Google Data » Becky C.

Turner Sports reaches fans across screens for March Madness

Becky C. — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 14:13:00 +0000

Consumers’ constant connectivity means that people can now satisfy their desire for information and entertainment at any moment during their day. This “in-the-moment” behavior requires marketers to focus on building cross-screen advertising strategies to capture the moments that matter.

With March Madness upon us, today we will shine a light on how one marketer, Turner Sports, developed smart cross-screen advertising strategies to play to the needs of sports fans. We will then explore five new mobile features we are launching in DoubleClick Digital Marketing that enable advertisers to more easily develop and run cross-screen campaigns.

How Turner engaged fans across screens

Turner knows that at the outset of the tournament, consumers watch the games via the March Madness Live desktop stream and mobile app. So driving traffic to the video stream and driving app downloads at the outset of the Tournament are the brand’s most important metrics.

As the tournament progresses, the focus shifts from the app to live TV tune-ins, to capture the excitement around the final match-ups. By understanding how and where consumers interact with March Madness content, Turner can build a better digital strategy and reach their users more effectively throughout the Tournament.

Turner used Google’s Lightbox format to create an expandable ad that drives people to the March Madness Live mobile app:

Five new features to help marketers run cross-screen campaigns

To help marketers like Turner accomplish their cross-screen advertising strategies, we’re excited to announce five new features across the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform.

Build cross-screen creative more easily:

For basic Flash ads: DoubleClick Bid Manager now supports automatic Flash-to-HTML5 conversion. HTML5 ads can run across mobile inventory where Flash ads cannot, expanding your mobile reach while offering a richer, higher performing creative. Initial results from our beta show that converting Flash assets to HTML5 increases mobile reach by 400% and drives a 2-3x increase in average click-through rate (CTR).

For interactive HTML5 ads: In the next few weeks, Google Web Designer will be launching starter templates to help advertisers quickly build mobile ad units from a pre-set format. Over 80 ad templates will be available, including 29 in-app templates, and all of them will be certified to work on DoubleClick Bid Manager. We’ll be adding additional templates for responsive GDN Lightbox formats next quarter. Google Web Designer will also integrate with the Asset Library in DoubleClick Studio, meaning users can access the same library of assets from Google Web Designer and DoubleClick Studio.

Reach your audiences across screens more effectively:

Based on geography: Last November, we announced that for users who opt in to location-based targeting, marketers can use geofence targeting in DoubleClick Bid Manager to reach people based on their proximity to a specified chain store. We are now expanding geographic coverage to over 100 countries, increasing the types of business chains available for your campaigns, and improving the workflow for the feature, including building better forecasting and reporting.

Based on brand safety: We are making app buying on brand-safe placements much easier. With app brand safety targeting, we have expanded our Digital Content Label algorithm to include even more Play Store and App Store apps, widening your mobile in-app reach while ensuring your ads only run on brand-appropriate apps.

Track and optimize app install campaign performance:

DoubleClick Digital Marketing will support third-party app tracking solutions in early Q2. This means advertisers can track their in-app installs (app downloads from an in-app ad) using supported third-party app trackers and attribute them back to impressions and clicks for in-app ads run on DoubleClick Bid Manager and Doubleclick Campaign Manager. Contact your DoubleClick rep to learn more.

Whether you’re reaching sports fans during the March Madness tournament, or more generally trying to reach your consumers in the moments that matter, these tools can help you build successful advertising campaigns that will run seamlessly across screens.

Posted by Becky Chappell, DoubleClick Marketing

Rich Media Gallery redesign: Simplifying complexity and optimizing for mobile

Becky C. — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 15:00:00 +0000

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.

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

Launching the Ads Status Dashboard

Becky C. — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 15:00:00 +0000

One piece of feedback our sales and support teams have heard over the years is that users want to know about urgent issues impacting DoubleClick products as soon as possible.

Accordingly, we are launching the Ads Status Dashboard, a new publicly-accessible tool that allows you to learn about major outages or functionality concerns across DoubleClick products, including DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Studio, DoubleClick Bid Manager, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, DoubleClick Planning, and DDM Reporting. When a major issue impacting large numbers of users is identified, we will post an outage notice in the appropriate row on the Dashboard, then provide updates to the outage notice at a regular interval until the issue is resolved.

We’re hoping this will allow all of our users to get access to crucial information quickly and without friction -- anyone who may be impacted can access the dashboard to check on the status of our products.

We’re looking to add additional products and features to the Dashboard in the coming months, so bookmark it, share it, and return to it often. We hope it saves you time!

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

Becky C. — Tue, 09 Dec 2014 19:06:00 +0000

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.

New audio component: Provides functionality for autoplay, loop, mute, etc. for audio files.

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.

Mobile momentum in digital + 3 tools for easy cross-screen campaigns

Becky C. — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 15:31:00 +0000

Marketers know that building cross-screen campaigns is important to overall campaign success. But many have been slow to adopt the HTML5 standards and mobile-compatible formats that are needed to achieve that success.

Today, more than 25% of pageviews occur on a mobile device (1) and more people consume content in HTML5-compatible environments than Flash-compatible ones (2), yet 83% of digital creative is still built in formats that don’t work on mobile devices. (3)

The “Make Mobile Work” Initiative

To help marketers make the transition to cross-screen campaigns, we have partnered with the IAB for the past year on the “Make Mobile Work” Initiative. Through an open letter signed by 22 publishers globally, a mobile check-list for marketers, and a quarterly webinar series, we increased awareness of the need for cross-screen campaigns and provided the steps to successfully create, target and measure these campaigns.

Positive momentum:

Efforts like this one appear to be working. Marketers’ trepidation toward mobile is beginning to melt away, as evidenced by strong growth metrics this year for HTML5 adoption and mobile inventory (metrics pulled from internal DoubleClick data, Nov. 2014):

250% growth in HTML5 impressions in DoubleClick Studio
130% growth in the percent of DoubleClick Campaign Manager impressions being served to mobile devices
Almost half of the mobile inventory available in DoubleClick Bid Manager is now in-app inventory

Three easy-to-use tools for cross-screen campaigns

As marketers begin to incorporate cross-screen strategies into all of their campaigns, we want to make sure that every marketer has easy-to-use tools to help them scale. So we recently launched three new features in the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform that make cross-screen creative, targeting and measurement easy to incorporate into every campaign:

Easy HTML5 creative: Our platform will automatically create an HTML5 version of every Flash banner you upload, with automatic Flash-to-HTML5 conversions for reservation campaigns (available in beta for programmatic campaigns). When your ads run on mobile devices, the interactive HTML5 ad will show up instead of a static backup image, helping expand your reach on mobile. You can also report on HTML5 impressions separate from Flash impressions. Learn More>>

Precise mobile targeting: For users who opt-in to location-based targeting, marketers can use Geofence Targeting in DoubleClick Bid Manager to deliver highly relevant messages to people based on their proximity to a specified chain store, across a broad geographic area. You can easily target all your store locations with a single click, enabling you to reach the right consumer and drive foot-traffic into your stores. For example, if you’re a hotel company, you can reach people who are close to your hotel, and offer them a discount to get them to choose your business. Learn more>>

Re-engage your app users: People are spending 86% of their time on mobile devices in applications. (4) DoubleClick now allows marketers to remarket to existing app customers inside other apps, for both reservations and programmatic buys. Using Floodlight tags, you can create audience lists around any engagement that takes place in-app (e.g. people who added an item to a shopping cart, top spenders in the last 30 days, or gold member app users). This lets you improve ROI by offering relevant ads to people who are already in the purchase funnel. Learn more>>

As 2015 approaches, we hope to see even more marketers incorporate cross-screen techniques, to successfully reach the right audiences on every device.

