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In the last hangout in our series “Programmatic in the Future”, Mediabrands Audience Platform’s VP of Strategic Solutions, Michael Brunick, Media6Degrees’ Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Pancer and Digiday’s Editor-in-Chief Brian Morrissey debated whet…

Is programmatic safe for brands? Join us tomorrow, Friday, 3/22 at 1:30 ET/10:30 PT as Digiday’s Brian Morrissey seeks the answer to this question in a conversation with Media6Degrees’ Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Pancer, and Michael Bruni…

As we’ve said before, we’ve entered the next wave of digital marketing, as major brands like L’Oreal, Audi and Kay Jewelers embrace digital media and make it a core part of their marketing strategy. We’ve seen a 65 percent increase in the last quarter alone in the number of brand advertisers using our brand formats and buying tools.

This influx of brand investment is translating into meaningful results for digital publishers.

• We looked at the 50 top publishers that enable brand-friendly ad formats on their sites. Over the past three months we found that, on average, they experienced a CPM increase of 2x or more when running these engagement-driven ads, such as our Lightbox ad, which expands to a full page only after a user has deliberately engaged with the ad. “We’ve seen CPM increases of more than 3X, and our advertisers love the large canvas and pay for engagement model,” says Rich Dredge, Answers.com’s Chief Revenue Officer.
• We’ve seen an overall increase in higher CPMs across our exchange — in the U.S., CPMs over $5 have increased 24% year-over-year while those over $10 have increased 23% year-over-year. Brand spend is a critical piece of these increases.

Fueling brand adoption
To continue this momentum, we’ve been investing in a suite of brand solutions over the past year to help these advertisers make the most of what digital marketing has to offer:

• New Ways to Buy — Last year, we introduced Active View, offering for the first time the ability to not only measure whether ads are viewable, but actually buy based on it. Brands are able to “reserve” a guaranteed number of impressions on brand-friendly sites across the web — and they pay only for impressions that are viewed. 
• • Over the past year, the number of advertisers using the reserve option has increased fourfold.
  • Nearly two-thirds of those are Ad Age top 100 brands. 

• New Ways to Engage — Last year, we introduced a new family of brand-friendly, engagement-focused ad formats. Engagement formats are already showing terrific early returns. For example, L’ORÉAL PARiS was one of the first brands to run a campaign using engagement ads. They ran an expandable ad in Germany as part of their “Beauty Minute” campaign and found that 30% of those who expanded the ad watched the entire 30-second embedded video. 

• New Ways to Measure — We’re committed to providing meaningful metrics for brands, measurement that goes beyond just clicks and conversions. Earlier this week, we introduced Brand Lift in AdWords, which will enable marketers to run surveys along with their ad campaigns, to determine how their ads helped their marketing objectives (i.e., whether their ads helped build awareness, increased favorability towards their brand, etc.). Brand Lift complements our other investments in brand measurement, like Active View and Active GRP. 

Digital media represents an amazing opportunity for both brands and publishers, bringing together sight, sound, motion, interactivity and measurement in ways we’ve never seen before.

Over the coming year, we’ll be continuing to invest in our products and systems that will help brands thrive in the digital space, as well as help publishers capitalize on the shift…so stay tuned for more to come.

Posted by Neal Mohan

At DoubleClick, we’re constantly developing new ways to help publishers provide valuable, highly engaging solutions to advertisers. Recently we launched the new LightBox full page expandable ad – an innovative format to drive greater campaign performance and deliver rich creative options for publishers.

In 2010, in order to help publishers maximize the value of every impression, we introduced the new version of DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP).

In the years since, we’ve continued to invest in this platform, including new features that we heard were most important to our publisher partners – like the ability to manage desktop, mobile and video on a single ad server, and tools that help publishers better optimize campaign performance and save time. Today, thousands of publishers, such as The Weather Company, Gawker Media, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal and YouTube, are all leveraging DFP. And over two-thirds of our overall publisher ad impressions run through this new platform, up from one-third last year.

As far as we’ve come, we are just getting started with innovation to help publishers build for the future. To preview just a few of our 2013 plans, we’ll be helping publishers grow with new data-driven revenue models by enabling Audience Extension from directly within DFP. We’re increasing their ability to tap into the accelerating brand opportunity with new ways to measure such as Active View reporting for viewable impressions. We’re investing to make it easier for publishers to manage advertising across devices with tools like the Google Publisher Tag, which automatically selects the appropriate ad for the screen size (aka “responsive design”). And we’ll also be making it faster to access online content: since the new DFP is roughly twice as fast at serving as DART, when we’re done upgrading we’ll be saving Internet users 63 years a day in waiting for ads to serve.

