Author Archives: Charlie Claxton

Working with the industry towards a fraud-free media supply chain

Advertising fraud is a complex challenge, but one that we are working to simplify for our partners. That’s why we’ve developed sophisticated systems, including over 180 automated filters and detection algorithms, to prevent invalid traffic from impacting our clients. For years, we’ve used these technologies to protect Google-owned media properties from invalid traffic and now we’re working to expand them to help the rest of the ecosystem.

Today we’d like to highlight three areas we are investing in, for DoubleClick Bid Manager, to help our partners build trust in the advertising supply chain.

Automating refunds for invalid traffic

In the coming months, we’ll be implementing new infrastructure to further automate the refund process for invalid traffic. Supply partners like AppNexus, Index Exchange, OpenX, Teads, Telaria and DoubleClick Ad Exchange have been very supportive of these changes and have committed to provide advertisers with refunds for invalid traffic detected up to 30-days after monthly billing.

“At OpenX, we believe it is the responsibility of every participant in the market to commit to providing a high quality, transparent and fraud free advertising marketplace. The industry must work together to advance a clean, well-lit ecosystem to be successful in eliminating the scourge of fraud from the market. We are pleased to partner with DoubleClick on this important effort to cut off funding for criminal actors and advance trust for our entire industry.”
-- Ian Davidson, OpenX

These commitments, along with others, cover over 90% of the available inventory in DoubleClick Bid Manager. Soon, we’ll identify in Bid Manager which supply partners provide refunds for invalid traffic and offer advertisers the option to buy only from those sources. This will make it easier for our customers to collect refunds for invalid activity.

Increasing transparency on invalid traffic we’ve filtered

It’s hard to prevent invalid activity if you don’t know how you’re being impacted. That’s why we’re investing in reporting features to give advertisers and supply partners greater visibility into what our invalid traffic defenses detect.

With these new features, advertisers will be able to see and understand the amount of invalid traffic detected in their campaigns both pre-bid and post-serve, including breakdowns by categories like data center traffic, automated browsers, and falsely represented inventory. Supply partners will receive reporting on the sources and amounts of invalid traffic that our systems are post-serve filtering from their platforms. By providing our customers and supply partners with access to this data we hope to provide more transparency into the sources of invalid traffic, facilitate conversations with third parties, and make sure our clients’ media spend does not enrich bad actors.
Example of an upcoming change to our user interface showing the sources of invalid traffic.

Support for ads.txt

Beyond our own platforms, we are fully supportive of industry initiatives to improve the health of the advertising ecosystem and combat ad fraud. Recently, the IAB Tech Lab released the ads.txt standard to increase supply chain transparency and make it more difficult to sell counterfeit inventory. It defines a simple method for publishers to publicly declare who is authorized to sell or resell their digital advertising inventory.

We believe the ads.txt standard is a significant step forward in the fight against ad fraud, and by the end of October, DoubleClick Bid Manager will only buy a publisher’s inventory from sources identified as authorized sellers in its ads.txt file when a file is available.

The success of ads.txt will be defined by the extent of its adoption, and it’s great to see healthy adoption by publishers since the standard was finalized.
These changes are just some of the things we’re doing to help combat ad fraud and increase transparency in the advertising supply chain, and it’s been great partnering with Nissan Motor Corporation and GroupM as we developed these solutions.
“Google has been a proactive partner helping us fight ad fraud. At Nissan, we look to Google, all publishers, as well as media agencies, to take their responsibility to clean up the inventory supply chain. It is therefore good to see that we’re gaining momentum to address this issue. We all need to embrace and demand new solutions to further accelerate this clean-up. That’s why we strongly urge all publishers we work with to adopt ads.txt to help keep the supply chain accountable and ensure marketer dollars are driving real results.” -- Roel de Vries, Nissan Motor Corporation
"We're extremely supportive of the steps Google is taking to bring transparency and accountability to the digital supply chain. It's critical that we have partners who are as dedicated as we are to protecting brands from ad fraud and we look forward to working together solve this issue for our clients." -- Rob Norman, GroupM

There’s no doubt that this is a complex problem, but if we continue to work together, we’re confident that we can address this challenge.

