The IAB Europe Chairman introduces the key forces transforming the digital landscape and the strategies that can help businesses to adapt and thrive:
• The impact of regulation and public policy
• The importance of continual education and employee engagement
• The potential for publishers able to evolve their proposition
• The new technologies vying for a role in the digital ecosystem
• The prospects for the future of digital advertising

How did we get to this pivotal point for the digital ecosystem – and where are we headed next? GroupM’s Advisor and former Chief Digital Officer, Rob Norman is one of the most sought-after industry voices on the future of digital. He explores the nature of the challenges that digital advertising now faces – and how the industry can adapt to deliver continued growth.

The latest research from IHS Markit shows digital advertising delivering 90% of all advertising industry growth – and not just through its most high-profile players. IHS Markit’s Senior Director Daniel Knapp reveals key findings of the research, including signs of important emerging opportunities in the digital ecosystem.

Forget pizza and mandolino. Discover Italy and Italians through the eyes of the country’s first internet company. How Italy’s favourite email provider and most read web portals have seen the country change in the past 20 years. And how we can forsee macro-trends through data and address the Italian consumers

Not content to depend on digital advertising for revenues, progressive-minded publishers are evolving their business models and opening up whole new revenue streams. SVP Blockchain Ventures Anne Goodman hosts a panel exploring different strategies for growth: from eCommerce to advertising alliances and native video.

From invisible background role to a vital driver of marketing and business strategy: the Data Protection Officer epitomises the transformation taking place in digital marketing. Our speaker will explore the key challenges in data protection, and the value that it provides for businesses through a more strategic approach.

Major brands and media agencies have swiftly come to depend on programmatic buying for the delivery of display ads. However, automated advertising can only reach its full potential through the most engaging format available on digital platforms: video.

While numerous studies proved a direct link between the exposure time and the rate of ad memorization, brands want to exceed the visibility standards applied to display ads to maximise the impact of their messages. Tradelab’s CEO Yohann Dupasquier will explain in detail the functioning of its piloting solutions of advertising exposition duration. Through a case-study, the programmatic platform will present how to generate a significant uplift of advertising attractiveness through cumulative exposure time, thus proving that a qualitative approach favouring useful reach offers display visibility and efficiency criteria comparable to the ones of video.

Giovanni Buttarelli is a prominent campaigner for modern and progressive data privacy regulation for the EU in the digital era. Appearing via video link, he answers questions on the likely impact of such regulation. This session will explore the key regulatory challenges and incentives facing the digital advertising industry, the impact on advertisers, agencies and publishers, and how the behaviour of companies and consumers and the digital ecosystem might change as a result.

Members of IAB Europe’s GDPR Implementation Group (GIG) will discuss the uptake of the Transparency & Consent Framework that helps publishers, advertisers, and technology companies comply with key elements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Which provisions in the General Data Protection Regulation are the most relevant to digital publishers and advertisers? What is the guidance of the European Data Protection Board (former Article 29 Working party) on these topics? This training session, provided by IAB Europe will provide insight into applying the GDPR to the digital advertising supply chain.

As new creative content and ways of thinking evolve, advertisers have responded quickly by merging new tech with old ad formats. But you can’t fit square pegs into round holes, and you can’t depend on old toolkits to measure the success of new mediums. Building brand has changed in the digital era. In this talk, Brad Smallwood, Vice President Marketing Science, Facebook will discuss what’s next in measurement and explain why marketers can’t rely on old techniques in order to track the performance of new ad formats, channels and technologies. This session will explore what should be in a marketer’s measurement toolbox today and why it’s not possible to match old measurements to new realities. Ultimately, there can be no half measures in the digital world.

MIXX Awards Europe & IAB Europe Research Awards Ceremony

The world’s second-largest luxury goods business spends over half of its advertising budget online. Franck Sineau explains why Richemont is committed to digital platforms, how it uses data, and how it will evolve its approach as the digital landscape transforms.

Following up on the plenary session from DAY 1 on IAB Europe’s GDPR Transparency & Consent Framework this training session presented by IAB Europe will offer the opportunity to ask any questions you may still have regarding the implementation of the Framework from the Global Vendor List to ensuring the best possible User Experience.

Across virtually all product and service categories and segments, the conventional source of differentiation and value is shifting from high-barrier-to-entry, capital-intensive, owned-and-operated supply chains, to low-barrier-to-entry, capital-flexible, leased and rented supply chains – and value extraction, historically managed through cumbersome, third-party processes, is now being accomplished via direct relationships between brands and consumers. CEO Randall Rothenberg details IAB’s groundbreaking research into the new world of Direct Brands – and their implications for media, advertising, and marketing.

