Tag Archives: Programmatic

Programmatic Selling just got better: Announcing Marketplace in DoubleClick Ad Exchange and Programmatic Guaranteed

As Neal Mohan announced last week at the DoubleClick Leadership Summit, Marketplace in DoubleClick Ad Exchange is now available to all customers globally, and we’re working to bring Programmatic Guaranteed to more publishers as soon as possible.

Today, the biggest brands and agencies are increasingly running premium digital campaigns across apps, videos, and native formats using programmatic technology, and we’re seeing this shift reflected across our platforms. Over the last year, the overall volume of programmatic transactions on our systems has grown 59%, while programmatic direct deals have jumped 2X. Today, eight of our top 25 publishers are selling at least 10% of their ad inventory through direct programmatic deals.

The growth of programmatic is just part of the story. Programmatic Direct deals, the channel of choice for many premium publishers, are also driving higher inventory prices. Preferred Deals and Private Auctions are generating CPMs that are double or triple what publishers see in the open auction. 

Introducing Marketplace in DoubleClick Ad Exchange
We see tremendous value in Programmatic Direct but, finding and connecting with all potential advertisers looking for premium offers is a challenge. That’s why we developed Marketplace, an easy to use interface for Ad Exchange buyers to discover, negotiate, and manage deals with the world’s best apps, sites, and properties. For publishers, Marketplace is where their brand is showcased through a customizable publisher profile, and where their programmatic direct offers are discoverable by programmatic buyers globally. 

Marketplace in DoubleClick Ad Exchange is just the beginning of how we see Programmatic sales evolving in the future. The programmatic buying trend shows no sign of slowing and, we believe even more premium deals will happen through programmatic channels. That’s why, over the rest of this year we’ll be rolling out a brand new way to transact through DoubleClick: Programmatic Guaranteed.

Blending Direct with Programmatic Sales
Programmatic Guaranteed allows publishers to offer their reserved, premium inventory via a new programmatic channel in DoubleClick for Publishers, and provide brands an opportunity to buy reservations in a more efficient way. Publishers can lock in revenue, while giving advertisers guaranteed access to premium inventory with programmatic targeting and frequency management. It simplifies the workflow of a guaranteed deal, cutting down the steps it takes to implement, from 40 steps to 4. And the best part, it does this all through our Real-Time Bidding infrastructure.

In our pilot testing with DoubleClick Bid Manager, Programmatic Guaranteed deals have been creating tremendous value. We’ve seen CPMs at 15-times open auction prices - on par with upfront or reserved campaigns. But in the future, we see incredible new opportunities for Programmatic Guaranteed. Since our solution utilizes Real-Time Bidding, instead of just automating line item booking in the ad server, we can open up innovative new deal types to give publishers enhanced flexibility that truly blends direct and programmatic capabilities.

We’re excited about the future of programmatic buying and selling and the possibilities it will bring for all of our partners. If you’re interested in learning more about Marketplace in DoubleClick Ad Exchange reach out to your account manager today, and stay tuned as we look to expand our pilot of Programmatic Guaranteed to more buyers. 

This is the first announcement in our post-DLS series. Join us over the next week as we release more details of all our recent product announcements. Next up, Native Ads in DoubleClick


Posted by Scott Spencer, Director of Product Management

Reaching consumers through the music they love: introducing ads on Google Play Music

Cross posted on Inside AdWords Blog

With over 30 million songs, Google Play Music provides access to the music people want. And today, we’re launching a free, ad-supported version so even more people can enjoy music that makes whatever they’re doing better.

At any moment in the day, Google Play Music has music for what people are doing – whether they’re working, working out, or working it on the dance floor – offering curated radio stations that deliver the right song at the right time. Our team of music experts, including the folks who created Songza, crafts each station song by song so listeners can just enjoy the music, effortlessly.