Posted by Payam Shodjai
Director, Product Management

Bringing video ads into view

For an ad to have impact, being seen isn’t just important, it’s fundamental. That’s why measuring the viewability of advertising matters so much. Today, we’re releasing new research to help the industry better understand video ad viewability rates around the world and across devices, and announcing updates to our Active View measurement technology that helps advertisers place their ads where they have a better chance to be seen.

The current state of video ad viewability

Last year, we announced that globally, average video ad viewability on YouTube grew to 93%, significantly higher than the 66% average video ad viewability across the rest of the web and apps. Today, this number is even higher: Globally, average YouTube video ad viewability is now 95%, while the average video ad viewability across the rest of the web and apps remains at 66%.1 And what’s more, 95% of YouTube ads are audible.2

Read the full “State of Video Ad Viewability” report to see viewability rates across different inventory types and devices around the world.

New Active View optimization strategies in DoubleClick Bid Manager

To ensure all of your video ads are being seen and heard, not just those on YouTube, we’re launching two new Active View bid optimization strategies in DoubleClick Bid Manager for video ads on the rest of the web and apps, where video ad viewability is lower. This includes the ability to optimize towards a video ad that is viewable on screen for at least 10 seconds, or towards a video ad that completes in view and is audible.

Active View optimization uses machine learning to maximize the impressions that meet your viewability and audibility goals. Specifically, this means that Active View factors in signals like video player size, domain and position on page to determine the optimal bid for each impression, so you get the most from your marketing budget. These new bidding strategies allow you to improve view-through rate for situations when you need to know that your audience is paying attention — if, for example, you need more time to explain your offering, or if your branding or logo doesn’t show up until the end of the video.

These two new Active View bid optimization strategies are now available in Bid Manager for all advertisers globally, building on our existing Active View bid optimization strategies that help you deliver against viewable CPM goals.

Advanced Active View metrics for all of your video ads

Earlier this year we announced enhanced reporting for YouTube TrueView campaigns in DoubleClick. Now, we're expanding on that announcement and making new Active View metrics available in DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager for all of your video ads, not just YouTube.

These new viewability and audibility metrics allow you to uncover deep insights into creative performance and user attention, including:

Studies have shown that the longer a user views your ad, the higher the lift in brand metrics like brand awareness and consideration. With new viewability and audibility metrics in DoubleClick, you can get closer to understanding which of your video ads are holding the attention of your viewers, and are thus most likely to make an impact, and which you need to improve in order to deliver more impact.

And, because DoubleClick Campaign Manager is MRC-accredited for viewable video ad impressions for desktop web, mobile web and mobile app, when you view these metrics in Campaign Manager you can feel confident that they’ve undergone a stringent, independent audit. We are also in the process of seeking MRC accreditation for video impressions and viewability statistics in both AdWords and DoubleClick Bid Manager.

Today’s announcements are the next evolution of Active View and reflect our commitment to empowering you with the data and tools you need to ensure your ads are capturing attention. Visit the Help Center to see all available metrics in Campaign Manager and Bid Manager reports.
Posted by Babak Pahlavan
Senior Director of Product Management, Analytics Solutions and Measurement, Google
Google and DoubleClick advertising platforms data, May 2017
Google Internal Data, Global, August 2016 (when volume is at least 10% for YouTube ads)

Scale your marketing with improved feed-based automation

If your business offers a large number of products or services, it can be difficult to manually create and manage keywords and ads for each and every one of them. Inventory keyword campaigns allow you to automatically convert your product catalog to highly relevant, up-to-date search ads. Today we’re providing additional flexibility and scale to feed-based automation with new upgraded inventory management. You can now automatically create thousands of campaigns, ad groups, keywords and other items based off any feed.

Endless possibilities with one easy setup

Getting started with upgraded inventory management is easy. First, connect the feed you want to use. Then, create an inventory plan. Finally, create templates for your campaigns, ad groups, keywords, ads, and other items. DoubleClick will automatically create thousands of each item at once, so you don’t have to. When creating new items, you can save time by editing your existing templates instead of starting from scratch.

