Tag: #OMDdmexco

OMD EMEA’s Marcus Johnson and Lyvia Aylward-Davies were on the ground at DMEXCO. Following their predictions pre-event, post-event they reflected on the key themes coming out of the conference.

Change of the human mindset in media

People remain the best assets to building, innovating and deploying ad tech solutions. That being said, we need to ensure that the correct human craft is being applied, especially in an environment where media is changing but the technology isn’t. 4C insights have developed their platform to seamlessly integrate Digital and TV in an era of video eruption on social media. Technology has long been able to solve this problem, but humans remain the biggest barrier to change and default to running two separate channels in parallel.

Creative Experience

Media owners and publishers at DMEXCO, reinforced their ambition to extract more creative value for advertisers. Publishers like Teads believe in their platforms and are not necessarily looking for a tech innovation to enhance their offering. Instead, Teads are focused on providing creative collaborations with clients, to help users achieve a better brand experience within the creative units. OMD EMEA is able to support our clients with unlocking more creative support, by leveraging our holding group’s negotiating position to extract maximum value.

New contextual obsession

In a time where data-driven audience targeting is seen as the best route to bringing the art and science together and achieving optimal media efficiency; a legacy approach has withstood the test of time. Contextual targeting has continuously been a crucial way to align specific user interests, with a client relevant brand proposition. However, scaling audience segments has also been a continuous challenge. DMEXCO highlighted some of the key opportunities that have emerged, mainly as a result of restricted 3^rd party audiences and limited gateways to accessing 2^nd party publisher data. As these audience segment shrink, contextual targeting has grown especially in the area of channel creators on YouTube and the wider adoption of video content.

Fearlessly protect your product

Twitch CRO, Walker Jacobs, was interviewed by Omnicom’s very own Innovation expert Chris Denson, who extracted a very memorable sound bite. When pressed on why Twitch takes so much pride in being a streamer first platform, Walker made the point of the most successful platforms, in terms of gaining consumer time, have stayed loyal to their principles. Netflix and Fortnite are current champions for consumer time but none of these platforms have adopted ads. Twitch has successfully integrated advertising by sticking to their streamer first principles and remain a model to imitate, as these platforms advance their commercial decisions.

Marcus Johnson is executive director and Lyvia Aylward-Davies is digital director at OMD EMEA

This being my first visit to DMEXCO I had been warned of the scale of it and the volume of information available so I was prepared to leave feeling overwhelmed and with my head buzzing full of new information.

I was excited to learn as much as I could in the 2 days that I was there and I wanted to make the most out of it; the ad tech industry is vast and ever-changing and I was relishing the thought of seeing all the companies I was due a catch up with in one place and leave with new information, new ideas and new areas to explore. I was on a mission to delve into as much of what was on offer as possible and I wanted to leave with some serious stats relating to how many stages I visited, how many tech companies I engaged with, how many talks, seminars and panels I attended; I covered 5 stages, 8 panels, 2 seminars and countless circuits of the multiple halls housing representatives from DSPs, SSPs, DMPS, CMPS and on and on and on, making my most impressive stat the 40,000 steps I walked over the 2 days.

It’s easy to hone in on the areas that come up most frequently in my day to day role, the themes that I was drawn towards related to ad quality and consumer perceptions of advertising, data usage in a privacy focused world and ultimately how much is  programmatic going to change as tracking capabilities reduce across browsers. There was a lot of focus on publishers and how significantly their ad revenue is affected when precise user targeting is diminished – calling on the industry that it is our job to educate consumers on the importance of advertising for funding the free internet.

I left with the message that tech companies were reminding us of the importance of engaging consumers with a value exchange. It’s funny because some people fear conferences like DMEXCO because they consider it one big sales pitch after another and the last session of day one by YEXT was a polished presentation demonstrating their on-site search technology. The product looked great, using the DMEXCO site itself to demonstrate just how well their tech could improve the search results and user experience when navigating the site. It was a sales pitch but following the presentation they offered something back to the audience, a full 30 minute original musical, with catchy songs, a dramatic story-line and a Broadway cast including Nick Choksi who performed in Jersey Boys. It was highly entertaining and a welcome relief after a long day of serious subjects like GDPR, ad fraud and the never-ending brand safety saga. We had sat through their sales pitch and were rewarded with a great show at the end – a very fair value exchange in my opinion and the most memorable sales pitch of the day and my lasting thought of the conference.

Amongst all the doom and gloom of the problems we are facing in the digital marketing space, many of these issues are related to regaining consumer trust. Yes we need to get better at gaining explicit consent to use consumers data for advertising and we need to get internet users on board by providing them with a rich internet experience without ads that frustrate them, and a value exchange can be a nice way to do that. Not everyone has something tangible to exchange but we can all be a little bit more creative in finding ways to offer the user something enjoyable; and what better way than lifting someone’s spirits is there to gain trust?