Published by the DoubleClick Marketing Team

sources:

1. Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report, Apr. 2014
2. StatCounter Sept. 2013 data
3. Internal DoubleClick Data, Nov. 2014
4. Flurry Analytics Report, Mar. 2014

In-stream video tools support video ad targeting

Becky C. — Tue, 28 Oct 2014 13:00:00 +0000

For the past week, we’ve discussed the ways that advertisers can pair smart creative with their media buying strategies, to produce successful digital campaigns. Today, we’ll talk about our fourth and final creative and media pairing around in-stream video -- advertisers should make sure they have the right video ad creative to run in their video ad placements.

Did you know? In 2014, over a third of mobile phone users streamed or downloaded video on their mobile devices. In 2015, the percent of people watching video on their phones is expected to jump to 40%. (1)

Rather than simply reusing TV commercials for their digital campaigns, advertisers can make their video ads work better for digital by building in interactivity. Interactive in-stream video (VPAID) allows advertisers to add additional layers of information on top of their video assets. This functionality turns a linear video into an experience that resembles a micro-site -- consumers can interact and learn about the brand all within the single ad unit, without having to navigate away from the original page.

Easy, automated in-stream video

Our new VPAID Layout allows advertisers to take an existing video asset, upload it into the Studio Layouts tool, and create an interactive ad unit in minutes. Here’s a demo of the process:

Smart serving technology for mobile video ads

When you build ad units with video in them and then serve them to mobile devices, you have to remember that video files are large, and mobile devices have slower and often fluctuating bandwidth connectivity. DoubleClick Campaign Manager has smart serving technologies to allow you to provide the best quality video to consumers based on their available bandwidth.

DoubleClick will now transcode and segment your videos so they can be served in a file size that will load on the viewer’s mobile connection (3G, 4G or wifi). The video can even be altered on the fly, if the connection changes during playback.

It’s important that advertisers pair smart creative with their media buying strategies. A campaign is only as good as the creative that shows up, so developing creative strategies that align with the media buy from the outset of the campaign is critical to campaign success. Advertisers that do this will benefit from more successful and engaging digital campaigns.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

(1) eMarketer Comparative Estimates, August 2014

HTML5 and in-app creative tools support mobile ad targeting

Becky C. — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 13:00:00 +0000

Last week, we talked about how creative strategies support the media buy in successful campaigns. Without ad creative that is engaging and relevant to people, a campaign will fall short of its advertising goals. Further, with consumers spending much of their time on smartphones and tablets, these engaging and relevant experiences need to work across screens.

Our third creative and media pairing focuses on creating successful cross-screen advertising: If your media agency is including mobile inventory in the media buy, your creative agency needs to build mobile-compatible creative to be served to those placements. The best way to build those ads is in HTML5, which allows you to provide the same interactive experiences for mobile as you do on desktop.

Did you know? There are more people in HTML5-compatible environments today than in Flash-compatible environments (1) yet 84% of rich media ads are still built in Flash. (2)

Here are four best practices for building cross-screen ads to pair with your mobile media buys:

Build in HTML5

Building mobile-compatible ads in HTML5 is getting much easier, as new tools come onto the scene to help expedite the transition from Flash. With our HTML5 and in-app layouts, advertisers can upload their existing creative assets and create multiple formats in minutes. For more custom HTML5 units, Google Web Designer provides a robust and intuitive suite of design and animation tools to allow for more creative flexibility.

Build for apps

80% of the time that people spend on their smartphones is spent within a mobile application. (3) Mobile web is very different from a mobile app, so what works on a website experience doesn’t necessarily work in a mobile application. Make sure to build ad creative that is designed for the app experience.

Use device form-factor

Desktops, smartphones and tablets all have different form-factors, or device-specific attributes and interaction modes. Smartphones and tablets have touch screens and accelerometers or motion sensors that sense movement and orientation of the device, while a laptop does not. Smartphones have much smaller screens, while tablets and desktops have larger, “lean-back” screens. Smartphones also have calling and texting capabilities. These are all opportunities for incorporating cool things about the device into your ad creative.

For example Burberry took advantage of device form-factor in their Burberry Kisses campaign. This campaign captured the shape of someone’s lips, digitized it and put it onto a digital letter that could be emailed to a loved one. To provide the same experience on different devices, the designers had to be smart about form-factor.

On desktop, they could use the video camera on the computer to capture a person’s lips. But smartphones and tablets don’t have a front-facing video camera that would work. Instead, the developers used the touch screen capabilities of these devices to allow people to kiss their screen. The device was able to understand the size and shape of the person’s lips via the touchscreen and digitize the image. This provided the same overarching brand experience for the user, but utilized a different way of executing it on different devices.

Use geo-location

Smartphones have the unique characteristic of travelling with us wherever we go. When a user opts to share their location information, the advertising they see has the opportunity to become more relevant to the physical world around them. Advertisers can send specific messages about their store or retail outlet to people who are traveling within a specified area around it.

By building HTML5 ads that work for apps, use device form factor, and provide geographically-relevant info, advertisers can ensure their ads reach consumers successfully on every device and environment.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

Sources:

1) StatCounter

2) Internal DoubleClick Data, Sept. 2014

3) Flurry analytics, Apr. 2013

Dynamic creative tools support programmatic media buys

Becky C. — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 13:00:00 +0000

As we introduced on Wednesday and explained further yesterday, it’s critical to pair your media buying strategies with smart creative strategies to develop more successful digital campaigns. A media buy is only as good as the creative that goes into it!

Our second creative and media pairing revolves around the idea of programmatic: When you are buying your media programmatically (automatically, in real-time, with granular information about each viewer) you should also be building your creative messages automatically, in real time, for every viewer. Dynamic creative is a technique that advertisers can use to accomplish these real-time messages.

Did you know? Consumers are twice as likely to engage with real-time advertising than they are with generic ads.*

Dynamic creative is a powerful and flexible system that lets marketers create a single ad template and then swap in creative variations to fit each viewer. What's more, it does it in real time: changing headlines, images, copy and calls to action depending on variables like the user's demographic, their location and the device they're using at the moment they see the ad.

People may be familiar with the idea of dynamic creative for direct response campaigns (i.e. showing a product based on what someone already viewed), but there are also clever ways to incorporate dynamic creative for brand awareness campaigns.

For example, Nike used dynamic creative to fuel their real-time “Phenomenal Shot” campaign for the World Cup. Nike wanted to deliver experiences that related to live moments in the soccer matches. They used an HTML5 dynamic template, which allowed them to create and manage one flexible ad—instead of hundreds of custom-built ads—that could run across screens.

To accommodate dozens of ad alternatives localized for 15 different languages, they created a Google Spreadsheet template that served as their dynamic feed to generate ads. Once the dynamic feed was set up, they could generate the ads quickly by updating the spreadsheet, which minimized the effort and speed of releasing ads in real time. The spreadsheet was robust yet simple enough that the ads could be updated without assistance from technical or creative employees.

