Although western Europe is expected to experience slower online ad growth compared to the U.S. recovery, the market is nevertheless improving. With that in mind, Collective, a New York-based company that’s particularly focused on supporting premium brand advertising, is bringing its show to the continent and is opening a UK office. Over the summer, the company hired Steven Filler, formerly commercial director of London-based viral video marketer Unruly Media, to lead the UK effort.
The display market in the UK is a smaller percent of overall internet expenditures, commanding about 20 percent of British online ad spend versus roughly 35 percent in the U.S., with search being even more dominant there. As in the U.S., that has largely engendered a “direct response” focus to online ad spending that has also served to influence marketers’ approach to display.
“This means that traditionally brand spenders online have focused on large portals to get reach, and then site specific buys using content to provide contextual relevance and also as a proxy to hit specific audiences,” Filler said in an e-mail interview. “This activity has also been supported by integrated editorial initiative to drive rich engagement. Agencies are not currently using networks to deliver branding campaigns in the UK because they are not getting the reassurances they need about site quality, and because networks are not equipped to provide then with relevant metrics to assess whether the clients branding goals have been achieved.”
In Collective’s view, that means there’s a void to fill. It believes it can address marketers’ and agencies’ concerns about the power of branding campaigns thanks to its ability to marshall data in the service of a campaign. The company is also buoyed by the fact that rich media and video are both growing at a faster clip than the overall market. “The data market in the UK is smaller than the U.S., but the landscape is changing quickly as many networks, portals and publishers are looking at ways to use data to add value to their propositions, by being able to target specific audiences. The trend for clients wanting to deliver highly targeted messages to specific audiences is consistent across both markets, as is the need to do this efficiently and at scale.”
For the most part, Collective’s business strategy is predicated on the shift from buying sites to buying audiences for branding campaigns, something that in the age of real-time bidding and demand-side platforms is high up the agenda of ad agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. Filler said that Collective is poised to capitalize on and help accelerate that trend.

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