Lina Angelides is head of programmatic at OMD UK.

The 2019 DMEXCO expo and conference coincides with the pivotal journey of our clients taking more ownership of their ad tech and data echo system. One of our main objectives in DMEXCO will be to explore cutting edge solutions that will amplify our proprietary agency platforms and ultimately help our clients to accelerate their digital goals.

We predict that the big players will come out in full force to showcase their big data solutions in a post-GDPR and data privacy era. We’ve seen the big tech players (Facebook, Google and Apple) enforce heavy restrictions on cookies, 3rd party data, and individual user logs. We have also started to see a gradual reintroduction of solutions that previously benefited from these now restricted components, such as multi-touch attribution; re-emerge as GDPR friendly cleanroom solutions, such as Google Ads Data Hub and Amazon Marketing Cloud. We expect company delegates on the expo floor, as well as conference speakers, to give clarity on how they will adapt their support for a cookie-less world. We also predict that platform integration will be a big talking point, especially with data management platforms (DMP) and demand-side platforms (DSP) answering to how they will overcome the big players extending their walled gardens, resulting in making addressable data match rates more difficult to achieve.

Stay tuned to hear more from OMD EMEA throughout DMEXCO and look out for our post-event recap next week.

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We sent Piers Drake, our Head of eCommerce, and Chelsea Horncastle, our Senior Product Innovation Manager and AI/AR specialist, to Cologne to check-out DMEXCO 2018. Here they discuss what they found:

Piers Drake: So, Chelsea, that was a busy couple of days; my Fitbit tells me we covered 15miles lapping the halls of the Koelnmesse! Other than aching feet, the overall theme that jumped out for me was one of retrenching in these post-GDPR times. ‘Take CARE’ was the DMEXCO tag line, and every other booth had the words ‘Safety’ and ‘Transparency’ written large on their displays, with a somewhat apologetic tone!

Chelsea Horncastle:  On top of which the keynotes were frequently referencing the disruption of data, gender inequality and the bleak outlook for retail! Quite negative thematically, but the atmosphere was actually very optimistic and buzzy, particularly when it came to the application of newer tech to consumer problems. And the halls were absolutely packed!

PD: Definitely. This was a transitional year for the industry I think. For me personally, the most interesting and positive stuff was when we dug below the surface and asked the exhibitors what they had coming down the pipeline for 2019. I think we found the seeds of some very cool tech and new approaches, but these weren’t always obvious from browsing the displays.

CH: The narrative that kept coming up with vendors, Google and AWS for example, was getting the appropriate infrastructure in place now to take advantage of the vast amounts of data – video, images, and more – already being collected. Also making voice and visual search technology more accessible, and using it to free up people’s time rather than for it’s own sake. I think the story of the next 12 months will be baby steps around implementation of these technologies at scale.

PD:  One exhibitor that brought this to life for me was Oath, who were demoing their AR content via Ryot Studio and HoloLens. Beyond the novelty of playing with virtual Smurfs (!), crucially they were talking confidently about the need to unite the content and publishing with an ‘insights engine’ of data in the background; what I’d call an end-to-end approach.

CH: Yep. The tech is impressive, but we need to move beyond the ‘cool technology’ angle and take it back to consumer insights – what are our goals with using these new formats and how do they help real consumers? And, AI can generate insights from big datasets, which is one of the most actionable ‘today’ applications.

PD: Thinking real-world applications, I was excited by the computer vision and ‘visual search’ tools we saw from Google, Microsoft and a number of startups. The Google Lens demo was particularly good because they were emphasising the practical uses, for example where you can identify plants or shoes or paintings with a tap, but then the UI drives you directly to other Google tools such as Shopping, Maps or Translate for the next steps. It’s going to be a great timesaver AND drive business results.

CH: Google Lens is great! On the B2B side, we saw Microsoft analysing the faces of people walking past their stand and estimating their genders, ages and moods – all in real time. This kind of real time analysis of video is a potential gamechanger for lots of industries, retail in particular.

PD: Yes, let’s talk retail! eCommerce vendors were dotted around the show and my main takeaway was that online retail is no longer an awkward cousin of digital! Everybody is talking about commerce outcomes, trying to explicitly link investment to sales (at last!)

CH: Ha! eCommerce seems much more mainstream this year and I heard a lot about AI-led personalisation. Salesforce were talking about ‘Shoptimism’ and the benefits of AI-driven recommendations on online stores, with their data showing a 5x transaction value from that.

