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Marco Bertozzi discusses Vivaki/Google deal on exchangewire

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Marco Bertozzi Discusses The Renewal Of The Vivaki And Invite Partnership
Posted: November 17th, 2010 | Author: ExchangeWire | Filed under: Ad Exchange, Ad Trading, Agency, Demand Side Platform, Online Advertising, RTB | Comments
Vivaki recently announced it was renewing its partnership with Invite Media. Marco Bertozzi, Managing Director EMEA at Vivaki Nerve Center, spoke to ExchangeWire this week about the implications of the partnership and what we’re likely to see in terms of innovation from Vivaki over the coming months.

FULL ARTICLE ON EXCHANGEWIRE CLICK HERE

Vivaki announced that it is renewing its partnership with Google for another two years. Does this mean that Vivaki will just exclusively use Invite Media to trade inventory? Or is there more to the deal?

MB: As I mentioned in my blog, the best friendships / partnerships come with time. Google and Vivaki have been working together since 2008 and have a close working relationship at a product development level and not just at a media level. It was our collaboration that encouraged them to purchase Invite. On that basis we feel that working with one partner, who in our view is the leader in this space is going to deliver better results than working with a whole range of partners who all have different processes and approaches, we will learn together and they are more likely to work to our needs as we are a large customer of theirs.

All that said of course it is incumbent on us to make sure we have a view on the marketplace and understand different systems. On that basis we have trialled different DSPs so to that extent it is not exclusive. As an aside the deal as you call it, I prefer a partnership as that is closer to the truth, is a Google one, not just an Invite one. Invite are one important part of our discussions.

What effect will the deal have on the European arm of the Vivaki and the Publicis agencies here?

MB: The US has been market leading in many areas of digital and ad exchange trading is no different. They are a good 12 months ahead of the UK in terms of maturity, understanding of the marketplace and scale. Therefore in EMEA we have always benefitted from that forward thinking work from the US and deals like this just add to that and help us mature more quickly in the EMEA markets. I believe this will create for us some very good first mover advantage in the areas we are focusing on such as video and mobile in the exchange space.

In a recent blog post you spoke about how the partnership with Google will focus more on mobile and video. What opportunities does Vivaki see in those channels from the perspective of data-driven ad trading?

MB: We see the whole ecosystem as being display whether its mobile, video or traditional display. The growth in spend is in these areas, the interest from agencies and clients is in this space so for us will come the need to be able to deliver an efficient and targeting solution in the form of exchanges across these different channels. We will want to have data that crosses channels and helps us discover out audience regardless of screen and this partnership will help us get there in the quickest time but at scale. There will always be small PR led partnerships around mobile and video but they are not at scale and often a lot of hot air, our approach is to do it right and to do it at scale.

Will “The Pool” initiative be part of this video and mobile strategy?

MB: The Pool is a slightly different approach where we are identifying the optimum ad format with in the video space. In the UK, Spain, China and US we are well underway with all of that work and it’s exciting to see the results. Although we will not be directly linking these, of course when the video ad exchanges take shape, our Vivaki built ASq model will be part of the formats available on the exchanges. I think more broadly Vivaki and SMG have really owned the video innovation space and so we would see these two areas being complimentary.

What are the key objectives you would like to achieve in the next two years with your renewed partnership with Google? Is it more automation across display, mobile and video?

MB: I think it’s pretty straight forward, we want to work with the Vivaki brands to accelerate all ad exchange trading but most importantly in the space of video and mobile, this will be a key battle ground and we want to be leading the market in this space, our work with Google and Invite will be a big part of this. Let’s not lose sight of why we are looking at all of this though, it’s to target the right audiences, minimise wastage and deliver strong targeting solutions and strong commercial results for our clients.

What currently differentiates Vivaki’s exchange strategy from those of other European holding companies?

MB: We have a purist approach to ad exchange trading and are not looking to create an ad network or exchange right now. The most important development for us is fine tuning the best approach to trading on exchanges and delivering an expertise to our clients, if the focus was on creating a marketplace or network I think the ambition is too centred on margin management and not on the best solutions. On top of that, the sheer scale and experience we now have from the US and more latterly in the UK in particular means we can use that experience to the benefit of our clients. Practical experience over the last 18 months gives us a head start on the other agency groups, some of which are still grappling with technical or organisational issues.

Since joining Vivaki do you think the European exchange space has evolved? Or are we still in the early stages of development?

