The acquisition builds on Iotecs existing programmatic display, mobile and video offering, and will see Platform360s business rebranded as Iotec Native Limited. Sitting at the nexus of content and programmatic advertising, the firm was founded on the belief that brands need to focus on engagement and relevance to regain audience trust.

That ethos of transparency and context aligns closely with Iotecs ethical focus, while Platform360s expertise in creative execution and digital media sales will integrate with Iotecs data science and machine learning capabilities, offering unique synergies in the native environment.

“This is an important step in our exciting journey towards creating a trustworthy digital ecosystem,” said Steve Hyde, co-chairman of Iotec. “With both businesses sharing a similar ethos and customer base, our clients will benefit from far greater quality and transparency of advertising.”

The acquisition is the first step in an ambitious growth schedule for Iotec, which has a number of yet-to-be-announced partnerships and acquisitions planned for the near future, focusing on products and services that can drive greater quality through the digital media and creative supply chain.

“Platform360 and Iotec are entirely complimentary, both in terms of our respective tech stacks and, more importantly, our vision,” said Oliver Low, co-founder and head of sales and marketing at Platform360. “Becoming part of Iotec gives us unprecedented access to deep industry know-how, network, and will help us scale Platform360s global footprint by making our unique native offering available to more clients.”

The post Iotec Global acquires Platform 360 to strengthen native offering appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

A survey of 750 marketing decision makers in the UK, France, and Germany – conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Iotec – found that 56 per cent of UK marketers agree that tech companies have an ethical responsibility to clients and end consumers, compared with 65 per cent in France and 31 per cent in Germany.

The idea of ethical responsibility has 60 per cent of French marketers and 54 per cent of UK marketers stating there is a need for code of ethics, as opposed to just 29 per cent in Germany.

This also means that budgets of some suppliers may suffer, with 83 per cent of French marketers, 81 per cent of UK marketers, and 69 per cent of marketers in Germany suggesting they are reading to switch to a more ethical ad tech partner.

Adding fuel to that fire, only 42 per cent of German marketers believe their current vendor is honest and transparent, while the figure sits at 60 per cent in France and 56 per cent in the UK.

The biggest fears that both French and German marketers have over transparency are price and margin, the use of data, and media placement. This is compared to UK marketers citing transparency over ad optimisation tactics as a more important worry than media placement.

Paul Wright, CEO of Iotec, said: “We are seeing continued disruption this year in all areas of marketing, and transparency continues to be a key driver of this change. Therefore, it’s now time for the industry to reinvent the advertising model around transparent and ethically driven business practices.”

Iotec’s research findings come as the company expands its operations into France, following its move into Germany last year.

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The research also found that 56 per cent of marketers believe their current tech provider is honest and transparent, while 81 per cent are prepared to switch to a more ethical and honest advertising supplier. Furthermore, 60.8 per cent of marketers believe transparency in the use of data is an issue compared to 42.4 per cent thinking the same for price and margin and 38 per cent feeling that way about optimisation tactics.

On the back of the findings, Iotec has released the ‘Ethical Adtech Manifesto’, which lays out the three core areas that need addressing in the industry, with the aim of driving the industry toward taking action. These are: transparency and fair trading, efficiency and effectiveness, and brand protection, security and privacy.

“Technology has advanced faster than we have been able to build a framework to harness it for the benefit of all: publishers, consumers and advertisers,” said Paul Wright, CEO of Iotec. “The survey results reflect the desire for change across the industry and I hope that the Ethical Adtech Manifesto inspires some action. Iotec are proud to be leading the charge, as a media buying platform that believes in end-to-end openness and transparency.”

The post Marketers want to see a code of ethics in ad tech, Iotec releases manifesto appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Ahead of the Programmatic Lunch, we spoke to Paul Wright, CEO of Iotec, one of our event sponsors, about why transparency needs to be the industry’s focus right now, the power of header bidding, and where stakeholders are failing when it comes to brand safety.

