Author Archives: Nicole Burgan

TrueView coming to DoubleClick: User choice meets programmatic

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertiser blog.

Today at Programmatic I/O in San Francisco, we are announcing our latest investment to help brands make the most of digital: the TrueView ad format will be available for programmatic buying within DoubleClick Bid Manager.

This launch brings together two important trends we’re seeing: the importance of user choice in advertising and the ability to reach the right person at the right time with programmatic buying.

We introduced TrueView, an innovative cost-per-view (CPV) ad format, five years ago as a way to put user choice at the heart of brand advertising. With TrueView, viewers choose to engage, and brands only pay when they do. Today, the format is a brand mainstay, representing 85% of all in-stream ads on YouTube. And based on a recent study, we’ve seen that two-thirds of TrueView campaigns deliver significant lift in brand interest.

In parallel, programmatic buying has evolved from just a real-time bidding tool for direct response campaigns to an important technology and data-driven solution for brand building. Across our own platforms, we’ve seen the volume of programmatic transactions double year-over-year. With the consumer journey now fractured into many "micro-moments" across screens, programmatic can help brands understand and reach their audiences across devices and formats.

In the next few months, marketers and agencies will be able to buy the TrueView choice-based video ad format on a cost-per-view (CPV) basis through DoubleClick Bid Manager. This is the first time TrueView has been available outside of AdWords, allowing DoubleClick clients to take advantage of features like cross-campaign frequency capping, unified audience insights, measurement and billing across campaigns.

Some of our partners are already seeing success:


"At Netflix, we have always embraced consumer choice. In the advertising world, TrueView is the epitome of that choice. The fact that we can now scale it further via DoubleClick Bid Manager represents a powerful new channel for marketing our content across the world." 
Mike Zeman, Director of Digital Marketing, Netflix




“TrueView has empowered us to give our consumers greater choice while delivering a better engaging viewer experience. As an early adopter of the TrueView beta in DoubleClick Bid Manager in the UK we have seen great success in achieving our CPV goals.”
                                                         Nestlé UK



“We’re really excited to bring TrueView on DoubleClick Bid Manager into our video campaign arsenal. This deepens our ability to achieve client success metrics on highly relevant and viewable video inventory combined with universal controls around targeting, frequency management and reporting.” 
Ian Johnson, EVP and MD, Global Product at Cadreon




“TrueView in DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) allows us to strengthen our branding offering while benefiting from significant efficiency gains. Once we can leverage DBM’s capabilities such as 3rd party audience targeting and universal frequency capping, we will have a very powerful
value proposition for advertisers.” 
Roli Okoro, Director of AOD, Middle East and North Africa


This adds to our ongoing investments to help brands get the most out of the programmatic landscape like Google Partner Select, Active View, Verification and brand safety protections. We're committed to providing the most complete programmatic platform to our brand partners to help them connect with their audiences in all the moments that matter. Stay tuned for even more in the months to come.

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Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display and Video Advertising Products


5 Years of TrueView: How user choice is ushering in the next golden age of video advertising

“Focus on the user and all else will follow." Those words have guided Google from the days working out of a garage in Menlo Park. While advertising may not often be seen as a user-first industry, we believe focusing on the user applies as much to ads as it does to any other product at Google. When we launched search ads, we put the user first by matching consumer intent with ads - people chose to click on an ad, and advertisers paid nothing if they didn’t.

Five years ago, we took that same concept and brought it to video with the introduction of TrueView. At the time, people thought we were crazy: “who would choose to watch an ad?” But it turns out, people do choose to watch ads...more than 100 million times in some cases. Video advertising in general is moving toward user choice - as people can fast forward, skip, close the screen. But with choice comes opportunity, and we’re seeing more creative, engaging, and entertaining ads now than ever before. In fact, last year four of the top 10 trending videos of the year were created by brands.

Today marks the fifth anniversary since we began testing TrueView as a video ad format. We've come a long way in five short years; all of the top 100 global brands have run TrueView ads over the past year, and 95% of TrueView advertisers have run campaigns across screens.1 We’re also seeing strong growth in new advertisers adopting TrueView, as the number of advertisers using TrueView grew 45% in 20142.