Nike cleverly used dynamic creative as a way to bring live moments into their ad campaigns in real-time. Knowing that their viewers were on their phones as they were watching the soccer matches, Nike made sure their ads could show up on smartphones and tablets, to grab users’ attention and engagement during commercials or breaks in the game.

As brands buy more reservation-based ads through programmatic channels, using the information about their audiences in their creative is going to become increasingly important. To accomplish these smart creative campaigns, Advertisers must include both the media agency and the creative agency in the room at the outset of the campaign. This will enable the agencies to develop creative and media plans that are aligned.

To learn more about how to pair dynamic creative with your programmatic media buy, visit our dynamic solutions page and select the vertical that is relevant for you.

And come back on Monday for our third pairing: Mobile media buys and HTML5 creative.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

*source: “Media Economy Report: How Data is Changing our Business,” Jan. 2014, Magna Global

Powerful creative management tools support large-scale campaigns: A deep-dive into Asset Library

Becky C. — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 13:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, we announced 13 updates to our DoubleClick Creative Solutions and explained how advertisers can develop more successful campaigns by pairing their media buying strategies with smart creative.

Pairing #1 from yesterday’s post centered on scalability: Creative agencies need robust creative management tools to keep up with the scale and complexity of increasingly large media buys. The new Asset Library tab that launched this week in DoubleClick Studio provides just that -- it allows creative agencies to easily scale and manage their assets across their creatives.

With Asset Library, you can host, manage and update all of your creative assets for free, from a single cloud-based location within DoubleClick Studio. Easily manage your assets across all of your DoubleClick campaigns and update live campaigns immediately with new creative.

Six things to know about the new Asset Library tab:

No waiting: You don’t have to wait for a hosted URL from the DoubleClick team, so you can get your ads live faster.
Larger file sizes: Upload individual creative assets up to 60MB, and upload any total file size that you want.
Share assets easily: Advertisers can use Asset Library to share their creative assets directly with their creative shops, all in one place.
Batch Update: Automatically update a batch of creatives with one click in Asset Library. You can also refer to assets uploaded to Asset Library within your dynamic creative feeds.
Automatic video transcoding: Asset Library automatically transcodes videos into all necessary formats when uploaded into the platform.
Update live campaigns immediately: Edit your asset in Asset Library and push it live to the locations you want in your campaign immediately, no 24-hour review cycle or re-trafficking required.

Here’s what some of our beta testers have said about Asset Library:

"We’ve used the asset library to host HTML5 assets and then pull them in dynamically within DoubleClick Studio. This has made file management more efficient and enabled us to change assets quickly when pricing, messaging changes and creative tweaks have been necessary." ~David Morgan, Director, 22Design

"We use DoubleClick Studio to build 99% of our creative and appreciate how Asset Library has simplified video serving. Instead of handing off files, we can manage the serving ourselves through our Asset Library folder." ~Kate Bush, Associate Director of Project Management, Isobar Detroit

"I have been using Asset Library with a dynamic ad campaign for one of our major clients. Having all of the assets accessible in DoubleClick Studio...in one place has saved me so much time and energy. I can keep all my assets in a well documented and simple way. It also makes the data feed that I put into Google Docs a lot smaller and easier to manage when dealing with vast amounts of data in the dynamic ads. It is the most beneficial upgrade to date." ~Darren Stevenson, Head of Digital Display at UK creative agency Partners Andrew Aldridge

Over the next couple quarters, we’ll be integrating Asset Library into Google Web Designer, DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager, so you’ll be able to access your creative assets from every management tool within the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform.

Ready to give it a try?

Simply login to your DoubleClick Studio Account and click on the new Asset Library tab in the top navigation bar. You can also check out our Getting Started guide.

Come back tomorrow for creative and media pairing #2 around programmatic.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Creative Solutions

13 new DoubleClick Creative Solutions to make your campaigns more successful

Becky C. — Wed, 22 Oct 2014 12:00:00 +0000

Savvy advertisers know they need to pair smart creative with their media buying strategies, to accomplish successful digital campaigns. Today, we're making it easier than ever to do just that with 13 new tools across our DoubleClick Creative Solutions. These updates help advertisers succeed with four key creative + media pairings:

1. Powerful creative management tools support large-scale campaigns
2. Dynamic creative tools support programmatic media buys
3. HTML5 and in-app creative tools support mobile ad targeting
4. In-stream video tools support video ad targeting

Pairing #1: Powerful creative management tools support large-scale campaigns

Display campaigns are getting larger and more complex. To keep up, creative agencies need tools that help them build ads to suit every shape and size required by that campaign, in a fast and seamless way.

Asset Library is a creative management layer launching today in DoubleClick Studio and rolling out across the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform in the next couple quarters. Asset Library allows advertisers to host assets for free in DoubleClick and easily manage and bulk update creative, even in live campaigns, without having to re-traffic them.

“We have cut our development time considerably using Asset Library as part of our daily work flow. It's hard to imagine how we survived without it.” ~ Michael Douglas, Head of Production, SapientNitro

Pairing #2: Dynamic creative tools support programmatic media buys

Advertisers can use the audience information from their media buy to craft relevant ads for every viewer. Our new dynamic tools focus on making the process easier to manage:

A lightweight version of dynamic creative for retail and hotel clients is available in DoubleClick Bid Manager (Premium US users). Use six HTML5 templates to build dynamic ads that are aligned with the programmatic media buy. They work for Facebook right-hand side inventory too!

Advertisers can now pull their Google Merchant Center Feed into a dynamic remarketing creative in both DoubleClick Studio and DoubleClick Bid Manager. This makes it much easier to build complex retail campaigns without having to re-input the data.

Understand which products in your dynamic ad lead to which website conversions, using the new u-reporting feature in DoubleClick Studio.

Pairing #3: HTML5 and in-app creative tools support mobile ad targeting

To show a successful ad unit on mobile and tablet placements, you have to build HTML5 ad creatives in formats that work well on smaller screens.

Build mobile-compatible ads in minutes, with 20 new HTML5 and in-app Studio Layouts.
To build more custom HTML5 ads, agencies can use Google Web Designer and then publish their ads in one click to DoubleClick Studio.
For a dynamic creative campaign, DoubleClick Studio supports HTML5 dynamic creative, so advertisers can ensure their real-time messages reach consumers wherever they are.
Publish with confidence: DoubleClick supports MRAID 2.0 (the IAB’s latest mobile in-app standard) and has certified over 90 of the largest publishers and networks, to make sure their websites will support DoubleClick in-app ads.

Pairing #4: In-stream video tools support video ad targeting

Make your TV commercials work for digital by building in interactivity. Serve your video ads alongside the rest of your digital campaign so that your data and reporting are consolidated. This can lead to better campaign insights.

Our new VPAID Layout lets you easily build interactive in-stream video ads (VPAID). Simply upload your video asset and add interactive elements to create a complex ad unit in minutes.
You can also ensure people have a smooth viewing experience with your mobile video ads. DoubleClick Campaign Manager will transcode and segment your videos so they can be served in a file size that will load on the viewer’s mobile connection (3G, 4G or wifi). The video can even be altered on the fly, if the connection changes during playback.

