In advance of the EU Network Ops Forum we asked keynote speaker Sacha Berlik of Mexad a few questions about the new data driven marketplace.
Q: Can you tell us about Mexad and what role the company has in the industry?
SB: Mexad’s core team are made up of Ad Exchange Veterans who have worked with exchanges since 2005 as well as Ad Network Veterans who have been in the industry since 1995. With offices in the UK, Germany and Austria (and two more in Q3 2010) mexad is the only service & technology provider focusing on RTB and Ad Exchange bid management in a pan-european scale. We don’t believe that a dashboard DSP is currently able to deliver the complex media solution that agencies need in order to build their own RTB-Operations. Our target is to teach and evangelize agencies on a pan-european level of the different RTB-sources and quality levels of each single Ad Exchange and Yield Manager in all the European countries. This way a real knowledge transfer takes place rather than learning of another bid management tool.
Q: Can you give a little background on how you think the industry has evolved specifically around technology and data?
SB: Increasing complexity. A lot of new stuff and very, very hard to differ the useful from the bad. One main concern is the belief that there’s an automatism of success of US technologies in Europe.
Q: What challenges are traditional sales teams facing in the current data driven world?
SB: A wind of change. You don’t sell at lunch meetings anymore. It’s getting more & more competitive and you need to explain several data sources on your own without getting back to Ad Ops for each single question. So the level at which sales teams have to sell is getting more complex and they need a better technical understanding.
Q: How or will sales teams stay relevant in this new marketplace?
SB: The future display sales guy will be more like an engineer, comparable with sales operations of engineer-driven industries.
Q: You will probably elaborate more in your presentation but can you talk briefly about what kind of impact this new market has on ad operations?
SB: Ad Operations impact will increase massively – but the Ad Operation Managers will have to adopt sales skills to stay on top of things.
There are still spots left for the Network Ops Forum in London. Register today at: https://www.admonsters.com/event/nf-eu-3