To see how video ads have evolved over the past five years, we took a quick trip down memory lane:


                                                    View the full infographic

Since launching TrueView, we've invested in providing new tools to empower advertisers to create ads that people want to watch. Measurement tools like Brand Lift and Earned Action reports help answer questions around how people watch content, and the impact that views have on brand metrics. Likewise, product enhancements such as mobile app promotions and 360 video are enabling advertisers to use TrueView as a creative canvas to engage their customers.

And we have big things coming in 2015. We're continuing to evolve TrueView to make an even better creative platform for brands - and our first step comes with the launch of cards on TrueView. Cards provide a beautiful platform for viewer interactivity with ads, making it easy for viewers to watch more of your videos, playlists, or connect to your website directly from the ad regardless of whether it’s shown on a desktop or mobile device. For more info on cards, check out our blog post.

By giving viewers this choice, everyone wins – viewers only watch ads that interest them, and brands are rewarded for creating interesting content that people want to watch. We’re excited to continue to innovate with video ads, and look forward to the next five years of YouTube.

Sources:
  1. YouTube global data, 2014. Top 100 brands defined by Interbrand Top 100 Global Brands list.
  2. YouTube global data, 2013 vs. 2014

New Infographic Shows Finance Trends Throughout The Year

As tax season hits crunch time, we all have money on our minds. But it’s not just in April that consumers are thinking of ways to spend and save—it’s all year-round. 

From January to December, people are constantly thinking about their bank accounts, credit cards, mortgages, and 401Ks. And increasingly, they’re using smartphones to search for relevant information; mobile searches for those topics are growing 48% YoY.
On Think with Google, our finance calendar shows what they’re looking for throughout the year. Marketers can use this calendar to stay ahead of the trends, reaching consumers when they need help the most.

So what financial products and topics are consumers searching for now? And what will they search for months from now? Here are a few seasonal highlights to keep in mind:
  • In July, searches for travel rewards peak. As consumers try to plan affordable summer getaways, they check if their credit cards can help out.
  • In August, searches for college financing peak. As back-to-school season begins, parents and students try to figure out how to pay for a college education.
  • In January, searches for 401Ks and savings products peak. A new year means a new approach to savings, as consumers aim to secure a bright future.

Find out more key moments when money matters in our finance calendar infographic on Think with Google.

LGBT Advertising: Brands Take a Stand on Equality

Today’s brands are held accountable not only for their products and services but, increasingly, for their stance on political and social issues. As more and more attention is focused on equal rights for the LGBT community—specifically, marriage equality and workplace diversity—consumers are appreciating when brands take a stand.

New data from Google and YouTube shows that messages about equality for the LGBT community have widespread impact, especially among millennials. More than 45% of consumers under 34 years old say they're more likely to do repeat business with an LGBT-friendly company. Of those young people, more than 54% also say they'd choose an equality-focused brand over a competitor.

Brands are responding with messages that support inclusion, equality, and diversity. For example, Burger King’s Be Your Way campaign introduced the Proud Whopper, featuring a rainbow-colored wrapper with a special message: “We are all the same inside.” And Honey Maid’s This Is Wholesome campaign celebrated the diversity of the modern family.

These pride advertising campaigns have been remarkably successful. The Proud Whopper ad reached 20% of the U.S. population, and young millennials over-indexed by 4.8X. As for Honey Maid’s ad, more than 8M people watched the 30-second spot on YouTube, and 97% of those views came from its target demographic: 25- to 54-year-olds.

Check out the full article on Think with Google for a deeper dive into these campaigns, with more stats and insights about the impact of LGBT advertising.

Evolution of TV: The Promise of Programmatic TV

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog

This post is part of DoubleClick's Evolution of TV series. In this series we identify the risks and opportunities around 7 dynamics transforming the advertising landscape as TV programming shifts to delivery over the Internet.