Digital campaigns are nuanced and complex, so having the right support resources at your disposal is important. We built the Creative Recommendation Tool to help you identify the best product to use based on your project’s resources. We’ve also integrated Chat Support into the Studio UI, so you can get in touch with a real person immediately, get your problem solved and get on with your work.

While advertisers may be focused on scaling campaigns across big bets like mobile, video and programmatic, smart creative is a critical element of every successful campaign and can’t be an afterthought. Advertisers will achieve the best results when they combine creative strategies with media strategies from the outset of their campaigns.

Over the next few days, we’ll dive into each of the four creative strategies listed above, to provide best practices for combining creative and media strategies in your campaigns. Stay tuned!

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Creative Solutions

Whip your seasonal campaigns into shape: Five “knead to know” tips for Media Agencies

Becky C. — Tue, 07 Oct 2014 13:49:00 +0000

Yesterday, we provided search marketers with four of our favorite tools to whip their digital strategy into shape. Today, we have five “knead to know” tips for Media Agencies to help you make your holiday promotions a piece of cake. With the right ingredients to scale and streamline your seasonal campaigns, you can find some extra time to sit back and enjoy your perfectly baked holiday pastries — while we take care of the rest.

1. Find the recipe for success with DoubleClick Planning:

During the holidays, it’s easy to spend a lot of money—on food, gifts and decorations. But it can be hard to pull everything together to create that quintessential “holiday cheer.” This year, we have the recipe to ensure you achieve your holiday goals. DoubleClick Planning is a brand new tool that helps you simplify the planning and buying of your campaigns. The tool begins to unify programmatic and reservation inventory management, so you can carry out all of your buys in one place. Faster and more efficient cross-channel planning enables more insightful media strategies, and will ultimately help you get an ROI the size of a holiday feast.

2. Whip up opportunities with real-time bidding and optimization:

We get it. The holidays are busy, and you often find yourself running out of time—both in the kitchen and with your digital marketing. Forget the manual, hand-churned methods of the past that can leave your campaign results as stale as last year’s fruit cake. This year, turbocharge your campaigns with real-time automated bidding in DoubleClick Bid Manager. We’ll dynamically change a line item’s bid, based on the likeliness that an impression will perform well. Then we’ll use that near-instant conversion data to optimize bids throughout the day—helping you achieve specific campaign goals. And the best part? It’s all automatic, so you won’t have to make it from scratch.

3. Delight customers with Google Merchant Center feed integration in dynamic creative:

Knowing which product to show each viewer can be as tough as choosing what to make for Thanksgiving dinner. To ease the decision-making process, we launched support for Google Merchant Center feeds in DoubleClick Dynamic Creative. Use your existing Google Merchant Center feeds to automatically update your DoubleClick Studio or DoubleClick Bid Manager display campaigns — showing the right product to the right customers, when they’re looking to buy. In addition, retail and travel advertisers can now target dynamic campaigns to right-hand side inventory on the Facebook Exchange through DoubleClick Bid Manager. With these dynamic options on the table, the rest is gravy.

4. Handle on-the-go customers with geofence targeting:

As a master cook, you’re moving around non-stop during the holidays—and so are your customers. But as they’re seeking deals and checking them twice across screens, how do you drive conversions - both online and offline? Geofence targeting in DoubleClick Bid Manager will enable you to deliver highly relevant messages to customers based on their proximity to a specified chain store. This means you can maximize performance for mobile by automatically adjusting the geofence, based on privacy and potential reach. Ready to make your holidays a multiscreen event this year? We’ll raise a glass of eggnog to that!

5. Measure beyond a “pinch” with GRP and Viewability data:

A “pinch” of this and a “dash” of that won’t get you to holiday-perfect results, especially during the busy season. With our suite of solutions, we’ll give you the precise measurements you need to cook up an impactful campaign. Ensure your campaigns are actually seen, with ActiveView on DoubleClick. Reach the right audience with comScore and Nielsen GRPs, integrated seamlessly into DoubleClick. Then, optimize your campaigns in real time using audience insights gleaned from comScore vCE in DoubleClick. By accurately measuring and optimizing your campaigns, you won’t need to wait for days or weeks to make sure your holiday dollars are spent on the right audience.

Hopefully with these tips in toe, you’ll get your holiday campaigns up and running in no time, so you can enjoy some R&R with family and friends this season.

Posted by the DoubleClick Marketing Team

Building the next generation of display ads for a multi-screen world

Becky C. — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 14:49:00 +0000

Cross-posted from the Inside AdWords blog.

It’s true that mobile devices offer a new canvas for advertisers to connect with consumers, but painting on this canvas has not always been easy. Many marketers started out by shrinking down their existing display ads for mobile, but this didn’t always make for a great consumer experience. They also discovered that frequently their existing display ads were not able to run on mobile devices or on mobile browsers. But now, a new generation of display ads is changing how advertisers engage with consumers on mobile devices.

Today, we’re excited to announce that over the coming months we will launch several mobile display ad formats and tools across the Google Display Network, the AdMob Network and DoubleClick that will make it easier for advertisers to build successful ads that work across screens.

Display ads built for mobile

The new display ad formats that will be rolling out in the coming months are designed specifically for mobile environments:

Big brand ads, built for mobile and resized for every screen: Mobile lightbox Engagement Ads use your existing brand assets to automatically create engaging rich media ads in HTML5 that run seamlessly across devices and screens. The ads will dynamically resize to fit any ad size, making them quick-to-create, and you only pay when users engage. We built a demo of this new format for Kate Spade's upcoming holiday campaign. These will soon be available in the AdWords Ad Gallery.

Invitation State

Expanded State

Video ads for the AdMob network that people can choose to watch: TrueView ads have already been running across gaming apps in the AdMob network. In the coming months, they will roll out broadly across more apps in AdMob. With TrueView, your ads can reach consumers while they engage with their favorite apps. Plus, you only pay when a user chooses not to skip your ad.

Ads that stay put even while a person scrolls down the page: The anchor ad format is a mobile web ad unit that sits at the bottom of the screen on a mobile device. As a user scrolls down the page, the ad remains “anchored” to the bottom of the screen. The user can dismiss the ad at any time.

Magazine glossiness for your existing text ads: The magazine style text ad format (previously launched for mobile websites) has now been extended as an interstitial in-app format for the AdMob network, bringing the glossiness of print magazine ads to the ease and practicality of a text ad. Google Display Network text ads automatically become eligible to serve in this new ad space.

Tools to help make your existing ads mobile-ready:

These next generation mobile formats will make it easier for advertisers to build beautiful and engaging mobile ads that work across screens, but we also wanted to make it easier to do more with your existing ads designed for desktop. We've developed three new tools, that will be available in the coming months, to convert your existing ads into versions that will work across screens and devices.

Automatic mobile sizes for your image ads: The auto-resizing tool for the Google Display Network will automatically create new sizes of image ads, including mobile-specific ad sizes.

Interactive HTML5 backups when Flash isn’t supported: The Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tools for the Google Display Network and DoubleClick Campaign Manager will automatically create an HTML5 version of your Flash ads. When these ads are served on a device or browser that doesn’t support Flash, the system can show the interactive HTML5 ad instead of a static image backup.

HTML5 and in-app rich media ads built in minutes: There are now 29 HTML5 and in-app formats available in DoubleClick Studio Layouts, a tool that let’s you upload your existing creative assets into a pre-built rich media ad template to quickly create rich ads that work on smartphones and tablets.