“I think the whole industry needs to address their approach to brand safety,” said Wright. “The good programmatic companies are using a range of solutions to give brands the protection they need, as simply ‘throwing better algorithms at the problem’ will not suffice. Publisher direct does not always guarantee safety as, for example, blog posts or comments may cause challenges in brand safety.

“Equally, the Silicon Valley giants have had to take brand safety seriously too after The Times investigation and the ongoing stories around fake news. We hope to see some greater progress there. If I was a client or agency I would be rigorous in asking all supplies their approach to brand safety and only dealing with those companies who have TAG or JICWEBS brand safety and anti-fraud accreditations.

“It is probably worth also checking whether the supplier arbitrages media. This practice often creates challenges as the supplier will relinquish control over ad placement in exchange for the cheapest inventory and that can generally be in poor or fraudulent content.”

Maintaining control at scale can be a huge challenge throughout the programmatic chain, but Wright argues that the advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence mean that smart marketers can fight for more efficiency, less fraud and brand safety, even when operating at a massive scale.

“The biggest advances we are already experiencing are in terms of campaign efficiency, with far better optimisation than can be achieved by a human,” said Wright. “With our fixed margin model, this brings equal benefit to advertiser and media owner. We are also applying machine learning to fraud detection and brand safety, again with benefits felt by all across the ecosystem.

“We believe that even in a programmatic world you can carefully curate your media partners. Combining this approach with the application of machine learning, in addition to transparent margins and rigorous auditing, means that we do everything we can to eradicate risk.”

That transparency is key, according to Wright. With all the controversy surrounding advertising and in particular programmatic over the past year, its more important than ever that ad tech suppliers are open and clear about where money is being spent, and how data is being used.

“Lack of transparency has got to be one of the biggest challenges facing the programmatic ecosystem right now,” said Wright. “Transparency of trading margin has been particularly under the spotlight this year, which has eroded trust largely between advertisers and their media suppliers but transparency concerns go beyond margin.

“Our recent mobile transparency research revealed that fraud tops the list of marketers’ transparency concerns at 32.8 per cent, with viewability coming second at 28.7 per cent, followed by targeting with 22 per cent.

“Partners who are transparent with brands across margin, data usage, media placement and optimisation will win. The efficiencies that programmatic can bring to media buying cannot be denied but there are still security fears which need to be addressed to put brands at ease with programmatic buying as a method.”

That relationship with media buyers is more important than ever given the changes that are facing the programmatic market, from GDPR to the rise of header bidding. Wright warned that header bidding in particular could shake up the industry and enable publishers to have a much closer relationship with buyers – good news for them, but potentially worrisome for ad tech vendors who exist in between the two parties.

“Header bidding effectively breaks the second price auction model which has been the basis of programmatic for many years,” said Wright. “We are seeing more and more publishers adopt the first price model, although I am not sure how ready the buy side is for this change. Being transparent non-arbitrageurs of media and using a dynamic CPM, we are adapting quickly.

“In the future, header bidding also potentially creates a situation where DSPs can have a direct connection to media owners and bid alongside, rather than through, exchanges. By reducing layers, you, in theory, should increase efficiency, but in seeing the complexity of an exchange minimised to a script on a publisher’s page, the nature of how a publisher operates will change.

“Private marketplaces are an ongoing development and a good thing as long as clients understand the value they offer. A private marketplace may not offer the scale of a wider open marketplace but it will offer context. That may mean an adjustment is needed with regard to KPIs in order to achieve campaign objectives.”

The post “Partners who are transparent will win” – Iotec on header bidding, fraud and more appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

As well as some great food, the lunch will offer you an opportunity to join some of the UK’s top programmatic minds from across the whole value chain. Brands, publishers, DSPs, SSPs, ad networks, media agencies, data & measurement specialists, exchanges and creative agencies will all mingle and discuss the issues that matter most to them.

