Wunderloop Connect: Enhancing The Online Media Buy In Europe

Wunderloop Connect launched its trading platform in March 2007, and has grown significantly in a number of European markets over the last two years. The platform allows the publisher to combine unsold inventory and valuable user data, and sell to agencies directly. Like the RightMedia Exchange, you can set up your key buying partners, connecting to agencies and ad networks. The platform does, however, allow the seller to set a floor price for their ad inventory.
Wunderloop Connect is a self-service model – but given how agencies in the UK are predisposed to a service model, the company also has an in-house sales team that builds strategic partnerships with media buyers. But the top digital agencies have seen the value of the inventory available on the exchange, and have now become active traders on the Wunderloop Connect platform.
It has been noticeable how pro-active some agencies have become in relation to developing their ad trading strategies. Holding agencies are developing demand side platforms, and are actively building specialist exchange-buying teams. They are readying themselves for the advent of these new trading platforms. Agencies were caught spectacularly off-guard with the growth in search, and as a result gave away a lot media-buying budget to specialist search firms. They can’t afford to make the same mistakes again with display.
Wunderloop seems well placed to help both agencies and publisher in the growing area of performance-based display advertising. Paulo Cunha, Senior Technology Consultant at Wundeloop and Editor of SkyHorse.org, spoke to FarneyMedia this week. He explained how the Wunderloop platform offers buyers and sellers strong trading opportunities – and why data insight provided by the Connect exchange can transform publishers’ ad inventory and site data into compelling media buys:
– Can you provide an overview of the Wunderloop Connect? How does your technology work? How do you buy and sell on the Wunderloop Connect platform?

At a basic level Connect is an ad exchange open to both Publishers and Advertisers as a trading platform with built-in ad serving, targeting, reporting and billing.
Publishers sign up, tag their sites and choose their rate-cards. Advertisers use the booking interface to forecast the available inventory using standard rules such as dates, formats and frequency cap but most importantly they can also use the behavioural targets on top of all other rules.
These behavioural targets can be from our standard list or, ever more frequently, based on our Target Discovery that helps advertisers build unique segments to address their audience even before the campaign starts to run.
The forecast result shows the unique users and available ad impressions per web site along with the publishers’ rate card.
Advertisers can then request the booking for the amount of inventory they would like and negotiate a price with each individual site publisher.
Creatives are uploaded, Publishers approve the creatives and the campaign is ready to run from the agreed start date.

– How does the platform benefit publishers?

Having the targeting element in the ad exchange component brings in best of both worlds: provides an additional sales channel (named or semi-blind), increases the value of poor contextual areas, provides a behavioural targeting tool to the publishers sales and operational teams, in essence it increases the effective CPM and provides the marketplace to increase the sales volume.

– How does the platform benefit media buyers?

Audience targeting and insight is what we are seeing as the main driver right now, especially with our ability to discover the best segmentation criteria for individual campaigns before the campaign starts.
There is also a strong operational benefit to be gained from using the exchange to simplify the planning, buying, execution and tracking of campaigns.

– What differentiates your exchange from other available platforms in Europe?

In the wunderloop connect exchange the segmentation is built by wunderloop using analytical models and the browsing data provided by the publishers, and this segmentation criteria is reviewed constantly for relevance. So it is not a publisher or advertiser telling us “this is a car-interested user”, we run the analysis and determine in real time on every page view if the user is or isn’t a car-interested user, along with over 400 other target segments. So we know our data – that’s what we do. The result is better targeting and insight. It works for both premium and remnant, but we’re seeing different strategies in different countries.

– Is the Wunderloop Connect platform open to advertisers, media buyers, publishers and intermediaries?

Yes, anyone can signup to the platform, but of course, we review all participants to maintain the level of quality on both sides of the media buy before any trading is allowed.

– Do buyers come directly to Wunderloop Connect, or is it a service model? Do you have a sales team to bring the opportunity to agencies, advertisers or ad networks?

We have both models working well in different markets. In the UK we service agencies and publishers to some degree, but, for example, in France it’s the media owners who deal directly with the buyers and most of them use the exchange to do behavioural buys on their own inventory whilst in Germany agencies are more open to the idea of booking on the exchange directly.

– How does Wunderloop ensure brand safety – do you have safeguards against inappropriate ads appearing on a publisher’s site?

We managed to get an efficient process to allow us to manually review and approve every campaign and creative that gets booked in our system. Publishers also get the chance to veto the creatives if they believe it isn’t right for their web site. We are looking at automatisation but nothing beats a human pair of eyes.
Publishers are scrutinised and all web sites are reviewed as part of the publishers’ sign-up process. Many are also named sites so in these instances the advertisers know exactly where they are booking with.

– Do you think that media buyers and sellers are now starting to see the benefits of exchanges and ad trading platforms?

I think the ad exchange concept is maturing and it’s increased usage is giving both publishers and buyers the opportunity to have real-life experience and see first-hand the benefits they heard of a few years ago when exchanges first appeared in the sales pitches. So this has helped to improve on the concerns surrounding the ad exchange concept. The real driver behind performance media for buyers is measurability. Exchanges and targeting that demonstrate and improve results will invariably help with the publishers view on performance campaigns, as will the rise of a new breed of automated yield/performance management tools.

With the growth in performance based display advertising, Wunderloop Connect is well positioned to become an integral part of the exchange strategies for both publishers and advertisers.