More than 100 eager ad tech lovers rolled into the latest 'Sydney Ad Tech Meetup' last night to see Living Social and Lotame take to the stage.
From TubeMogul to Brandscreen, Ensighten, Starcom and new startups, such as Publift, the event saw the gathering of many bright minds. (See pic gallery below).
AdRoll hosted the event, which is organised by director of demand APAC at SpotXchange, Christopher Blok, and director of platform solutions at Lotame, Evgeny Popov, to discuss the latest and hottest topics in the industry.
Marketing director at LivingSocial, Sebastian Graham, took the audience through “The Money in Marketing” and looked at fees vs media spend. He said brand spend tends to be split 50:50 with the creative and media sides and also discussed the global players in the market.
On questioning where the share of media spend will go, Graham said: "TV is going to still be the powerful one, but it is just going to be programmatic. Digital-wise, mobile is going to be the major driver, they just need to sort out their creatives.”
On out of home, he added it was “going to be one of the last mass market mediums you won't be able to miss", along with live sports.
Opportunity-wise for ad tech, he stressed that improved targeting, 1:1 creative and communication and to simplify the process and players were next on the block.
Popov's talk focused on debunking cross-device myths and he that despite the time spent on mobile surpassing desktop, the dollars are not flowing in the same way – which is mainly due to not being able to drop cookies within apps or mobile web
He also discussed the benefits of "deterministic vs. probabilistic matching" – with deterministic being a direct match established when there is known information, and probabilistic using PII-free signals from different devices/using statistical analysis to identify the links between the signals.
“We have seen the member base of the 'Sydney Ad Tech Meetup' grow to now include agency, ad ops, ad tech, data and brand marketers which is great," Blok said.
“The meetup group has grown significantly in the past year and a half, with member numbers currently at 650+.”
Ex-Googler and founder of a new Sydney-based startup, publisher monetisation company, Publift, Colm Dolan, said it was the company's first meet up and it was better than expected.
“We had heard about it through a new client so thought it would be a good place to meet like-minded people and to find out more about the Sydney ad tech scene – and it was," Dolan said.
“Naturally being a startup we are keen to network and see what else is happening so the presentations were a good insight to that – we also met some interesting and diverse people so all in all it was a good experience.”
Check out the previous wrap-up here: Ad tech junkies unite for latest Sydney meetup
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