MB: It’s slow but steady. On the one hand it feels as though everyone is talking about it but then you realise that it’s still very much under radar, I think all the people connected with this industry know each and other and interact, some limited teams in the agencies are aware but generally it’s still nascent. That said I am having more conversations with publishers who are waking up to the possibility that exchanges are an opportunity rather than a threat and that can only be a good thing. We are also slowly seeing the migration of US companies into EMEA but that remains surprisingly slow, so all in all I think things are growing but we are not mainstream yet!

One year since my first Bertozzi Bytesize blog.

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12 months since my first blog. Unbelievable change from that year to this. Although I learnt a lot of commercial and man management business skills at TMP it is a very different world I currently inhabit in the Vivaki Nerve Center.

I did not imagine that 12 months later I would have written over 70 entries, wired my self up on Twitter with 160+ followers, it’s been a hell of a learning curve, and frankly one I needed to go on, you can’t work in the heart of digital and not understand this world of Twitter and blogs. How the world has changed, once upon a time if you had some PR you hoped that Campaign or Mediaweek would cover a story, but now Twitter and online in general spreads the news like wild fire. Learning that ecosystem is important and I have and really enjoyed it. It’s like a guilty secret, most people I know, even those in digital scoff at the idea of a blog, but I think that’s shit, they don’t have to blog but niether should they scoff, if you don’t understand how this all works then you can’t truly advise clients who want their strategies to be based in this social world.

Well its right that one year later I am still banging on about things because that’s all I hoped for this blog, nothing too intellectual or deep, just a thought on, exactly as my blog is called, and nothing more.

The last and important point is that since writing that first blog, I have had my first child and that is the big news of the last 12 months, it does also mean time is even more precious so no matter how these blogs come out, I have to work hard to produce them!

The future holds loads of opportunity to write, Monaco Media Festival in November, Sky Media golf masters in Dubai! some exciting new deals being announced by Vivaki and more..keep following and let’s catch up in another 12 months.

Exchangewire Ad summit 2010

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So how do I feel after the largest gathering of Ad exchange professionals ever collated? I feel like we collected the largest group of ad exchange professionals all together and generally made ourselves feel better that we are part of something big and we made some great contacts. What I don’t feel is that we extended our reach beyond that room, and actually that would have been the best outcome of today. it’s a small thing but there were virtually no tweets, no coverage, nothing that seemed to extend beyond the room which is a shame, lets hope the attendees talk about the day.

Today was the inner sanctum, you could use all the phrases and acronyms that you liked today – DSP / SSP / Adexchange / Adnetwork / data etc without feeling like someone would not understand, and I think that’s fine, but what we need is amplification and understanding. I would have liked to have seen some more clients there, where were they? The agency folk were slim on the ground a smattering from Vivaki, Carat, Infectious, Mediacom but not many and none brought clients. It was a technology / supplyside gathering in the main.

What I wanted to see was a few clients and more mainstream agency folk to come and see what it was all about, see what it all meant and how it would affect them. I was asked to come up and co present with the Global CEO of Vivaki Nerve Center and I talked about my disappointment that the NMA had hardly bothered to talk about exchange trading in a recent issue and thats how I feel the industry is in general. It’s interesting because it appears no one has learned anything from the birth of search, ie we should have all embraced it quicker and we should have wanted to know more sooner, it feels like it’s happening again.

Of the content Admeld, Quantcast, Vivaki, Infectious, Google, Rubicon all contributed amongst others to an interesting session, the discussions around data and the demand side seemed to raise the most passions as people grapple with who owns what, who does what and who is going lose the most in the new world. Overall it was strong content, perhaps needed more direction and linkage but strong nevertheless, as I say, it was like preaching Catholicism to the Vatican, I would rather be in front of a crowd of non believers!

Credit to Ciaran for organising this, it takes some balls to get these things going and he did a great job, I hope for the next one there is a push to bring people from outside of the Lodge and bring in non believers, clients, broader agency people so we can spread the word. Today we established a real crop of experts in one room and that is a great start, on to the next..well done Ciaran.

Google Zeitgeist, inspiration in a day.

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There was more passion from the speakers and less from the audience compared to the EMEA version, that was my overriding impression. I expected more whooping but instead found a very reserved audience.

