The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

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Programmatic Punch Technology Programmatic

Come and join the digital media industry's heavyweights at Programmatic Punch

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By Ronan Shields, Digital Editor

November 23, 2016 | 7 min read

The bell will be rung for The Drum’s second annual Programmatic Punch event hosted in London on 8 December, where leading industry names will duke it out over some of the key issues played out over the last 12 months, and will try to identify some of the potential pain points to come in 2017.

Programmatic Punch December 8 2016

8 December will see the second annual Programmatic Punch hosted in an actual boxing ring in Shoreditch Town Hall

Programmatic Punch will be hosted in Shoreditch Town Hall, London, where attendees can watch leading names from outfits such as AdBlock Plus, AppNexus, The FT, The Trade Desk, Three, WPP and many more, thrash-out the key issues of the day in an actual boxing ring. This punch-y nine-round affair will equip those in attendance with key insights into the disruption these technologies pose to the industry, and ready them for any potential upcoming sucker-punches.

With over 70% of all online display ad spend now being traded using programmatic technologies, there’s little doubt that those without at least the most cursory of knowledge in this rapidly developing sector of the industry will be on the ropes going forward.

Who were the winners and losers of 2016?

The last year has proven nothing short of tumultuous in the sector with ongoing rounds of mergers and acquisitions, wholesale changes in publisher strategy, issues around measurement verification all combining to leave questions marks hanging over some of the industry’s biggest names.

Some have compared the current ‘adtech bubble' with that of the dotcom boom (and subsequent bust) of the early part of the century. In the opening round of proceedings Steve Chester, IAB, director of industry programmes, will be on hand to identify some of the key turning points of the year, and how to resolve them, with leading industry names (see below).

Programmatic Punch

In no part of the industry has this disruption been felt more than in the agency sector, given that 2016 has seen wholesales changes in two of the biggest ad agency networks, prompted by a number of reasons including the incursion of adtech, martech, and increasingly management consultancies.

Programmatic Punch will see Wayne Blodwell, CEO of The Programmatic Advisory, and ex of WPP and Dentsu Aegis, put representatives of Publicis Groupe and WPP, and fast-rising adtech startup Teads through their paces, over their respective strategies to cope with this potential blow.

No holds barred

Elsewhere in the day, The Drum's managing director Andy Oakes, will dawn the referee's stripes in a bout between those of who have taken sides in the uber-divisive adblocking issue – one that has continued to dominate headlines throughout 2016.

Stepping through the ropes in the 'pro-corner' will be AdBlock Plus and Three, and in the other media owners including Paul Lomax from Dennis Publishing. Don't expect any split decisions in this bout, knockout blows will be in order.

Elsewhere on the card, The Drum will focus on some of 2016's success stories, with its own in-house adtech expert Rachel Wilkinson speaking to the FT's global head of programmatic Elli Papadaki (see below) to discuss how the title was able to elevate its programmatic yield to be on par with direct sold, all the while avoiding the potential pitfalls of channel conflict.

The Drum Programmatic Punch Round 4

Blows to duck in 2017

Other key features of the card include out-of-home (OOH) specialist, Exterion Media's chief data officer Mick Ridley, who will demonstrate his ambitions to take these technologies to the next frontier, ie from the desktop to the high street.

With the traditional OOH outfit poised to roll this offering out in 2017, it is sure to make advertisers sit up and take notice, with The Drum profiling how Exterion Media sees such a move potentially delivering a rabbit punch to some of the digital media industry's biggest names earlier in the year.

Meanwhile, with investors and the industry's biggest names now probing the 'black box of programmatic' – and entire companies standing victorious, or lying flat on their back based on whether or not they have first party data in sufficient amounts – this key issue will be explored further.

In this round, Nielsen Marketing Cloud's managing director for Europe Matt Bennathan will step through the ropes to discuss how marketers need to start building their own defensible consumer data strategies, along with participants from MediaCom and Videology.

Meanwhile, a special presentation from a data privacy expert will help instruct attendees over the defensive manoeuvres they should take in 2017 if they are stay on the right side of regulators ahead of the implementation of the pan-EU General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) due to come into force in 2018.

The main event

Bringing the curtain down on the intellectual pugilism will be arguably the biggest challenge to the adtech industry's status quo, ie the dominance of 'the waterfall', which many view as the result of the biggest name in the industry's adtech stack.

Richard Wheaton, managing director of 55 and former head of Neo @Ogilvy, will examine the latest tussles in the header bidding space, one that has seen the decline of some of the industry's biggest names, and see adtech outfits move to chip away at Google's hegemony of the space of the publisher monetisation space.

Programmatic Punch Header bidding panel 2016

The Drum's Oakes explained why the title takes such a combative approach to the subject. He said: “We’ve all been at events where it’s all a bit cosy and people don’t want to get involved in tough issues.

“We are all aware that we need to address some problems in the industry and we are all aware that there are some contentious issues that need to be discussed. So we decided to change the way this discussion happens. We’ve decided to make things a little more punch-y.”

See here for further details such as ticket details of The Drum's Programmatic Punch event hosted on 8 December in Shoreditch Town Hall, London.

Check out #ProgPunchLDN to engage early with those who plan to attend

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