Opera [NASDAQ: OPRA] has announced the launch of its self-serve advertising platform Opera Ad Manager, powered by DanAds, a customizable and scalable self-serve ad tech infrastructure for tier1 publishers. It is designed to create, manage, and report on digital advertising campaigns in one place allowing advertisers to reach customers in all phases of their journey from discovery to conversion.

Recently, Opera Ads proudly celebrated its two-year anniversary. Since its launch it has become a force to be reckoned with, reaching and engaging millions of Opera users worldwide with innovative, content-based ad experiences from Opera’s global inventory, across its portfolio of products and partner inventories.

Hundreds of millions of engaged users choose Opera products to lead their online lives. Consolidated financial results from the second quarter 2021 showed advertising revenue has increased 128% year-over-year, to $28.9 million, predominantly fueled by monetization growth within Opera News and mobile browsers. The standalone revenue for Opera News grew 442% year-over-year and 49% sequentially versus the first quarter of 2021.

Over the last two years, the Opera team has maintained a commitment to improving user experience by introducing innovative, feature-rich ad formats. As a result of these efforts, Opera is launching a self-serve advertising platform Opera Ad Manager powered by DanAds, a leading provider of self-serve technology. As a response to our advertisers’ needs, we made it seamless and efficient to tap into the Opera Network and reach an engaged target audience by offering an easy to use interface to access our inventory in the most transparent way.

Opera Ad Manager is a portal that offers individual businesses and service providers the opportunity to advertise to their ideal audience around the globe, leveraging an easy to use interface to access the scaled inventory of Opera’s trusted browsers and news apps in the most transparent way. The video introduction to Opera Ad Manager is available here.

As a response to our advertisers’ needs we have made it seamless and efficient to tap into the Opera Network and reach and engage target markets by self managing and optimizing marketing campaigns. Opera is now offering anyone the ability to buy and advertise with Opera making advertisers completely self-sufficient in their campaign execution. Opera is lowering the threshold for advertisers around the world by allowing access to it’s wide audience with even a moderate budget. This is a perfect fit for small and medium enterprises which are just about to start to advertise their businesses. Using state of the art self-serve tools makes the process of placing an ad simple, fully controllable at every stage and easily changeable to tune the campaign inline with its objectives.

“At Opera we are always looking for innovative technologies to be integrated in our products and extend our offering. The partnership between Opera Ads and DanAds allows for complete automation of all ad operations, saving time and effort, which in turn leads to an increase in campaign efficiency and, thus, maximizes the ROI of every ad dollar spent.” says Per Wetterdal, EVP Commercial.

There are a great number of successful and innovative providers of self-serve technology beyond the big two: Google and Facebook. DanAds is one of the leading independent providers of choice on the market and is known for providing publishers with their own customizable, scalable, self-serve platforms, allowing for the automation of all ad operations, sales, and creative management to increase revenue effectively. It is trusted by companies like Tripadvisor, Hearst Magazines, Bloomberg Media Group, The Atlantic, New York Post and Philips.

“We have been excited since day one of working together with Opera on the Opera Ad Manager. Our two companies have many similarities, being Scandinavian players on a truly global market and believing in the need for a transparent ecosystem. This is just the beginning of our partnership and we look forward to continue our set roadmap together”, says Istvan Beres, co-founder and CEO at DanAds.

By partnering with DanAds, Opera Ad Manager allows anyone to convey their message to the right audience, at the perfect time, in the most opportune place thanks to:

• Ease of use and freedom of choice: Starting a campaign has never been simpler thanks to the straight-forward and easily accessible platform. At every stage it is possible to view all available options and play with the variables. This freedom of choice is what makes self-service advertising so popular.
• Full control of campaigns: Manage your creatives, scheduling, spending and targeting with fully transparent results. From custom reporting and analytics for the campaigns visualized with online graphs and tables to the easy export options.
• Reach: All the necessary tools to reach millions of potential users around the globe are presented on the platform.

Opera is looking forward to continuing implementing technologies that not only allow brands to connect with large, highly-engaged audiences, but to target those audiences with precision. All with Opera, and its innovative features, at the core.

