COLOGNE-If anyone doubted that DMEXCO has become a huge, must-attend event, that was dispelled by the presence of the “big dogs.” Companies like Accenture, IBM, Oracle and SAP had a major presence here this year, “Which I think speaks volumes,” says Ashley J. Swartz.
In addition to being the Co-Founder & CEO of Furious Corp., the inventory and supply chain management company serving premium publishers, Swartz is a long-time contributor to Beet.TV. She’s also a regular at DMEXCO, so when she uses words like “holy madness” to describe the gathering of some 1,000 exhibitors and 45,000+ attendees, her roundup of the two-day event is worth noting.
What struck Swartz as noteworthy—and perhaps cautionary—this year is the ratio of noise to signals emanating from the digital advertising and media ecosystem. She sensed a divide between what the “old school” marketing, email, conversion and clicks crowd was saying and that of the marketing automation and marketing cloud providers, AKA the big dogs.
“It’s kind of what those big dogs bring, they come out and just talk about business,” Swartz says in an interview with Beet.TV at the conclusion of DMEXCO. “There’s not a lot of lexicon and vernacular that is digital marketing or advertising. They’re just talking about moving a P&L. “Which I think is very interesting and speaks to where we are as an industry or maybe where we need to go.”
She cites the expectation from U.S. attendees that tried-and-true issues like digital ad viewability, fraud and virtual reality technology would be omnipresent. As The Wall Street Journal reports, there is a resurgence of marketer doubt about digital advertising transparency. “But there’s not a lot of talk about fraud or viewability within the booths themselves,” Swartz notes. “I’ve only seen those on panels. It’s not front and center.”
Another disparity is the interest that U.S. players bring to DMEXCO regarding addressable and programmatic television advertising. “This conversion of television and video reaching audience, addressability, set-top box data, I’m not sure that Europe really cares about that,” says Swartz. Maybe Sky does, but a third of its audience is on its digital platform.”
And while U.S. companies have been fairly obsessed with “big data,” things are different in Europe. “Every DMP has a booth here,” Swartz says. “But yet we know that the EU privacy laws are much more restrictive and that big data is not so big. It may be a little short in Europe.”
Her overall conclusion: the industry needs to focus less on each new emerging “metric” and more on “how our clients perform and how we service them and the value that marketing and advertising provides.”
This interview was taped at DMEXCO ’16. It is part of a video series of industry leaders. The series is sponsored by Videology. For more Beet.TV coverage of DMEXCO, please visit this page.
