EsheleD Marketing & Technology

Answering to our users – delivering on commitments

Last year at IAB’s Innovation Days, I made a number of predictions, all focused on answering one central question: how can we put the user at the center of all that we do? One year later, I think it’s time for a progress report - to hold ourselves accountable and see how far we’ve come. I presented an update on some of my predictions earlier today at Digital Media Summit, hosted by Luma Partners:

Prediction: People will have a direct say in 25% of the ads they see:
Update: We’ve seen choice friendly formats take off across the industry. In our own network, engaged views of TrueView skippable ads grew 4x last year. Going beyond ads, we rolled out paywall alternative Google Consumer Surveys, which has already shown more than 300 million surveys, with an average publisher RPM of $12. Given all the innovation, I actually think we aimed too low and that consumers will have a say in well over half of the ads they see.

Prediction: Engagement rates across all display ads will increase 50%
Update: This increase in engagement will be driven by two factors: relevance and creativity. While technological innovations continue to improve relevance, we believe rich media will be the key to unlocking the creative potential of digital advertising. According to Nielsen AdRelevance, rich media impressions almost doubled in 2011. We’re committed to helping creative agencies scale and optimize rich media ads with templatized ad units in the latest version of DoubleClick Studio.

Prediction: 35% of campaigns will use metrics beyond clicks and conversions
Update: As we move to a model that seeks to drive engagement versus just clicks, we need new measures of success. We’re working with the industry-wide “Making Measurement Make Sense” (3MS) initiative to establish new standards for brand advertisers to measure reach and engagement. And just last month, we launched the Brand Activate Initiative with several pilots for new metrics — Active View, which shows brands whether their ad has been seen; and Active GRP, the digital counterpart to the gross rating point. We’ve already received interest from dozens of major brands.

As an industry, we’ve made plenty of progress over the last year. With all the innovations to do right by our user, I actually have two new predictions I’d like to add to the list.

New Prediction: 25% of brands will favor digital ads over all other media
This is a pretty bold prediction, considering today this number is probably close to none. So why are we so bullish? First, audiences continue to move online: in 2011, households with broadband internet but with no cable TV, increased 23% (Nielsen Cross-Platform Report Q3’11). Second, so is content: the newly launched YouTube Original Channels alone will introduce 25 new hours of original programming a day. Third, technology is offering new levels of control and measurement: technologies like real-time bidding will allow for improved targeting while initiatives like 3MS and Brand Activate will demonstrate effectiveness. With reach, control, quality content and measurement, I think the real question will become, why wouldn’t a brand name digital their favorite medium?

New Prediction: 100% of campaigns will be integrated everywhere
All signs indicate that campaigns that reach across screens - TV, desktops, smartphones and tablets -- are more effective. For example, in a study conducted by Google and Nielsen Multi-Media Labs in September 2011, users who saw a multi-screen Volvo campaign had a 24% higher brand recall than those that viewed their ads on TV alone. We’re increasingly seeing increased interest in buying across screens on our own platforms, like DoubleClick for Publishers Mobile, where we’ve seen the number of impressions delivered double every quarter.

The online advertising ecosystem is complex, and in order for digital advertising to be a medium that provides a great experience for consumers, marketers and publishers alike, we all need to work together. For our part, we’ve invested in hundreds of partnerships to better support publishers, and advertisers, ultimately serve our users. Happier consumers will drive better performing ads, more money for publishers and increased ad spend (including marketing budget) for agencies. I look forward to seeing the continued innovation that this “user revolution” inspires and working with all of you to move towards the bright future I hope we all envision for this industry.

Mark your calendars for DoubleClick Insights on June 5th

From our vantage point, we see unprecedented opportunity as the digital media world continues to grow and diversify. What does this mean for the future of buying and selling ads online?

Tune in and find out as Google's Neal Mohan, VP of Display Advertising sits down with industry leaders to explore how the digital ecosystem is swiftly evolving, and how advertisers and publishers can work better together to chart a path to capitalize on every opportunity, while simultaneously addressing the challenges we face.

PubTalk: PCH’s Denise Leggio on winning big with DoubleClick Ad Exchange

You probably think of Publisher’s Clearing House (PCH) as a mail-order sweepstakes company that surprised winners with big, over-sized checks. However, PCH has evolved its traditional magazine and merchandise direct marketing business to include several “play and win” properties such as pchlotto.com, pchgames.com and pchsearchandwin.com.

Delivering over 300 million ad impressions per month across these sites, PCH tested multiple strategies for monetizing remnant inventory before turning to DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) in early 2010. Today, AdX’s share of revenue has grown 5X and it now monetizes up to 70% of all remnant inventory. We caught up with Denise Leggio, Director of Ad Operations at PCH, to learn more about what worked for them with AdX.

Won over by strong controls
“With a brand like ours, ad quality is just as important as the RPM. But Ad Exchange is easy to use and allows us a broad range of controls, like blocking competitive or undesirable ads from bidding. It lets us maximize revenue without giving up control of the ads or compromising our brand,” says Denise.

