Tag Archives: Advertisers

Video and the Moments That Matter

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

“with DoubleClick” 2014 wrap-up

Increasingly, marketers are looking to integrate their digital marketing efforts in order to get better campaign performance, while also benefiting from workflow efficiencies for their teams. To celebrate and learn from the successes these teams are seeing, we launched with DoubleClick, highlighting stories and perspectives from marketers and agencies about how integrated platforms are changing how they work, creating bigger impact, and fueling better decisions.

We kicked off the series with a recent study, “Adding Data, Boosting Impact,” where the Boston Consulting Group found that marketers who use an integrated platform to power their programmatic buying are seeing major uplifts in performance and engagement. The study, now published on Think with Google, identifies five steps marketers should take to achieve these uplifts.

And throughout the series, we highlighted specific marketers and agencies who realized similar gains. Like Neo@Ogilvy, and how they freed up 40 hours per week with more streamlined workflows, and how Kia improved their CPA by 30% with powerful attribution tools. We saw how T-Mobile eliminated static backup images by 85% with HTML5, and how the Kellogg Company increased their ad viewability rate to over 70%. Dive in to learn about these and many more success stories.
Today we wrap up the series, but stay tuned for more with DoubleClick customer spotlights in 2015.

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DS features in November

In November, we added the following features to DoubleClick Search (DS):
  • Report purchase details in DS: Learn which products in your inventory make up your sales with purchase detail reports. Enable this feature by configuring your Floodlight transaction tags to report on revenue, cost, and profit for individual products sold in each conversion. DS reports can also show which campaigns (including keyword and Shopping campaigns), ad groups, and keywords contributed to the sales of those products. Finally, you can segment your reports using any attributes from your inventory feed.

We also updated the following features:
  • Executive Reports:
    • Share reports: Share a link to your executive reports with clients, executives, non-DS users, or anyone that you want to see how you’re performing toward your advertising goals.
    • Resize charts: DS has added chart resizing to the list of formatting options available in executive reports. With a single click, you can expand or contract a chart horizontally or vertically.
  • Bid strategies: Set a minimum ROAS constraint: In addition to bid limit and position constraints, you can now set a minimum ROAS constraint. For bid strategies that are focused on maximizing revenue, set the minimum ROAS constraint to optimize bids and keep the marginal ROAS above a target threshold.
  • Apply, remove, or change sitelinks for AdWords campaigns in the DS UI: If you need to apply sitelinks to several campaigns in your AdWords account, you can now use the DS UI in addition to bulksheets.
  • Use the DS API to report on AdWords location extensions: If you've set up upgraded location extensions in DS, you can use the DoubleClick Search API’s Reporting Service to download adGroup, campaign, or feeditem performance metrics for location extensions.

    Note that reports downloaded from the DS API include only location extensions that have recorded at least one impression during the report's time range.


See these updates in action in the November New Features training video:


Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

Evolution of TV: 7 Dynamics Transforming TV

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.

Viewers increasingly want to watch their favorite TV shows anytime, anywhere, and on any screen. There's lots of TV content online, but hitting all three of those checkboxes isn't yet possible for every piece of programming. To do so requires a greater shift to delivering TV programming over the Internet rather than just over the air, satellite, or cable. Sounds simple, right? It's not. It is a massive shift that has game-changing implications for everyone involved.

This shift isn’t just impacting TV programmers and distributors, but also the viewers watching their favorite TV shows and sports teams across every screen, and the advertisers telling their brand stories against that content.

Today we are introducing the first part in a series called the Evolution of TV. In this series, DoubleClick and Google have identified 7 dynamics transforming the advertising landscape as TV programming shifts to delivery over the Internet. These 7 dynamics fall into three key areas:
  • Viewer engagement 
  • Delivery over the Internet and cloud 
  • Advertising 
Download the first part of the series now to learn the risks and opportunities associated with each of the 7 dynamics transforming the TV landscape and driving the shift of the $68 billion TV advertising industry.


-
Anish Kattukaran
Marketing, DoubleClick Video

with DoubleClick: Kellogg dishes up offline sales and increases viewability with programmatic buying

This post is part of the with DoubleClick series, highlighting stories and perspectives from industry leaders about how they are succeeding with an integrated digital marketing platform.

Kellogg Company is a century-old marketer with some of the world’s most trusted brands. Kellogg’s vision is to enrich and delight the world through foods and brands that matter, and digital marketing plays a key role in helping them move consumers through the path to purchase. The cereal powerhouse adopted DoubleClick Digital Marketing for programmatic buying. Using the unified platform, they were able to gain a holistic view of the consumer, deliver the right message to the right person, and ensure that their digital marketing efforts delivered maximum effectiveness.
Kellogg recognized that traditional marketing channels often aren’t enough to reach consumers in today’s digital age. To help solve for this, Kellogg embraced programmatic buying as a key part of their digital strategy to stay at the forefront of changing consumer behavior. “Programmatic buying has played a significant role in our digital marketing strategy,” said Aaron Fetters, director of Kellogg’s Insight and Analytics Solution Center. “It’s an opportunity to drive further success in our core metrics for digital advertising, and to use data and technology to deliver our message to the target audience.”