This new ad-supported version is great for advertisers interested in connecting with consumers through premium content and delightful mobile experiences. This Google Play Ads inventory is available through DoubleClick Bid Manager and the Google Display Network (GDN), which gives advertisers access to engaging and beautiful ad units such as TrueView video ads and Lightbox ads – all mobile-optimized, seamless across screens, and simple to set up. Plus, advertisers can take advantage of all GDN’s targeting options to promote their product or service to the right people – including keywords, affinity audiences, remarketing and demo targeting.

Many advertisers are already investing in this new music inventory, including the media agency Omnicom. Steve Katelman, EVP of Global Strategic Partnerships at Omnicom shared that: “We want to reach customers where they're spending the most time, so music is a critical part of our media mix. As a launch partner for Google Play Music, Omnicom Media Group can offer our clients an invaluable head start in delivering engaging, high-impact brand messages on mobile and the web to music-loving consumers.”

To get started with ads on Google Play Music, set up your campaign in AdWords or Doubleclick Bid Manager today.

Posted by Elias Roman, Product Manager, Google Play Music

2 days to go: SMG’s Laura Desmond previews her keynote at the DoubleClick Leadership Summit

Laura Desmond, Global CEO at Starcom Mediavest Group, will be keynoting the live stream from the DoubleClick Leadership Summit on June 17th. We caught up with Laura for a quick glimpse of what she’ll be speaking to and what owning the moment means to her. 

Register now to hear her live on June 17 at 9AM ET.

The rate of change is only accelerating, driven by rapid technology advancements and evolving consumer behaviors. FOMO isn’t just for millennials anymore—it’s a pressure our industry feels everyday.

Brands need to shift from mass-market strategies to precision ones that deliver relevancy along with immediacy. Core to delivering is keeping the consumer at the center, understanding them deeply, and delivering experiences that match their pace and purpose. 

Owning the moment requires more than just being “real-time.” Winning now depends on the ability to mix velocity and relevancy, drawing upon data, unification, personalization and agility. 

On Wednesday, I’ll be sharing how against a backdrop of great change, brands can drive impact with velocity marketing. Today’s best marketers are much like the hottest EDM mix artists -- leveraging technology, data, and collaboration to own the moment, deliver relevancy, and spur action. 

Register now to hear more from Laura on Wednesday, June 17th at 9AM ET.

Guest post by Laura Desmond, Global Chief Executive Officer, Starcom Mediavest Group

2 days to go: SMG’s Laura Desmond previews her keynote at the DoubleClick Leadership Summit

Laura Desmond, Global CEO at Starcom Mediavest Group, will be keynoting the live stream from the DoubleClick Leadership Summit on June 17th. We caught up with Laura for a quick glimpse of what she’ll be speaking to and what owning the moment means to her. 

Register now to hear her live on June 17 at 9AM ET.

The rate of change is only accelerating, driven by rapid technology advancements and evolving consumer behaviors. FOMO isn’t just for millennials anymore—it’s a pressure our industry feels everyday.

Brands need to shift from mass-market strategies to precision ones that deliver relevancy along with immediacy. Core to delivering is keeping the consumer at the center, understanding them deeply, and delivering experiences that match their pace and purpose. 

Owning the moment requires more than just being “real-time.” Winning now depends on the ability to mix velocity and relevancy, drawing upon data, unification, personalization and agility. 

On Wednesday, I’ll be sharing how against a backdrop of great change, brands can drive impact with velocity marketing. Today’s best marketers are much like the hottest EDM mix artists -- leveraging technology, data, and collaboration to own the moment, deliver relevancy, and spur action. 

Register now to hear more from Laura on Wednesday, June 17th at 9AM ET.

Guest post by Laura Desmond, Global Chief Executive Officer, Starcom Mediavest Group

BT increases sales volume and efficiency using DoubleClick Bid Manager with Google Analytics Premium

Cross-posted on the Google Analytics blog

Modern marketers live in a world that’s dominated by data. Advancements in programmatic buying enable marketers to leverage data and analytics to connect precisely, in real time. Advertisers who are smart about organizing, segmenting, and acting on this data are realizing the benefits of more personalized marketing. BT, a leading telecommunications firm in the UK, did just that and saw fantastic results.

