Mendel Senf Discusses The New YD Positioning, Its Move Into The Spanish And German Markets And Why The Service Layer Should Have Prop Tech

Mendel Senf is CEO of YD World, an exchange-trading focused agency. Here he discusses the new YD positioning, its move into the Spanish and German markets and why the service layer should have proprietary technology.
Can you give an overview of the repositioning of the Yieldivision brand?
MS: We have spent three years fighting to get into the online agency market and have delivered value from display advertising. Yieldivision is evolving to become a real time media agency, delivering real time in-market audiences for European advertisers.
We broke with the established way a traditional agency operates by delivering direct value from display advertising to A-brand advertisers. Our aim was to close the gap between performance marketing companies/networks and cpm display sellers and buyers.
Moving on from our old positioning underlines our ambition to become a pan-European offering. We are very excited about the new YD direction, which support our international ambitions – as well as continuing to demonstrate our local and industry knowledge.
How would you define the new YD proposition?
We are the first European real time agency group which combines real time targeting, RTB, real time creative and real time reporting that can deliver a better conversion ratio compared to the traditional way of advertising. We call our approach RT4. This is beyond performance-based advertising on CPA or re-targeting CPC networks. We deliver our advertisers conversions, branding KPI’s, the learnings how to get there, insights about who their buyers are so that they can act in real time on their data. Everything is directed to reduce the ad cost, and increase efficiencies around display. In short: sell more or more effective to the right profiles. Since 2010, the breakout year of RTB in Europe, we developed a strong position in the Benelux market, allowing us to grow our services into the German and Spanish market. Our ambition is to deliver our services on a global scale and our first steps in Germany and Spain (YD Berlin and YD Madrid) is the right step to open the global market for our international advertisers.
Is YD building proprietary tech to help differentiate its offering?
We have been working hard on our own proprietary technology. We have developed improved executing capabilities, helping us to optimize our targeting, creative and reporting tools. We use Appnexus for our ad-serving and focus on the real differentiations in speeding up delivery. Data quality, creative optimization and reporting are key to delivering better performance. Around our targeting technology we have build a user interface which gives our campaign management departments the ability to identify more data points for campaign performance. This solution is bringing massive improvements to campaign quality – and connection with all data suppliers. Next to the conversion process our tech department delivers a fully integrated reporting dashboard, enabling our campaign management resource and advertisers to constantly manage and report their revenues and ROI.
Are the Spanish and German markets ready for data-driven display?
We see 2011 as the year to roll out our services to the German and Spanish market. We see both growing into a full-grown data-driven display market within a couple of years. They are already getting ready on the supply side right now – and it’s our task to help the big advertisers in these markets to get performance and branding KPI’s out of their display budgets. The display markets in both countries are big enough and with RTB we will see the data-driven space grow even faster.
Is there enough dynamic inventory available in those markets to make data-driven display campaigns work?
Although the supply in the markets needs more publishers to make a step into yield-management solutions like exchanges or SSPs. That said, I can say that the availability of dynamic inventory is key in rolling out our business model and delivering value to advertisers with our technology.
Do you think the availability of dynamic inventory across exchanges has enabled specialists like YD to scale their business across a fragmented European marketplace?
For sure without dynamic inventory there isn’t an opportunity to deliver value from display – or scale across Europe. We chose to create targeting and optimization technology to deliver performance and let the algo decide what impressions should be getting more budget. We think there is huge opportunity in delivering this type of scalable audience buying model to the European market.