Let’s say you’re a clothing retailer looking to promote your new line of Fall dress styles. Through a single setup, you can create an inventory plan that uses your dresses product feed to automatically generate a campaign for each and every dress style. Then for each dress style campaign, create thousands of relevant keywords, sitelinks, and more.

Show more relevant ads

Your ads will always be up to date as they’ll automatically reflect any changes to your feed. You can customize almost anything using your feed and apply functions and rules to that data. For example, show how many dresses are available by applying the COUNT function to the headline of your ad template. You can also apply a rule to automatically pause these ads when you sell out of that particular dress.

Holiday Hypermarket, a popular UK travel aggregator, uses upgraded inventory management to help improve its ad targeting and increase efficiency. The brand saw click through rates increase by 88%, ROI increase by 11% and saved upwards of 30 hours in campaign creation.

“Upgraded inventory management’s ability to generate entire campaigns based off of templates has saved us many hours in legwork. We can now focus our time on running and optimizing campaigns.”
- Ruaridh Stewart, Senior Account Manager, Periscopix
You can learn more about upgraded inventory management in the DoubleClick Search Help Center.
Posted by Henry Tappen
Product Manager, DoubleClick Search

Programmatic Native Ads on DoubleClick available to all

When we announced the beta of DoubleClick Native Ads, our goal was to help our partners earn the most money possible with ad experiences that are both engaging and complementary to the user experience. Since then, we’ve seen hundreds of partners deliver beautiful native ads that match the look, feel and function of the surrounding content. And we’ve learned that advertisers are willing to pay more for and users are more likely to engage with native ads compared to traditional ad experiences.

Today we’re happy to announce that all partners on DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) can now deliver native ads programmatically to users across any screen with DoubleClick Native Ads.

Grow your business with native ads

DoubleClick Native Ads provide a dynamic framework for delivering ad experiences that advertisers and users love. Rather than serving a static image or text ad, native ads deliver an engaging user experience by taking multiple creative components — such as a headline, thumbnail and description — and assembling them in real-time to match the style of the site or app.
Partners like the New York Times are using DoubleClick Native Ads to deliver premium standalone ad experiences, increasing CTRs 6X. Accuweather is using native ads to grow programmatic yield on their existing ad placements. In fact, this strategy has improved CPMs 40%, with over 15% of their total impressions won by native-specific demand.

“DoubleClick's native product provides the perfect solution for us to increase CPMs while delivering a mobile experience that is consistent with what users expect from Accuweather,” says Bill McGarry, Vice President of Advertising Sales at Accuweather. “Since implementing DoubleClick Native Ads, we've seen a significant increase in CPMs and we look forward to expanding our investment in native.”

All of DoubleClick, one flexible native solution

With DoubleClick Native Ads, you can deliver beautiful native ads while leveraging the efficiency and scale of a single platform that works across all of your advertising inventory, sales channels and ad formats — whether they’re custom display, video or native ads.

One of DoubleClick’s strengths is the multiple ways it connects buyers and sellers. Whether it’s a Programmatic Guaranteed deal or Private Auction, DoubleClick gives you more ways to work directly with advertisers on high-value transactions — now across all of your native inventory.

We’re also helping you maximize your revenue by allowing these new formats to compete with traditional banner ads. By activating native demand across your existing ad units, you can capture the highest value from a broader group of advertisers competing to serve ads to your audience.

New tools for designing beautiful native ads

Finally, we’ve made it easier for partners to implement DoubleClick Native Ads with the launch of 22 new and customizable native styles in DFP. Though partners can also build custom integrations from scratch, these templates can serve as a great starting point.

The templates take advantage of the many new features we’ve added this year:

  • Ad attribution and AdChoices badges can now overlap the primary image, removing the need to place these elements in a separate row.
  • Additional style targeting options, like devices and negative key values, help you to show the right style at the right time.
  • Better previews make it easier to see how your native style will look while you build it.

We’ve also developed a guide to building great native ads, with advice from Google’s design team and feedback from advertisers about the type of inventory they want to buy, to help you create beautiful and high-performing native ads.

