The Swedish Data Platform Built by Publishers, for Publishers

Programmatic buying had existed anywhere in the world for barely two years when we launched Sweden’s first programmatic ad network. Almost no Swedish publisher sold inventory this way yet. We built the market before there was a market, and learned how automated buying works from the inside.

On their own, few Swedish publishers had the scale to interest a media agency comparing them against global platforms. Brain unified more than 150 publisher websites into a single programmatic data offer, so reach and audience data could be sold together instead of site by site.

We sold Adapt ADX, the ad network, along with 360, the agency concept we had built around it. Together the services grossed more than 50 MSEK. The exit proved the model commercially and freed the team to focus on the harder problem underneath it: the data.

The publishing industry was in crisis, and Mktmedia’s management was offered a buyout. We took it and bet the company on Brain. That same year we rolled out a programmatic targeting standard across the Swedish DSPs, so publisher audiences could be bought consistently wherever advertisers were working.

Apple had started blocking third-party cookies and Google had announced it would follow. We launched the world’s first publisher data enrichment service that never depended on third-party cookies to begin with — built for the market that was arriving, not the one that was ending.

Stampen Media became the first Swedish publisher to operate entirely independently of third-party cookies. Their audience data now rests on first-party foundations they own outright. They reached that position two years before the rest of the market had to confront the same deadline.

We brought leading data and programmatic technology companies together under the Audience Alliance to take on digital marketing’s biggest challenge in two decades. In the same year we converged our publisher and advertiser products — Brain Media and SAM under a single name: Samhub.

IDFREE lets publishers share audience data without sharing personal data or cookie IDs. It allowed competing publishers to expose one unified audience taxonomy to Mediekompaniet, Sweden’s largest ad network, while each of them kept full control over their own users’ information.

Data only earns its keep when a salesperson uses it in front of an advertiser. Sales Suite adds automated reporting, campaign validation, customer analytics and advertiser integration. After rolling it out, Stampen increased the use of data in their digital sales tenfold.

Publishers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland face the same squeeze as the Nordic ones: strong audiences, weak data infrastructure, and global platforms taking the budgets. We signed our first German customer in July, taking a model built in Sweden into Europe’s largest publishing market.