Author Archives: Nicole Burgan

Google Play’s Real-Time Marketing at the Oscars

Huge cultural events such as the Oscars are too big for just one screen. According to Nielsen research, 84% of smartphone and tablet owners are watching TV with a second screen in hand. For marketers, this presents an incredible opportunity to reach consumers in real-time.

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During the Oscars, Google Play used hyper-relevant marketing to connect with movie fans in real-time. Just before the award for Best Picture winner was announced, there were eight separate, film-specific ads ready to go live. The moment that Birdman won, ads congratulating the film were pushed to second-screen devices. What used to take hours to scale took mere seconds, and viewers could go directly to the Google Play Store to buy or rent the winning film.
This real-time strategy brought huge rewards. There was a 59% lift in searches for Google Play movies among those who saw the ads, according to Google’s Brand Lift measurement tool.

As we continue to rethink real-time, we’re writing the rules as we go. Here are four solid lessons marketers can learn from this Oscars experience:
  1. Start with data and insights. Data revealed that consumers watch television with a second screen in hand, and that searches for award-winning films spike immediately after the award is announced. 
  2. Build creative with flexibility in mind. Make sure you can update and adapt your creative in real-time to be as relevant and timely as possible.
  3. Make real-time purposeful and additive. It’s important that your brand is adding to the user’s experience, not just interrupting the moment.
  4. Measure the impact of real-time efforts. Real-time marketing requires significant advance planning. Was it worth it? Google Play ran a test and control experiment to find out. The test versions were the real-time ads that congratulated the winners as they were announced. The controls were a group of generic ads that featured all Oscars movies on Google Play. Our test proved successful: Click-through rates of the test/real-time ads were 19% higher than the control ads.
Learn more about this real-time marketing play at Think with Google.

How To Stay Relevant Throughout Awards Season

On Sunday night, the Oscars will last for about 4 hours. On the web, they will last for months. Google and YouTube data reveals that today’s audiences are engaging with the awards show well before, during and after the actual event.

Before Oscar night, people are searching for red carpet looks, Oscar pools, party tips, nominees, and movie trailers earlier than ever. From 2013 to 2014, search interest for "Oscar pool" and “Oscar party” grew 28% and 10% respectively. And when the nominated films are announced in January, they get an instant boost on YouTube.
During the actual Oscars ceremony, brands get a huge opportunity to connect with consumers in real time. Last year, nearly half of all Oscar-related searches on awards night came from smartphones and tablets. To capture that in-the-moment interest, marketers can go big on small screens. Explore our playbook on real-time marketing to find out how.



After the show ends on Sunday night, the after-party starts on YouTube. Last year, there were 25X more YouTube searches for the Oscars the Monday after the awards than on the day itself. And the interest lasts for months—60% of views for behind the scenes Oscar videos in 2014 came in the eight months after the event.

Explore more Oscar stats on Think with Google to stay relevant throughout this huge cultural moment.

Evolution of TV: Reaching audiences across screens

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertiser blog

This post is part of the 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.

The lines between TV and the web are blurring, as people increasingly watch TV online on all their devices and watch online video on their TV’s.

In part 1 of our Evolution of TV series, 7 Dynamics Transforming TV (article, PDF of whitepaper), we introduced the increasing shift of TV to delivery over the internet.

Here, in Part 2, we dig into the first dynamic — reaching fragmented audiences spread across hundreds of screens and devices — and explore how scale, measurement, technology and brand safety come together to address the challenges and create huge opportunities for broadcasters, distributors and advertisers to grow their audiences and increase brand engagement.






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Anish Kattukaran
Product Marketing, DoubleClick Video & Brand Measurement

Rich Media Gallery redesign: Simplifying complexity and optimizing for mobile

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertiser blog

We’re excited to unveil our redesigned Rich Media Gallery website, Google’s destination for digital creative inspiration and education. The new design provides a seamless experience across screens, and makes it easier to find the right product and ad format you need to build your campaign. 

Two and half years of content:
The original website launched two and half years ago, in September 2012, and since then, we’ve added over 1000 creative examples to the gallery and seen 50% year over year growth in unique viewers.
Why the redesign?
The new design optimizes the website experience for every device and removes complexity, allowing users to quickly reach the right answers. 

Seamless, cross-device experience: We used Google’s Material Design Principles to create a consistent look and feel across smartphones, tablets, and desktops. The site incorporates mobile-friendly elements, such as easy scrolling, full-screen interactive gallery examples, and clever transitions.

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The Rich Media Gallery website is now fully responsive, resizing content automatically based on the size of the device you’re viewing it on.

Get to the right answer quickly: We want the Rich Media Gallery to be an intuitive guide to Google’s creative solutions, to help you identify the best tools and ad formats for your campaign.
  • Filter the gallery by ad type or feature, to see the most relevant creative examples for your campaign. 
  • Check out the Creative Recommendation Tool, which provides a recommendation for the best product to use for your campaign, based on your answers to a few questions.