Higher yields with Dynamic Allocation
“One of the biggest benefits of Ad Exchange is Dynamic Allocation with DFP. Ad Exchange will only serve if it can beat the highest-paying ad at that exact time, ensuring optimal revenue.” For PCH, Dynamic Allocation has also informed pricing decisions on direct inventory.

Multiple tools and levers for deeper insights and higher revenue

MRAID support in DFP: Simplifying in-app rich media on mobile

As part of today’s release of the Google AdMob SDK, DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) and AdMob now fully support the IAB’s Mobile Rich Media Ad Interface Definitions (MRAID) standard for advertising in mobile applications.

MRAID is an initiative from the IAB to define a common API for mobile rich media advertisements, in order to help the mobile marketplace reach new levels of consistency, efficiency and effectiveness. Adopting a common standard for rich media in applications will make building rich media ads simpler and enable advertisers to reach a wider audience with a single creative.

For publishers who use DFP to deliver ads to mobile applications, the new Google AdMob SDK gives your advertisers the flexibility to provide creatives that work seamlessly across any application, regardless of the device, platform, or ad technology involved. Using an MRAID-compliant SDK also enables publishers to:

• Work with a greater range of vendors to produce rich media campaigns 
• Reduce integration and maintenance costs by removing vendor-specific SDKs 
• Develop differentiated ad formats against a stable, vendor-neutral platform 
• Attract large scale advertisers building high value, high reach campaigns 
• Use HTML5 creatives across mobile web and mobile apps

We look forward to actively participating in the future development of MRAID. We believe it will have a significant impact on the mobile advertising industry by lowering costs, increasing scale and providing the foundation for a mature mobile display ecosystem.

Posted by Marcel Gordon, Product Manager

A Universal Language for Video Ads

So what does the subway system have to do with video advertising? Well, the two dominant video advertising guidelines -- VAST and VPAID -- are like the unified transportation system for video advertising. VAST and VPAID define a common language that unifies the diversity of the video advertising industry: Flash and HTML video players, ad networks and exchanges, mobile devices and connected TVs, 30 second spots and interactive overlays.

At Google, we’ve been longtime supporters of video advertising standards. We’re happy to announce our support for the latest set of guidelines announced at the IAB’s Digital Video Marketplace Event today. This means that we’ll be implementing VAST 3.0, VPAID 2.0 and VMAP 1.0 across our video advertising products. Together, these three guidelines strengthen the video advertising infrastructure already adopted by most participants in the video ecosystem. The Video Suite also adds support for skippable ads, podding, in-ads privacy notices and ad sequencing, while offering greater clarity around compliance and mobile scenarios.

What benefits can you expect from VAST 3.0, VPAID 2.0 and VMAP 1.0? 

• If you’re a publisher, interoperability will improve and you’ll be able to accept a wider set of video ad formats with less technical work. The new error codes will also help with troubleshooting of third party served ads.
• If you’re an advertiser, the Video Suite allows you to create more engaging brand stories that reach a wider audience across all devices. You’ll be able to take greater advantage of skippable ads, which offer new pricing models focused on performance.
• If you’re a vendor, the technical details of these specs really matter, and we’ve provided much more clarity around the compliance requirements for video players and ad servers.

So much has changed in the online video space in just ten years, that we thought we’d take a trip down memory line with this infographic:

Click through for the full infographic

As an industry, we’ve started to take VAST and VPAID for granted, much like New Yorkers and their subway system. That’s a good thing, because it means they’ve become an essential part of powering our economy.

Posted by Payam Shodjai, Product Manager, Video Monetization

First-Party audience segments in the upgraded DFP service

Buying and selling ads based on audience has transformed the display industry in recent years. Buyers use new technologies to run highly relevant campaigns to users across ad networks and exchanges. This benefits publishers greatly, because it allows them to deliver more useful ads to their users ultimately helping increase RPMs on their indirectly sold inventory.

Publishers are increasingly taking control of their audience data as one of the key assets of their digital businesses. But publishers tell us they still want better tools to improve the integration, transparency, and control over their own audience data for both direct and indirect ad sales.

Today we’re announcing the first in a series of features in the upgraded DFP service that help publishers manage and control audience data through one platform, integrated directly with their primary ad serving technology.

This first release is focused on first-party segments - as a publisher, you will have the ability to define your own user audience based on criteria that you define (e.g., sports enthusiasts, travel readers). First party audience segmentation was available in the existing DFP service, and is now integrated seamlessly with the upgraded DFP service.

First-party segmentation involves no implementation or integration effort by you. Simply define the criteria you want for your audience segments, in DFP and DoubleClick technology does the work of populating them directly from the ad tag. Once you’ve defined your audience you can use it to increase the direct sales value of undersold inventory, and gain insights on how different audience segments are engaging with content across your site. We have designed it to be seamless, easy to use and to put you in control of your data.

First party segmentation is a great tool for our publishers, but it’s just the first step in the work of building out DFP’s audience capabilities. In the coming months you’ll see more information from us as we release a series of new features that are directly integrated with the upgraded DFP service.

