Europe's Old Media Forge Ad Pacts in Fight With Facebook and Google

In an effort to retain advertisers and slow the advance of Google and Facebook, European broadcasters are setting aside traditional rivalries to forge alliances that offer wider reach for ads and internet-style data about audiences, according to Bloomberg.

Germany’s ProSiebenSat.1 has joined forces to sell digital-video ads with Television Francaise 1 and Italy’s Mediaset. In France, SFR Group and Metropole Television’s M6 have teamed up with publishers and ecommerce sites. And in Britain, rival pay-TV operators Sky and Virgin are combining information on customers to offer advertisers more insight into viewers and give them better-targeted ads.

While European television networks haven’t been hit as hard as their U.S. counterparts, internet-based competitors are catching up. YouTube and Netflix still rank behind streaming services from the BBC and ITV in adult viewing. And Sky remains the market leader in the top five European markets, with about 21.5 million subscribers, followed by Netflix with 10.8 million, while Amazon is in fifth.

As streaming companies go after video subscribers, Facebook and YouTube are encroaching on TV advertising as well as viewing time. The pay-TV companies argue that their audiences are focused and attentive, amid skepticism in the advertising industry about how many digital ads actually reach consumers. They say they can protect advertisers from distasteful content such as extremist videos that have popped up on YouTube.

Sky and Virgin say that with web-linked set-top boxes and smart TVs in most British homes, their deal will let them offer advertisers better data on a targeted audience of more than 30 million people in the U.K. and Ireland. The effort builds on Sky’s existing AdSmart technology, which allows advertisers to aim their marketing at refined audience groups using thousands of combinations of age, location and lifestyle.

In France, the SFR-led team of almost 100 media brands, called Gravity, promises to allow advertisers to push digital campaigns onto a variety of formats and devices to reach 44 percent of the country’s daily internet users.

The alliance cutting across Germany, France and Italy, dubbed the European Broadcaster Exchange by its backers, aims to sell advertisers pan-European digital-video campaigns to a market of more than 250 million viewers, with an automated trading platform based in London.

Even if broadcasters can work together, changing consumer behavior is against them. The TV audience is moving online, and simply offering a better way for advertisers to measure viewership will do little to slow that shift. Online, which accounts for almost 60 percent of U.K. ad budgets, continues to take more share across Europe, and suggestions that advertisers would boycott Facebook and YouTube over concerns such as robot-generated traffic appear to be more noise than action.