Anyone who’s watched our Careers page or Facebook feed lately has probably noticed that we’re hiring. Demand for real-time bidding technologies is growing fast, and to meet that demand we’re continually expanding our team. It’s an exciting time to work at sociomantic, and an exciting time to be participating in one of the fastest-growing segments of online advertising.

Just look at where the “big guys” are investing — Google has gone gaga for RTB display in the last year (see for example their recent purchase of Admeld for $400 million), Microsoft has just announced some big improvements coming to their display machine, DG’s recent purchase of both MediaMind and EyeWonder… the list goes on. The digital share of the marketing pie will only continue to grow of the next years, and the growth of RTB will be a major component of that expansion.

The industry’s growth is just one reason why it’s an exciting time to work at sociomantic, but the benefits are many. In no particular order, here’s my top ten:

1. A sense of urgency
Every day is a big day at sociomantic HQ. For us, as for any startup, hurdles and challenges abound. Things are changing and expanding constantly, and for a certain personality type, the intellectual stimulation provided by this constant flux is what makes working here worthwhile.

2. Personal Fulfillment
From my experience, this is something that is much harder to achieve from within a large corporation. Working for a startup, you see the immediate, visible results of what you personally have contributed to the company. And as the company grows, you get to witness not only the daily effects, but the lasting impact of something you helped to build.

3. Research and Innovation
There are a lot of companies in this space that offer good, smart marketing solutions. That means it’s our job to create and maintain even better, even smarter marketing solutions and deliver them with superior service if we want to stay in the game. Our company was born out of academic research, and research and innovation remains (and will remain) one of the central tenants of our business.

4. Fast-Paced Learning
I’m a full supporter of higher education, but I get the feeling that I’ve learned more in my past 1.5 years at sociomantic than I learned in four years of studies. I don’t think this is necessarily the fault of my schooling as much as a characteristic of the work environment here. I can safely say that I head into each weekend with the feeling that I have expanded my capabilities or knowledge in some way each week.

5. Diversity
Our solutions are aimed at cross-border, multi-national eCommerce companies. So it makes sense that the people developing our products should come from a global background. Internationality is a key tenant of our business design, and we strive to build a team that is as diverse as the markets we serve. There’s a certain sensibility about people  with what we call an “international mindset” — the open-mindedness and flexibility that comes from immersing yourself in new and different cultures. This mindset — and the diversity that breeds it — makes this an awesome work environment.

6. Freedom
This may seem a little surface-level at first, but I think it has a huge impact on day-to-day attitudes at a company. At sociomantic, we are given a lot of flexibility — whether it comes to the hours and days we choose to work, what music we play on the office speakers, or the clothes we wear at the desk, our managers create an environment where the team can feel comfortable and do their best work. After all, if you hire someone because of his or her individual attributes that set them apart from the other candidates, he or she should feel comfortable expressing those attributes in their place of work, right?

7. Growth
Working in a startup like sociomantic, you really get to feel the pulse of an industry that is truly alive — growing, expanding, and changing each day. And growth is a really exciting thing, no matter what industry or company you work in. Watching trend lines that are going up — whether they are measuring efficiency, revenue, full-time employees, data volumes, or happy customers — is something that is sure to excite every department in the company.

8. Responsibility and Influence
One of the key differences in working at a startup versus a large corporation is in the level of responsibility given to individual team members across the hierarchy. We operate with a relatively flat structure here — all team members get to contribute to major projects, even our interns. Because each project team gets a high level of responsibility, people really tend to take ownership of their projects, striving for excellence on all levels.

9. Impact and Disruption
It’s a great testament to our founders that they have managed to build a company which is truly rocking the existing European display ecosystem, and it’s an honor to be part of a team that is dedicated to helping our customers take advantage of the most sophisticated online marketing approaches available in the market today.

10. Our Team
I can truly say that I am proud to work with some of the best and brightest minds in the industry today. As mentioned in the previous point, our diversity in both cultures but also in experiences gives us a creativity and agility that makes us champion innovators. On the other hand, the high-level digital marketing experience of our founders, management, sales, and product teams means that we know the industry inside-out, and can anticipate and accomodate customer needs and desires. Plus, these folks are just plain fun to work with.

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

Are you looking for an unique, exciting, and challenging career in a dynamic and competitive industry? Maybe we’ve got a desk for you at the sociomantic office. Why not check out our Careers page and find out?