So I missed the first day, by all accounts a roller coaster of a day where the economists depressed everyone and Ted Turner inspired everyone. I arrived in time for dinner and Cirque de Soleil. I was surprised how little enthusiasm there was for the show, people were clapping politely when they should have been going crazy, the Europeans were far more excitable, I thought it was meant to be the other way round! That theme of restraint continued into the next day except for Geoffrey Canada – anyone heard of this guy? No probably not in EMEA, he is a US inspiration, he is a social activist and educator who campaigns for better education for the ethnic minorities with a focus on Harlem.

Geoffrey was one of the best speakers, most entertaining, intelligent and passionate speakers I have seen for some time. I have been to 5 zeitgeist and it was the first time there was a standing ovation, it felt strange for me, a bit like the judges getting up and down for X factor but he deserved it, look him up, there are not many presenters like him.

The crowd did not ask questions, there were limited interactions, in europe they are queuing up, to be fair mainly spanish, Italian opinionated people happy to tackle anything, perhaps the Americans are more respectful and don’t want to challenge everything, the Europeans love it! This was what surprised me the most.

Geoffrey was great. Later in the day Lance Armstrong was on stage, he clearly is an inspiration, I found him a little dull if I am honest, he sparked up when he talked about cycling, part from that it all felt a little emotionless for me, it’s a personal thing but I can’t help but feel when i see famous sportsmen that i want to hear about amazing anecdotes about their sport not their website, albeit a worthy cause. By the way he reconfirmed that he never took performance enhancing drugs, I believe him.

One man who was very impressive was the CEO of Verizon. He runs a company of 120billion dollars and employs 220k people! That is a staggering number of people to be responsible for, he was impressive, very impressive. The shame of the session was he was subjected to banal questions that came from a very subjective perspective. One man stood up and recounted how his wife waded through bills and would it not be easier to simplify the process? To be fair to him, he answered diligently. He was clearly a man who ran a serious business, he joked with Eric Schmidt of Google with a kind of ‘ I know you are big and powerful and Google, but my company is big stuff even against your operation, kind of way.’ That session ended with one man banging on about his contract and how T-mobile did it differently. At last his patience ran out and he tersely replied – we are not T-mobile and shut him down like the annoying man that he was. There is only so much of that shit you need to listen to. I was amazed at how low level, subjective, experience led the questions were, there was not a single weighty question asked of him..strange. By the way 4g is coming in a serious way for Verizon by end of year.

Will.I.am was brilliant. Simply brilliant, these musicians are now so talented in so many other ways, business people, innovators, entrepreneurs. He was very funny, but clearly was leading the way in how to change the music industry. This is a guy who would be happy to shut out the music label industry. He was joined on stage by the CMO from coke which made it feel a little more dirty to me, he was talking a very purist story, it felt diluted by her intervention.

I have gone on for a while now. I want to end on a more serious note. The CEO of Canter Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick was invited to talk about he coped with 9/11 and the impact it had on his business. Let’s hear the facts. Honestly I can’t remember them all it was too shocking but roughly it was something like this..650 of 900 members of his team were killed. Because he had always encouraged family and friends to be employed by existing employees it was something like 17 sets of brothers and sisters were killed, he lost his own brother..9 years after the event he was still struggling to deliver his speech without tears. The story was unbelievable, his clients rallied to them, the LA office gave up profits to pay for the families of the dead, he ran the business at cost and gave the rest to the families of the dead. It brought tears to everyone’s eyes, it was incredible. I am glad I was there just for that. Read more here

There were no questions after that session.

I found the content and speakers far more inspirational and interesting than the UK this year, they appeared to come with more passion than in the UK and I found myself addicted to what was going on, the only thing that let things down was the audience.

Finally I found the relentless and ruthless networking quite distasteful, the thousand mile stare as they try to see your badge and decide if you are important or not. One thing you realise is just say you have a UK or EMEA role and they switch off, oh, that little island , no, you are not worth anything to me..it’s painfully transparent.

Priority inbox from Gmail. Saves me up to 2 minutes a day

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I like it, I do! I like Gmail, I have used it for years, an early adopter, its the home of all of my phone contacts with my iphone and BB synched to it so I never lose another contact. It is so much better than hotmail in keeping out the nasty little virus people. I have a great email address as I got in early.

Priority inbox is also a likeable invention but I am not sure I entirely get it. They list the emails that are important at the top, the less important ones underneath. If you are a serial checker of your email whether it’s work or play then what that usually means is I have 1 email as priority and 2 less so, the end result being I can see all three in one view and its easy to filter out the good from the bad. I also still have to delete / archive / report as spam the less important so again, I have to go grubbing about in those less important emails anyway. I just dont think it saves time or makes life easier?

