sophisticated attribution and de-duplication strategies. It’s no easy task to assign weights to the all the marketing touch-points that result in a sale or a happy customer, but marketers are getting smarter about how they attribute credit for various interactions throughout the funnel and customer loyalty cycle.

Looking back at the Salon, we can see that in France the topic of real-time marketing has truly arrived on everyone’s minds, but like in the Netherlands there are still a lot of questions starting with “How…”

Trying to understand how to leverage your big data stores with really-real-time, customer-driven performance display? Get in touch or meet us at one of these upcoming eCommerce events:

Next at:

eTail West, Palm Dessert, USA
eCommerce One-to-One, Monaco

Exchange-based ad trading is relatively young when observed in the global marketplace, but has gained critical mass since we placed our first real-time bid in 2010. At the time we started, Sociomantic was one of the first managed DSPs with a proprietary bidder operating in a 100% RTB capacity. Obviously that situation has changed pretty dramatically in three years, as many ad networks have pivoted and at least some trading desks have by now added proprietary layers on top of the borrowed infrastructures. On the supply side, we’ve seen some great strides especially in the last twelve months, with private exchanges on the rise and major publishers like like Hi-Media, Interactive Media and the La Place Media collective entering the game.

Throughout the growth and adoption of RTB, Sociomantic’s focus has remained largely the same: delivering dynamic, user-centric display campaigns that result in unmatched performance at massive scale. With this focus in mind, our evolution is driven by three major opportunities.

First, the global opportunity – we’ve expanded our infrastructure to support campaigns in more than 45 markets worldwide. Every advertiser we work with around the globe gets access to the same real-time tools: RTB, dynamic creative, stream-based optimization (machine learning based on always-open data feeds), and real-time reporting.

The second opportunity lies in the nature of programmatic trading itself. While we’ve seen many players apply the same old tactics within the exchange environment (eg, blanket bidding €1.50 for all cookied users), we have continuously evolved our bidding and dynamic creative algorithms to better leverage the impression-level targeting made possible by RTB to its greatest effect for our performance-driven advertisers. We see bespoke segmentation and creative customization, used together to deliver real-time tailored offers and prices, as the gold standard for performance display.

Third, the first-party data opportunity. We’re not talking about basic retargeting cookies here, but about helping advertisers understand the value of the data they own, and then to capture, analyze, and apply that data in an intelligent way to get unmatched performance and increased insights on their customers. We view it as our responsibility to advise our clients on topics like CRM segmentation, smarter attribution modeling, and adopting a customer lifetime-value driven approach in order to push their online marketing strategy to the next level where they can serve even more tailored offers and pricing for both retargeting and prospecting campaigns.

Unfortunately there are still some pain points within the trade at large that will need to be weeded out before we as an industry can graduate to the next stage. There is still a huge lack of pricing transparency from some players in the market, with many vendors hiding margins within a black-box approach and dated pricing models. Full transparency into cost of media and margin should be the expected from every buying partner. Ability to scale is another big topic that we will see come to the fore as the market matures – this “big data” that everyone is talking about certainly isn’t going to get any smaller, so advertisers need to make sure they’re partnering with companies whose technology is prepared for a healthy long-term cooperation as data volumes grow and cross-border eCommerce becomes the norm. The third development that we hope to see become ubiquitous in online marketing is the transition to atruly real-time, stream-based approach. There’s no reason advertisers should settle for reporting or decisioning based on stale data, when their customers and prospects live and act in a real-time web.

Overall we’re extremely excited by the development we’ve seen in the industry in these past years and our goal is to continue to push the boundaries of what is possible within the most powerfully user-centric advertising channel that exists today.

Read more about the maturing RTB market on ExchangeWire.

2012 was a year of tremendous growth for Sociomantic Labs, as we expanded from our European base (in Germany, Poland, France, and The Netherlands) into new frontiers, launching operations in Brazil, Russia, US, UK, and Spain.

Just as we tap our local expertise to execute intelligent display advertising campaigns every day, we wanted to localize our predictions for 2013 to the trends particular to each region. Therefore we’ve spoken to our managing directors from each market or region to offer you a global picture of what eCommerce advertisers can expect from performance display this year.