With these new tools and formats, we’re making it easier for advertisers to develop beautiful display ads that just work, regardless of screen or device, ensuring a better experience for both consumers and brands.

Posted by Jonathan Alferness, Director of Product Management for Mobile Display Ads at Google

Behind-the-Tech of Nike’s “Phenomenal Shot” World Cup Campaign

Becky C. — Mon, 15 Sep 2014 19:06:00 +0000

The World Cup offers a good barometer for how tech is being used by a critical mass of people around the world. Four years ago, we had the first World Cup of the social media era. This summer, the big story was how fans were using mobile devices and tablets to engage with the matches and with each other. And just as audience habits are changing, advertising tactics are evolving to keep up.

Nike’s Phenomenal Shot is a perfect example: A real-time campaign that played off the action in ways that wouldn’t have been possible four years ago. Nike Phenomenal Shot let fans all over the world view, remix and share phenomenal moments from Nike athletes, just seconds after the plays happened. (Play around with one of the ads yourself.)

As part of the latest Google Art Copy & Code collaboration, Nike partnered with Wieden+Kennedy, Mindshare, Grow, and Goo Technologies to create this innovative campaign, providing a new way of tapping into the real-time energy of live sports, all across the web.

While it’s fun to play around with the ads, if you’re in the advertising industry, it’s even better to learn how they were built. That’s why we asked Drew Ungvarsky, CEO of digital agency Grow, and Mike Glaser, Marketing Manager on the Google Art Copy & Code team, to walk us through the technology and techniques that were used to create this campaign. From DoubleClick Dynamic Creative to robust WebGL experiences, the Nike Phenomenal Shot campaign demonstrates what advertising for today’s modern web can be.

Navigating the “wild west” of HTML5 with Google’s Tech Lab and Google Web Designer

Becky C. — Thu, 07 Aug 2014 13:20:00 +0000

Marius Veltman’s thought experiment yesterday utilized the Tech Lab’s Full Page Flex and Motion Sensor components to enable viewers to navigate the scenery of the ad in full screen, by tilting their mobile device.

This component is just one example of many that are being developed by Google’s new Tech Lab, a project created by Google’s Creative Technical Consultants to produce new innovations, push the boundaries of rich media and partner with creative agencies to help take these solutions to the next level. Even the best designers and developers need inspiration, and the Tech Lab has been established to help our DoubleClick Studio Certified Partners experiment with the latest, most innovative ad formats and features for their campaigns.

HTML5 is still a bit of a “wild west,” both risky and alluring in that it is unchartered territory. There is space for creative designers and developers to experiment with new executions. As Marius pointed out in his article, “the experimentation process … is crucial to developing new ideas and pushing the creative envelope.”

The Tech Lab helps designers and developers build never-before-seen formats and features into their rich media campaigns. These fresh ideas haven’t been used in many (if any) campaigns before, meaning they are exciting but also untested; but these are the realities of living on the edge of technology.

To date, the Tech Lab has created 15 innovative formats and features, and today the group is launching three new ones for HTML5:

HTML5 Autoplay Video: Start any video within an HTML5 creative automatically, without requiring a user interaction.
HTML5 Shake and Shout: Boost your HTML5 creatives by adding cool interactions: Let people blow or shout onto their device and the mic will pick up the cue; or let them shake the phone and the accelerometer will pick up the cue.
HTML5 Twitter Widget: Boost your HTML5 creative’s social IQ by adding the twitter widget and letting viewers view, tweet, retweet, and follow your twitter account directly from your mobile ads.

If you’re a DoubleClick Studio Certified partner, reach out to your DoubleClick rep to begin working with the Tech Lab. To become a Studio Certified partner, visit our exam page.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, Google Web Designer

A Google Web Designer Thought Experiment

Becky C. — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 13:13:00 +0000

Yesterday, we announced a revamped Google Web Designer, brimming with new features that make it even easier for creative designers and developers to build robust HTML5 creative.

Today, we’d like to introduce you to Marius Veltman, a rich media expert from Holland and a life-long creative technologist. We first met Marius last year when he tested out the alpha version of Google Web Designer and gave us a list of improvements for the product.

For this launch, Marius gave us a peek into his world as an artist and designer and helped us push the limits of HTML5 with a “Google Web Designer Thought Experiment.” We asked him to create an awesome HTML5 ad unit, using only Google Web Designer, that takes advantage of different device form factors and successfully conveys a brand’s message.

We selected the Google Cultural Institute as the brand and used the Street View imagery from their Great Barrier Reef World Wonders Collection as the assets. We then set out on an adventure through Holland to document Marius’s creative process as he worked to develop the ad.

Watch as Marius’s sketches come to life through the medium of HTML5 and the help of Google Web Designer. Marius's ideas develop in parallel to his own story as a designer. Then, check out the actual ad unit and learn more about his process.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing, Google Web Designer

One Year In: An Update On Google Web Designer

Becky C. — Tue, 05 Aug 2014 13:00:00 +0000

Almost one year ago, we launched Google Web Designer, a free, easy-to-use, professional-grade HTML5 authoring tool. Over that year, we’ve seen increased adoption of HTML5 and Google Web Designer across the industry.

Fast facts, one year in:

In the first half of 2014, DoubleClick Rich Media ad impressions from HTML5 grew 140% compared to the second half of 2013.
Ads built with Google Web Designer have garnered 2.5B impressions since the launch of the product.
Over 20% of Google Web Designer’s user base are returning users and 72% are located outside the United States.
We partnered with the IAB to launch the “Make Mobile Work” Initiative, which has reached thousands of people through press outreach, an industry open letter, and quarterly webinar series.
Advertisers are seeing performance improvements as a result of adopting HTML5. For example, TalkTalk decreased their eCPA by 12% and reduced their backup image rate by 13% by adding HTML5 to their campaign.

So what’s launching in Google Web Designer?

Today’s launch provides more granular control and creative flexibility to creative developers and designers, and allows them to easily build more interactive and animated HTML5 content and get it published quickly.

Revamped Events and Components allow designers to make any element interactive, and customize the types of interactivity within their creative.
The updated timeline provides more granular control for designers to easily build animated content.
Tighter integrations with Google Drive, DoubleClick Studio, DoubleClick Campaign Manager and AdWords let users collaborate on their works-in-progress and publish finished units more quickly. This integration marks the first time that AdWords will support HTML5 ads.

Simplifying cross-screen advertising

In addition to Google Web Designer, we are continuing to develop tools to make it easier for advertisers and agencies to build successful cross-screen advertising campaigns.

We recently launched several features in DoubleClick to help you execute and measure your campaigns across screens, including in-app remarketing and conversion tracking in DoubleClick Campaign Manager. We also launched MRAID 2.0 support in DoubleClick Studio and we have certified 69 large publishers and networks for in-app formats, meaning developers can build mobile in-app ads with the confidence that they’ll be accepted across more publishers and networks.

Through its integration with Google Web Designer, AdWords now supports HTML5 ad creatives. In addition, Flash ads that are uploaded to Adwords will automatically be converted into HTML5 ads and can be uploaded via AdWords Editor and other 3rd party tools coming soon. Over the next few months, we’ll also be releasing tools and services that will resize ads to some of the most popular mobile sizes, without requiring any additional work on the part of the agencies.

Want to learn more?