Posted by Sean Harvey, Product Manager

Doubling Down on Publishers

This morning, I had the pleasure of addressing the third-annual Admeld Partner Forum in New York. When we completed our acquisition of Admeld this past December, we said that we’d be looking at how to bring the best of their products and ours together to help us achieve our shared vision: helping our publisher partners make the web work for them, and get the most out of what online advertising has to offer. 


Over the past couple of months our teams have been hard at work figuring out exactly how this might happen. Today, we’d like to put our cards on the table and share what we’ve done and where we’re headed. 


Investing in the team: We realize that helping our partners succeed requires not just the right products, but the right people. So we’re investing in the team, bringing together our sales and services teams from across the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and Admeld. This enables a continued focus on high-touch service for Admeld’s publisher partners, and also boosts Admeld’s presence across the globe.<


Tapping new pools of demand: Next quarter, we’ll start offering AdX Connect, a way for Admeld clients to start getting access to demand from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. We’ll also be enhancing the advertiser, buyer, and bid transparency levels in the exchange, so that they are comparable with those currently provided to Admeld publishers.


Connecting the dots with DFP: We’re taking two big steps towards tying together Admeld and DoubleClick for Publishers: making it much easier for publishers to leverage SSP-style ad network optimization functionality directly within the DFP platform, and building an API so that Admeld’s mobile optimization capabilities will be more fluidly integrated with DFP mobile.


While we’re excited about these changes, they are just the initial steps. Our long term goal is to create a single, seamless platform for publishers that allows them to manage all their inventory -- across desktop, video and mobile -- with the control and flexibility their businesses require. Our publisher partners make the web the wonderful place that it is today, and by empowering their continued growth and success, we all come away winners. 

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Display Advertising

Supercharge ad performance with DFP Optimization

When advertisers are evaluating whether to advertise on a publisher’s site, they want to ensure their ad will perform well. Advertisers decide whether to keep buying on your site or a competitors’ based on if their campaigns are reaching the most valuable audience and meeting their campaign goals.

As a publisher, ensuring your advertisers campaigns are receiving the impressions, clicks, and conversions they expect can be a daunting task. Ad operation teams spend hours at the controls of their ad server adjusting delivery settings, flight dates, and targeting, in effort to help their advertiser’s campaigns perform well. But solving this equation manually for hundreds or thousands of campaigns at once is virtually impossible to do.

The answer may lie in technology....and we think we can help.

Today, we’re excited to introduce DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Optimization, an advanced optimization system that supercharges ad performance to help publishers increases the value of their premium inventory, and boost yield for non-premium inventory.

DFP Optimization leverages Google’s infrastructure and processing capabilities to automatically deliver the best ad, to the best user, at the best time. The system uses advanced modeling and pattern recognition, and harnesses the power of AdWords machine learning and AdSense contextual matching, to deliver ads to users who are more likely to respond to them. DFP Optimization helps advertisers improve campaign performance, while helping publishers maximize clicks, conversions, and revenue.

Heise Online, one of Germany’s leading IT publishers, saw clicks on their optimized campaigns increase by 52% using DFP Optimization. This increase helped their sales teams improve the site stats they share with prospective clients, and were able to charge new premiums for its highly valuable inventory. Thomas Goldmann, Sales Director at Heise Online said “DFP Optimization has had a positive influence on our sales relationships with advertisers. Optimization allows better use of our premium inventory and increases the quality we can make available to our customers.”

DFP Optimization is fully integrated with the DFP ad serving platform, and can be easily implemented across all of a publisher’s inventory. After activating DFP Optimization, the system will continually learn, process, and adapt; this happens all without any manual intervention from your ad operations team. The system provides validation for publishers and their clients through a built-in control group that demonstrates the percentage lift for each optimized campaign. With this powerful reporting tool, you and your clients will know the solution is working.

To learn how you can begin increase the value of your inventory with DFP Optimization, please contact us.

Posted by Alex Vogenthaler, Product Manager

New tools and policies for Publisher Networks in the Ad Exchange

As the size and quality of publisher networks have grown, so has their need to operate more efficiently and profitably. With this in mind, we’ve rolled out a series of updates for publisher networks in DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

First, we’ve revised our policies to allow publisher networks to use the Ad Exchange even if they own & operate few (or none) of the sites they represent. As always, every partner site has to meet the same high-standards of quality as every AdX publisher.

Second, we’ve built a set Network Partner Management tools that make it easy to add new partners, manage hundreds of domains, and monitor their performance.


For current clients, using these features requires no changes to your existing tags. In addition, reporting, payment and site management remains in your hands.

If you’d like to learn more about these new capabilities, please sign up for one of the webinars below, contact your Ad Exchange account representative, or tell us how to contact you and we’ll have someone reach out.

US Webinar
Tuesday, March 13 at 11am PST (1pm CST / 2pm EST)
Register HERE

EMEA Webinar
Tuesday, March 13 at 2pm GMT (3pm CET)
Register HERE

Posted by Drew Bradstock, Product Manager

On stage at IAB: Daring to get the most out of online advertising for publishers, advertisers