Television advertising is big business. How big? TV ad spending in the U.S. is projected to reach almost $84 billion per year by 2018. Traditionally, many of these billions are spent during upfronts—that time of year when traditional TV networks and, increasingly, digital media companies gather to present their fall lineups and pitch marketers for ad dollars. Whatever TV inventory hasn't been sold, or is held back, is then sold in what is called the scatter market.

While this traditional TV buying and selling model has worked well for decades, it's not without its inefficiencies. "Programmatic TV" is a likely solution that could apply digital advertising's efficiency models to improve TV advertising.

We define "programmatic TV" as a technology-automated and data-driven method of buying and delivering ads against TV content. This includes digital TV ads served across the web, mobile devices, and connected TVs, as well as linear TV ads served across set-top boxes.

As with any new technology, though, the programmatic TV offerings on the market today fall short of the full potential of the technology. As a result, programmatic TV skeptics have reason to ask “why change what’s not broken?” We’re here to say that, while the TV buying and selling process isn’t exactly broken, there's a role for programmatic TV to make it better.

In Part 3 in our Evolution of TV series we dispel the hype about programmatic TV, address the challenges, and concentrate on its promise for brand advertisers, programmers, and broadcasters.

Download the PDF from Think with Google for the in-depth story.



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Rany Ng,
Director of Product Management, Video

Go behind the scenes of CLEAN & CLEAR®’s content marketing strategy

In the last year, Americans have doubled their digital video viewing, and brands are responding accordingly—focusing more on video marketing than ever before. In fact, many are building comprehensive strategies around YouTube campaigns. And when brands go big on video, the rewards can be even bigger.
For instance, Johnson & Johnson Consumer Companies brand CLEAN & CLEAR® earned millions of YouTube views for its anchor series, SEE THE REAL ME®. More importantly, it boosted market share by double digits.

On Think with Google, we talked to Kacey Dreby, group brand director at CLEAN & CLEAR®, about the keys to developing a relevant and engaging digital video strategy. Here’s what she had to say:

Screen Shot 2015-03-02 at 11.34.57 AM.png


On choosing YouTube to host the series
"TV and chronological social channels can feel fleeting. If your audience isn't watching that show or checking their feed that day, it's gone. We chose YouTube as a hub in part because our content lives there for as long as we want. Our YouTube channel is a collection, a library, a content repository. People on YouTube care less about when a video is posted and more about whether or not it's relevant to them in the moment."

On real-time marketing for live events like the MTV Video Music Awards
"There's a fallacy out there that real-time marketing happens at the last minute. A lot of our content was at least partially created before the VMAs ever began. Our creative team prepared content for different outcomes or situations that could occur during the event. They designed and wrote content that can be manipulated easily in the moment. That way, almost everything could be approved ahead of time, and all the team had to do to make it relevant was swap in a word here or a photo there."

On establishing a two-way dialogue
"For us, content isn't 'we post; you respond.' We stick around to have an authentic, ongoing, two-way dialogue with our fans.…To prepare for that audience interaction, we carefully train every community manager (CM) who works with us. We figure out as a team what the message should be in the various situations they'll encounter, and then we train our CMs to adjust that generic messaging so that we sound personal, never forced or canned."

Read more of our Q&A on Think with Google to find out the lessons CLEAN & CLEAR® learned—that any brand can put into practice.

Measuring the Impact of YouTube Ads on Brand Metrics

For online video platforms like YouTube, engagement metrics (such as views, likes, shares, comments, and watch time) provide a basic barometer to how an audience responds to videos. While these metrics are important to inform strategies and creative direction, when it comes to measuring effectiveness views and shares are often a proxy for brand metrics such as awareness, perception, and audience interest.

In the past, gaining insight into brand metrics has been tricky. While you could get instant feedback in the form of clicks and views, it was difficult to measure brand impact without expensive, time-consuming testing, and sometimes those results wouldn’t come in until the campaign was over. When it comes to YouTube ads, that’s no longer the case: our Brand Lift solution allows you to gather brand metrics about YouTube ads in a matter of days. Advertisers across a variety of verticals have used the tool to test and optimize their online video content.