I think this is designed for someone who has no more than 1 minute available between meetings, has 1000 emails landing between the check ins and has loads of important emails. If that is the case then I think this product is perfect. For me I waste as much time accidently clicking on normal inbox and going back to priority as it saves me in the reading of them! Its a small gripe, otherwise I like it, dont strike me off beta!!

Hard work being a technology company at the moment

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I would not want to be in this space at the moment. It is fiercely competitive and every man and his dog has a new angle on targeting, tracking, bidding and the like. Digital has always been like that, a constant stream of questions from clients, planners and other agencies along the line of – ‘you heard of x company, apparently amazing, can you have a look at it for me?’ Being on the inside of a technology company must feel like that at the moment, especially big ones like Google and Microsoft.

The energy at the moment is focused on biddable media whether that be ad exchanges, search of Facebook API and therefore companies have come along like Marin and Kenshoo to challenge the elite. They are new and shiny and fast and they produce product roadmaps about 6 months ahead of the slightly larger more sluggish rivals.

Teams in Doubleclick now are constantly being asked about what can be integrated into their systems like DART search, it’s a fair question because the market is moving so quickly the agencies are having to adapt rapidly and therefore they need their suppliers to do the same. Deep integrations that are hard to move is not a good enough reason to stay with a supplier. It’s not however as simple as doing the usual Google bashing or Atlas bashing, I have some sympathy for them. When they change one thing it has to deliver against all their other systems and make sure that nothing falls over. With great volumes and large customer bases comes a big responsibility to not mess up. Some start up with 5 clients can afford to mess about a bit and change things as it pleases with little or no impact, Google can’t do that.

I would like to see what happened if an agency said to one of these new companies – OK I will move all our spend to you, we want 24.7 customer service, technical support, migration in weeks, nothing to go wrong, we want to check all your contracts and privacy set ups and all the rest. Simply, they would not cope. So on that basis I think we have to understand that there are many pretenders to the crown but they could not all make it and its easy to bash the big boys.

Nevertheless it must be hard work right now and I don’t envy them. Sometimes things just do not work, today we saw the end of Google Wave. Of course we did, it was a nightmare. A small part of me does think though that those resources could be redirected into services that meet the real needs of customers rather than so many experiments. How is Buzz doing?

Outside of that particular field there are so many companies selling data, targeting and tracking. They all want a piece of our client’s websites, they all want a test, it is a minefield out there and sorting the wheat from the chaf for agency digital planners is extremely hard and often hard for the companies to differentiate themselves. I have not seen so many new companies selling their wares since 2000, they wont all make it and as agencies we need to somehow back the right horses..

Business cards the sex end of business courtship

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I realized the other day that I had been in touch with someone at work for weeks and had never seen so much as a business email or phone number. Or that I had lost the number of one of my best friends from University and yet had never lost touch. Staying in touch now is through a plethora of different channels where they do the hard work for you.

There was a time when my contacts in my phone were like gold dust, a pain to lose and painful to replace and yet now I am less precious about it all because some kind website or other has those people just a click away. My roller deck is kind of old fashioned looking, every time I deal my way through business cards I do think how backward it all feels.

I find now with such a connected world that I am approached by a mixture of friends and business colleagues through any number of channels. Sometimes it’s a tweet, but that is still not quite there yet as many of my friends have just reached Facebook so Twitter is like a distant dream. Work people on the other hand, far more, starts with a Tweet and then it’s like a courtship depending on the keenness of both parties as to how quickly it progresses! Is it straight to sharing emails? Perhaps a dalliance around Linkedin, takes things on a step further without full exposure of details..it’s an interesting progression. Perhaps this is why we have cards, it’s like consummation, you have been on an electronic courtship and now you have met and been able to exchange paper titles and verify you are both real.

Once you have crossed all the barriers then you can contact people in so many ways, I have often checked my work email to find that note someone sent me to no avail, ah well it must be in Linkedin, nope, Facebook and on it goes, Foursquare has now moved the game on to straight stalking. I said no the other day to a couple of people, last thing I want is a couple of weirdos following me around and trying to sell me data!

All of this of course means we hardly pick up the phone, the calls are drying up and texts and FB and LI are taking over, you don’t need a call, you just saw them check in at Soho House. I think generally we are over calls and cards. Maybe not the girls, but the boys definitely, It’s always better face to face, so let’s use every means of technical kit to get us face to face and so we can get down to the serious business of exchanging old pieces of worn out card..

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