Ever wonder where brand love comes from? So did Oath. Oath has found out by looking at the many underlying drivers of brand love in our latest global consumer research study. We all know what love feels like, and we know getting your consumers to love your brand is more important today than ever before.  But WHY does a consumer love a brand? What does that relationship look like?

Blockchain technology promises to bring new levels of automation to the booking and delivery of digital ads – and provide new levels of traceability and transparency in the process. Is a new technology the solution that can increase trust in digital advertising? Or will it complicate the supply chain further still? Ciaran O’Kane of Exchange Wire hosts a panel of ad tech experts putting the future of the digital supply chain under the spotlight.

The creative canvas of outdoor media promises new levels of digital engagement – but can brands combine the capacity for personalised targeting with visual impact at scale?

The phenomenon of digital transformation is bringing with it a radical change in the digital experience strategies and approaches being deployed by businesses. Consequently, there is a need for concrete solutions that are aligned with the rapid transformation taking place and that address the new needs and habits of digital users.

SHAA’s response is to deploy interactivity as a key tool for injecting new value into digital experiences. We aim to give users the opportunity to experience dynamic, highly personalized content and to this end have developed a broad range of interactive solutions that generate high levels of engagement and offer maximum levels of performance.

Brand Safety may have beeen an overused phrase in 2017, but ensuring brands have safe experiences online has arguably hit its inflection point. Reacting to brands need for transparency the IAB introduced the ads.txt standard. On top of that there have been serious concerns about contextual advertising and a commitment from publishers and technology companies to demonstrate compliance with best practice. So what have we learned and what does the future hold for Brand confidence?

In an increasingly automated and AI-driven media landscape, businesses face a fundamental choice: they can focus on efficiencies and push human beings into the background, or they can leverage the extra capacity that technology provides to empower their people. Ad Operations training consultant Rob Beeler is joined by Hossein Houssaini of Havas and Richard Dunmall of MediaIQ. Together they explore the talent development strategies that are securing a role for intuition, empathy and humanity in the media supply chain.

Xaxis shares an exclusive preview into the initial results of their pan European research carried out in partnership with IAB Europe on the state of Artificial Intelligence. What are the current expectations, challenges and future of Artificial Intelligence for organisations within our advertising ecosystem? Is it the next industrial revolution? Will all humans be replaced by robots? How much myth vs reality is true of the current uses of AI? These questions will be answered and more by our resident EMEA AI expert, Silvia Sparry, EMEA Operations MD, Xaxis.

Online advertising is the most accountable medium marketers have ever had.  It also brings frustrations. The advertiser view panel will include be a frank discussion of what works well, and what could be improved, independently moderated by Andrew Buckman, Managing Director EMEA at Sublime Skinz.

The rise of digital giants has been facilitated by their clever business models which leverage personal data of their users and turn it into highly personalized online ads. Yet, the seeming permanence of those models, once taken for granted, is increasingly put into question on a number of fronts. On the one hand, the ability to find secondary uses to the networked infrastructures as well as the data harvested in the process of selling online advertising has allowed big tech firms to expand far beyond their original business  model and start offering services such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence; those services tend to offer much higher profit margins than online advertising (which itself is becoming more expensive due to higher costs of traffic acquisition). On the other hand, growing concerns about the negative social consequences of data extractivist models embraced by digital platforms (e.g. the ease with which fake news proliferates online) have pushed tech firms to consider other ways of monetizing their services, including subscription or usage fees for the services they offer; governments, on recognizing that tech platforms perform functions akin to those of utility firms, might eventually help subsidize some of those charges and usage fees, as long as it helps decrease the velocity and power of fake news. What are the social ramifications of this shift away from online advertising as the dominant force shaping the development of digital giants? And what would happen to many of their users’ online and offline activities that digital giants have helped to subsidize, at whatever political and social cost?

The importance of digital advertising to business growth will only increase – but that doesn’t make the future of digital advertising any more predictable. To thrive, businesses must embrace the continual disruption that is characteristic of the digital landscape. Brand strategist Amelia Torode examines the practical changes that they can make, in order to do so: not just executing digital transformation programmes, but building business strategies, workplace cultures and supplier relationships that are optimised for on-going change.