With the event just over six weeks away, we reached out to some of the attendees who’ve already signed up to ask what they considered the biggest challenge facing the industry right now. As you might expect, the answers covered a wide range of topics, from the growth of programmatic guaranteed to Russia’s influence on the US election, but already some key themes started to emerge.

One key concern was trust and transparency in the industry, and whether everyone involved was doing their best to make sure they could be held accountable for their role in the system. One attendee suggested that, in order to participate in such a powerful digital ecosystem, firms should be licensed by an independent global trade body, while others suggested that we’ll see a growth in ‘ethical advertising’.

 “The biggest challenge for the industry to overcome from our perspective is most definitely transparency,” said Emily Hanson, vice president of marketing for Iotec, one of the event’s sponsors. “Marketers are demanding it and a lot of players in the ad tech ecosystem are not set up to provide it. No doubt we’ll see more lawsuits come to the fore on this, especially with relation to mobile programmatic.”

The other major theme in responses was the changing nature of the industry itself, as programmatic continues to evolve and find new iterations. New developments in location targeting, machine learning and omnichannel campaigns mean that messaging can be more unified than ever before, but at the same time, once reliable features of the digital advertising landscape are being eroded by the shift to mobile and the collapse of traditional channels.

“I feel like the biggest challenge facing the industry right now is how we operate in a post-cookie world,” said Ally Stuart, managing director for EMEA at Sharethrough. “People are spending an increasing amount of time on mobile which, combined with the introduction of stricter data laws, means that we are going to have to have a radical rethink of most targeting, attribution and measurement strategies.”

“I think the industry faces a challenge of keeping up to date with consumers’ behaviour in order to be able to reach people in the places and in the ways that will prove the most effective for brands,” said Andy Chandler, vice president for EMEA at event sponsor Tapjoy. “A large part of this year the industry has been inward facing, dealing with issues from within, many of which were certainly vital to address, but it has meant that the continuing shift of people’s attention away from traditional media models still isn’t being addressed.”

Not everyone sees the glass half-empty when it comes to the future though. Cadi Jones, commercial innovation director at ClearChannel, spoke about how new technologies were enabling a more complete and comprehensive approach to marketing than ever before.

“For me, the biggest change on the horizon is sort of a two-parter,” said Jones. “Firstly, the increase in people-based marketing, and with that an increased focus on location-based data as an indicator of who that user is, what makes them tick. Hand-in-hand with this is the idea of omnichannel marketing – getting a much better grip on who you are reaching across your entire media plan, and thinking about the different touch points you have with a single user.”

These responses represent just a small selection of the topics that will be discussed at our Programmatic Lunch. Tickets are extremely limited, with places restricted to only 10 tickets per type of company to ensure that the entire programmatic ecosystem is equally represented. Tickets include a three-course lunch and there’ll be ample time for networking with both old friends and new ones.

The event takes place on 24 November at The May Fair Hotel, London, starting with welcome drinks at 12.30. Click here to register your place, and we look forward to seeing you on the day.

The post Untangle the chain at our Programmatic Lunch appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Mobile Marketing has launched the Programmatic Lunch, a networking event that will connect all parts of the programmatic chain.

Taking place in London on Friday 24 November, the Programmatic Lunch will bring together representatives from brands, publishers, DSPs, SSPs, ad networks, media agencies, data & measurement specialists, exchanges and even creative agencies for a frank and open discussion of all the key issues in this space.

The event kicks off with welcome drinks at 12:30pm, followed by a three-course lunch and the chance to catch up with old friends while making new ones in the bar afterwards, with drinks running from 4:30 till late.

To make sure the conversation includes all parts of the chain, well be limiting each table to one representative from each discipline.

Tickets cost £250 (+ VAT), and are limited to 10 tickets per type of company. Book your place by clicking Register on the Programmatic Lunch website.

The event is sponsored by headline partner Adobe Advertising Cloud, plus Sizmek, Iotec Global and Tapjoy.

The post Join us for a Programmatic Lunch on 24 November appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.