From my own experience, I can say that many online marketing companies have been struggling to report actions within 30 minutes, and there have been times in the past where I have spent hours waiting for an interface to show hardly any numbers. Within the last 10 years, few improvements to performance and scalability have hit the display market at large. Therefore I ask: where is the innovation? Several large corporations dominate online marketing, but so far even these giants haven’t committed to acceleration of online marketing actions in order to keep up with the speed of how personal communication travels through real-time channels like Twitter and Facebook. Finally we are starting to see major investments into this area from some parties, but the progress has been slow to arrive.

But even within the “real-time bidding” segment, some of the prominent players on both demand and supply side report their final numbers as many as 12 hours after things have happened. We as an industry should be offering our clients more.

Many companies are still using old relational database systems for these massive amounts of data, when obviously relational databases aren’t built for this type of work! Of course the ability to store, retrieve, and analyze massive data sets in mere milliseconds is by far the most expensive and critical part of Research and Development when talking about real-time marketing. But it seems that when it comes to these technology decisions, the decision makers at most companies in the space must be thinking, “Okay, I want to have a safe way of dealing with this topic.” They aren’t yet taking the risks that will be critical to truly move this industry forward.

The term “real-time” has been abused within online marketing by a lot of companies telling you they can offer real-time services. Usually this means you get reports after 90 minutes and then campaign changes are applied after another 30 minutes. I think a more appropriate term for true real-time advertising might be “stream-based marketing,” as it tells that information is traveling with the speed of the network — which at best can travel as fast as the speed of light! (And in the finance industry they are already investing in the fiber optic technology necessary to achieve such speeds.) Real-time means milliseconds – and in the future, even microseconds — not minutes or hours. I’m not suggesting that the industry change its terminology (it’s already far too confusing). I’m just calling for a halt to the misuse of the term “real-time” that is rampant within this industry.

So what does it mean to build stream-based online marketing technologies? Well, it basically means three things:

1. You want to see your spending milliseconds after purchase.
2. You want to start, stop, and optimize your campaigns in real-time in order to minimize losses and find out what works and what doesn’t without having to wait.
3. You want to react on external effects as quickly as possible.

From a technical standpoint, this means you need to provide instant feedback to the user as well as enabling the user to update his campaign settings and see the effects within milliseconds. We need to innovate to make this possible! We need to enhance the user experience and need to learn from other markets in order to make online marketing more sustainable and performant!

So, who’s up for the challenge? Can you handle real-time, for real?

If you’re interested in joining our team of innovators from around the globe to develop stream-based solutions that will help move the online marketing forward, check out our Careers page.

In January, we said that “real-time bidding” was the phrase on the lips of online marketers across Europe, and it seems like the case is certainly true in Germany this summer. On Tuesday we had the pleasure of participating on a panel at the sold-out Ad Traders Conference in Hamburg, an ad exchange-focused event put on by Adzine and ExchangeWire (two great sources for commentary on RTB in Europe, for those who are new to the game). We met and heard from many of the key players of the real-time display industry in Germany, where the topic – and the technology – is picking up more speed every day.

See our overview of the recent D3Con for more insight on the RTB scene in Germany.

It’s clear from the day’s discussions that Germany is a unique market in the European ecosystem — with more than 400 ad sales houses and numerous agency-owned ad networks, it seems perhaps an unlikely candidate for quick adoption of exchange-traded media. But despite these barriers, the participants emphasized that many of these existing businesses will need to adapt if they want to hold on to their shares of the display advertising pie. As advertisers continue to learn about the value that RTB can bring to their display strategy, they will demand real-time bidding technology and buying expertise, or find new partners who can supply it. Or as allegedly stated by Arndt Groth from Adconion, “reselling arbitrage and fairy dust is no business model for the future.”

The topic of the display market’s (over-)crowdedness was a frequent favorite from the presenters. In fact, the infamous Kawaja LUMAscape made such a frequent appearance that one attendee offered a cold beer for the first presenter who didn’t use the slide. In all seriousness, Matthias Pantke from Adscale reported that they are currently working with 26 retargeting companies – all the proof you need that players who want to stay in the display game will need to go beyond retargeting.