In a world where high-quality ad experiences are more important than ever, DoubleClick Native Ads provide a solution for delivering beautiful and impactful ad experiences efficiently while helping you build thriving and sustainable businesses.

To get started with DoubleClick Native Ads, visit our Help Center or contact your account manager today.

Posted by Aaron Karp
Product Manager, DoubleClick

Delivering more revenue with sustainable advertising solutions

At DoubleClick, we've always had a single mission — to help you grow revenue and build sustainable businesses with advertising. That means ensuring we're helping you make the most revenue from every impression, with solutions that keep up with advertiser demands for more programmatic access to inventory, while at the same time delivering on the expectations of users for great experiences with your sites and apps on every screen. To that end, over the last year we launched products like Optimized Private Auctions, optimized pricing in the Open Auction and DoubleClick for Publishers First Look.

Today, we’d like share some updates on how we’re using the power of automation and machine learning to create sustainable solutions that drive greater advertising performance and revenue for our partners.

Smarter yield through machine learning

Programmatic buying has created many opportunities for publishers to maximize revenue, but optimizing manually puts publishers at a disadvantage when programmatic buyers are constantly investing in smarter bidding technology. That’s why we’ve been applying optimization and machine learning techniques developed over the years at Google to help publishers make more money from programmatic demand. In fact, since 2016 we have run hundreds of experiments resulting in over 50 improvements to our auction algorithms. These optimizations have generated 15% more revenue for publishers using DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Actionable insights with Opportunities & Experiments

Data can be an important input for making better decisions, but the best yield management strategies also include constant testing and measurement. To make this process easier, we recently launched a new Opportunites & Experiments tool that puts publishers in control of Google intelligence.

Publisher opportunities and experiments in DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange provide customized, actionable and quantifiable suggestions on how to increase yield. With a few clicks, publishers can safely run an experiment, and if they like the results, accept the change to apply it across their account. Publishers including The Soul Publishing in Russia, TV2 in Norway, and Match.com in the U.S. have grown revenue with Opportunities and Experiments.

"Opportunities and experiments lets us bypass the heavy, manual labor part of the yield optimization process. It lets us skip straight to projecting results of possible changes and testing a yield hypothesis against a control test group in a safe way. Essentially, the feature helps us find the test cases worth our time automatically, letting us focus on increasing yield and revenue,” says Mikaela Rimaila, Programmatic Manager, TV2. "Personally I’d love to do all my yield optimization through this feature, as it adds a safety layer to rule changes, easily giving us the chance to compare and analyse the effects of the test.”

"Opportunities and experiments in AdX has helped streamline our yield optimization process and boosted our indirect revenue. We receive customized suggestions to increase our yield, such as floor adjustments, and have seen significant gains as a result."
- Gregg Murphy Senior Director, Revenue Operations, Match.com

Bringing Exchange Bidding to more partners demand without compromising user experience

We’ve made a lot of progress since announcing our test of Exchange Bidding last year, and today we’re happy to announce the Open Beta of Exchange Bidding, available for publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers* globally. Exchange Bidding helps publishers bring more of their programmatic demand together into a unified auction and the results have been impressive. On average Exchange Bidding is delivering double-digit programmatic revenue uplift, with some publishers seeing programmatic lift as high as 40% with minimal impact to user experience. Today, 100+ publishers can choose from 7 trusted third party exchanges, including our new partners, COMET, OpenX and Sovrn.

"We've been working with Google on the development of Exchange Bidding for several months now and while it's still early, we are pleased with the level of partnership and transparency we have seen from the Google team. While there are still issues to be resolved and the product is very complex, their efforts have resulted in real and positive changes to the Exchange Bidding product. Based on our experience so far, and the excellent results we have seen to date, we are optimistic that we can deliver material value to our publisher partners via Exchange Bidding."
- Jason Fairchild, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer, OpenX

Driving sustainability in the future

Looking back at the results from our latest yield management improvements shows us what’s possible, but I think we can do more. We’ve shown how machine learning can deliver more value to publishers, and in the future, we’ll continue to invest in it to deliver even more innovations. Also, the work our teams have been doing on server side technologies have revealed more opportunities to improve publisher revenue by taking advantage of synergies across our products. Publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange may have noticed our first step in this direction, a unified UI for both platforms. Moving forward you should expect more innovations like these to increase publisher yield.