BT wanted to increase the relevance of their remarketing campaigns by creating more precise audience lists. With the help of their media agency Maxus, BT found that using Google Analytics Premium with DoubleClick Bid Manager offered the ideal solution.

Google Analytics Premium gave BT the ability to create granular audience segments based on site behavior metrics such as recency, frequency, referral source, and stage of cart abandonment. Once these audience lists were created, the native integration between Google Analytics Premium and DoubleClick Bid Manager meant they could be shared with the platform to make more precise media buys in just a few clicks.

Using Google Analytics Premium with DoubleClick Bid Manager put Maxus and BT in the driver’s seat of their media campaigns. They not only gleaned full transparency with a single customer view and de-duplicated metrics across all channels, but also saw better measurement through unified reporting, and the ability to optimize based on the results.
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"Our goals were to build up ‘best practices’ of programmatic display remarketing techniques with a focus on driving post-click sales,” says Alison Thorburn, Head of Digital DR Media at BT. “The DoubleClick suite of products enabled us to do this quickly and efficiently as audience data can be easily organized and utilized.”

The new analytics-driven approach produced a 69% increase in post-click sales and an 87% reduction in post-click cost per acquisition compared to the previous year’s remarketing activity. It also compared favorably to the remarketing activity that ran simultaneously outside of DoubleClick Bid Manager; post-click sales were 30% higher and post-click cost per acquisition was 42% lower. BT has now consolidated its display remarketing through DoubleClick BidManager.

Read the full case study here.


Posted by-
Kelley Sternhagen, Product Marketing, Google Analytics
Kelly Cox, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

Moving to the forefront of programmatic buying

The abundance of choices consumers have today means people are consuming content in more places and actively tuning out what’s not relevant in the moment. In this environment, programmatic buying is redefining how marketers can connect with consumers in all the moments that matter. And to take advantage of its benefits, advertisers are adopting programmatic at dramatic rates. In fact, eMarketer predicts that 83% of all display buys will be bought programmatically by 2017.

However, achieving the promise of programmatic is not a guarantee. It takes partnering with the right platform to effectively craft, execute, and manage a programmatic strategy. But with so many options, how should advertisers choose the right platform to reach their unique goals today, and in the future with programmatic buying?

To help marketers better understand what to look for when Choosing a Programmatic Buying Partner, we uncover the five areas of expertise to look for in a potential platform.
This buyer’s guide will help marketers define and prioritize selection criteria for a programmatic buying platform that’s the right fit for your short- and long-term goals. Download the whitepaper here.


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Posted by -
Kelly Cox, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

How the Cloud is Transforming TV Across All Screens

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.

Recently, at the National Association for Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas, we released the fourth installment of our Evolution of TV series where we explore the impact of the cloud on TV's transformation. The premise of this new whitepaper is that everything we know about TV delivery and viewing is about to change.


Everything from the way we watch TV to how it's distributed is changing. The delivery and production of the TV content we're viewing—and sometimes binge-watching on so many screens—is on the cusp of industry-wide innovation as TV delivery shifts from over the air, satellite, or cable to the internet. To support TV programming over the internet, those responsible for delivering the content—the programmers and distributors—are beginning to migrate their operations to a more flexible, agile environment: the cloud


In this new whitepaper we explore a few of the cloud migrations happening in specific areas of the TV business like:
  • Subscription services
  • Transcoding and encoding
  • Broadcast automation
  • Stream packaging
  • Signal distribution between partners
  • Signal acquisition between partners
  • Storage and archiving


In short, migrating TV to the cloud not only affords programmers and distributors cost savings and efficiency but also enables innovation that could change TV as we know it today into a far more dynamic, personalized, and addressable medium.


Download the PDF to get the entire scoop on how parallel transformations in other industries show us that the cloud will encourage innovation and necessitate agility for programmers and distributors, as well as create a vastly different viewing experience for users.