From the supply-side, there were reports of many challenges, but confirmation that the number of real-time buys is growing. According to Admeld’s Tom Jenen, more than half of their ads now sell via RTB. In Germany, the key challenges for the sell-side to overcome with German publishers are fears of commoditization and sales channel conflict. As discussed at the D3Con and across numerous editorials in the past months, some suggest that the private exchange model may be a stepping stone for many fearful publishers to gain their first RTB experience.

As the sell-side brings more supply into the exchanges, the challenge for demand-side platforms like sociomantic and agencies like mexad and YD World will be to bring what Improve Digital’s Joëlle Frijters described as a “critical mass” of competitive demand to the ecosystem. It was clear to everyone that the potential of the channel goes far beyond retargeting, but in Germany many companies have not yet moved past this first phase. This is of course a huge part of the sociomantic mission – pushing the boundaries of real-time display beyond remarketing, bringing the efficiencies of the RTB channel to highly efficient reach campaigns in order to help online marketers squeeze full-funnel value out of display.

All in all, there were some great questions and calls-to-action raised at this conference, and we are already looking to forward to continuing the discussion here on our blog, on Twitter (@sociomantic), and in September at ExchangeWire’s Ad Trader Summit in London and the dmexco in Cologne. Bis dann!

Intrigued by real-time bidding but still trying to figure out how it could work for your online shop? Don’t hesitate to email us your questions.

Several times last year, Terrence Kawaja (of LUMAscapes fame) gave a presentation he called “The Science-ification of media,” in which he outlined online media’s transition from a world of Don Draper-like “Mad Men” to the new world of “Math Men” – a world of digital advertising driven by real-time data and analytics. In case you missed it, here he is giving the presentation at Google Zeitgeist 2010:

With the influx of real-time bidding (RTB) and related technologies, we are seeing ever-larger pieces of the display pie being given the scientific treatment. Although we can see science-ification in many different aspects of display – from audience targeting to ad impression pricing – today we want to focus on little thing called creative.

Getting Creative, with Science

In display advertising, “creative” is the world used to describe the ad itself – whatever fills up those little ad boxes that dot almost every page on the web. You might also know it by the term “banner” – but display creative could also be a video, a survey, or even a game. While in the pre-digital days, marketers used A/B testing to find out which ad variation worked best, in digital advertising the testing and optimization (ie, choosing which ads to show) happens in real-time and on an individual user level.

So what does that mean, exactly?

Think of it as “Choose Your Own Adventure” advertising. It means that online ads can look different based on who’s looking at them, when they see them, in what environment, when they last saw one, and any number of other factors. It means that, in the same campaign, a consumer electronics company can show dramatically different ads to the 25-year-old sales rep from California checking out game scores on a rainy Wednesday evening and the retired teacher in Delaware scoping apple pie recipes on a breezy Sunday afternoon. Sounds great, sure, but how does it work?

Performance-based Optimization

Performance-based optimization is digital’s answer to A/B testing. It allows advertisers to test different ad variations based on results they deliver. Maybe the purple ads don’t perform as well as the lime green ones for a particular campaign. Maybe there are more clicks with the button on the top instead of the bottom. Performance-based optimization just shows the better performing ads more often. The difference from traditional A/B testing is that the selection process happens automatically, and – with the right technology partner – in real-time.

Dynamic Creative Optimization

In your basic performance-based optimization, the advertiser uploads a selection of pre-made variations of the creative. Then the system serving the ads (for example, sociomantic) discovers which ones work best and shows those ads more, making adjustments as the performance shifts.

If what I described above is your basic A/B(/C/D/E…) testing for digital, then dynamic creative optimization is it’s cooler, smarter big brother, multivariate testing. This means that each element of the creative — such as the copy, the image, the product, the offer, or the call-to-action – is an independent variable to be optimized.  By supplying the ad server (that’s us) with multiple options for each variable (eg, five sets of copy, seven possible images, four possible buttons, ten possible background colors), this allows for the automatic creation of dozens or even hundreds of ad variations.

What makes this practice especially potent is pairing it with audience targeting data. This allows advertisers to “micro-segment” their audience, serving up highly specialized ads to highly specific audience groups. And of course performance comes into play again here, but instead of optimizing across-the-board, each segment is optimized independently from the others.

Isn’t it amazing what machines can do these days?

DCO Best Practices: Remarketing and Dynamic Ad Personalization

We’ve said it before and we’ll surely say it again: remarketing is a tool that should already be in every eCommerce advertising toolbox. But finding the “right person” – one who has already visited your shop– is only valuable if you can show him or her the “right message.” When it comes to remarketing, dynamic creative optimization plays a pivotal role in the delivery of this message.