Jason Kelly, CEO (New York)

Real-time bidding continues to open up new capabilities/channels for e-commerce companies to leverage their vast stores of visitor and CRM data sets across new environments at scale such as Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Apple, etc. We expect to see the line continue to blur between media and e-commerce retailers and travel companies as they push into these new channels leveraging retargeting, RTB and CRM practices to unlock the power of their first-party data assets.

(This prediction first appeared in Adotas.)

Lothar Krause, VP Sales (Berlin)

In all our markets across six continents, we expect to see data-driven display become a bigger percentage of the total display advertising pie, especially among eCommerce and performance-oriented advertisers.

- As the need for intelligent display increases, we will see the CRM and online marketing departments grow increasingly closer together.

- While 2012 was the year of attribution model testing, 2013 will be when advertisers begin to move away from a last-click model in favor of more intelligent attribution modeling to help push their businesses to the next level.

- The companies who can calculate customer lifetime value (CLV) most efficiently and accurately will be the winners of 2013, because they will be willing to pay higher costs to reach their best users for long-term success.

Maciej Wyszynski, Managing Director Central & Eastern Europe (Warsaw)

We’ve experienced dramatic changes in the perception of RTB in CEE in the last two years. The model is no longer viewed as the unreachable “Holy Grail” of advertising, but as an intelligent, accessible ecosystem that brings new benefits for online advertisers and publishers. The model has already started to loom large in media houses and agency directors’ minds as they’re aware that they absolutely can’t miss the “RTB train” that has arrived at the display advertising station. The trend is especially relevant for online retailers, and incidentally eCommerce has been forecast by Polish State Treasury as extremely promising sector for the national economy, which assures us that our eCommerce focus is on-point.

The buzz around the RTB model that surged in Q4 2012 will grow rapidly in 2013. No doubt we will observe more new vendors entering the CEE market – SSPs, DSPs, and other exchange-focused players from both home and abroad. Marketers can look forward to deepening their knowledge of and experience in intelligent performance display with tools such as the IAB Poland’s forthcoming “RTB Guide,” due to be released in Q1 by the RTB Workgroup (article in Polish).

Most importantly, the quickly growing number of web users in CEE will experience the positive effects of the model, as personalized RTB banners grow increasingly more common on their favorite portals, social networks, and on the screens of their smartphones.

Christopher Caussin, Managing Director Southern Europe (Paris)

In 2013 we will see eCommerce advertisers begin to focus in on their first party data. The growing importance of multichannel sellers will make the loyalty card a key asset to link the offline and online worlds together. It will be the year of CRM display, when merchants will concentrate more and more on understanding whom they’re talking to and tailoring their messages to individual users – from their on-site content to to their email and display campaigns. Additionally:

- Merchants will get smarter about analyzing their marketing activities. Today’s rules on last versus first click will continue to disappear towards a more balanced analysis that the web is offering between the first and last contributors to the sale.

- In terms of scale, I’m anticipating forecasts to actually be lower than the reality given the excitement around RTB this year in the European market. RTB is a very common term now. But what’s not so common is an awareness of just how quickly the market is growing as a whole.

- On a larger scale, we will see an even deeper interconnection of devices, from PC to mobile/smartphones and tablets, and even integrating TV as well – which could be the next advertising frontier.

Bas Drogtrop, Managing Director Benelux (Amsterdam)

We noticed many of our clients are investigating the possibilities of connecting CRM data with online display campaigns. It has been acknowledged that by applying the true customer value, advertisers can distinguish themselves from their competition (more effective campaigns and budget spends). The challenge lies within identifying these customers, segmenting into groups and applying the right tactics to each one of them.

Another trending topic is attributing sales to the right conversion channels. There are many technological solutions for conversion attribution available. The challenge of many advertisers is how to configure these solutions and weighting channels in the best possible way. We have seen very positive results in our display channel with advertisers that were capable of finding the right sales attribution configuration.

Francisco Morales, Managing Director Latin America (Sao Paulo)

Ever since 2010 Brazilian internet has been marked by the accelerated entrance of international VCs, private equity funds as well as global incubators. Whereas the preceding years were mainly dominated by local players with a more limited access to funding, the new investor landscape allowed for projects with a different profile to be launched. International investors with a better access to liquidity and the willingness to wait longer for an investment to “pay back” allowed for new capital-intensive models with a higher risk profile to be launched. As a result a significant number of already proven models from the US or Europe have been built in Brazil over the past years. Specifically the e-retail market with its high working capital needs was able to profit from this development and continues to grow rapidly with many new players trying to capture market share or even create the market for new products and/or categories.