Posted by Jonathan Bellack
Director of Product Management, Publisher Platforms
*Exchange Bidding is not currently available to publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business

Announcing Exchange Bidding open beta

When we announced the pilot program for Exchange Bidding last year, our goal was to help publishers earn the most money possible, with the least complexity, while maintaining the best user experience.

We’ve been working on Exchange Bidding in collaboration with our publisher and exchange partners for the last year, and today we’re happy to announce the Open Beta of Exchange Bidding, available to publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers* globally. Our partners have been seeing great results during our testing, and we’d like to give you more details about this powerful enhancement to DoubleClick for Publishers.

Greater revenue without compromising user experience

When every millisecond counts, the fastest solutions yield the best results. Relying on client side connections over mobile networks to manage yield can result in annoyed users, lower viewability and lost opportunities.

That’s why we challenged ourselves and worked hard to prioritize speed during the closed Beta. To maximize revenue without compromising on user experience, we built Exchange Bidding directly into DoubleClick for Publishers.

The results speak for themselves. Publishers in our closed beta have seen double-digit programmatic revenue lift on average, with some seeing programmatic lift as high as 40%. Plus, Exchange Bidding is up to 15x faster than client side or server side solutions in the market today. While header bidding solutions add on average 500ms to 1,000ms of delay to ad delivery speed, Exchange Bidding adds only 60ms seconds of delay.

Publishers like Hearst Digital are seeing great results.

“Our goal is to move as much of our advertising code off our sites as possible. Less code loading on the client side is better. Exchange Bidding is great because it helps us move in that direction. It’s simple to setup and works with our existing DoubleClick tags.”
- Scott Both, Director of Programmatic Sales Engineering, Hearst Digital Media

Reduced complexity with all demand in one ad tag

Beyond speed and revenue lift, Exchange Bidding creates greater value for publishers by reducing the complexity of their existing yield management setups. Because Exchange Bidding is built into DoubleClick for Publishers, it works with our existing ad tags, requires no additional coding to a publisher’s site or app or additional line items cluttering up a publisher’s ad server, and puts no additional burden on users.

Instead of taking days or weeks of development and adjustments to set up, publishers can get Exchange Bidding up and running in less than a day. Instead of constantly updating the price and priority of partner line items or adding hundreds or thousands of new line items to implement header bidding, publishers simply create a handful of yield groups that define which third party exchanges can bid on specific inventory. And instead of spending days collecting reporting and billing information from multiple partners, reconciling discrepancies, and waiting to get paid, Exchange Bidding provides publishers unified reporting and consolidated billing on our standard terms.

“Integrating and maintaining client side headers is a significant investment for any publisher. Setting up server side bidding with Exchange Bidding was simple. It also helped us reduce a lot of the operational overheads associated with headers and it promises to reduce latencies and discrepancies whilst improving scalability”.
- Nat Poulter, Head of Programmatic at MailOnline

We only succeed when our partners succeed

We understand that in order to help publishers thrive we must foster a sustainable advertising ecosystem. That means creating solutions that deliver the most revenue possible for publishers, while maintaining great experiences for users, and providing all players in the industry equal access to high quality inventory.

To ensure we were getting the right feedback from all parties, we created an advisory board with members from our initial exchange partners. It’s feedback from this group that helped inform the development of Exchange Bidding and make it work better for every participant.

"We've been working with Google on the development of Exchange Bidding for several months now and while it's still early, we are pleased with the level of partnership and transparency we have seen from the Google team. While there are still issues to be resolved and the product is very complex, their efforts have resulted in real and positive changes to the Exchange Bidding product. Based on our experience so far, and the excellent results we have seen to date, we are optimistic that we can deliver material value to our publisher partners via Exchange Bidding."
- Jason Fairchild, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer, OpenX

We’ve seen great results during the testing phase of Exchange Bidding. Today, 100+ publishers can choose from seven trusted third party exchanges including our new partners, COMET, OpenX and Sovrn to compete equally in a unified auction against a publisher’s direct sold campaigns in DoubleClick for Publishers and bids from DoubleClick Ad Exchange. We look forward to working with our existing and new users to make Exchange Bidding the best solution for the industry.