Anish Kattukaran,
Product Marketing, DoubleClick Video & Brand Measurement

A call to action: Stopping digital advertising fraud

A lot of ink has recently poured onto the subject of digital advertising fraud—which is a great thing. Fraud is a real and serious problem, but some, we think, still hold a mental image of fraudsters as one-off bad actors sitting in a dark room racking up clicks on ads on their site to make a few extra bucks. The truth is far more troubling: the majority of ad fraud today is perpetrated by sophisticated organizations that devote vast resources to build and operate large scale botnets run on hijacked devices, to reap multi-million dollar payouts [1,2].

Stopping these bad actors requires an industry-wide, long term commitment to identifying and filtering fake traffic from the ecosystem. This is not a task any one company can take on alone. We need everyone across the industry to take steps toward making digital advertising more secure and transparent. Here are some actions we’re taking to help move the entire industry forward. (We hope others join us.)

Describing threats in common, precise language
Many of the statistics and headline-grabbing disclosures in the market today do a great job of creating panic, but share very little detail to help anyone actually solve the problem.

Imagine if police officers looking for a bank robber could only describe the criminal as “suspicious”. The robber would be free for life. And yet this is disappointingly how advertising fraud is policed today. “Fraud” and “suspicious” are seen as synonymous and applied to everything from completely legitimate ad impressions to fake traffic generated by zombie PCs infected with malware. Before we can stop advertising fraud, everyone needs to start using common, precise language to disclose fraudulent activity.

The IAB introduced its Anti-Fraud Principles and Proposed Taxonomy last September providing the industry with this common language and we strongly support these standards. But these are early steps – as an industry we can’t stop there. When fraud is identified it should be shared in a clear structured threat disclosure, mirroring how security researchers release security vulnerabilities. By increasing the amount of data we share in a transparent, helpful way, others in the industry will be able to corroborate any claims being made, remove the threat from their systems, removing it from the ecosystem. Further, if a public disclosure could lead to further damage, then vulnerable parties should be notified in advance.

Ensuring bad actors can't hide: Supplier Identifiers
If you bought a designer scarf in a store only to find out it’s a knock-off with a fake label, you’d expect a refund. You’d also know which store to avoid in the future. The same should hold true for fraudulent inventory. When fraud is identified, it should also be possible to identify the seller or reseller who should take responsibility for the inventory. 

Today this doesn’t hold true. As an illustration of the problem, we are currently finding significant volumes of inventory misrepresenting where the ads will actually appear and in many instances there is no reliable and verifiable mechanism to identify who in the supply chain is responsible for this misrepresented inventory.
To address this problem, we propose that the buyer of any branded (non-blind) impression should be passed a chain of unique supplier identifiers, one for each and every reseller (exchange, network, sell-side platform) and one for the publisher. With this full chain of identifiers for each impression, buyers can establish which supply paths for inventory can be trusted and which cannot. If a buyer finds a potential issue, and it’s clear where the problem lies in the supply path, then there should be an unambiguous process for refunds. It will also be easy to avoid this supply path in the future.

Ultimately the burden for ensuring the quality of online inventory starts with those who sell it. To this end, we submitted a proposal to create an industry managed supplier identifier to the IAB Anti-Fraud Working Group in February, and we’ve heard others in the industry support this call for more transparency. We've come to take this type of guarantee for granted when we shop in a store – let's work together and make it a standard for digital advertising as well.

Cleaning up campaign metrics
Before investing your hard-earned money in a local business, you’d definitely review their financial reports to understand if it’s a good investment or not. In digital, campaign metrics are the record of truth. They help advertisers evaluate which inventory sources provide the greatest value and outline a roadmap of where ad spend should be invested. But if these metrics are polluted with fake and fraudulent activity, it’s impossible to know which inventory sources provide the best return on spend.

