AdTech Startups and Trends at The Europas

The Europas is a competition that showcases the most notable tech startups emerging from across Europe. Founded by Mike Butcher in 2009, it covers not just early-stage companies but also mid- and late-stage ventures, leading investors, and founders across the EMEA region. In 2014, more than 150 startups were nominated, competing for awards across 25 categories plus the Grand Prix Award.

Looking at the Best Advertising, Marketing Startup category, three clear market trends stand out among the nominees:

programmatic multi-screen audience buying (cross-device targeting), native and video advertising formats, and — somewhat surprisingly — social media monitoring, where two well-funded, mature companies earned nominations despite both having been on the market for seven-plus years.

Here's a closer look at each trend and the startups representing it.

Programmatic Multi-Screen Audience Buying

Cross-device targeting — sometimes called multi-screen audience buying — has become increasingly important for marketers as tablet and smartphone adoption accelerates. Mobile devices accounted for 31% of all website traffic in Q4 2013, and app usage has already overtaken PC Internet usage in the U.S. Reaching the same user coherently across all those screens is the central problem this category of AdTech is trying to solve.

Two of the six nominees in the Best Advertising, Marketing Startup category are attacking this problem head-on, using advanced algorithms combined with programmatic (RTB) media buying to access global ad inventory.

Adbrain (founded 2012, $9M in funding) is a DSP (Demand Side Platform) built specifically for multi-screen campaigns. Because it can't rely on shared account IDs the way Facebook or Google can, Adbrain uses proprietary probabilistic algorithms — studying a user's journey across sessions and devices to infer that multiple devices belong to the same person. Notably, the company also claims to identify users based on behaviour even when a single device is shared by multiple people in a household, which is a meaningful edge case for tablet usage in particular. Their cross-device advertising guide is worth a read for anyone interested in how statistical identification works in practice.

Struq (founded April 2008, $8.5M in funding) approaches cross-device targeting from an e-commerce retargeting angle. The platform gives retailers tools to build product recommendation ads and retarget users as they move between devices. For mobile environments where cookies are unreliable or unsupported, Struq integrates with AdTruth to handle user identification.

Native and Video Advertising Formats

The 2014 shortlist doesn't include a pure-play native advertising startup — a gap worth watching in future editions. What is represented here is interactive video and an inventive take on ad engagement.

Brainient (formerly BrainRolls, founded January 2009, $2.7M in funding) builds interactive video ads through a web-based platform. The product took over five years to reach its current form — an unusually long development arc — but the result is a full-stack solution for creating, delivering, and measuring interactive video campaigns across platforms, devices, and formats. Their video ads gallery gives a good sense of what the format enables.

Future Ad Labs (founded 2012, $96k in funding) takes a different angle entirely with its flagship product, Play Captcha. The concept replaces conventional CAPTCHAs — those frustrating strings of distorted text — with a brief, branded interactive task. A car brand, for instance, might have users drag the right paint colour onto a model vehicle to verify they're human. It's a small moment of engagement, but it serves two purposes simultaneously: it provides publishers with an incremental revenue stream while giving advertisers a genuinely engaged interaction rather than a passive impression.

Social Media Monitoring

This segment may be the least technically novel among the nominees, but the companies here are mature, globally deployed, and well-resourced.

Brandwatch (founded October 2005, $31.7M in funding) monitors and summarizes what's being said about brands, people, and products across the web. In an era where brand communication is increasingly two-directional, the ability to detect and respond to conversations quickly has real operational value.

Social Bakers — The Europas 2013 winner — (founded October 2008, $34M in funding) is a social media analytics platform that helps brands measure, compare, and benchmark their social performance against competitors. It's one of the more comprehensive solutions in this space, and the company's growth trajectory reflects genuine market demand.

The common thread across these nominations is a market in transition: audiences are fragmenting across devices and platforms, ad formats are evolving beyond the banner, and the infrastructure for tracking and measurement is being rebuilt from the ground up. The strongest nominees here — particularly in the cross-device and interactive video categories — are tackling genuinely hard problems with approaches that weren't possible even a few years ago.

You can find the full 2014 shortlist across all categories here.