Spending on automated advertising is growing quickly worldwide even though there are certain statistics showing that Programmatic ad impressions are lower quality than direct-sold.
That being said, Programmatic represents 67% of total digital display ad spending in the US, reaching over $25 billion this year.
Closer to home, iCEE.news wanted to take the pulse of events in the CEE region and talked with Hristo Hristov/ CEO @ Netinfo, the leading Bulgarian digital media company.
“Digital is rising by 27% YoY in Bulgaria”
- As the main local adnetwork in the country, how do you compete with Google, Facebook and other global players in the Bulgarian market?
The way we compete as publisher is by using our strong sides.
We create content and distribute it everywhere: on our platforms as well as on Google and Facebook, we control the sales relationship with our partners and we develop a strong data driven sales and marketing approach which keeps us on top of the trends.
“We are using a sophisticated ad tech stack which allows our clients to run geographically targeted segmented campaigns through various channels in our portfolio as email marketing, native ads and video”, Hristo Hristov, Netinfo
Together with the fact that we have 80% reach in the Bulgarian market gives the advertisers comfort that we are going to give them a good product and a good price.
Google and FB account for around 58% of the market and that is an increase of 3% YoY so we see that their growth is slowing down.
We are sort of passing the point of “cheap clicks” and the price in those channels is beginning to grow and catch up towards the rest of the market.
- What’s the actual size of the market and the general spendings in online vs other media? How big the global giants domination is?
There is no official statistics on the size of the total advertising market in Bulgaria.
We can only speculate based on data from different sources that digital advertising is around 20-25% of the total advertising market.
- How do you face the challenges of automation and Programmatic advertising versus insertion order kind of campaigns?
We manage our inventory through a set of rules which prevent Programmatic from undercutting our prices in direct sales.
For example we have floor prices on the different positions which are a little bit higher that our direct CPM’s so Programmatic actually drives our revenue up.
- How do you deal with the fake news industry, is that also a big problem in your market?
Fake news is a problem in Bulgaria.
There were several initiatives recently launched on the market in order to increase the awareness of the users how to detect fake news.
Generally the only way to tackle such a problem is through informing and educating the society.
Keypoints about Netinfo
- A media and tech company with 230+ employees
- It reaches over 80% of Internet users in Bulgaria/ over 1 million people on a daily basis
- Annual revenues around €13 million EUR
“GDPR (The General Data Protection Regulation) is one challenge that we face. We have to prepare ourselves for the data protection laws which will hit us in 2017 and we take this topic very seriously”, Hristo Hristov, Netinfo
Here you can read some other great insights about “Brand Safety in Programmatic era” subject, from major agencies in Romania.
The topic will be developed inside iCEE.fest 2017, on June 15&16.
Don’t miss the best price available and join the place to be for the CEE digital industry this June.