About Opera

Opera is a leading global web innovator with an engaged and growing base of hundreds of millions of monthly active users. Building on over 25 years of innovation that started with browser products, Opera is increasingly leveraging its brand as well as its massive and highly active user base in order to expand its offerings and business. Today, Opera offers users around the world a range of products and services that include PC and mobile browsers, the AI-powered newsreader Opera News, and recently launched fintech and classifieds apps. Opera is headquartered in Oslo, Norway and listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange (OPRA).

Joakim Lundberg joins self-serve adtech leader DanAds as Chief Commercial Officer to support the company’s growth and rapid expansion into new markets

DanAds, the world leader in self-serve advertising technology, today announces the appointment of Joakim Lundberg as its new Chief Commercial Officer to support the company’s rapid growth and planned expansion into new markets.

Joakim joins from fintech disruptor Klarna, where he held multiple positions since joining the company in 2008, just three years after the company was founded. During his tenure, Joakim held both the Sales Director position and, most recently, the position of General Manager, Sweden.

DanAds is now in an exciting phase of rapid expansion, having recently secured $5 million in funding which raised the company’s total valuation to $44M. The company also recently appointed former Swedish finance minister Anders Borg as the new chairman of the board, as well as Kristina Schauman, former CFO of OMX, Carnegie and Apoteket AB, and Sophia Spala, Head of Intellectual Property and Technology and partner at leading Swedish law firm Setterwalls AdvokatbyrÃ¥, as board members. Alongside these appointments, the company continues on its growth journey, recently signing notable clients including Washington Post and Dish Media, among others. Joakim’s breadth of experience will help to steer the company as it grows, entering new territories and tackling new markets.

On joining DanAds, new CCO Joakim Lundberg comments: “DanAds is rapidly reshaping the global advertising market, just as Klarna reshaped the market for payments. Sweden and the Nordics have produced a number of unicorns and I am convinced that DanAds will be the next bright star. Considering the rapidly growing global demand for digital advertising space – which already constitutes a multibillion-dollar market – DanAds has enormous potential. I am always drawn to businesses that are changing markets for the better and DanAds is definitely one of those. I look forward to taking this next step, working alongside some amazing people and striving to truly make a difference in this ever-changing industry.”

”We are very happy that Joakim decided to join DanAds, both as a partner and CCO,” adds Istvan Beres, CEO and co-founder of DanAds. “His previous experience at Klarna will be important to facilitate our rapid growth journey as we work hard to develop scalable business models”.

In a short time, DanAds has taken the do-it-yourself trend to the advertising industry through internationally known clients in the U.S and the UK, among other markets. The service enables ad sellers such as publishers, content owners and user-generated content platforms (UGCs) to effectively reduce their operating costs and take ownership of their ad sales. The platform opens up a direct connection between ad sellers and ad buyers who, regardless of their size, are able to buy advertising space directly from publishers such as Tripadvisor, Bloomberg Media, and Hearst Magazines (who own Cosmopolitan, GQ, Elle and Oprah Daily).

DanAds operates with a digitally scalable business model, as a license and commission-based SaaS, which enables their clients to become autonomous and increase their revenues substantially by automating their ad sales process.

From our perspective, the aim has always been to help and empower the publishers

Please note: this is an excerpt from an interview with MarTech Cube, published August 24th 2021. Read the full piece on their website here. 

“Prior to co-founding DanAds in 2013, I held a number of senior roles in media and the IT industry and have a decade’s worth of experience working in adtech and media innovation.

My interest in media and automated technology began in 2007 while working in a digital sales role at a company owned by Bonnier in Sweden. In this role, I noticed the industry was lacking those automation tools required to streamline sales and ad operations. By addressing this shortfall, I knew that it could liberate publishers’ sales, AdOps, accounting, and management teams to focus more on those mission-critical and value-adding tasks that impact the most important thing: the bottomline.

Businesses will see that it’s difficult to determine the most effective marketing methods. One thing I believe will be a struggle is to acquire accurate data. Without clear data of what’s working and what’s not working, it will become very difficult for a business to determine the direction of its marketing strategy and where to allocate budget.
With the right self-serve tools, marketers and the wider business can learn from and optimise first party audience data allowing you to make informed decisions when it comes to changes to strategy and budget allocation.

