I’ve been watching with interest the ‘under the radar’ launches of some new Irish online advertising sales houses. For as long as i’d care to remember, the Irish market consisted of just two main players, Sales Online and Generator. Ad2-One launched an Irish office here in Dublin in 2005, but they seemed to lose their way after the loss of a key member of staff. Sales Online and Generator have been squabbling for the same clients for quite some time now, Generator losing Eircom to Sales Online earlier this year, and some other ‘musical chairs’ type deals. But now we have some serious competitors in the marketplace, with the arrival if i-Believe, Tradedoubler Ireland, and Electric Media.
i-Believe
i-Believe is the brainchild of Lee Thompson and Dermot O’Reilly, with both having outstanding CVs which includes time spent working together at Associated New Media in London. Between them the have also worked at i-level, Starcom Digital, Yahoo, and Mediaedge CIA – all of which are well established agencies in the UK.
Lee Thompson was also the Managing Director of Metro Ireland at the start up stage, and managed the successful launch of the paper I’m particularly impressed with both Dermot and Lee in terms of their level of experience of how things work in London – we’re unbelievably behind the times here in Ireland when it comes to digital advertising. Maybe they can help move things along here, and help to educate the market a bit better.
Tradedoubler Ireland
As I previously mentioned, Tradedoubler Ireland have an office here in Dublin since late last year, and are growing their business not only in their traditional area of expertise – affiliate marketing – but they have also established, with the help of Graham Crawford, a sales house / media buying arm which allows them to leverage their media buying power and client list to provide integrated solutions for agencies and publishers alike.
It’s a clever move by Tradedoubler, who can now offer publishers even more ways of generating revenue above and beyond CPM and tenancy deals. As CPA offerings start to make more sense here and the market matures, it’ll make real sense for publishers they’ve signed up exclusively – including Iol.ie, which was previously looked after by Sales Online.
Electric Media
I don’t know too much about these guys, except for the fact they’re the digital media sales arm of the Irish Times, and have a lot of inventory to sell across the Irish Times’ network of websites which includes Ireland.com, Irishtimes.com, Entertainment.ie, and of course the €50 million Irish dotcom purchase of the decade, Myhome.ie. Myhome.ie and Entertainment.ie were also previously with Sales Online, so two more big losses for them there.
Will we perhaps see a similar move by Independent News and Media to look after the sales function for their network of websites? Some of these are currently sold by Generator, but the level of exclusivity in the arrangement is not known.