Start Exploring:
  • The new homepage offers a curated set of the best creative examples from the gallery. You can “deconstruct” these ads to uncover which formats and features were used to build it. (See below)



    • The new Ad types section will provide an overview of each format type, and then aggregate the build guides, gallery examples, and other relevant resources in one place, so you have everything at your fingertips to build your own version. 

      • Make sure to check out the new HTML5 Lightbox format. It's Google’s first truly responsive framework that allows you to build your creative once and deploy it on any device or screen size. Think of these like a DoubleClick Studio Layout, except that the expanded state of the Lightbox is completely responsive to screen size. (Overview video here.) 

      • If you’ve already downloaded Google Web Designer, you have the option to open HTML5 templates from the website directly in Google Web Designer, so you can immediately get started on a project.


    Interested in building your own mobile-optimized website?
    Read the behind-the-scenes scoop from the Rich Media Gallery design and development team to better understand their strategy and approach to this redesign. They discuss how they applied Material Design principles to create a mobile-optimized experience, and they walk through the various challenges they faced as they built the new site.

    Posted by the Rich Media Gallery Team

Reframing Creative Constraints: Firestarters in NYC

Creative work increasingly requires doing more with less—but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

At the second Firestarters event in NYC, we brought together smart thinkers from inside and outside the ad world to share how they framed their creative constraints and turned them into advantages. About 200 strategists and planners came to Google’s office to hear what the panel had to say.

The discussion centered around A Beautiful Constraint, the new book from renowned planners Adam Morgan and Mark Barden. In just 15 minutes, the duo explained the 3 core concepts at the heart of their work:
  • Ask Propelling Questions. To get to the Propelling Question, you must ask yourself: What is the biggest ambition you have, and what are the limitations that keep you from achieving it?
  • Engage in Can-If Thinking. This means framing answers to your Propelling Questions in a specific way. Instead of beginning every sentence with "we can't do that because..." you’re forced to start with: “We can do that if..."
  • Create Abundance. Essentially, look around to see what resources are available and where your strengths lie. What unlimited resources can you put to work?
These three steps are meant to take creatives out of habitual behaviors and lead to bold, unconventional thinking. On Think with Google, read more more about the Firestarters event in NYC and learn how to turn creative constraints into advantages.

Join Forrester and Google for a conversation about the real-time opportunity in retail SEM

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search blog

There’s no doubt that technology continues to transform the pace of business. In the past, it wasn’t possible to track online conversions back to ads in real-time. You couldn’t always be sure you were advertising only in-stock items or immediately traffic out seasonal assortment changes.

But now advanced digital marketers are able to take advantage of real-time conversion and product data in their advertising campaigns to great effect.

Forrester recently completed a global study of 240 retailers’ search campaigns. What they found was… opportunity. Most retailers still don’t take advantage of existing real-time capabilities in digital marketing, and leave a significant opportunity for savvy marketers who do.

Come hear Forrester and Google talk about: 
  1. Results from Forrester’s retail search study 
  2. Insights about the retail search market, and where you can take advantage 
  3. How to become more “real-time” in your own digital advertising 

Speakers:
Shar VanBoskirk, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
Henry Tappen, Retail Product Manager, DoubleClick Search

Time: 
Wednesday, February 18th at 11AM PST/2PM EST

Register now on the event site. 

We look forward to seeing you there.

Video and the Moments That Matter

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertiser blog

Today’s consumer spends more time in digital than any other media, often while fluidly moving across screens. In the past three years alone, multi-screen media consumption has jumped by 500 percent, with 90 percent of consumers moving between one device and another to complete a task, whether it’s to shop, plan a trip or browse content. And the growth rates are stunning: on YouTube, more video content will be uploaded today than all three major networks created in the past five years.

Today at CES I announced two really exciting developments that will help turbocharge the future of video advertising:
  • First, more than 30 mainstays of video advertising--broadcasters, premium publishers and major brands--have joined our premium video marketplace, Google Partner Select and;
  • We’re rolling out viewability reporting across our ad platforms. This will, for the first time, inform brands whether their video ads on digital channels were actually seen or not (as opposed to, for example, appearing off-screen, going unwatched or being swiped past).
Our goal with both of these updates is to help marketers succeed in today’s world of media abundance by connecting them with consumers at the right time in the right place and enabling them to measure what truly matters.

An update on Partner Select
In June we introduced you to Google Partner Select, a premium video marketplace that brings together the best of brand advertising with the best of programmatic. Our goal was to create a marketplace of top-quality video content from the best producers. Today, we’re happy to share some of those partnerships.



Since launch, more than 30 broadcast and premium publisher brands have signed on including CBS Interactive, Fox News, Discovery, Animal Planet, TLC, HGTV, Food Network, Cooking Channel, Travel Channel, Hearst Television, Rolling Stone, Us Weekly, Men’s Fitness, and PGA Tour. These publishers are helping brands discover a wide range of their premium video content including full-episode shows, live sports & news, and short-form content across a broad range of audiences and content categories. And all of this inventory is exclusive to Google Partner Select.

We’ve also seen strong traction on the advertiser side with over 20 major brand advertisers, including iconic brands like Allstate, BMW and Netflix, and their agencies having signed significant commitments to buy through Google Partner Select. In our early tests, we've seen video ads running through Google Partner Select driving significant audience engagement with 74% video ad completion rates, demonstrating that when brands pick the right moments, engagement follows.