From our perspective, the aim has always been to help and empower the many publishers, who, unlike big companies such as Facebook and LinkedIn, lack the necessary expertise or labour and financial resources to build their own self-service platform and, as a result, are stuck in an expensive and time intensive cycle of relying on both manual direct sales and third party-controlled, non-transparent programmatic sales.

By offering the accessibility and ease of transaction to both traditional and emerging digital publishers, we are able to provide a direct line between the business and advertiser, offering a one-stop solution that enables automation of all ad operations, sales, and creative asset management, as well as helping to open up additional revenue streams for publishers as the world migrates to online at a growing pace. From the advertisers’ perspective, we also empower local and small businesses, for whom the barrier to entry may have previously been too high, to reach the target audience of their choice.”

Read the rest of the interview here. 

Ã…rets Nybyggare (Foreign-Born Entrepreneur of the Year) is a prize awarded annually by the King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf. Since its inception in 2000, the award recognises and celebrates foreign-born entrepreneurs and business innovators making a positive contribution to Sweden.

This year we are delighted to learn that our CEO and Co-Founder Istvan Beres has been nominated for this prestigious award. Istvan moved from Romania to Sweden as a 14-year old and founded his first company while still a teenager. From there he helped to turn a record store with two locations into a national chain with 25 locations at its peak, among numerous other ventures, including stints at CDON and United Influencers.

In 2013 Istvan co-founded DanAds with Peo Persson. Today the company is the leading provider of self-serve advertising platforms, representing 11 out of the world’s top 50 publishers (not including Asia). Read more about DanAds here.

 

DanAds continues to bring self-serve advertising solutions to an ever-greater number of publishers and has now entered the Polish market through a partnership with Looksoft. The latter specialises in mobile marketing and advanced mobile solutions, and will be the local representative for DanAds going forwards.

“Publishers in Poland earn mainly on sales of a programmatic and direct cooperation with media and advertising agencies or advertising networks. The process of direct sales, especially in the sector 
of small and medium enterprises, is very expensive. It relates to maintenance of a sales department, traffic, costs of financial settlements. Automation of sales process allows publishers to offer advertisers a self-service model, where the whole process of creating an account and launching a campaign may take less than 5 minutes”, explains Rafał Sułkowski, Sales Director of Looksoft Advertising.

“Thousands of small and medium companies want to advertise in local media or at national publishers but it is too complicated and expensive. It requires contact with an advertising sales department and going through the whole process. Thanks to DanAds, publishers can sell more of their advertising inventory, increase their margin and serve more clients with the use of the self-service platform”, highlights Rafał Sułkowski.

“We have chosen Looksoft Advertising to develop our product on the Polish market because the agency has outstanding experience in cooperation with foreign partners and a unique combination of marketing and technological competences”, says Istvan Beres, CEO of DanAds.

Programmatic Power Player companies were chosen from the hundreds of submissions received from across the globe. AdExchanger’s editors evaluated each entry based on the strength and breadth of its offerings, its documented case studies and client references. Founded in 2008, AdExchanger is an integrated media and events company devoted to the digital advertising and marketing space.

DanAds was listed as a Power Player within both B2B and Digital Transformation, after winning recognition for those same categories in last year’s awards.

NB: This is a translation of part of a longer article first published by Dagens Media. The original article, by David Gustavsson, is available in its entirety in Swedish here.

There are thousands of ad-tech and mar-tech solutions around the world and at least 30-something leading providers in Sweden alone. Dagens Media has mapped out the market, and assessed the players.

Johan Liljelund is the CTO and Executive Vice President of DanAds. He makes the case that many programmatic ad platforms lack sufficient transparency. DanAds is a Swedish ad-tech company active in the US since 2018 and the UK since 2017, and now expanding into Spain, France, Italy and Germany. With the company’s tool, publishers are able to automate their advertising sales and create a direct channel to advertisers via a self-serve system, Johan explains.

The technology makes it possible for publishers to cut out the middleman, and let advertisers handle ad placement, payment, assets, and reporting directly in the publisher’s platform. The user data is never shared externally in the process.

