RTB Gaining Steam Throughout Europe: National Rail Enquiries Sees Success through Automated Sales

By Gianluca Carrera, VP International, MD Europe

The dmexco show in Cologne, DE this past week was to me a watershed moment in marketing technology from the publisher perspective. (For those of you in the US, this is the biggest marketing technology show in Europe: our CEO Rajeev Goel was on a panel “The Science of Display Advertising” with Randall Rothenberg of the IAB and I held a seminar: “Balancing Sales Channels in Real Time.”) Walking the halls and talking to so many media execs, I am excited about the extraordinary gains European publishers have made in getting the most value for all their inventory. Increasingly, this means that they are embracing technology as a mode of selling. In a report from analyst firm IDC released last October [http://info.pubmatic.com/adrevenuereport.html], European growth rates for real time bidding were even stronger than those in the US.  In the UK they were projected to grow 114% to encompass 25% of all display sales from 2010 through 2015 while in Germany they are expected to grow 99% to encompass 20% of display sales during that same time period.

PubMatic is pleased that our European customers are now stepping forward to tell us just how our platform is changing their business.  National Rail Enquiries, which is one of the most important travel sites in the UK – it’s where people go to book their rail travel – is an amazing story of a business that took control of its ad inventory from third parties. They learned that with the proper tools they could not only manage the process with minimal internal resources but also increase their revenue.

It’s important to note that NRE is not a traditional publisher with editorial content sold by a full sales team, but incredibly valuable content nonetheless that advertisers want to be a part of: it’s transactional in nature and has high customer engagement. The challenge is how a company like this manages the ad sales process without paying for a full staff or a very high margin to a third party for sales and operations. The results have been impressive: they increased their unsold effective CPM by 50% and overall revenues increased 30% since beginning the program in April.  Sixty percent of what they sell is now done programmatically and their head of sales sees programmatic selling as a complement to what he can do with direct sales:  “I was slightly wary of moving to a programmatic trading platform as I was worried it might emasculate me and my ability to meet people face to face and sell. But in reality it is very different,” Jonathan McCauley-Oliver, Online Sales Manager told a reporter from NewMediaAge on September 4^th.  “I can now see the true value of the site as it gives me a great deal of transparency.”

For the full case study, which has details about some of the technical and process hurdles that PubMatic was able to help solve for NRE, please go to [http://info.pubmatic.com/mkto_downloads.html].

We look forward to being a part of the ongoing momentum of RTB as it builds throughout Europe and will share more case studies like this here.