Now, imagine if you invested in that small business only to find out it was actually a fictional front created by an organized crime ring, complete with receipts and a cashier, to cover up their back office money laundering operation. Fraudsters work hard to disguise their bot traffic as being human by having them do things like go window shopping or plan a vacation to create a whole world of made-up conversions and interactions before directing them to their final destination.

As long as fake traffic still appears to be delivering value, advertisers’ spend will continue flowing to the operators of fake traffic sources. Of course our industry should push for 100% fraud free ecosystem. The reality, though, is that some will likely always slip through. When it does, it's also our responsibility to keep it from skewing marketers' metrics. If we can keep reporting systems from giving credit to fake traffic, this removes the incentive for publishers to buy this bad traffic from bad actors.

As an industry, we owe it to our clients and ourselves to ensure that metrics are clean and accurate. Let’s work together to identify fraudulent traffic and invest in systems to filter it out of campaign metrics. 

A fraud-free ecosystem?
Advertising fraud is a real and serious problem, one that creates significant costs for advertisers, takes revenue from legitimate publishers, and enables the spread of malware to users, among other harms. To eliminate it, we must take action to remove the incentive for bad actors to create and sell fraudulent traffic. The steps I’ve outlined above seek to do this by cutting off their access to advertising spend and making it difficult for fraudsters to hide.

Over the coming months, we’ll be taking these steps and working with the industry to help others clean bad traffic from the ecosystem. 

Posted by Vegard Johnsen, Product Manager Google Ad Traffic Quality

A call to action: Stopping digital advertising fraud

A lot of ink has recently poured onto the subject of digital advertising fraud—which is a great thing. Fraud is a real and serious problem, but some, we think, still hold a mental image of fraudsters as one-off bad actors sitting in a dark room racking up clicks on ads on their site to make a few extra bucks. The truth is far more troubling: the majority of ad fraud today is perpetrated by sophisticated organizations that devote vast resources to build and operate large scale botnets run on hijacked devices, to reap multi-million dollar payouts [1,2].

Stopping these bad actors requires an industry-wide, long term commitment to identifying and filtering fake traffic from the ecosystem. This is not a task any one company can take on alone. We need everyone across the industry to take steps toward making digital advertising more secure and transparent. Here are some actions we’re taking to help move the entire industry forward. (We hope others join us.)

Describing threats in common, precise language
Many of the statistics and headline-grabbing disclosures in the market today do a great job of creating panic, but share very little detail to help anyone actually solve the problem.

Imagine if police officers looking for a bank robber could only describe the criminal as “suspicious”. The robber would be free for life. And yet this is disappointingly how advertising fraud is policed today. “Fraud” and “suspicious” are seen as synonymous and applied to everything from completely legitimate ad impressions to fake traffic generated by zombie PCs infected with malware. Before we can stop advertising fraud, everyone needs to start using common, precise language to disclose fraudulent activity.

The IAB introduced its Anti-Fraud Principles and Proposed Taxonomy last September providing the industry with this common language and we strongly support these standards. But these are early steps – as an industry we can’t stop there. When fraud is identified it should be shared in a clear structured threat disclosure, mirroring how security researchers release security vulnerabilities. By increasing the amount of data we share in a transparent, helpful way, others in the industry will be able to corroborate any claims being made, remove the threat from their systems, removing it from the ecosystem. Further, if a public disclosure could lead to further damage, then vulnerable parties should be notified in advance.

Ensuring bad actors can't hide: Supplier Identifiers
If you bought a designer scarf in a store only to find out it’s a knock-off with a fake label, you’d expect a refund. You’d also know which store to avoid in the future. The same should hold true for fraudulent inventory. When fraud is identified, it should also be possible to identify the seller or reseller who should take responsibility for the inventory. 