Today, DanAds is the market leader in self-serve advertising platforms. Their clients are publishers in the US and UK, including Bloomberg Media Group, Hearst Magazines, Reach PLC (Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Sunday People) and Mail Metro Media (Daily Mail, MailOnline, Metro).

“We work in self-serve advertising, which is a rapidly growing phenomenon among larger publishers and which has further accelerated since the pandemic started. We quickly help publishers and media groups to digitalise themselves and take control over their advertising revenues and user data,” says Johan.

He adds that DanAds wants to contribute to a democratisation of the advertising market and make it possible for publishers to compete with the tech giants for advertisers’ budgets.

The programmatic value chain, he argues, is beneficial to neither the advertiser or publisher. With programmatic advertising, nearly half of advertising expenditure is lost in the process. The technology used by DSPs and SSPs is shrouded in obscurity, with a lack of transparency in data handling, he continues.

A recent example is The Guardian, who filed suit against Rubicon, claiming that the latter was taking unfairly large fees in relation to services delivered.

“This industry has been the big buyers’ market where publishers have seen shrinking ad revenues and eventually put almost everything on programmatic. That’s what we want to change. There’s just too much “black box”. If you take 20% in “tech fees” to mediate a deal then of course a lot of of value is lost.”

Furthermore, small advertisers are virtually excluded from all advertising spaces, except Google and Facebook who together account for about 60% of the global advertising market today, according to Johan.

This market is expected to grow, primarily driven by small-to-medium businesses who are dependent on online advertising to be seen.

“We want to ensure that our clients have the tools to take a slice of this pie. Publishers need to find a way to earn money on their first-party data instead of giving it away to Google and Facebook. We want to help our clients to capture the large volume of lower budget deals out there via a self-serve platform, making it scalable and profitable for the publisher, says Johan.

He adds that advertisers like Telia, Ica Insurance and Philips – who sit on a lot of data and who traditionally use media agencies – have now started to handle an increasing number of ad purchases in-house.

Isn’t there talk of the media agency’s comeback as the number and complexity of in-house systems increases?

“That’s correct. But I think it’s possible to make it simpler with fewer systems. With the right technology in place you can own and manage your own data. Then you can create your own ecosystem.”

“There is a crazy number of adtech and martech solutions. That technology is driving the market forward hasn’t been good for the publishers. We’ve seen how adtech solutions collaborate to own more of the whole value chain. There are also many solutions that peak early only to disappear later on. And many of the systems that never really blew up have been bought up by Big Tech. Amazon, for example, acquired the DSP provider Sizmek. And in self-serve, Rubicon bought up two or three competitors to then shut them down.”

Facebook and Google, for example, have gained too much control over data, which is motivating the trend towards self-serve. Johan cites the Washington Post’s new project with several hundred publishers. The project aims to make direct connections to self-serve systems in a controlled manner.

A project of this scale can contribute to changing the rules of the market, says Johan. And self-serve marketing is an important piece of the puzzle. At the same time, Johan expects many solutions will be knocked out and disappear from a market with a flawed ecosystem.

“There’s a long way to go before we reach a market that works for everyone, publishers and advertisers alike. At DanAds we think that the most important thing is transparency and data security; that’s the key to building long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships.”

Read more about self-serve and the future of online advertising here.

Sweden-based DanAds helps companies from all over the world to sell digital advertising. Now the company has received 45 million SEK from their owners, appointed Anders Borg (Sweden’s former Minister of Finance) as chairman of the board, and partnered with the bank Nordea as their financial advisor. “All signs point to an IPO next year,” says co-founder Istvan Beres.

 

Anders Borg with DanAds founders Istvan Beres and Peo Persson. Photo: Josefine Stenersen

 

The Swedish tech company DanAds, founded in 2013 by Istvan Beres and Peo Persson, wants to connect large web platforms with SMEs. The company integrates their technical booking solution, which gives the advertising buyer a self-serve platform inside the publishers’ systems. After that, the tool handles everything from booking, payment and billing of the advert, in formats as diverse as image, sound, text, and video. 

