COLOGNE — To US media companies, the European market can often seem like, on the one hand, a fragmented morass of patchwork negotiations and, on the other, an overbearing harbinger of heavy-handed central legislation.
Both of those things may be true – and both are going to drive digital advertising business over the next year, perhaps more so than in any previous year.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jana Eisenstein, EMEA MD of digital video ad-tech company Videology, describes the forces driving the changes.
“There’s a real sense of collaboration within the industry,” she says. “There’s a real impetus across the industry to work together to be able to deliver true converged solutions.”
In particular, Eisenstein is referring to EBX, a consortium recently formed between broadcasters from four countries – ProSiebenSat.1 (Germany), TF1 Group (France) and Mediaset (Italy and Spain) – to build a scaled offering for pan-continental premium video ad inventory.
Eisenstein says: “It means you’re able to buy and transact against advertising campaigns on a pan-regional basis against premium-quality broadcast media, which is really exciting, which is great. Up until now, it’s been a very regional type of offer.”
But there are challenges, too. From next may, Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will command all companies handling data on EU citizens, wherever they reside in the world, to comply with a host of new stipulations including:
- tighter consent conditions for the collection of citizens’ data.
- consumers can instruct companies to stop processing their data.
- automated decision-making and profiling decisions must be made clear.
- consumers can request decisioning by automated processes be stopped and handled by a human instead.
- they have the right to request an explanation of automated decision-making.
- they can request free access, rectification and deletion of data.
Eisensein says her company is checking all its policies for compliance, but she reckons that GDPR could have wider implications than that.
“You’re going to see some consolidation in the industry, particularly around data providers,” she says. “We’re seeing, on the publisher side, there’s going to be some more scrutiny about who they work with in terms of allowing use of their data.”
Earlier this month, Eisenstein’s company signed a partnership with YoSpace, a UK dynamic ad insertion provider, to offer advertisers real-time decisioning across live streaming broadcast anywhere the pair have common clients.
She was speaking at the DMEXCO digital ad industry gathering in Cologne, Germany where the topics of GDPR and broadcaster strategy were high on the agenda.
This video was produced as part of Beet.TV leadership series from DMEXCO, presented by NBCUniversal. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
