The digital advertising challenges are multiplying: Is your advertising team fluent in digital technologies? How are you leveraging your customer behaviour data? Are you recruiting enough data analysts or 'creative technologists'? How should you deal with ad networks, programmatic buying, data leakage... never mind the opportunities in mobile?

Study Tour ROI: In the US, new ideas emerge fast in a highly competitive market. Join this Study Tour to visit the best companies, learn about the challenges that will hit you hard in 2014 and take action now. This tour is a great opportunity to find out how to survive in an increasingly automated, data-heavy, multi-platform ad environment.

New York: Data, video and the National Publishers

Visits (most confirmed but couple TBC):

The New York Times: We will visit the NYTimes Idea Lab, which develops new advertising formats, and hear about the company’s strategy on treating all inventory as premium, not using any ad networks (except for Google Doubleclick for some remnant inventory), their involvement in programmatic buying, how they protect their user data and deal with the mobile opportunity.

The Wall Street Journal: In 2011, the Wall Street Journal kick-started its IP TV platform WSJ Live which has become phenomenally successful. We’ll find out how they manage to keep video production costs low while at the same time selling pre-roll advertising at absolute top CPMs. We’ll also learn how the publisher, in addition to selling its inventory, has started selling audiences directly to advertisers.

Buzzfeed: Arguably the most famous implementer of native advertising, circumvents the cut-throat banner market by helping advertisers create content that users want to share, and serving it in-stream.

Bloomberg: In addition to its broadcast tv channel, Bloomberg runs a successful web tv site and mobile app. We’ll learn about the company’s advertising strategy for this as well as its other mobile platforms.

Huffington Post: Meet with top management at a digital pure player with a proven track record in native advertising and leveraging data.

International Advertising Bureau (IAB): Get a US market update and trend watch from their demand side & data expert + other specialists.

Quantcast: Quantcast is one of the top five data processing organisations in the world (alongside Google and Facebook). The company consists of two parts: Measurements and Advertising, and we’ll learn from their experiences in advanced predictive modelling and how their publishing partners benefit from the collaboration.

Lotame: The home of Crowd Control – a data management platform which allows publishers, marketers and networks to organise and understand their audience from any source in order to target them through online advertising.

Chicago: Local business models & Excellence in mobile classifieds

Visits (TBC):

Shaw Suburban Media: Shaw Media relatively early found that a paywall model for monetisation did not work, and are instead focusing heavily on Google Surveys, daily deals and social – both in terms of advertising and content.

Tribune Publishing (Chicago Tribune): Learn about the digital advertising strategy of this local giant – including mobile product strategy, mobile ad strategy and sales as well as digital marketing and audience acquisition.

Classified Ventures: Classified Ventures (owned by Gannett, Tribune, McClatchy, Washington Post and A.H. Belo), which owns and operates award-winning Cars.com and Apartments.com, has 16 years experience in the digital classifieds market and over 1,410 employees in 41 states. Learn how they stay at the top of the classifieds game, with particular focus on mobile.

Centro: Centro calls itself a digital media logistics company, and works with advertisers to help them get the most out of their campaigns and ad dollars. They run their own brand exchange and work with papers like the Chicago Tribune to improve local revenue / targeting.

Sapient Nitro: This Chicago based advertising agency has some big brands in its portfolio, and will give us the brand perspective on digital advertising revenues.