Posted by Sam Cox
Group Product Manager, DoubleClick Ad Exchange

*Exchange Bidding is not currently available to publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business

Helping you scale with new tools for customized marketing

At DoubleClick, we're always looking for new ways to help you drive growth and efficiency. This means giving you tools that let you scale and customize your marketing in a way that suits your business needs.

A pain-free bid strategy with Automated Bidding

Scale and customization are critical to effective media buying. But a dependence on manual processes is often painful, especially when you’re running thousands of campaigns. It’s time-consuming and prone to mistakes.

To ease this pain, we’ve rebuilt Automated Bidding from the ground up. Rather than trying to guess the best bidding strategy, you can use Automated Bidding to leverage deep insights informed by Google’s machine learning. You set your bidding strategy to meet campaign goals, such as conversions or viewable impressions, and DoubleClick does the work for you, analyzing dozens of signals to dynamically place bids on the most valuable impressions.

Automated Bidding is now available in all DoubleClick Bid Manager accounts.

Flexing to meet your business goals with Custom Algorithm

While Automated Bidding lets you scale your marketing campaigns to meet a number of common goals, many marketers have campaign objectives specific for their business.

We’re introducing Custom Algorithm to address this need. This solution lets you customize the DoubleClick Bid Manager algorithm based on your proprietary data and models. You can assign a value to each impression based on your own unique data, and then Bid Manager automatically optimizes your strategy against those values, rather than clicks or conversions.

Fully customizable to meet any campaign goal, Custom Algorithm offers brands in any industry a way to better drive results using their proprietary data and insights. For instance, a financial services company could customize the algorithm to serve more of their ads to consumers with a high credit score, while a retail advertiser could use their historical purchase data to reach people likely to make high-value purchases.

Custom Algorithm also creates opportunities in more complex scenarios. Google’s internal media buying team used Custom Algorithm for the launch campaign of the Pixel phone. With the aim of optimizing for viewable placements on premium inventory, the team used previous campaign results to build a media buying model to score impressions based on these two factors. They used Custom Algorithm to increase the number of impressions on premium placements, while reducing cost per viewable impression.

They saw great results: Impressions on premium inventory more than tripled and viewable CPM fell 34% when comparing to previous campaigns that didn't use this approach.

Custom Algorithm will launch in limited beta in June 2017 and roll out in full availability towards the end of the year.

Adapting your bids to the user’s context with Bid Multipliers

Automated Bidding and Custom Algorithm are new tools to help marketers automatically set their bids to reach their broader marketing goals. But the most effective bid strategies are ones that align to the user’s context.

For instance, imagine you want to adjust your bids based on the device consumers are using. Right now this process requires you to manually set these bids in separate line items.

We’re aiming to improve your productivity with Bid Multipliers. This new solution lets you set different bids for six dimensions all within the same line item, including device, site, audience lists, demographic, location and time of day. You can also adjust your bids to better reach particular customer segments. For example, if your customers are converting at a higher rate on mobile than desktop, you could shift your strategy to bid higher on mobile campaigns.

We’ll roll out Bid Multipliers to all DoubleClick Bid Manager accounts over the next few months.

We understand the leverage you can gain when we invest in tools that give you greater efficiency and help you scale. With these new solutions, we aim to increase your productivity and empower your team to achieve more impactful results.

Posted by Deepti Bhatnagar
Senior Product Manager, DoubleClick

Introducing Ads Data Hub: Next generation insights and reporting

Mobile has fundamentally changed how we live our lives. With our devices never more than an arm’s length away, people can find, watch or buy anything at anytime. That’s why earlier this year we shared that we’re developing a new, cloud-based measurement solution for YouTube, designed for a mobile world. Today, we’re announcing the beta for this solution, Ads Data Hub, to help advertisers get more detailed insights from their campaigns across screens while also protecting user privacy.