Today this doesn’t hold true. As an illustration of the problem, we are currently finding significant volumes of inventory misrepresenting where the ads will actually appear and in many instances there is no reliable and verifiable mechanism to identify who in the supply chain is responsible for this misrepresented inventory.
To address this problem, we propose that the buyer of any branded (non-blind) impression should be passed a chain of unique supplier identifiers, one for each and every reseller (exchange, network, sell-side platform) and one for the publisher. With this full chain of identifiers for each impression, buyers can establish which supply paths for inventory can be trusted and which cannot. If a buyer finds a potential issue, and it’s clear where the problem lies in the supply path, then there should be an unambiguous process for refunds. It will also be easy to avoid this supply path in the future.

Ultimately the burden for ensuring the quality of online inventory starts with those who sell it. To this end, we submitted a proposal to create an industry managed supplier identifier to the IAB Anti-Fraud Working Group in February, and we’ve heard others in the industry support this call for more transparency. We've come to take this type of guarantee for granted when we shop in a store – let's work together and make it a standard for digital advertising as well.

Cleaning up campaign metrics
Before investing your hard-earned money in a local business, you’d definitely review their financial reports to understand if it’s a good investment or not. In digital, campaign metrics are the record of truth. They help advertisers evaluate which inventory sources provide the greatest value and outline a roadmap of where ad spend should be invested. But if these metrics are polluted with fake and fraudulent activity, it’s impossible to know which inventory sources provide the best return on spend.

Now, imagine if you invested in that small business only to find out it was actually a fictional front created by an organized crime ring, complete with receipts and a cashier, to cover up their back office money laundering operation. Fraudsters work hard to disguise their bot traffic as being human by having them do things like go window shopping or plan a vacation to create a whole world of made-up conversions and interactions before directing them to their final destination.

As long as fake traffic still appears to be delivering value, advertisers’ spend will continue flowing to the operators of fake traffic sources. Of course our industry should push for 100% fraud free ecosystem. The reality, though, is that some will likely always slip through. When it does, it's also our responsibility to keep it from skewing marketers' metrics. If we can keep reporting systems from giving credit to fake traffic, this removes the incentive for publishers to buy this bad traffic from bad actors.

As an industry, we owe it to our clients and ourselves to ensure that metrics are clean and accurate. Let’s work together to identify fraudulent traffic and invest in systems to filter it out of campaign metrics. 

A fraud-free ecosystem?
Advertising fraud is a real and serious problem, one that creates significant costs for advertisers, takes revenue from legitimate publishers, and enables the spread of malware to users, among other harms. To eliminate it, we must take action to remove the incentive for bad actors to create and sell fraudulent traffic. The steps I’ve outlined above seek to do this by cutting off their access to advertising spend and making it difficult for fraudsters to hide.

Over the coming months, we’ll be taking these steps and working with the industry to help others clean bad traffic from the ecosystem. 

Posted by Vegard Johnsen, Product Manager Google Ad Traffic Quality

How Many Video Ads are Actually Seen? New Infographic and Research for Video Viewability Across the Web and on YouTube.

If an ad isn’t seen, it doesn’t have an impact, change perception, or build brand trust. That is why measuring the viewability of advertising matters. It gives marketers a clear understanding of campaign and messaging effectiveness and allows advertising spend to be allocated to the media where it will have the most impact.

We have long been advocates of viewability as a currency between buyers and sellers, which is why we’ve had viewable-only buying on our network for more than a year and have been investing in our Active View technology.

As a continuation of that effort, today we are releasing new Active View data from across our Google, DoubleClick and YouTube video ad platforms. This new research on the 5 factors of video viewability is being published today on Think with Google to start the discussion about the state of video ad viewability.


In this research we found that only 54% of all video ads served across the web, excluding YouTube, had a chance to be seen! On YouTube 91% of ads were found to be viewable.


As advertisers shift to paying for viewable video ads, rather than served impressions, understanding the drivers of viewability for video ads is more important than ever.

To learn what viewability is and how it is measured, visit our new interactive Active View demo here.

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Sanaz Ahari, Group Product Manager, Brand Measurement
Michael Giordano, Product Marketing, Brand Measurement
Anish Kattukaran, Product Marketing, Video & Brand Measurement