This year our team is shifting all of our effort and investment to DFP to deliver even greater innovations for our partners. With this in mind, we’ll be ending support for our DART for Publishers legacy ad serving platform on September 1, 2013. To ensure continuity of ad serving, support and training, publishers who haven’t upgraded to DFP by that date will be automatically scheduled for an upgrade date between September 1 and December 31, 2013 when ad serving on the DART for Publishers legacy platform will cease. Note that publishers using the DFP Small Business platform do not need to take any action and are already supported on the new DFP.

We strongly advise all publishers to complete their upgrades to DFP before September 1 to make sure you are able to use the new DFP to its full potential during the busy 2013 holiday season. Please contact your account manager as soon as possible if you don’t have an upgrade date scheduled. And if you’re not sure who to contact, you can always reach out to our customer support team.

We know our partners are looking for tools that can grow and adapt to the needs of their business not just today, but also for tomorrow, the next year and ten years from now. That’s why we’re fully committed to the new DFP. We’re ready to accelerate our pace of innovation on our platform, and we look forward to helping publishers as they break new ground in digital.

Posted by Jonathan Bellack, Director of Product Management

Update: Due to unexpected circumstances, this hangout has been canceled on Thursday, March 7. Stay tuned for more information when it is rescheduled.In our next installment of “Programmatic in the future”. Join us on Thursday, 3/7 at 1:30 ET/…

We hope you’ve been following our series “Programmatic in the Future”, featuring conversations with publishers, advertisers and Google’s product development team, on how programmatic technologies are going to evolve.Join us on Thursday, 2/21 at 1:30 ET…

Our team is always looking for ways to improve the DoubleClick for Publishers platform to make Digital Advertising easier for our partners. Whether it’s making ad operations more efficient or providing more data and metrics for your sales strategy, our goal is to continuously innovate and improve upon DFP. Over the last couple of weeks we announced a series of enhancements to the DFP platform (Mobile, Video, and Desktop) to help publishers make the most revenue from their inventory, and today we’d like to let you know about a couple more.

Conversion Reporting
The value of online advertising is often judged by the click-through rate and number of impressions received by an advertiser’s campaign, but those metrics don’t tell the full story. What a lot of advertisers really want to know is, did a user convert; i.e. did they take a specific action such as make a purchase, sign-up for a newsletter, or download a file? That’s where conversion reporting comes in.

Now available in DFP Premium, conversion reporting allows publishers to showcase the value of their inventory while providing advertisers new ways to measure campaign performance. Using this new tool, DFP users can select specific activities to count as conversions and then provide their advertisers customized performance metrics for their campaigns.

Reach out to your account team if you’re interested in learning more about this new opt-in feature.

Custom Fields
Publishers of all sizes use DFP to run their advertising business and we understand that no two publishers are the same. So, to help our partners manage the complexity of trafficking ads on their sites, we provide a wide variety of fields to organize and package inventory for specific orders, line items, and ad creatives. But sometimes, publishers need extra fields to implement innovative solutions for their clients.

The new custom fields feature provides publishers just that, the ability to create custom metadata fields to manage their inventory in new ways. DFP users can simply define a new field on the order, line item, or creative level and then use those fields to save data, create reports, or map them into DART Sales Manager to be used for sales proposals.

To get all the details about his feature, contact your account team or read about it in the DFP help center.

Bulk Edits
Ad operations teams are the hub of a publishers advertising business. They manage and respond to a constant flow of requests, changes, and new orders for their site, and sometimes spend a lot of precious time making edits in their system. We understand that editing line items can be a tedious and time consuming process, so we build two new features to make modifying your setup faster: in-line edit and bulk line item edit.

The in-line edit and bulk line item edit features were designed to reduce the number of clicks and page refreshes needed to make changes. In-line edit allows you to make multiple changes to any line item directly from the orders page and save them all with one click. Also from the orders page, bulk line item edit allows you make the same change to multiple line items quickly and easily. For the full detail of these changes visit the DFP help center.

Posted by
Beah Burger, Florent de Gantes – DFP Product Management Team
Gaurav Kc, Josh Israel, David Plass – Software Engineering Team

The role of technology should be to make things easier, to simplify the complex. Our goal at DoubleClick is to do just that, make digital advertising easier for our partners. With DFP that means helping our publishers maximize the value of every impression regardless of format or screen size. It also means providing a flexible and customizable platform for publishers of all sizes and business models to build their own advertising solution.

Today we’re happy to announce the DoubleClick Third Party Partner Directory available on the DoubleClick site. This directory lists all the DoubleClick approved platform partners who have developed innovative solutions and services for DFP. Publishers can pick and choose from over one hundred preferred partners to extend the functionality of their advertising platforms.