We are also announcing that Ads Data Hub is a solution not just for YouTube, but a tool that offers access to more data and helps unlock actionable insights across Google ad platforms, including the Google Display Network and DoubleClick. And with Ads Data Hub now in beta, we’re expanding who can use it.

Built on infrastructure from Google Cloud, including BigQuery, Ads Data Hub gives advertisers or their preferred measurement partners access to detailed, impression-level data about their media campaigns across devices in a secure, privacy-safe environment. Data from other sources, such as a CRM system or marketing database, can be incorporated as well. With this full view, advertisers or their partners can analyze the data and draw out insights specific to their business.

For example, if an e-commerce retailer wants to understand what the path to conversion looks like, they can bring additional online data about their customers into BigQuery, and Ads Data Hub will enable them to combine that data with their ads data so they can see what a typical journey is from first encountering a user until conversion.

Consistent with our commitment to privacy, no user-level data can be removed from the secure Cloud environment. Impression-level data is only accessible for the purposes of analysis and generating insights. In the future, advertisers will be able to act on the insights they get from Ads Data Hub and buy media with greater precision.

As an early alpha partner, Omnicom Media Group helped to define the solution and has seen significant value from both the amount of data available through Ads Data Hub and the broad set of analyses and custom queries that are possible.

"With the complexity of today's consumer journeys, we are seeing that marketers are looking to solve harder business challenges than ever before. Through our partnership with Google and our use of Ads Data Hub, we will be able to answer a broader range of questions and expand our analytical services."
- Slavi Samardzija, Global CEO, Annalect, An Omnicom Media Group Company

With the shift to mobile, consumer behavior has changed for good. Marketers need tools to help them make sense of this new world, and Ads Data Hub is a key step forward.

Posted by Geoff Samek
Senior Product Manager, Ads Data and Privacy

Improving the living room viewing experience

Picture this: You're chilling on your couch, streaming your favorite show. In the next ad break, the ad loads slowly and is grainy and pixelated. Clearly, you're frustrated because you expect more from your HD TV and lightning-fast internet connection.

You're not alone. Advertisers and broadcasters hate it when this happens too -- they want you to stay deeply engaged with what you're watching and not be distracted by the streaming experience. But providing TV-quality ad experiences has become challenging with the proliferation of connected TV devices that people use to stream video.

At DoubleClick, we are focused on helping deliver great user experiences by enabling advertisers and TV broadcasters to show seamless, high-quality video ads across all screen sizes and device types.

In this vein, we partnered with the IAB, CBS Interactive, Ad-ID and others last year to develop a new digital video standard that allows advertisers and broadcasters to deliver TV-quality ads to living room screens and devices. This standard, called VAST 4.0, updates previous video standards to work better for the viewing behavior in today’s world.

Today, we’re rolling out support for aspects of VAST 4.0 in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, and DoubleClick for Publishers. It was important to launch this standard for both advertisers and broadcasters simultaneously to ensure that the whole ecosystem runs smoothly, from insertion order to ad serving.

To enable optimal viewing experiences on living room screens, we prioritized our focus on two specific aspects of VAST 4.0:

  • TV-quality viewing experiences: TV-quality creative files (known as mezzanine files) uploaded to DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick for Publishers can now be passed to services that dynamically stitch ads into video streams (server side ad insertion platforms). This helps ensure a higher quality viewing experience, especially for connected TVs, by enabling the TV-quality ad creative to be transcoded and served in one stream alongside the video content.
  • More efficient ad delivery: A universal ad ID system helps the server side ad insertion platform better identify unique vs. existing creatives, which reduces unnecessary transcodes.

This updated set of standards applies across ad servers and server side ad insertion tools, helping advertisers and broadcasters provide high quality viewing experiences for their audiences.

To learn more about VAST 4.0 and how we’re supporting it in DoubleClick, please register for our webinar, coming up next Monday, 5/22, from 12-1pm ET.

Posted by Peentoo Patel and Sunil Gupta
Product Managers, DoubleClick Video Ads