Creative Agencies:

Visit our revamped website and download the product for free.
Register for our Google Web Designer overview webinar on Wednesday Aug. 13th. Our lead Product Manager and Creative Technical Consultant will walk through the new Google Web Designer features and demo some cool creative executions.

Media Agencies:

Register for our third webinar in the Make Mobile Work Series, focused on best practices for mobile targeting, on Tuesday, Aug. 12th. Google will be presenting alongside speakers from Millennial and Facebook.

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

New tools to help advertisers embrace cross-screen campaigns

Becky C. — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 16:12:00 +0000

Today, we're excited to shine a light on several new features of the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform that help advertisers more seamlessly embrace cross-screen advertising.

Mobile advertising is, without question, top of mind for marketers; but according to the latest "Internet Trends 2014" report from Mary Meeker, it's also the biggest opportunity gap of all forms of media spend. Although 20% of time spent on media is within a mobile environment, only 4% of US advertising spend is on mobile. (1) Marketers still struggle to get up to speed on the new technologies and strategies that cross-screen campaigns require.

That's why we're excited to bring new tools that make it easier to build, buy, target, execute and measure your campaigns across screens:

Google Web Designer integration:

Build HTML5 ads easily in Google Web Designer and publish them into DoubleClick Campaign Manager. This allows you to quickly get your HTML5 ads live and serving to any device.

Mobile inventory growth:

Buy more mobile inventory -- Programmatic mobile inventory on DoubleClick Bid Manager has grown 130% since Q4 2013 across 12 exchanges and includes both display and video formats. Adding mobile inventory on DoubleClick Bid Manager allows you to incorporate mobile into the rest of your media strategy and optimize across all of your media buys.

In-app remarketing:

(Re)target your customers using audience lists within mobile app environments, so that you can drive and measure re-engagement with your existing mobile app users.

Publisher Certification program for in-app creative formats:

Execute your mobile campaigns with the confidence. While mobile rich media standards are widely accepted across the industry, publishers still vary in their implementation, resulting in discrepancies and inconsistent behavior of in-app creative. We are certifying publishers and networks to ensure their mobile apps can accept and run standard mobile in-app ad units (59 certifications completed to date.)

In-app conversion tracking:

Measure in-app view-through and click-through conversions with Floodlight to report on mobile app downloads or any other in-app activities. Whether you are running an app install campaign or driving in-app purchases, you can now attribute these activities to your in-app media and better measure app campaign effectiveness.

TalkTalk drives 12% decrease in eCPA with HTML5 creative and mobile programmatic.

TalkTalk, a Telecom company based in the UK, has embraced cross-screen strategies for their campaigns and drove a 12% decrease in their eCPA using DoubleClick and Google Web Designer. Their creative agency, 22Design, used Google Web Designer to quickly learn and build HTML5 into TalkTalk’s campaign, getting the campaign live in a third of the expected time.

Not only was the learning process much easier than anticipated, the HTML5 ads actually performed better than the Flash ads, indicating that TalkTalk’s audience was more receptive to the brand message on mobile devices than on desktops. Equipped with their new HTML5 creative and audience insights, TalkTalk was able to add mobile inventory to their programmatic media buy for the first time.

Rather than waiting on the sidelines, TalkTalk has taken a proactive approach to trying new mobile strategies and techniques with DoubleClick. They started slow, tested what worked, and iterated on their findings, to get their campaigns running successfully across screens.

Check out the full case study here.

We are excited about these new tools and will continue to improve our technology to help marketers and agencies more seamlessly build, execute and measure cross-screen campaigns.

Posted by the DoubleClick Marketing Team

(1) Mary Meeker’s “Internet Trends 2014” - http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends

Design with device in mind: Five strategies for successful cross-screen ad creative

Becky C. — Mon, 19 May 2014 15:48:00 +0000

Last week, the IAB hosted the second webinar in the "Make Mobile Work" Initiative, a program aimed at helping advertisers unlock the full value of mobile advertising. The webinar, entitled "Design with device in mind," focused on strategies for designing ad creative to work properly across screens.

For those of you who weren't able to watch the webinar, you can view the recording here, but we also thought we'd share the strategies more broadly.

Five strategies for developing successful cross-screen creative:

Note: "Step Zero" is to build your ads in HTML5, so that they can even show up across screens. We talked more about that in our first webinar.

1) Design ads differently for mobile phones vs. tablets.

Too often, advertisers lump mobile phones and tablets together as one and the same. But consumer behavior is very different on these two devices. On a smartphone, consumers are typically on the move and their information gathering is action-oriented -- they are searching for a specific answer or piece of information and want to find it quickly. On these smaller screens, you want to keep things short and provide information easily and quickly to users.

With tablets, on the other hand, consumers tend to be stationary and their information gathering is more entertainment-oriented -- they are browsing for interesting things and are more inclined to spend time flipping through content. On these larger screens, you can provide longer, more engaging experiences that use interactive elements, games, photos or videos.

2) Make ads feel more like content.

Consumers now expect engaging and interactive ad units, and they won't tolerate ads that are intrusive or unhelpful. Think of your ad as another opportunity, just like your website, to provide useful information for people to engage with your brand and learn more about your products. This is true for all of your digital creative -- desktop, tablet and smartphone -- but it's especially important for the tablet environment, where consumers are often in the “browsing” mentality. Here, they may be more likely to engage with an ad unit, so it's critical to ensure that your ad grabs their attention.

Cadillac used interactive video and multiple content areas in this ad to provide multiple ways for people to engage with the brand and check out the product, directly within the ad unit.

3) Take advantage of the device form-factor.
Build your ads to mimic the way people already interact with the device. Use the touch screen and the accelerometer within mobile phones and tablets to build in interaction modes like swipe, touch, tilt, and shake, giving people new ways to interact with your content.

The Alka-Seltzer ad unit from Project Re:Brief illustrates how you can build these interaction modes into your ad creative in a way that works seamlessly (and even augments) the creative narrative.

You should also take advantage of the call functionality and geo-targeting capabilities inherent in mobile phones. According to the “Mobile path to purchase” research, 69% of consumers searching on mobile phones expect businesses to be within 5 miles or less of their location. And 55% of users who search for a product on their mobile phone want to purchase within an hour of searching. (83% want to purchase within the day.) Use click-to-call, location extensions, and the maps API to help consumers learn more about your company and reach a purchase faster.

4) Alter your assets to work for mobile.
Your standard 30-second TV commercial may not be the best video format for your digital placements, so you should get creative about the length, frequency and sequencing of your video content. You can try shorter 5-15 second video ads on mobile phones, and longer video units on tablets. (Many of the best YouTube videos from brands today are two- five minutes long!) You should also consider sequencing your video ads to create a linear story for a viewer through subsequent ad units.

Another thing to consider is the speed and cost of people's internet connections on smartphones and tablets. People streaming or downloading video content when they are not on wifi have to pay for those data charges, so you should be smart about the file size of the ads that you show people. Identify whether the person is on a mobile network vs. wifi, and then serve smaller file sizes to the person on the mobile network, and larger file sizes (higher res assets, more interactive elements) to the person on the wifi network. This helps reduce viewers' frustration when they can't download and ensures that your mobile video message gets through with the quality you intended.