One of the coolest things about real-time bidding is that it allows you to reach an individual user at a singular point in time. In addition to impression-level pricing (pricing efficiency), RTB provides the opportunity to personalize each ad to the consumer who’ll be reading it. It’s the “micro-segmentation” discussed above, but down to the user level. And it drives serious results for online retailers.

It’s one thing to show a previous website visitor a generic creative with a “Free shipping” offer. It’s quite another thing to display the apartment rentals she checked out last week alongside offers for several similar flats in the same part of town. Of course personalization starts with the individual user’s previous behavior on your site, but the possibilities hardly stop there – we can also incorporate historical CRM data, deep shop analysis on product and category levels, real-time performance data, and more.

The moral of this advertising story is that science-ification of creative has brought the possibility of one-to-one marketing to the digital world. Now advertisers wishing to reach customers and potentials with individually tailored ads have that possibility at their fingertips via real-time bidding.

Many thanks to T. Kawaja for the use of his made-up term in this blog post.

If you’re interested in learning more about dynamic ad personalization or any of our other science-ified solutions, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

• What is real-time bidding (RTB)?
• Who are the market players?
• What sorts of revenues are possible via RTB?
• How does RTB fit into the world of Affiliate Marketing?

Also published today is an interview I did with Adzine’s Jens von Rauchhaupt which explains the sociomantic approach to social targeting, “Wir nennen das auch RTB-eCommerce.”

Thanks To Markus Kellermann and Jens von Rauchhaupt for the great interviews and the chance to speak on topics that we are quite fond of.

• careers in online marketing
• typical employers in our industry
• the different online marketing channels, as well as their advantages and disadvantages
• new trends in online marketing

Of course I talked a bit about social targeting and real-time bidding, and how these types of technologies are changing the world of display advertising in a big way. Hopefully I was able to excite some more people on this fascinating subject.

Thanks to Ralf Schindler and Tanja Fritzsche for organizing the event and the audience for listening and asking so many great questions. If anyone has any questions that were left unanswered, please feel free to get in touch.

Maciej to speak at adStandard conference, 4 March, Warsaw

I also wanted to note that Maciej Wyszynski, our new Managing Director CEE, will be speaking in Warsaw next week at the adStandard 2011 conference. If you speak Polish (or just like the way it sounds), you can check out this video he recorded as a teaser for the conference spot.

sociomantic is innovating in the rapidly growing world of real-time bidding (RTB).  RTB is a display advertising technology that enables advertisers to bid for individual ad impressions in real-time auctions, similar to the way advertisers bid for keywords in search marketing. The sociomantic social targeting logic allows advertisers to find to both previous website visitors and action-prone new users across the web via RTB. By custom-tailoring the ads presented to each user in real-time, sociomantic helps e-commerce advertisers achieve their desired cost-per-action (eCPA) to achieve their performance marketing goals.

Wyszynski brings to sociomantic his excellent competence in online marketing, internationalization, and customer relations. Most recently he has been working as an independent consultant, advising online marketing firms on entry into the Central and Eastern European markets. Just previous to his consultancy, Wyszynski was working for four years at zanox, a leading performance-based advertising network. As Executive Sales Director for the CEE region and Head of zanox Poland, he launched their Warsaw office in 2008, from which he built and led their CEE sales team. Prior to zanox he was working for eBay in Berlin.

“We are thrilled to bring our real-time bidding solution to advertisers in Central and Eastern Europe, and Maciej is truly the best man to lead our entry into these markets,” says Thomas Brandhoff, Managing Director of sociomantic. “Not only does he know these regions better than anyone else in online advertising, but his extensive experience in the performance marketing and e-commerce sectors guarantees that he will have a thorough understanding of how best to serve our clients.”

As Managing Director CEE, Wyszynski will be responsible for the region strategy, heading all sales and development efforts as well as overseeing and nurturing client relationships. His first efforts will be dedicated to educating CEE advertisers about the benefits of RTB, and he begins this task by speaking on the topic of the “individual user profile” at the adStandard 2011 conference, 3-4 March at the Businessman Institute in Warsaw.