The entrance of new players increased competition in online advertising, forcing many players to professionalize their marketing approach. Companies along the entire supply chain of online ventures also had to adapt: Previously prohibitively expensive advertising channels such as Facebook or retargeting have set up local entities in Brazil, democratizing access and making it easy for small and mid-size online retailers to reach the masses. We believe that 2013 will continue to see increased optimization efforts among the advertising industry and consequences on the marketing mix for many companies. As the businesses grow more sophisticated, we believe that companies with a high ability to react to changes in the competitive landscape will be able to stay ahead of the curve. Moreover, 2013 is expected to be a year of exits, as more mature companies are said to be in preparation of an IPO.

Michael Balakin, Managing Director Russia (Moscow)

2013 will be the year of growing competition and market maturation in Russia. Most of the eCommerce players here already have some experience with retargeting, but in 2013 we will see RTB finally become a buzzword as knowledge of performance display grows more advanced.

Big and medium eCommerce shops will all be using the retargeting services more intelligently this year, but the selection of vendors will become more of a deliberate choice rather than “try them all” approach used by many e-retailers in 2012.  This choice will be based on comprehensive assessment of the many factors such as: technology, inventory/reach, technical support and customer service, transparency & business model, etc.

Gavin Wilson, Managing Director UK (London)

- Multi and weighted attribution becomes even more prevalent as advertisers start to experiment more so with a scaled reward for all or numerous touch points that the consumer experiences as opposed to being solely reliant on a last-click model.

- Display RTB gains more traction as the big retailers explore 100% auction-based models as opposed to models involving pre-buying of inventory or price arbitrage.

- CRM data, its use, and intelligent partnerships between technology companies and advertisers will hold more market gravitas as advertisers expect RTB partners to consider increasingly more information per user and be more tailored when targeting different consumer groups.

- RTB crosses multiple channels more so including mobile and video, capturing consumers at multiple entry and purchase points.

Miguel Ochoa, Managing Director Spain (Madrid)

Despite the current low volume of eCommerce sector in Spain overall, expected levels of growth (20% yearly) give a very optimistic picture for 2013 and beyond, especially as many large offline players launch or settle their online activity. We see a serious fight against RO-PO (research online – purchase offline) trends in Spain, estimated to triple the current e-commerce yearly revenues. Most entrepreneurs are choosing online models to create their new businesses, due to business potential and low entrance barriers. On the demand side, we are all expecting that all the positive trends that market offers (online penetration, consumer confidence, payment methods, etc.) compensate for the loss of purchasing power families are suffering due to the crisis.

Intelligent advertising purchase models have succeeded amongst Spanish advertisers, as variables like who, when, what, and how much have relegated “context” to a secondary level as an audience indictor. While many Spanish advertisers tested RTB in 2012, we expect that 2013 will not only be the year RTB is recognized as the smartest way to acquire display inventory, but also the year for the Spanish market to learn how to make full use of the channel with more intelligent applications in terms of technology, metrics, data integration, etc.

More broadly, for some years now we have been predicting the imminent take off of mobile eCommerce (“mCommerce”). 2013 looks like it might be that year. The figures for smartphones and tablets penetration (59% of online population gets a smartphone, 77% has mobile internet, and 23% has a tablet) together with the fast increase ratio (+11%) suggest that the modest figures for mobile purchases in Spain so far will become much higher this year.

Have some performance display predictions of your own? We’d love to hear your feedback on Twitter. Check our out accounts in English, French, and Polish.

PRESS RELEASE

Madrid, November 29, 2012 – Sociomantic Labs, pioneer of real-time bidding technologies for eCommerce advertisers, today announced the launch of its Spanish operations under the direction of Miguel Ochoa, who has been appointed Managing Director Spain. Ochoa will oversee the execution and development of the Sociomantic’s business strategy in Spain from the new office in Madrid.

With a strong background in the online display advertising industry, Ochoa brings his leadership experience in sales, account management, and business development in the region. In his most recent role as Sales Director for affilinet Spain, Ochoa was responsible for driving revenues through managing both sales and account management teams, activating new business and servicing existing agency and direct client relationships. Prior to that, he acted as International Business Development Manager at AdLINK Media International and Senior Account Manager at Monster-TMP Worldwide.

