This morning a coalition of major European telcos, retailers, data businesses and ad tech companies announced the formation of the European Media Marketplace, a new initiative designed to make it easier to buy ads across a number of major media owners using an array of advertiser-friendly datasets.
The founding members of the European Media Marketplace are T Advertising Solutions (part of Deutsche Telekom), Equativ, Experian, lastminute.com, leboncoin and Kleinanzeigen (both part of classifieds group Adventia), Orange Advertising, Vinted, Virgin Media O2 and Vodafone. Together, these companies will make their inventory and data available through a single access point, through which advertisers and agencies will be able to activate campaigns across connected TV, video, display, native, and retail media.
The launch announcement emphasised that this is neither a new platform, nor a traditional publisher or data alliance, but described it as “a collaborative marketplace” which connects media, data, and AI-powered activation through a single interoperable framework. Partners will retain full control over their inventory and data, as well as their commercial strategies, while the unified activation capabilities should make life easier for the buy-side.
The marketplace will initially launch in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, with the first campaigns expected to go live this coming September. The founding members expect the initiative to expand into more markets further down the line.
A European alliance for European regulation
While the founders don’t see the European Media Marketplace as a data alliance, data is certainly a big part of the picture. Each member owns a large, unique, and advertising-friendly dataset, as well as their own inventory. Making all of these accessible via one purchasing point could be an attractive offering to the buy-side.
Of course, Europe has its own specific set of data regulations which have at times made it more difficult to use third-party data to target and measure campaigns. But since the founders are all European companies, they say they’re well placed to maximise the value of data while respecting audience privacy and data regulation.
“Our contribution to the European Media Marketplace is privacy-by-design: consented profiles, processed and stored strictly within Europe,” said Stephan Jäkel, CEO of T Advertising Solutions. “To us, data privacy isn’t just a box to check. Advertising fuels a massive part of Europe’s free web, especially for independent publishers. For European advertisers, it provides seamless, transparent access to regional reach on a legally secure, localised data foundation. Ultimately, this initiative is a massive win for many aspects of digital sovereignty. It proves that high-performance advertising and data privacy don’t clash – they are a unique European strength.”
And as often is the case with these sorts of initiatives in Europe, the European Media Marketplace also pitches itself as a sovereign European alternative to the US-based giants which dominate the ad world. The founding members say the marketplace will reduce unnecessary intermediaries and create more direct connections between advertisers and audiences, ensuring more value is returned to media owners.
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