The single most significant regulation in the history of digital advertising, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), comes into force on 25th May 2018.

While often portrayed as a negative by many in the digital advertising ecosystem, GDPR will in fact be the catalyst for a new era of quality and clarity, with publishers having to carefully scrutinise the quality of their partners more than ever and with severe penalties for those that don’t. Unfortunately, there are many advertisers and agencies who are slightly behind the curve in compliance, but things are improving.

Often cited as the future of marketing itself, programmatic advertising has brought huge benefits to digital marketing in recent years, with technology enabling advertisers to precisely target audiences efficiently and at scale, while also delivering relevant, personalised, messaging that enhances the user experience for consumers.

In the UK, programmatic digital display ad spending continues to be strong, despite concerns about GDPR and brand safety; issues that made it into mainstream media this year. There are still bits and pieces to iron out, but transparency is improving and will get even better as various technological plays come into effect.

Programmatic digital display ad spending continues to rise at a healthy clip. From £1.99 billion ($2.69 billion) in 2015, programmatic will account for £3.39 billion ($4.58 billion) in 2017 and predicted to rise to £4.52 billion ($6.10 billion) by 2019. This represents 79.0% of all UK digital display ad spending, and that share is more than likely to reach 84.5% or more by 2019.

As a comparison, last year more than 80% of digital display advertising in the US was programmatic advertising, up from 23% in 2011.

But programmatic in many countries has also spawned a somewhat incomprehensible and opaque ecosystem, in which many suspect agencies have thrived, while issues around quality, ad fraud, and brand safety appear to have proliferated.

Put simply, GDPR is very likely to be a good thing for the digital advertising industry, resulting in a thinning of the herd among agencies in the ecosystem.

This is precisely why US-based Digital Ignite – www.digital-ignite.com – have now opened an office in the UK, able to provide advertisers in the UK and Europe with the following:

• Highly targeted programmatic advertising.
• Real-Time Bidding.
• Real-Time client-facing Dashboard.
• GDPR compliant.
• Digital Ignite provide managed services (rather than SAAS) using strategy, Big Data, RTB and attribution technology to deliver lead/sales-orientated solutions for clients.
• The Digital Ignite stack is brokered through 200 exchanges, DSP’s and data companies who are constantly bidding against each other for the best KPI for clients.
• Digital Ignite’s data pull is a 30 page pivot with hundreds of thousands of data points.
• Digital Ignite are the processor for all campaigns.
• Being a digital advertising agency, Digital Ignite also offer creative services.

Whether you’re an agency or an advertiser, to learn more about Digital Ignite and what it can do for your business, contact Fiona Swainston, SVP Digital Ignite, Europe, via Fiona@digital-ignite.com