“It’s no secret that Spain is the birthplace to some of online retail’s most successful brands, and we are excited to be able to deliver local display advertising expertise and consultation to the eCommerce advertisers here,” said Sociomantic Managing Director and co-founder Thomas Brandhoff. “Miguel’s proven sales and business development track record will make him a great partner for our advertisers in Spain and driver of Sociomantic’s success in this market.”

Sociomantic was founded in Berlin in 2009 to help eCommerce advertisers capture more sales through smarter display advertising. Today the company serves advertisers in more than 45 markets across six continents, delivering full-service RTB solutions from nine offices around the world. The launch of the new Spanish entity follows closely on the company’s expansion into Brazil, Russia, U.S., and U.K. earlier this year – growth that Sociomantic has funded purely from organic growth, with no external investment to date.

Real-time bidding and programmatic retargeting have dramatically altered the display landscape worldwide since its inception three years ago, enabling marketers to leverage scale and precision to direct their campaigns at specific audiences throughout the web.  Research firm IDC recently projected that worldwide RTB spending will grow from $1.4 billion in 2011 to $13.9 billion in 2016. Paired with projections that eCommerce revenues will exceed $1.25 trillion globally in 2013, Sociomantic’s global approach to providing cutting-edge RTB technologies tailored to meet eCommerce needs will enable marketers around the globe to take advantage of this enormous opportunity.

Commenting on his appointment, Ochoa said: “In my first conversations with Sociomantic, I was thrilled by the remarkable performance that this platform offered to advertisers and the results they generated for their clients.  I am very excited to join a team that is dedicated to helping customers succeed with the most advanced display advertising technologies, supported by transparent pricing and deep consultation from experienced display marketers.”

About Sociomantic Labs

Sociomantic Labs is the global demand-side platform (DSP) delivering real-time bidding solutions for eCommerce advertisers around the world. The Sociomantic DSP helps marketers drive incremental sales and grow customer lifetime value using today’s most advanced display advertising techniques. Real-time bidding, stream-based data management, dynamic ad personalisation, and real-time reporting technologies allow Sociomantic’s clients to reach new and existing customers alike with individually priced and personalised display ads. All of these real-time technologies work together to deliver unmatched display performance on a global scale, with best-in-class services delivered from nine offices worldwide.

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The second edition of ExchangeWire's Paris event

Last week I had the pleasure of attending ExchangeWire’s Ad Trading Summit Paris, the premier data-driven advertising event for the French online advertising industry. Last year, ATS Paris focused the discussion and debate on the future of automated media buying. ATS Paris 2012 took the discussion to another level, as the French industry has moved on significantly since 2011.

RTB is no longer a vision – it is now a business and commercial reality in France. We are seeing even more independent trading desks in the market than ever before, and the developments around La Place Media and Audience Squared shows that France could be stealing a march on both Germany and the UK in terms of real-time advertising adoption.

The speakers of ATSP’12 showed gigantic enthusiasm and sureness that the golden age of the display had come. However, the last results of Kantar media (3% reduction of the investments in display versus increased investment in radio and TV) showed that perhaps the golden age is not yet arrived, and that there is still some work and education to be done. Bilan did some testing of the RTB channel with agency trading desks, and found that although they could get some ROI by applying first party data, the agencies still needed to define the model KPI for measuring a display campaign.

We could see from the conference and our own experience that there are a still a few places that the display industry need to continue evolving, but it’s clear that players on every side are stepping up to the task.

Data

Third-party data is still largely not operational. All the attempts seem to show that the synchronization of online and offline data by third party data providers is not yet fully effective, primarily due to issues with data quality. For the moment, actors like eXelate and BlueKai are starting in on the French market.

From a first-party perspective, everyone seemed to share the understanding that in order to find the value within existing sets of big data, advertisers have to better understand which data they need and who they can trust to manage it. The biggest challenge is to find partners that can collect, manage, and analyze this big data and use it intelligently in real-time.