Among their clients are counted major global brands such as Bloomberg, Expedia, Phillips, Soundcloud, and Tripadvisor. They also support the American media giant Hearst and the British groups Reach and Mail Metro Media, who together have several hundred titles in their portfolio. A new customer acquisition is US-based Roku, a popular TV streaming service.

Despite the rocky year for the advertising market as a whole in 2020, where many companies cut costs during the corona pandemic, DanAds was able to grow their revenues by around 125% to circa 40 million SEK. The company takes between 1.5 – 5% of advertising revenues as earnings, plus a license fee.

“We have continued to grow rapidly. For the last decade the advertising market has been dominated by giants like Google, but they are coming under closer scrutiny from regulators – and companies are moving more towards automated systems like DanAds. All the middlemen and costs that exist on the market today, that we want to get rid of, hurt both advertisers and publishers,” says Peo Persson, co-founder of DanAds.

DanAds has now taken in 45 million SEK in new capital through an equity issuance from existing owners such as the Storytel-billionaire Jonas Sjögren, Hugo Stenbeck, Mellby GÃ¥rd’s CEO Johan Andersson and the ecommerce star Alexander Hars, also a co-owner of Desenio. Until now, DanAds has prioritized growth in the US and UK, but with this additional capital the company seeks to expand its business to more countries in Europe. 

“The plan now is to launch our products in the rest of Europe and actively start discussions with potential customers, which we’ve done very little of until now. Naturally we’re looking first and foremost at the largest and most populous markets such as Italy, France, Spain, and Germany,” says Istvan Beres.

DanAds’ most recent capital injection came in fall 2020, totalling 42 million SEK through a convertible loan, which DI reported on at the time. The company was then valued at approximately 185 million SEK. On the list of owners can be found the state-owned Almi Invest and the risk capital firm Wellstreet, as well as Paradox founder Fredrik Wester and Eirik Winter from BNP Paribas. 

Following the newest transaction, DanAds’ valuation increased steeply to circa 370 million SEK. 

“We doubled our valuation in four months and closed the funding round at the maximum amount in 24 hours. Myself and Peo (Persson) went in with 15.5 million SEK of our own money, that’s how much we founders believe in this company,” says Istvan Beres.

DanAds has also chosen Nordea and Setterwalls as advisors in preparation for a potential IPO in 2022. The objective before then is to acquire an additional 100 million SEK in capital, but according to Istvan Beres it remains to be seen what valuation DanAds will seek then.

“This process will most likely result in an IPO next year. We’re moving at a good pace and want to reach certain goals connected to profitability and stability before we move into quarterly reporting,” says Istvan Beres. 

He adds that the objective is to reach a turnover between 80-100 million SEK in 2021, but that DanAds isn’t yet aiming to make a profit on the whole year on account of continued investments in growth. 

The company’s board of directors is likewise undergoing change. Anders Borg, former Minister of Finance, becomes the new chairman following a few years as co-owner. The company also takes on two new board members: lawyer Sophia Spala and Kristina Schauman, former CFO in several listed companies and board member of Billerud Korsnäs and Nent.

“DanAds is unique among Swedish companies in taking such a strong position in the US, which also suggests a promising future in Europe. This is a very effective software to bring back profitability in the media industry. But it’s not just about automating processes, rather that the advertisers also gain access to a much better targeting of the consumers that they want to reach,” says Anders Borg.

This article was originally published in Swedish by Dagens Industri on April 29th 2021, written by Johannes Karlsson, and is available here.

The partnership gives each company ‘Trusted Partner’ status and enables both companies to broaden their offering to publishers

 

STOCKHOLM & NORTH CAROLINA, USA, April 23, 2021- DanAds (www.DanAds.com), the Stockholm-based self-serve advertising infrastructure helping businesses large and small cut through to their target audiences with their easy-to-use, cost-effective solutions, today announces its partnership with Kevel (www.kevel.co), a leading provider of ad serving APIs. This collaboration allows both companies to expand their product offering to their customers and provide an all-encompassing digital advertising toolkit.

As part of the partnership, both companies will gain ‘Trusted Partner’ status with each other. Kevel will be one of DanAds’ vendors of choice for companies that want to build their own publisher-side ad platforms, with the partnership making it easy for companies to launch walled gardens, whereby they have complete control over the data that is shared with third parties and their revenue destinies. The partnership also enables Kevel to improve its position within the digital advertising market, allowing it to offer its customers the ability to fully manage their own digital advertising with DanAds, cutting out middlemen and streamlining their advertising operations.