Formulating the right key performance indicators (KPIs) for their digital marketing campaigns was vital in reaching Kellogg’s goal of driving offline sales. And for this, the right digital measurement tools were critical. One of Kellogg’s main KPIs was ad viewability, and with programmatic buying and measurement solutions from DoubleClick, Kellogg’s viewability rate increased to over 70%. “It's amazing the impact you can have on a measurement like viewability, when you focus on it, plan for it, and optimize for it,” Fetters said.

DoubleClick solutions have helped Kellogg refine the targeting and frequency of their digital campaigns, and the team is confident that with DoubleClick they’re reaching the right consumer and managing their campaigns more effectively. The food company is now two to three times better at ensuring their impressions go directly to the consumers they most want to reach.

To learn more about the team's approach and results, watch the video below and check out the full case study here.
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CES: A keynote on building brands with video

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

Digital Advertising in 2014: An Industry in Motion

2014: IAB’s “Open Letter to Marketers” advocated for the universal adoption of HTML5. “Programmatic” became the ANA’s marketing word of the year. The MRC lifted its advisory on transacting on viewability. 

These are just some of the moments that moved our industry forward in 2014. “Digital Advertising in 2014: An Industry in Motion” recaps the ideas we congregated around as an industry, the technology we evolved to realize them, and the impact we saw from executing on them. Together with you, we:
  • Told stories through big, beautiful canvases everywhere
  • Evolved media buying 
  • Measured what matters with new metrics
  • Made digital easier for all of us
As we raise a toast to the year that was and look forward to 2015, we thank you for partnering with us and ensuring that we never stay still, that as an industry, we’re always in motion.

Get DoubleClick’s full 2014 recap here.

Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing team

For Brand Marketers: 5-Step Guide to Programmatic Buying

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

Library, Groups, Expandables… oh my! Google Web Designer spruces up for the holidays.


Today, we are excited to announce a new local library and new grouping functionality in Google Web Designer, which make it easier to add, edit, manage and group creative assets. We’ve also spruced up many of the components in the gallery, which build on the updates we launched in August, to help designers and developers make interactive and engaging HTML5 ad units for cross-screen campaigns. 

Manage your assets with ease:
  • Add, edit, and manage your assets in one place in the new local library: Add assets from the stage or within the library workflow, drag and drop from your desktop, or use the new import dialogue under File. Then, customize your folders and organize your assets to your liking. 
  • Group elements together: Once you group elements together, they are stored in your local library. You can drag and drop groups onto the stage and edit them all at once. 
Create more engaging, interactive ads:
  • Build ads that expand in all directions: The “view mode” will allow you to see the expanded state as an overlay, and move it to the desired expanded position. Learn more.
  • YouTube autoplay feature: You can now use the YouTube component to build a masthead that automatically plays the embedded video.
  • Other enhancements to the components gallery allow you to:
    • Add “navigation” (the dots or thumbnails at the bottom of a gallery that show that multiple images exist.)
    • Auto-scale images: stretch, resize or crop images to fit within the gallery 
    • Snap to ‘n’ frames: advance by a specified number of frames in the swipeable or carousel gallery (i.e. 3 images show on the first page of gallery, swiping moves to the next 3). Learn more.
  • SVG (scalable vector graphics) support: Google Web Designer now supports uploads of SVGs and provides a set of basic features, including 2D editing, cut, copy & paste, and selection tool support. 
Share your awesome Google Web Designer ad units with us! Submit them to the Rich Media Gallery and we’ll promote them to the ~35,000 people who view the site each month.

If you don't yet have Google Web Designer, you can download it for free here.

Posted by Tony Mowatt and Sean Kranzberg, Product Manager and Engineering Lead for Google Web Designer

P.S. It may take a couple hours for the updates to show up in your version of the product. 

How many ads are actually seen? New benchmarks for viewability

Yesterday, we revamped DoubleClick Verification to provide marketers a robust solution to understand and control where their campaigns appear, including if they were viewable. Today, we’re releasing new data from our ad platforms to shed light on the state of ad viewability.

With the advancement of new technologies we now know that many display ads that are served never actually have the opportunity to be seen by a user. In fact in a recent study of Active View data by Google, we found that 56.1% of all ads served were not measured viewable.(footnote) Yet, the average publisher’s viewability is 50.2%. This means a small number of publishers are serving the majority of non-viewable impressions and dragging down the served impression viewability average by almost 6%.

As advertisers shift to paying for viewable, rather than served impressions, it’s more important than ever to understand what drives the viewability of ads. To see all “5 factors of viewability” check out the full infographic and study at thinkwithgoogle.com.

Posted by Sanaz Ahari, Group Product Manager