“Joining DFP’s partner ecosystem was an easy choice for Brightcove. By plugging into DFP’s API’s, we can easily offer a turnkey integration with our Video Cloud online video platform to the world’s top publishers who use DFP,” says Chris Johnston, VP Digital Media Solutions at Brightcove. “Through this partnership, premium publishers can easily monetize their video content with Video Cloud across every platform and device with full IMA3 support for Flash and HTML5.”

We understand that Publishers may choose external service providers in addition to DoubleClick to manage their ad operations. So, we built DFP with an open architecture (including our new DFP API, Data Transfer, Mobile API’s and Video SDK’s) to support a vibrant and innovative third party ecosystem and to provide publishers the flexibility to easily extend the functionality of their advertising solutions.

“At Allrecipes.com, we are constantly evolving and perfecting our Ad Operations process. As one of the first publishers to transition to DFP, we were pleased with the functionality the DFP API offered our internal team as well as support for the third party vendors with whom we work. With DFP and the new API, our team was able to automate more internal processes and enhance and extend our capabilities with third party systems.” – Adila Esbhani, Director, Ad Operations, Allrecipes.com

“We work with a variety of technology vendors at The Weather Company, but Google DoubleClick truly supports our business with its open infrastructure and access to third-party partners. When we upgraded to DFP, many of our preferred technology vendors were already set up, and we were able to easily find, test and integrate new Mobile and Video applications to create our own customized advertising solution,” says Charlie Stafford, Advertising Technologies Manager for The Weather Company. “We have a lot of vendors with whom we work but Google is one of the few that I can say has truly partnered with us to make our goals their own.”

Last year we launched the DFP partner program to provide publishers choice and it’s great to see how much it has helped our partners (both publishers and third parties) succeed.

To see the full list of approved platform partners visit the DFP Partner Directory. Or, if you are a third party service provider and have an application or service that is ready for DFP, please submit your application here to be included in the DFP Partner Directory.

Posted by John Park, Partner Program Manager

This week we’ve been highlighting new DFP enhancements that are helping publishers tackle the challenges of the rapidly evolving digital advertising landscape. On Monday we announced recent advances in DFP Mobile and yesterday we covered how DFP Video is enabling publishers take advantage of the high-growth video advertising opportunity. Today, we’d like to highlight a bunch of great new features available on DFP and DFP Small Business.

Available in DFP

In our second edition of ‘Programmatic in the future’, join us tomorrow, 12/6 at 1:30ET/10:30PT as Mario Diez, CEO at Quadrant One, the industry’s premier private exchange marketplace, weighs in on what the potential of this technology is f…

Brand advertisers want to know that the inventory they are buying is safe, clean, and high quality. We take this very seriously at Google and employ both cutting edge technology and human review to ensure that DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) can offer th…

A recent study by eMarketer estimates that more than 25% of US digital display dollars will come through real-time bidding (RTB) by 2016. As brand dollars move to this channel, publishers are left to answer a few key questions.Over the next few weeks,…

We know your ad ops team is busy. Team members traffic campaigns, handle account relationships, manage reports and billing, and promote yield management — all while optimizing like mad.

That’s a lot of hats to wear, and a lot to worry about. So when we built DFP, we took the same principles of simplicity and ease-of-use that we build into our consumer-facing products, and applied them to the complex world of ad trafficking. The result is a friendly, easy-to-use interface meant to save time and reduce human error.

We cut the number of workflow clicks, consolidated common views, and made it easier to find critical information. Users can now create orders, enter line items, and target from a single screen — saving time by using targeting presets, bulk edit and global search. DFP Premium supports 5 levels of hierarchy, so you can group related bits of inventory together easily for targeting and reporting.

The result: more efficiency, fewer human errors, less time needed to traffic a campaign, and more time to focus on advertiser needs. (And to move your own business forward.)

Here’s what what some of our customers have to say about how they’ve saved time and boosted efficiency with DFP:

A few choice quotes, in case you’re skipping ahead:

“The biggest benefit of DFP premium has been that it’s incredibly, simply, really easy to use. Our traffickers are delighted to be using the tool, it’s just been a pleasant experience all throughout.” – Tutuwa Ahwoi, Ad Ops Manager, National Public Media

“In moving to DFP we have a better UI, we have faster reporting, we have faster data input times, we have access across all devices. Those are things that have led to a 15% increase in operational efficiency our for our business.” – Erin Pettigrew, Head of Ad Operations, Gawker Media

“DFP has provided about 10 to 15% more of our time back to my team.” – Denise Leggio, Director of Ad Operations, Publisher’s Clearing House
If you’re already using DFP, we hope you’re seeing improvements to your workflow. And if you’re about to start using DFP, we’ll be there to help show you the improvements we’ve made.

Posted by Josh Cohen and Beah Burger, Product Management Team