PD: Whether it’s via human curation, AI or a hybrid – recommendations and personalised experiences are a key area where rivals can offer something different to Amazon. They had a sizeable presence at the show but were characteristically reluctant to discuss their plans. The explosive growth of their Amazon Advertising platform was a frequent topic of conversation with third party tool providers like Kenshoo, who told me that Amazon Search is growing at 10x the rate of Google Search.

CH: From my side, I was surprised that Alexa was invisible among the other AI assistant demos on show. Meanwhile, you said eBay had some interesting ideas when you spoke to them?

PD: I think eBay is one to watch as they are launching new tools and trying to shift perceptions of it as a ‘second hand’ eCommerce platform – their data is that over 80% of product sold is brand new. They already have an upper-funnel proposition and potentially it could evolve into a brand-friendly ‘end-to-end’ platform that offers more control over the shopping experience than Amazon.

CH: Let’s talk social for a moment. Facebook, LinkedIn and Snapchat were all there. Snapchat was the most low-key of these, mainly letting the product do the talking. Facebook were primarily featuring Instagram and Blueprint, showing some neat upgrades to IG Stories with more animation and motion.

PD: Social was a little low-key all round. I was surprised by the lack of messaging platforms around DMEXCO given the predictions of how ‘conversational UI’ was going to be big by now. And social commerce was invisible. We’re out of time unfortunately, so what was your highlight overall?

CH: Overall, it was a demo that sparked my imagination. That is the best part of attending conferences like Dmexco. This demo used image recognition to create a connected car experience, where it could understand what people see as they drive past buildings giving additional information or actions as needed. The idea is still very new, but it allows us to think about what the future could look like. And, yours?

PD: It’s slightly off-the-wall, but one of the most crowded and best-looking stands was a replica of a general store with tins, bottles and bags of pasta on display, with ‘shopkeepers.’ The popularity of it really captured for me why the eCommerce story is becoming about joining online up with physical retail – because despite all the info available online, people love browsing real shops….and going to trade shows like DMEXCO!

We sent Piers Drake, our Head of eCommerce, and Chelsea Horncastle, our Senior Product Innovation Manager and AI/AR specialist, to Cologne to check-out DMEXCO 2018. Here they discuss what they found:

Piers Drake: So, Chelsea, that was a busy couple of days; my Fitbit tells me we covered 15miles lapping the halls of the Koelnmesse! Other than aching feet, the overall theme that jumped out for me was one of retrenching in these post-GDPR times. ‘Take CARE’ was the DMEXCO tag line, and every other booth had the words ‘Safety’ and ‘Transparency’ written large on their displays, with a somewhat apologetic tone!

Chelsea Horncastle:  On top of which the keynotes were frequently referencing the disruption of data, gender inequality and the bleak outlook for retail! Quite negative thematically, but the atmosphere was actually very optimistic and buzzy, particularly when it came to the application of newer tech to consumer problems. And the halls were absolutely packed!

PD: Definitely. This was a transitional year for the industry I think. For me personally, the most interesting and positive stuff was when we dug below the surface and asked the exhibitors what they had coming down the pipeline for 2019. I think we found the seeds of some very cool tech and new approaches, but these weren’t always obvious from browsing the displays.

CH: The narrative that kept coming up with vendors, Google and AWS for example, was getting the appropriate infrastructure in place now to take advantage of the vast amounts of data – video, images, and more – already being collected. Also making voice and visual search technology more accessible, and using it to free up people’s time rather than for it’s own sake. I think the story of the next 12 months will be baby steps around implementation of these technologies at scale.

PD:  One exhibitor that brought this to life for me was Oath, who were demoing their AR content via Ryot Studio and HoloLens. Beyond the novelty of playing with virtual Smurfs (!), crucially they were talking confidently about the need to unite the content and publishing with an ‘insights engine’ of data in the background; what I’d call an end-to-end approach.

CH: Yep. The tech is impressive, but we need to move beyond the ‘cool technology’ angle and take it back to consumer insights – what are our goals with using these new formats and how do they help real consumers? And, AI can generate insights from big datasets, which is one of the most actionable ‘today’ applications.

PD: Thinking real-world applications, I was excited by the computer vision and ‘visual search’ tools we saw from Google, Microsoft and a number of startups. The Google Lens demo was particularly good because they were emphasising the practical uses, for example where you can identify plants or shoes or paintings with a tap, but then the UI drives you directly to other Google tools such as Shopping, Maps or Translate for the next steps. It’s going to be a great timesaver AND drive business results.

