Programmatic media buying is set to really start “happening” in Central East and South East Europe in 2015, argues Odysseas Ntotsikas, founder and managing partner of Athens-based ThinkDigital Group.

Few global regions expect faster growth in programmatic spending next year than Central, East and South East Europe.

The region has lagged behind Western Europe and the US in the switch to digital advertising, but has seen an acceleration over the past few years – albeit dominated by big players like Google and Facebook, which can occupy as much as 80% of local digital ad markets.

Now local advertisers, agencies and publishers are waking up to the potential of programmatic. Analysts have said the region will experience a 600% year-on-year leap in programmatic buying in 2015. To meet this growing demand, IPG Mediabrands recently opened a Cadreon office in Budapest, Hungary, while WPP’s Xaxis platform has arrived in Romania.

Publishers from Hungary to Romania and Greece have begun their journey towards full programmatic adoption, partnering to create private marketplaces such a Project Agora, set up and operated by local platform TailWind.

Speaking to M&M Global, Odysseas Ntotsikas (pictured), the founder and managing partner of ThinkDigital Group, which owns TailWind, says he expects things to “really happen” over the coming 12 months: “There have been early steps, though other than this we haven’t seen significant change in the local agencies. But we are expecting lots of action in Q1 and Q2 next year.”

Lack of scale

One of the reasons for the slow adoption of automated media buying, argues Ntotsikas, is the comparative absence of scale of local publishers. While in the Middle East, publishers have the size, skills and infrastructure to switch to programmatic, their equivalents in South East Europe are hamstrung by a lack of resources.

“One of the differences compared to the bigger markets is that, in most cases, the publishers are quite fragmented and small. This means they have limited resources in terms of access to technology and talent, to be able to compete with the international players,” he says.

A research project carried out by ThinkDigital and AppNexus in the summer suggested there is a “liquidity” problem blocking the migration to programmatic – namely a shortage of appropriate technical know-how on the buy side, and of premium inventory on the sell side.

“Education is a huge part of what we’re doing,” says Ntotsikas. “We are trying to help the market with this, providing agencies with the technology to buy and publishers the opportunity to monetise inventory in a more sophisticated way.”

Ntotsikas expects more private marketplaces to crop up across the region, as local publishers unite to explore the new technology and take the fight back to the likes of Google, before seeking more advanced, individually-tailored strategies.

“2015 is going to be the year where we will see really programmatic things happening,” he asserts. Many the industry will be hoping he is proved correct.