Supply

On the publisher side, we’ve seen a recent influx of top French premium publishers getting together to pool their inventory into an exchange environment.  The latest round included La Place Media, which includes Lagardere, Le Figaro, TF1, Amaury Group, and more. Second, there was the Audience Squared group of publishers, including M6, L’Express, Le Point, Le Monde, etc. These publishers are being pulled between their existing direct revenue streams and the possibility to increase revenues via RTB with higher eCPMs and access to new advertisers. But overall they expressed the need for more transparency into different campaigns and into who will have access to their inventory.

Demand

The conference confirmed our focus on eCommerce RTB technology as the right position, optimizing for cost-per-action for France’s biggest eCommerce advertisers. As more players continue to enter the market on the demand side, I think we will see the difference in technology capabilities starting to make a big impact on advertisers. While there are dozens of trading desks running RTB campaigns on out-of-the-box tech without the power to optimize or fine-tune the stack, the sociomantic DSP includes fully proprietary technology components that work together in real-time to deliver the highest performance: (1) our granular bidder, able to bid in real-time for evolved retargeting and reach campaigns; (2) our own data management platform (DMP) to manage all types of data (broad data, yield data, user data, CRM data, third party data); and (3) our dynamic bannering solution that streams the products of our clients into the ads in real-time.

As the industry continues to evolve, pricing transparency and lack of arbitrage will also become a key issue for advertisers – perhaps a topic for next year’s conference.

Unfortunately, there was not a big presence of advertisers yet at the ATS Paris. This simply shows that we are still in evangelization period and must work hard to educate all players on the market about the benefits of this channel. But with the US and UK markets leading the way, with 25% of display investments going via RTB these days, we can see that the path of continuous testing and learning is the best way forward for the industry.

Thanks to Ciaran O’Kane and the ExchangeWire crew for another great event.

Gavin Wilson named Managing Director UK, Sociomantic Labs

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

London, UK, 2nd October 2012: Sociomantic Labs, leading provider of RTB technologies for eCommerce advertisers, today announced its launch in the UK under the direction of Gavin Wilson, who has been appointed Managing Director, UK. Wilson will oversee the execution and development of the UK business strategy as part of this latest expansion.

With a strong background in B2B publishing, events and online advertising, Wilson brings with him over a decade of commercial and business acquisition experience. His previous role as Commercial Director at Affiliate Window saw him co-develop the US arm of the business as it expanded into new territories. Prior to that, he worked at United Business Media where he was responsible for growing a portfolio of B2B solutions and commercialising new areas of the business.

This news follows the recent appointment of Jason Kelly as CEO, as well as the launch into North America, Brazil, and Russia in September.

Kelly commented: “With the growth of display advertising higher in the UK than anywhere else in Europe, we are excited to be able to deliver local expertise and support to advertisers in this market. With his deep experience across multiple media disciplines, Gavin is the ideal person to lead our UK business operations”.

Sociomantic was founded in Berlin in 2009 to provide eCommerce advertisers with a cutting-edge platform that enables them to use the scale and precision of real-time bidding to address action-prone audiences with personalised display ads. The company’s best-in-class technologies have enabled it to offer its solutions to advertisers in more than 45 markets on six continents, based purely on organic growth without any external investment to date.

Commenting on his appointment, Wilson said: “Sociomantic is a rapidly growing business that has pioneered advances in display ad technology that produce stunning results for its clients. I’m looking forward to leading Sociomantic’s growth in the UK market, looking at the longer-term needs of eCommerce advertisers, and helping these advertisers to harness the full potential of their online commerce through smarter display advertising.”

This story first appeared in new media age (subscription required).

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About Sociomantic Labs

Sociomantic Labs is the global demand-side platform (DSP) delivering real-time bidding solutions for eCommerce advertisers around the world.

The Sociomantic platform helps marketers drive incremental sales and grow customer lifetime value using today’s most advanced display advertising techniques. Real-time buying, stream-based optimisation, and dynamic ad personalisation technologies allow Sociomantic’s clients to reach new and existing customers alike with individually priced and personalised display ads. Real-time reporting enables advertisers to see their sales and campaign results just milliseconds after they happen. All of these real-time technologies work together to deliver unmatched display performance on a global scale, with best-in-class services delivered from Berlin, Warsaw, Paris, Amsterdam, São Paulo, Moscow, New York, and London.

Learn more at www.sociomantic.com.

For media enquiries, please contact:

Hazel Johnstone, GingerMay PR
Email: hazel [at] gingermaymarketing.com
Tel: +44 (0)1892 542782