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 foresee 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.

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.

In 2017 for the first time the share of digital media in global ad spending (41%) exceeded TV (35%)*. Digital and tv jointly cover 76% of global ad spending and are most powerful channels in marketing communication. Now, for the first time, it is possible to measure them in one study using single-source panel and the same methodology. Let us introduce our cross-media measurement for online, TV and radio, that is able to reveal the consumer journey with content & ads consumption patterns enriched by the online shopping behaviours.

*according to MAGNA / IPG.

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.

During the presentation Tim van der Bilt, MD Dentsu Aegis NL, and Josje Zwinkels, Head of Programmatic for Microsoft EMEA, will highlight 5 concrete examples of how they went about the centralization: (1) central reporting and dashboarding, (2) supply & deal management, (3) central data, (4) transparency & control, and (5) an owned Exchange. The latter example – the DAN Exchange – is a solution for advertisers that opens up the complex programmatic supply chain. Through the exchange DAN can deliver better inventory quality, 100% transparency, efficiency in deal set-up and management, control on brand safety, and furthermore a GDPR-compliant connection to end users.

The promise of the GDPR was that it would lay down tougher rules that gave consumers more transparency and control over how their personal data were processed, including for advertising, and those tougher rules would enable them to engage online confidently. Companies could continue to create new, innovative services, and advertising could continue to provide a revenue stream to European media.  But on the eve of GDPR enforcement, the goalposts seem to be moving.  Some regulators and civil society organisations consider that transparency & control are no longer enough – that consumers need to have choices made for them, lest they make the wrong ones.  How do we preserve users’ freedom to decide how they want to consume media and other online services in an environment where daily revelations about misuse of people’s data by bad actors put increasing pressure on policymakers to lay down ever-more-onerous restrictions on the responsible players?

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.

In a world of complexity, competing incompatible standards, multiple tagging solutions and cross- device, measurement is charged with being online’s key differentiator to other media. IAB Europe’s Brand Advertising and Measurement research reveals the industry’s measurement priorities and the panel discusses next steps for driving a quality digital measurement environment.

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

Dress code: Smart/Black Tie optional

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.

In a country still dominated by TV (with an average of 4 hours per user per day and more than 50% of media investment) online players are struggling to get consumers’ attention. While the shift to mobile is concentrating traffic on OTT, online video and entertainment players are showing great potential for growth. comScore will show the latest data and key trends in the Italian market, while Auditel will explain how it is building one of the most sophisticated cross-media measurement systems to foster market development.

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?

Disruptive innovation helped to confuse and complicate the supply chain for digital advertising. Could it now help to fix it? ExchangeWire CEO Ciaran O’Kane is joined by Alanna Gombert CRO of MetaX, ProgRox CEO Erol Soyer, Quantcast Italy General Manager Ilaria Zampori and Luke Fenney, EMEA Vice President Publisher Development at Index Exchange.

Video may have killed the radio star, but Spotify, as the world’s largest music streaming platform, has revived the role audio plays at the center of our lives. With the world’s library of music in the palm of our hands — and connected in our cars and smart TVs — we can now soundtrack our lives wherever we are and whatever we do. And millennials are doing just that. They name streaming music as the one media they can’t live without. When you couple this rise in listening with the explosion of podcasts and voice assistants, the future of audio has never looked so exciting. But what does this ultimately mean for marketers? How can they tap into the opportunity to effectively reach these growing number of listeners?

Overview of the DOOH developments in the Dutch market

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 MiQ. 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.

The 10 rules to reinvent the ad experience on Mobile leveraging technology and data

Digital advertising has been helping businesses and brands grow for many years, yet the industry itself faced major growing pains over the past year. It is time for us to collectively set our ambitions higher — for consumers, advertisers, and content owners alike. In doing so, we’ll help ensure the internet remains the free, open, pluralistic place it is today and help businesses of all sizes grow. Join Google’s Mark Howe as he explores key areas of progress over the past year and outlines our vision and plans for the year ahead, as we work to build an advertising ecosystem that works for everyone.

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.