CH: Google Lens is great! On the B2B side, we saw Microsoft analysing the faces of people walking past their stand and estimating their genders, ages and moods – all in real time. This kind of real time analysis of video is a potential gamechanger for lots of industries, retail in particular.

PD: Yes, let’s talk retail! eCommerce vendors were dotted around the show and my main takeaway was that online retail is no longer an awkward cousin of digital! Everybody is talking about commerce outcomes, trying to explicitly link investment to sales (at last!)

CH: Ha! eCommerce seems much more mainstream this year and I heard a lot about AI-led personalisation. Salesforce were talking about ‘Shoptimism’ and the benefits of AI-driven recommendations on online stores, with their data showing a 5x transaction value from that.

PD: Whether it’s via human curation, AI or a hybrid – recommendations and personalised experiences are a key area where rivals can offer something different to Amazon. They had a sizeable presence at the show but were characteristically reluctant to discuss their plans. The explosive growth of their Amazon Advertising platform was a frequent topic of conversation with third party tool providers like Kenshoo, who told me that Amazon Search is growing at 10x the rate of Google Search.

CH: From my side, I was surprised that Alexa was invisible among the other AI assistant demos on show. Meanwhile, you said eBay had some interesting ideas when you spoke to them?

PD: I think eBay is one to watch as they are launching new tools and trying to shift perceptions of it as a ‘second hand’ eCommerce platform – their data is that over 80% of product sold is brand new. They already have an upper-funnel proposition and potentially it could evolve into a brand-friendly ‘end-to-end’ platform that offers more control over the shopping experience than Amazon.

CH: Let’s talk social for a moment. Facebook, LinkedIn and Snapchat were all there. Snapchat was the most low-key of these, mainly letting the product do the talking. Facebook were primarily featuring Instagram and Blueprint, showing some neat upgrades to IG Stories with more animation and motion.

PD: Social was a little low-key all round. I was surprised by the lack of messaging platforms around DMEXCO given the predictions of how ‘conversational UI’ was going to be big by now. And social commerce was invisible. We’re out of time unfortunately, so what was your highlight overall?

CH: Overall, it was a demo that sparked my imagination. That is the best part of attending conferences like Dmexco. This demo used image recognition to create a connected car experience, where it could understand what people see as they drive past buildings giving additional information or actions as needed. The idea is still very new, but it allows us to think about what the future could look like. And, yours?

PD: It’s slightly off-the-wall, but one of the most crowded and best-looking stands was a replica of a general store with tins, bottles and bags of pasta on display, with ‘shopkeepers.’ The popularity of it really captured for me why the eCommerce story is becoming about joining online up with physical retail – because despite all the info available online, people love browsing real shops….and going to trade shows like DMEXCO!

With September upon us, it means it’s time for DMEXCO again. Starting in 2009, this will mark the 10^th year for the digital marketing and advertising annual trade fair and conference held in Cologne, Germany. With over 1,100 exhibitors from 39 different countries, 100,000 sqm of expo space and over 570 speakers, there is a lot to cover in only two days.

Don’t worry, though, we will be tweeting key takeaways throughout the event @OMD_EMEA.

So, as we prepare to attend, we have had a thorough look at what will be presented at DMEXCO 2018. The big themes this year are artificial intelligence (conversational and image recognition in particular), eCommerce, immersive experiences (VR, AR, MR) and blockchain. These technologies offer exciting new opportunities, changing the dynamics of how brands and people interact.

Enhancing brand interactions.

The adoption of voice assistants, immersive experiences and image recognition technologies are fuelling increased consumer expectations. 72% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and 66% are likely to switch brands if they feel treated like a number not an individual. But, they also offer brands opportunities to create completely new experiences to delight and engage with their consumers. Industry leaders and brands alike will discuss how these technologies have empowered consumers (Age of the Costumer) and what adoption means for brands from new search behaviours (Voice-First – How Voice Affects your Future Brand) to messaging as a media channel (The Power of Messaging as a Marketing Channel).

Powering agile commerce.

Ways in which digital retail and eCommerce are shifting the landscape for brands will be a key theme of DMEXCO. Speakers from the likes of Amazon and eBay will share how the worlds of retail sales and marketing have collided, opening up new opportunities to fully connect-up digital businesses across media and commerce. Additionally video, transportation and blockchain are changing shopping behaviours in new ways. Creating a ‘sticky’ consumer experience that balances consistency with personalisation is key – another topic that will be explored.

Driving disruption.

We are only at the beginning of understanding how these technologies are going to transform everything from the way we work to how we shop or spend our free time. We will be exploring different exhibitors, from those preparing for connected-vehicle experiences to others pushing the boundaries of interactive advertising, and points of view from around the world.

Stay tuned. Follow us on Twitter for live updates.