Programmatic Advertising 2.0: Data as a raw material

By way of introduction, on Wednesday at the Zurich Hub Adello Country Manager Sandor Laczko expressed his conviction that programmatic advertising will completely reshape the Swiss advertising market in the next twelve months. Automated ad delivery is therefore the most interesting field in the digital value chain - and at the same time the biggest challenge due to its complexity. At Adello, machine learning is used to enable the efficient processing of huge amounts of data and to continuously improve the performance of campaigns.

Rasoul Jalali, General Manager of Uber, then showed why data is the fuel of the American ride-hailing giant - and not just for amusing and rather peripheral sociological studies ("where are the best hotspots to meet other singles"). As an example, he demonstrated the new UberPool product, which makes it possible for multiple passengers with different destinations to share the same vehicle. The Uber algorithm ensures that detours are minimized and operations are efficient - and that Uber vehicles will increasingly shape the Swiss street scene in the future.

Shaping the street scene is also the focus of Clear Channel. Marketing Director Oliver Schönfeld used examples to illustrate that the programmatic revolution is also taking place in out-of-home advertising. "Mobile users pay much more attention to posters," says Schönfeld - and, together with Adello founder Mark Forster, he also presented an innovative product which, by incorporating mobile advertising and local user data, is able to increase the effectiveness of poster campaigns not only by the 5-10 percent estimated by the public, but by an astonishing 36 percent.

But how do you refine the most important raw material of the 21st century? Dr. Michael Prim, head of Adello's Data Science team, gave insights into the daily work with data and showed parallels to his former work in the field of particle physics. The twelve-member data science and analyst team deals with "machine learning", "high performance computing", "data mining" and above all: with the algorithm that manages to fish out the appropriate data sets from over 10 billion per day in fractions of a second. This has resulted in various patents and award-winning mobile advertising products from Adello, which are managed by around fifty employees around the globe.

The shopping app "Bring!" also uses user data traces for targeted marketing. Co-founder Dominic Mehr demonstrated the potential of the app, which is already used by hundreds of thousands of shoppers, for native advertising, and how the Heineken brand can be made palatable to users who put "beer" on their list, and which also regularly reminds them to buy their favorite brand again.

Finally, Sandor Laczko asked the experts about the reasons why programmatic is still in its infancy in Switzerland compared to other countries. Manfred Strobl, CEO of Mediaschneider, explained that in Switzerland, publishers are reluctant to use programmatic for various reasons. Likewise, it has not yet become established on the agency and customer side due to the technical requirements.

Mark Forster answered the question of how the requirements were changing on the one hand with the fact that the handling of data first requires an understanding of the business model in order to derive KPIs from it, which then have to be used for data-driven optimization. This fundamentally changes the value chain. He pointed out that in the U.S., CIOs and data science teams are often the main contacts when it comes to programmatic - in other words, less and less the advertising or marketing departments. Michael Schönfeld explained how programmatic is currently being discussed very intensively, especially in traditional media such as OOH. Dr. Michael Prim explained how complex data-driven technology is, but how creativity in implementation would continue to play an important role in the end.

The next mobile trade event will take place in the fall of 2015. The invitation will be sent to all subscribers of the Adello newsletter.