5) Create both in-app ad units in addition to mobile web ad units.
Smartphone users spend up to 5 times more minutes per month on apps than they do using the mobile web. (Nielsen Smartphone Analytics, March 2013) So it’s important to build in-app ad units, in addition to mobile web ad units, that can get in front of that audience. Mobile applications also offer different contexts for you to place your ads, so it provides more variety when considering your creative and targeting strategies.

------------------
These 5 strategies are just a taste of the content available through the "Make Mobile Work" Webinars. Our next webinar will be in mid-August and will focus on how to target your campaigns and reach the right people across devices. (RSVP here.) We hope you'll join us!

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

The Layouts Series 2.0 – Elevate your digital campaign: Millmaine trades up from static banner ads to rich media

Becky C. — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 15:39:00 +0000

This week, we’ve covered how to use Studio Layouts to give yourself more space for brainstorming while still being able to build HTML5 and engaging Lightbox and YouTube Mastheads with ease. Today we’ll focus on how you can elevate even your static image ads to rich media with Layouts.

Building rich media ads in Flash is complex, translating from Flash to HTML5 is even more complex, and the whole process can leave agencies throwing their hands in the air and reverting back to static image ads. DoubleClick Studio Layouts provide an opportunity to elevate your standard banner ads and trade up from static images to rich media, without the added cost and production time.

Millmaine jumps from static image to HTML5 rich media in one hour.

Millmaine Entertainment Marketing typically created digital campaigns for their client, the National Gallery of Australia, that primarily involved standard ad units. According to Gerard Rowan, Creative Director at Millmaine, “normally, we would just run some static images, but I had been researching the possibilities of DoubleClick Studio and when I came across Layouts, it seemed like an easy way to implement a rich media campaign.”

Millmaine used the HTML5 Featured Video Layout to create a unit that reused the National Gallery’s existing TV commercial in a display ad, giving them more reach across the web. To promote the "Gold and the Incas" exhibit specifically, they built an ad that evoked scenes from the ancient Incan civilization intercut with shots of the actual exhibit.

Rowan says the process of creating the campaign with Layouts was “nice and quick”. In fact, he had the ads up and running within one hour. “With DoubleClick Studio Layouts, it was a matter of swapping out some of the elements, such as the background image and the call-to-action button, and then supplying a link to the YouTube video for our television commercial.”

The choice paid off. More than 84,000 people viewed it in one day, and 3,230 clicked through to learn more. In the end, more than a quarter million people saw the ad, which was used for a home page takeover of the main newspaper in Australia’s capital city, The Canberra Times.

Rowan concluded, “We don’t usually have days and weeks to turn jobs around. More often we have a few hours. So we are looking for quick and effective solutions like DoubleClick Studio Layouts, which give us the potential to build more rich media content so we can do more exciting web ads for our clients.”

Learn more about Studio Layouts here, and get started today by visiting the Layouts tab in your DoubleClick Studio Account.

Posted by Becky Chappell, DoubleClick Product Marketing

The Layouts Series 2.0 – "Long-tail" display doesn’t have to mean boring ads: LG livestreams smartphone launch across the web

Becky C. — Wed, 23 Apr 2014 15:57:00 +0000

Yesterday’s blog post focused on how to easily build HTML5 ads using Studio Layouts. Today, we’ll discuss the various types of engaging ad units you can build with Studio Layouts.

While we recommend that you use Studio Layouts to build out your long-tail of ad units for your display campaign, that doesn’t mean that all of those units have to be bland banners. Studio Layouts offers a rich selection of IAB rising star and Engagement ad formats that let you make your creative ideas shine through interactive units that engage viewers.

LG livestreams using a Layout.

Take LG as an example -- in late 2013, LG faced the impending product launch of their new G2 smartphone, and they needed to convince a huge, global audience of the benefits of the device. Their launch centered around the unveiling of their phone at a big event in New York City, but they wanted to reach even more viewers who couldn’t attend in person.

According to Danny Kim, Digital Marketing Manager with LG Mobile Communications in Seoul, Korea, “The launch campaign was focused on product awareness and branding. So the most important metrics were impressions, reach, and engagement.”

To achieve these goals, LG’s creative team used Studio Layouts to build a Lightbox Engagement ad unit that could livestream the video from their event across the web. By syndicating their video content through the live-stream, LG received “almost 10 million playbacks during the live-streamed show, which is a huge number for a product launch...the results were a pleasant surprise,” says Kim.

Additionally, by using Studio Layouts to build this ad, LG was able to complete the development process in record time. The QA process was accomplished in six hours and the tags trafficked in less than one day. Without Layouts, this process could take multiple days to complete, so using the Layouts template cut the turnaround time by more than 80%.

What cool formats are available?

Studio Layouts currently offers six different formats of Lightbox Engagement ads, including Featured video and video gallery, as well as a masthead version of the image gallery, carousel and background masthead. (Engagement ads are Google Display Network’s proprietary ad format that measures user engagement via a required 2-second hover before the ad expands.)

You can also build full YouTube Mastheads with Studio Layouts; we’ve turned our most common YouTube Masthead formats - Background, Carousel, Featured Video, and Image Gallery -- into Layouts so that you can easily create these units without the long review timelines that often accompany hand-coded YouTube Mastheads.

To get started with Layouts, simply click on the Layouts tab in the top-level navigation bar in your DoubleClick Studio account. Learn more>>

Posted by Becky Chappell, DoubleClick Product Marketing

The Layouts Series 2.0 – Mobile, made accessible: Bask Digital creates HTML5 ads in minutes instead of hours

Becky C. — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 15:30:00 +0000

Yesterday we explained how you can use Studio Layouts to open up more time in your project schedule for the brainstorming and creative ideation for your campaigns. Today, we’ll specifically take a look at a customer who used Studio Layouts to gain access to HTML5 creative.

Bask Digital discovers HTML5 Layouts

HTML5 ads can be tricky to build, but HTML5 Studio Layouts let you take the same assets from your flash ads, plug them into the HTML5 Layout, and create HTML5 ads in minutes. For Bask Digital, a California-based web and social media shop for political campaigns, this ease-of-use enabled them to incorporate HTML5 ads into their campaigns for the first time at a large scale.

Previously, managing partner Jonas Kleiner used to spend hours creating HTML5 ads from scratch, compressing videos and tinkering with the code. The whole process was very complex and the steep learning curve meant that training his design team to code HTML5 ads was not a realistic option.

Once Kleiner learned about Studio Layouts, he found that he and his team were able to build HTML5 ads in 15-30 minutes, compared to the hours it used to take them to hand code everything.

“We just have to create a background image, embed a YouTube video, and it’s done. And then we have all the tracking and tabbing available, just like with other Doubleclick Rich Media ads,” says Kleiner. “HTML5 Layouts brings the campaign down to the core of design. Rather than using effects, you need to create a really good image, and then use the power of good graphic design to drive eyeballs.”

Using Studio Layouts, Kleiner and his team at BASK have been able to incorporate HTML5 into their campaigns, where it otherwise would not have been feasible.

What HTML5 Studio Layouts are available?

There are currently nine different HTML5 formats available in Studio Layouts, including 3D image gallery, scroll box, slideshow, swipe gallery, video and image gallery, GDN Lightbox Featured Video, YouTube video wall and a featured video format. You can view demos of all of these formats here.

In the near future, we’ll be launching our first in-app Layouts (HTML5 ad units that can work within mobile and tablet applications) as well as additional HTML5 formats for mobile web.