To understand how our Google Preferred offering performed for advertisers, we conducted several different meta-analyses using Brand Lift data. After analyzing around 50 campaigns from Fortune 100 brands and category leaders running on Google Preferred (some of YouTube’s most popular channels), we found that 94% of the campaigns drove a significant lift—an average of 80%—in ad recall. We also found that 65% of Google Preferred ads saw an increase in brand awareness, with an average lift of 17%. This is particularly impressive considering that the brands in the study were already well-known.

We also measured YouTube’s impact on what we call “brand interest,” or interest in a brand as measured by an increase in organic searches for it on Google. Looking at more than 800 Brand Lift studies, we found that 65% of YouTube TrueView campaigns drove a significant lift in brand interest, with an average lift of 13%. These numbers tell a compelling story. YouTube advertising is about more than lean-back impressions; after YouTube viewers see ads they love, they lean in and search for those brands and products.

Content may be king, but brand metrics play an integral role in everything from planning quarterly media spend to creative direction. With tools like Brand Lift, brands can now have access to brand metrics that matter in near real-time. See how brands are using Brand Lift to move the needle, and get tips on how to drive impact with Brand Lift on YouTube in our YouTube Insights report for March.

How are music fans engaging with SXSW online

Hundreds of buzz bands and under-the-radar artists are in Austin this weekend for the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival—along with tens of thousands of music fans. But you don’t need to attend the festival to engage with SXSW. New data reveals that millions of passionate, interested music lovers are watching the festival on YouTube and on mobile devices.

Driven by mobile, U.S. viewership of SXSW content on YouTube grew by 62% in 2014. This presents a perfect opportunity for brands to reach SXSW fans beyond Austin’s city limits. As soon as people hear the festival buzz—the most surprising performances, the hottest new artists—they’re looking for content on YouTube, pulling out their smartphones more than ever before. Compared with viewership immediately after SXSW 2013, watchtime of video content from last year’s festival increased by 137% on mobile.


So brands know how fans are watching, but they also need to know who’s watching. You may not be surprised to learn that a large audience of young millennials watches SXSW content—but an older audience is beginning to follow the festival as well. In the last year, the 35–55-year-old age group has more than doubled its watchtime of SXSW videos.

Head to Think with Google for more stats about SXSW trends on YouTube, and find out how to reach these devoted music fans throughout the year.

Toward Viewability: You Can’t Count What You Haven’t Measured

Cross posted from Think with Google.

Last month at the IAB’s annual leadership meeting, viewability—a metric that shows whether an ad was actually viewed—was the topic on everyone’s mind. This is hardly a surprise. According to the “5 Factors of Viewability” research that we published in December, more than half of ads online today never even have a chance to be seen—something we can and must change.

As many of you know, we’ve long been advocates of the industry adopting viewability as a currency, a common metric to help both marketers and publishers improve their business results.

And we’ve already come a long way. Forward-thinking publishers are introducing ad units designed for maximum viewability, and thousands of advertisers have taken advantage of viewability-based buying on the Google Display Network since we rolled it out last year. Brands and agencies are prioritizing viewability in their buys, and are seeing that doing so drives better results. 

In fact, in tests we ran this month, advertisers measuring viewability based on the MRC standard for display ads with our Active View technology found that viewable ads saw conversion rates improve by as much as 50%. These viewable ads, with a minimum of 50% in view for a minimum of one second, drove a brand lift of 10.3% while non-viewable ads didn't contribute to lift at all. The business impact to buying based on the MRC standard is real.

While we have made some progress, there is still significant work for us to do as an industry to establish viewability as a currency. The conversation has started to devolve from a collective agreement to tackle the viewability issue to debates over viewability rates and how to value viewable buys. It’s a bit like arguing over whether a recipe needs one egg or two while ignoring the fact that the oven has caught on fire. We are so close to effecting real change on this issue; let’s not lose our nerve now.