Viewability for Video
When it comes to impact, being seen is not just important, it’s fundamental. That’s why this time last year, we set a goal for ourselves to help make viewability a common currency across the industry. I’m encouraged that this issue is staying top of mind for so many and hope that marketers and publishers continue to push for the full transparency and accountability they deserve.

In our latest of ongoing investments in this area, in the coming days, we will start to offer viewability reporting for video campaigns available to all marketers and publishers using our DoubleClick platforms, as well as for the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. We’ll soon have this capability for reserved inventory on YouTube as well (including all of Google Preferred) across desktop and app views, a significant addition with so much viewership now happening in mobile. In the coming months, we’ll start offering the ability to target viewable impressions in DoubleClick, as well as the ability to buy only viewable video impressions across the Google Display Network. Later in the year, we also plan to report on audibility for video ads, as well as the total amount of time an ad was viewable.

We’re adhering to the industry definition for video viewability (as set by the MRC and Making Measurement Make Sense): 50% or more of the video being on screen for two seconds or longer.

Viewability, though, is just the starting point, not an end in and of itself. With the confidence that their ads can be seen by a real person, marketers can then go on to strive for--and measure--what really matters, impact and engagement. Along with our commitment to viewability, we’ll continue our investments in other ways to help marketers drive engagement, like our TrueView format (where advertisers only pay when consumers engage) and Brand Lift surveys, which help marketers measure the impact of their campaigns on their branding goals.

I’m incredibly excited about the future of digital video for brand building. No other medium brings together sight, sound and motion--and incredible measurability. This is the start of what we expect will be a year of leaps forward in the industry in making digital work for brand advertisers. So watch this space for more to come.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Video & Display Advertising

Get your Shopping certification today on Google Partners

Last year we created the Google Partners platform to provide tools and resources to help agencies learn more about Google's advertising solutions. Through Google Partners, individuals can get certified in AdWords and agencies can earn the Google Partner badge. Today we’re very excited to extend the Google Partners certification offerings to include a new Google Shopping exam in the United States.

If you are an agency specializing in Merchant Center and Shopping campaign management, you can now get certified in AdWords by completing both the Shopping and AdWords Fundamentals exams. A certification shows to potential business partners that Google recognizes you as an online advertising professional that can successfully manage Shopping campaigns.



The Shopping exam will test your proficiency in Merchant Center account creation, product data, Shopping campaigns management and optimization best practices. To take the test, start by creating a profile on Google Partners today. All exams will be listed under the "Certifications" section.

Worried about studying for the exams? Join us in the Google Partners community to get access to webinars, special events and trainings from your peers and the Google team. Also, use these helpful study materials:
If you’re ready to take the test, sign in to Google Partners and get started. The Google Shopping exam will be expanding to other countries soon -- stay tuned!

Alex Chen, Product Marketing Manager, Google Shopping

CES: A keynote on building brands with video

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertiser blog

With 2014 drawing to a close, we’re getting excited about what’s ahead in the new year. We’ll be ringing in 2015 at the International CES (Consumer Electronics Show) the first week of January. If you’re planning to go too, we’d like to invite you to come by C Space, the new destination at CES for advertisers, publishers, agencies, and content creators.

On the first day of the event (Tuesday, January 6th), Neal Mohan, Google’s VP of Display and Video Advertising Products, will be headlining C Space. In his keynote he’ll talk about how brands can make the most of video in a climate where consumers are easier to reach but harder to influence. He’ll discuss not only how to drive engagement but also how to measure the impact that it has on brand metrics.

Following his keynote, Neal will join Meredith Levien, EVP Advertising at The New York Times, in a fireside chat.

Learn more about C Space and check out the full agenda here.

Hope to see you there!

Tuesday, January 6th 2015
1 - 2 PM PT

For Brand Marketers: 5-Step Guide to Programmatic Buying

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertiser blog

A lot has changed for marketers over the years. But one thing remains constant: the need to connect with and move an audience in the moments that matter. Brand marketers are beginning to truly embrace programmatic buying to do just that. The challenge is, many marketers don’t know where to start in order to successfully embrace programmatic for their brand campaigns.

To help address this challenge, we’re pleased to share our five-step guide: "Programmatic: A Brand Marketer’s Guide," to provide context and ideas for how marketers and their agencies can successfully embrace programmatic buying. It covers the essentials that brand marketers need to know in order to:
  1. Organize audience insights
  2. Design compelling creative
  3. Execute with integrated technology
  4. Reach audiences across screens
  5. Measure the impact

Our guide includes seven case studies with brands including Nike, KLM, Talk Talk, Kia, GOL, Burberry, and Kellogg so that brand marketers new to programmatic can learn from their peers.



We hope this guide can help you realize the ultimate promise of advertising in the digital age: to effectively run highly relevant, creative, and measurable campaigns, at scale. To make the most of programmatic buying, we invite you to explore the five steps to programmatic success.

You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on our Google+ page.

Posted by Kelly Cox, Product Marketing Manager