“It’s extremely motivating being part of the sociomantic team, who have innovated state-of-the-art online marketing technologies within remarketing and real-time bidding, two methodologies which are revolutionizing display advertising,” says Wyszynski. “Never before was it possible to serve the right ad at the right time to the right user in such a precise way, generating higher the conversion rates, incremental sales, and leads for our advertisers.“

About sociomantic labs:

sociomantic labs, creators of Europe’s leading real-time bidding platform for performance advertisers, are one of the first demand-side vendors to bring this revolutionary display advertising technology to the European market. The company has developed a groundbreaking social targeting solution to help advertisers dramatically improve the performance of their online display marketing. The Berlin-based bootstrapped firm was born out of the combined expertise of its founding members in the areas of online marketing, scalable computing, and social network analysis.

Learn more at sociomantic.com

# # #

For inquiries please contact:

Email

sociomantic labs GmbH
Münzstraße 19
10178 BERLIN
Germany

+49 (0) 30 5015 4701

Resources:

German Press Release

Polish Press Release

Maciej Wyszynski Headshot

sociomantic labs Logo

BERLIN, Germany, February 9, 2011 – sociomantic labs, Europe’s leading provider of real-time social targeting for advertisers, today announced the appointment of Lothar Krause as Vice President Sales.

Krause brings to sociomantic his extensive experience in the world of online marketing. He comes to the company from his position at zalando, one of Germany’s largest online retailers, where as Head of Online Marketing he was responsible for the acquisition of new customers and driving purchases across all online marketing channels. Prior to his work at zalando, Krause was working for more than four years as an Executive Sales Director at zanox, where he had the opportunity to build and lead sales teams for one of the online marketing industry’s leading performance-based networks.

As Vice President Sales, Krause will lead sociomantic’s penetration of the European market as the company continues its rapid expansion. In particular, his sales team will promote the adoption of sociomantic’s social targeting technology by Europe’s top eCommerce players. Krause joins sociomantic founders Thomas Brandhoff, Thomas Nicolai, and Lars Kirchhoff as a member of the executive team.

“Lothar is one of the most experienced and networked online marketers in Germany,” says Thomas Brandhoff, Managing Director of sociomantic labs. “He has deep insight into the latest state-of-the-art marketing mechanisms across all channels. His knowledge and leadership experience will be vital components in building teams that can effectively communicate the value of our social targeting technology for online marketers.”

“I’m looking forward to the new challenge at sociomantic, who are operating in the most dynamic and interesting online marketing areas of the moment: performance oriented targeting and real-time bidding,” says Krause. “In my previous work, I have had the opportunity to review many advertising technology vendors, and sociomantic has developed a truly groundbreaking technology that delivers notable performance lift for online advertisers.”

About sociomantic labs

sociomantic labs, creators of Europe’s leading social targeting technology, are one of the first demand-side platforms to bring real-time bidding to the German market. The company has developed a groundbreaking ad targeting solution to help advertisers dramatically improve the performance of their online display marketing. The Berlin-based bootstrapped firm was born out of the combined expertise of its founding members in the areas of online marketing, scalable computing, and social network analysis.

Learn more at sociomantic.com

# # #

For inquiries please contact:

press @ sociomantic.com
sociomantic labs GmbH
Münzstraße 19
10178 Berlin
T +49 (0) 30 30 87 46 13

If you haven’t already, head over to the site and have a look to get the inside scoop on what we’re up to and where we’re headed.

We’re also excited to announce that we will be heading to London on March 3 to attend ExchangeWire’s The Data Economy conference. From the event page:

ExchangeWire is assembling the European buy and sell side together for in-depth analysis and debate around the area of data in the European display market.

The Data Economy is the first dedicated European conference focused on data usage in display. The event is aimed at agencies, advertisers, ad traders, ad nets, ad exchanges, ad-tech vendors and publishers.

The full-day conference will look to discuss and debate the evolving European data economy – with an emphasis on how media buyers and sellers can gain from having better insights, valuation, control, trading strategies and data management.

This event is surely an essential one for anyone operating in automated display and data in the European market.

We’ll be sticking around London on Friday, too, so if you’re a London-based advertiser interested in learning about our real-time social targeting platform OR a potential data, technology, or supply-side partner interested in a discussion, please shoot us an email and we can set an appointment.

I hope we can look forward to seeing many of you there. Bis dann!

And if you think something, just wait ’til you check out his native javascript prowess!

May you be inspired… to dance, and to code for a more awesome advertising future.