It is imperative that we, as an industry, take three major steps:

1. Focus on counting viewable impressions; viewability rates don’t matter

Marketers are not saying that they want a percentage of their campaign to be seen; rather, they are saying they want to pay only for viewable impressions. In this request, viewability rates don’t matter, but the actual number of measured viewable impressions does.

We believe the industry needs to aspire to 100% viewability, full stop. This means buying and selling only viewable impressions. I understand this is a significant challenge, one we're working to solve on our own media properties; without a solution, however, viewable impressions cannot become a currency for the industry.

2. Adopt a single standard for viewability

It’s critical that our industry accepts a single viewability standard, common to all. Without that, it will be impossible to determine the true value of a viewed impression; create scale; or optimize, pace, and forecast inventory effectively.

Through collective discussion and analysis, our industry and the MRC worked hard to build and agree on a standard definition of viewability, one that we support. But since doing so, not all of us have supported it, with some advertisers and publishers recently suggesting new definitions. What we cannot do as an industry is resort to building around multiple standards.

The way to move forward now is to accept the long-discussed, hotly debated, yet proven standard set by our industry. There will be plenty of opportunities for our industry to make adjustments and updates as our understanding of viewability evolves, but we’ll never have that opportunity if we don’t collectively take this first step and establish a true currency.

3. Resolve discrepancies in measurement

Discrepancies and low measurability rates are not acceptable, yet today they exist when publishers and advertisers compare viewability vendors. To put an end to these discrepancies, we must not only adopt a common standard but also ensure a shared process and method of measurement. A liter of water is always the same regardless of who does the measurement. The same should be true for viewable impressions.

To get here, we must integrate measurement technology directly into ad serving, with viewability data appearing directly alongside other campaign metrics, accurately reconciled for buyers and sellers.
Looking ahead at viewability

As a technology, viewability is still in its earliest stages; there are many exciting opportunities for us to solve collectively. For example, viewability on mobile will be crucial as consumers spend more and more time on their smartphones. Secondary engagement metrics such as viewable time and audibility (after all, video is about sight, sound, and motion) can start to offer an even fuller picture of an ad’s effectiveness. But our industry won’t get there if we’re still debating the standard itself.

The best technologies are those that delight their users and then just get out of the way. We’ve come to expect this, for example, in instantly mapping out a route in a new city on our phones or having lunch delivered with just a few taps. My hope is that a year from now, viewability will be a true currency—and just as expected and as simple for everyone.

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Neal Mohan,
Vice President of Display and Video Advertising Products

For March Madness 2015, more fans and moments than ever

Is your bracket ready? Better yet: is your marketing strategy ready? Because this year the Big Dance is a bigger opportunity than ever.

Last year, 30% of people in the U.S., an estimated 90M, filled out a bracket for the NCAA Tournament. The best-rated game of 2014 reached 4.7M people. March Madness interest level is absolutely massive, with more fans than ever before following along.

Since this huge audience is increasingly engaging on the web (and on smartphones), there are major opportunities for brands to connect with fans at key moments, in deeper ways. As the games tip off, we have a few tips of our own:
  • Focus on second screens. During March and April 2014, 40% of searches related to brackets were on mobile. As mobile searches continue to rise, marketers should increase their focus on second-screen habits, optimizing campaigns for smartphones.
  • Include casual fans in your marketing. Top search questions about college basketball come from entry level fans: “How long do college basketball games last? and “how many quarters in college basketball?” dominated during the tournament last year. With more fans to reach than ever before, marketers shouldn’t just focus on fanatics—make sure to consider newbies in your strategy.
  • Capitalize on the moments that matter. In 2014, the peak day for highlight searches was the day between the Final Four and the National Championship—a day when no games were scheduled. Take advantage of moments like these that only happen online.
  • Add to the action; don’t be a distraction. A Google Consumer Survey revealed that while second-screening during games, fans are most likely to (in order): check other scores, watch highlights, search for information about players, and post on social. Join the conversation in a way that complements what they’re doing rather than take them out of it.
Read more March Madness tips and stats on Think with Google, and enjoy the wild month of basketball to come!