Kevel offers the API infrastructure required to create customised digital advertising platforms for sponsored listings, native ads, internal promotions, and more. This helps publishers to increase their revenue and reduce their reliance on non-transparent platforms offered by big tech giants. DanAds provides an easy-to-use, automated self-serve advertising platform where publishers can create their own ads, set their own campaign budgets and monitor their results, allowing them to receive a greater share of advertising revenue than they would from traditional programmatic ad purchases, where a significant proportion of revenue is lost to intermediaries, such as media agencies and trading desks, within the supply chain.

Istvan Beres, CEO and co-founder of DanAds, comments: “We are very excited about the opportunity to bring DanAds’ and Kevel’s expertise and market-leading solutions together, providing a service that is far greater than the sum of its parts. This partnership will provide a more streamlined, integrated offering to publishers and advertisers alike, allowing them to achieve the best possible results, quickly and affordably.”

James Avery, CEO and co-founder of Kevel: “It’s no secret that Amazon’s and Facebook’s self-serve ad platforms have contributed to their success, yet few brands have capitalized on these trends. The partnership between Kevel and DanAds makes it easy for everyone to build their own ad platforms, expanding their revenue without sacrificing the end-user’s experience, or data.”

 

About DanAds

DanAds (www.DanAds.com) is the Sweden-based leading provider of self-serve advertising infrastructure, supplying publishers with white-labelled, customisable and scalable self-serve platforms. Owing to the Scandinavian penchant for transparency, DanAds believes that openness between advertisers and publishers is necessary to increase engagement and drive scale. The company supplies a closed ecosystem in which all operations and data are controlled by the publisher.

DanAds was founded in 2013 by CEO, Istvan Beres, and CPO and Head of Sales, Peo Persson. Among DanAds’s clients are some of the world’s leading traditional publishers including Hearst Magazines and Bloomberg Media Group as well as some of the largest UGC (user-generated content) platforms and globally known brands such as Tripadvisor, Roku, Philips and SoundCloud.

 

About Kevel

Kevel offers the infrastructure APIs needed to quickly build custom ad platforms for sponsored listings, internal promotions, native ads, and more – allowing brands to drive new revenue in a user-first way.

Kevel is committed to the vision that every online retailer and publisher should be able to add privacy-focused ad revenue streams and take back the Internet from Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other digital monopolies. Customers like Ticketmaster, Yelp, Strava, Mozilla, and many more have already launched successful ad platforms on Kevel. Learn more at www.kevel.co

DPR has drafted this boilerplate for Kevel. Feel free to replace with one they provide if preferred.

ISO 27001:2013 is issued to DanAds by PECB Management Systems Inc. as a consequence of the company’s commitment to privacy and information security.

STOCKHOLM, APRIL 22 2021 – DanAds (www.DanAds.com),  today announces that it has been awarded ISO 27001:2013 certification, an internationally recognized information security standard, highlighting the company’s commitment to quality and best-practice. DanAds self-serve advertising infrastructure is helping businesses large and small to reach their target audiences through easy-to-use, cloud-based solutions.

 

As the market leader of self-serve advertising infrastructure, the certification cements DanAds’ dedication to upholding the strictest security standards for its global customer base of publishing clients and their brand partners who utilize DanAds’ white-labeled platforms to build and monitor their advertising campaigns.

By meeting these critical security and privacy assurance standards, DanAds demonstrates that it has the appropriate safeguards in place to reduce identified risks and provide the highest level of information security and privacy protection for its customers, including controls dedicated to protecting both its clients and its own internal data. 

“Achieving ISO 27001:2013 certification is an incredible milestone for the company and further highlights our ongoing commitment to maintaining the highest possible security and privacy standards,” comments Johan Liljelund, CTO at DanAds. “This formalized assurance to our clients will enable us to continue working hard to help democratize the digital advertising space, providing publishers with the best tools in order to enable businesses of all sizes to reach targeted audiences.”