Programmatic: Promise & Challenges

Firstly, I’d like to welcome everyone to our inaugural event. We hope to get as many of our members to attend. Do also spread the word to colleagues and friends, as we’d like to grow the member numbers substantially.

Programmatic: Promise & Challenges

Programmatic buying including real-time bidding (RTB) has become a very important paradigm for digital advertising. It uses real time systems, rules and algorithms to automate the delivery of data driven, targeted and relevant experiences to consumers as they interact with a brand’s many touch points. RTB, as the most elaborated mechanism of programmatic buying, allows the buyers to perform the specific bidding on each individual ad impression. With such features, the big data science and artificial intelligence techniques can be leveraged to highly improve the performance of programmatic buying. As a result, programmatic buying is the most efficient advertising paradigm and is poised for rapid growth in the next five years.

According to eMarketer, during 2013, the ad spending on programmatic buying in the US grew by as much as 56% and accounted for 53% of the total spending of online display advertising. In 2017, programmatic buying is expected to account for as much as 83%.

In this inaugural event, we’re kicking off the Group with a bang: we’re delighted to have three very distinguished speakers from both industry and academia to talk about the basics of programmatic, where it fits in the ecosystem, its technical challenges and research problems.

They are:

· Jean-Paul Edwards, Strategy and Product Development Director - EMEA, Manning Gottlieb OMD

Jean-Paul has been with Manning Gottlieb OMD for almost 17 years. In 1997 founded the agency’s online planning and buying offering. Since 2003 he has led the Futures function in the agency to understand the evolving communication landscape and provide clients with valuable insight into the impact of new technology on media and marketing. This involves everything from the development of new communications models to the management of various new forms of media and understanding how to measure the effect of these new channels and approaches. Outside of work Jean-Paul is kept busy by three errant children, he is a keen skier and reader of a wide range of embarrassingly geeky topics.

Jean-Paul will be talking People and Platforms: A point of view on how, in the emerging programmatic era, machine learning can be best aligned with human creativity and insight to maximise value in terms of performance, efficiency and growth.

· Farshad Dabeshkhoy, Account Director, and Tim Faxon, Sales Manager, EMEA - AppNexus Europe Ltd

Farshad and Tim will be talking about "Programmatic display advertising in Europe: the past, present and future", that is, how we got to where we are today, the evolution of the ad exchanges and the different business models. We will also look at how emerging markets are learning from mistakes and successes in the more established markets to not only follow, but catch up and compete.

· Jun Wang, Senior Lecturer at UCL and Co-founder of MediaGamma

Dr. Jun Wang is Senior Lecturer in University College London and Founding Director of MSc/MRes Web Science and Big Data Analytics. Dr. Wang holds a PhD degree in Computer Science. He is a leading researcher in information retrieval, data mining and computational advertising. He has pioneered research on futures contracts for online advertising. Together with 2 large DSPs, he presented the 1st tutorial on RTB in the research community in 2013. His team also won the 1st RTB algorithm contest in 2013 with 80+ participants worldwide. He’s a winner of multiple “Best Paper” awards.
http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/jun.wang/blog/

Jun will be talking about Real-time bidding algorithms and how the performance can be evaluated over a publicly available bidding dataset.

Beer and pizza will be served afterwards so please do hang around to introduces yourselves - we’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions for future events.

We’re looking forward to meeting all of you. Please spread the word and invite friends and colleagues!

Schedule:

18h00 - 18h05: Shuai gives a welcome talk, introduce the group, guests and thank sponsors and state the rest of the proceedings.

18h05 - 18h35: Jean-Paul Edwards from Manning Gottlieb OMD

18h35 - 19h05: Jun Wang from University College London

19h05 - 19h10: Weinan introduces the iPinyou dataset

19h10 - 19h40: 30 min break - beer and pizza served

19h40 - 20h10: Fash Dabeshkhoy and Tim Faxon from AppNexus

20h10 + drinks and networking.