To get started with Layouts, simply click on the Layouts tab in the top-level navigation bar in your DoubleClick Studio account. Learn more>>

Posted by Becky Chappell, DoubleClick Product Marketing

The Layouts Series 2.0 – Making time for innovation: How to spend more time brainstorming your creative idea

Becky C. — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 15:06:00 +0000

We began “The Layout Series” in Aug. 2013 with the initial launch of DoubleClick Studio Layouts. This week, we’ll continue the theme with “The Layouts Series 2.0,” providing updates about the product and why it matters to you.

We have never talked to a creative who doesn’t want more time to brainstorm and innovate. The quick turnarounds for digital campaigns mean that you already have limited time to get your big ideas on paper. But your brainstorming time is also eaten up by the time it takes to build all the supplemental ad units needed to flesh out a campaign.

Today, your project timeline might look something like this:

When half of the project timeline has to be devoted to building out all the ads to match the media buy, your brainstorming and design time gets cornered into shorter periods at the beginning of the project.

We built DoubleClick Studio Layouts with this reality in mind. Studio Layouts help creative agencies and production shops condense the time it takes to build out that long-tail of standard units for a campaign, so that you have more time to come up with a great idea at the outset of the project.

With Studio Layouts, your project timelines can now look more like this:

If you can build the long-tail of your ad units in half the time, you can make space at the beginning of the project for more brainstorming and design time, giving you the chance to come up with really innovative ideas.

Once you’ve built your “big, bad” creative units and sold your idea into your client, take the creative assets from those primary units, upload them to the Studio Layouts filler tool, preview and publish. Instead of spending an hour or two hand-coding each additional ad unit, select from one of 21 different formats (26 different sizes) and build each ad in 5-10 minutes.

Example media spec sheet:

Studio Layouts can save you 75% of your production time, because it’s easy to build out all the additional units you need to complete your campaign. Plus, because all the trafficking and reporting tags are baked in to each Layout, there are fewer areas where things can break, so your ads should go through QA much faster.

Use Studio Layouts to give yourself the space to innovate for your digital campaigns, by becoming more efficient with your ad production on the backend of your project.

You can get started using Studio Layouts today - check out the Layouts tab in the top navigation bar of your DoubleClick Studio account. Learn more >>

Posted by Becky Chappell, DoubleClick Product Marketing

DoubleClick Studio Certification Program Updates

Becky C. — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 15:06:00 +0000

At the beginning of March, we announced a month-long campaign to revamp our DoubleClick Studio Certification program. Over the course of the month, we have released new resources to better communicate the benefits of being a Studio Certified user, and new badges to help you develop a diverse set of skills.

Our new certification resources - by the numbers:

1 new landing page on the Rich Media Gallery
2 new one-sheeters for creative and media agencies*
5 new case studies featuring studio certified creative agencies*
12 tips and tricks, available via our Certification Poster

EX: Did you know certified users now have access to Live DoubleClick Chat Support?

The new certification badges include:

Engagement Ads badge: This badge lets you prove your expertise building Google Display Network Engagement Ad formats.

Updated QA badge: The updated badge includes comprehensive testing for Flash, HTML5, and dynamic creatives.

Note: If you took the QA Certification exam before March 13th, 2014, you'll need to get re-certified with the new QA badge by July 1st, 2014.

Media agencies -- if you're looking for a creative agency that knows the in's and out's of the DoubleClick product, you can find them on our Certified Partner list.

Creative Agencies -- even if you're already certified in our core badges, you can continue to develop your skills in more complex areas, such as dynamic creative, the YouTube Masthead and VPAID. So keep building your expertise and get certified today.

Posted by Becky Chappell, DoubleClick Product Marketing

*available in the resources section of the new Certification landing page

Build your expertise. Get Studio Certified.

Becky C. — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 14:20:00 +0000

As an industry, we know that getting in front of the right user is just half the story. A campaign’s creative is a critical component that can make or break campaign success. And as the people who design and develop that creative message, creative agencies need to be experts at their craft, with a deep understanding of the tools of their trade and the ability to promote that expertise across the complicated ecosystem of players that compose the advertising landscape.

Here at DoubleClick, we recognize this need and have spent the past year and a half developing a robust training and certification program for our creative agency partners. By becoming a DoubleClick Studio and QA Certified Partner -- a “Jedi” so to speak -- you put yourself in the driver’s seat to build creative faster, with fewer issues, and ship it on your own timeline.

Our DoubleClick Studio Training and Certification program enables you to:

Work more efficiently by taking control of your turnaround times
Build your expertise in the Studio product and keep your skills fresh
Promote your expertise as a Certified Partner to prove you’re the best for the job

Over a thousand people in the creative industry have already become Certified Partners, representing individuals and agencies across the globe, and every day we're adding more. Here are five of them to tell you a bit about their experience:

Beyond the core Studio and QA certifications, you can hone your skills further and demonstrate your “specialist” abilities with additional badges, including Dynamic, Masthead, and VPAID badges. These advanced certifications can help you create innovative, out-of-the-box approaches to digital creative that can set you apart from the crowd.

Ready to get started?
Visit the Studio Certification page. You can take all of our exams through this portal. Each exam takes ~1-2 hours to complete and has accompanying training materials to help you if you get stuck.

Still unsure?
Every day for the month of March, we’ll provide tips, fun facts and case studies about DoubleClick Studio and the Studio Certification program. Check back here each day for a new, unlocked Tip of the Day. Today’s tip features Tom Miller, Founder and Owner of Creative Ocean, sharing his experience with Studio Certification.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

Take advantage of engagement metrics and larger file sizes with Enhanced Formats in DoubleClick Campaign Manager

Becky C. — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 15:00:00 +0000

Today, we’re launching Enhanced Formats in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, which allow media agencies to easily add engagement reporting to their standard banner ads and upload larger creative files (such as HTML5 creatives) to DoubleClick Campaign Manager directly.

Digital advertising has moved beyond the impression and the click -- consumers can now interact with ads in more nuanced ways and advertisers need to be able to measure and understand these interactions. As digital creative becomes more interactive and built for multi-screen, it is also challenging publishers’ website specifications with larger and more complex files. Enhanced Formats provide an easy and inexpensive tool, built into your existing DoubleClick Campaign Manager workflow, that allows you to ensure all of your digital ads are built to accommodate the changing realities of the modern web.

Measure user engagement and interaction for every digital ad you create

With Enhanced Formats, you can add basic engagement metrics and multiple exit links to your standard banner ads automatically. These will let you track metrics such as interaction rate, display time, the number of times people click on different exit links in your creative, and the breakdown of impressions that occur on various versions of your creative (back-up image vs. HTML5 vs. Flash.)

Enhanced banner in the DoubleClick Campaign Manager dropdown menu

Upload larger files sizes, such as HTML5 files

Instead of compressing your HD assets to meet publishers’ specifications, add a polite load image and load your heavy file after the rest of the website loads. That way you preserve your high-res assets without violating publisher specs. Because many HTML5 ads require larger file sizes, the polite load is essential for running mobile-compatible ads. You’ll also be able to pay a fixed price for your assets, rather than paying “by the KB,” so you’ll know exactly what to expect when invoices show up.

Upload mixed mode creative

Instead of showing a static backup image when Flash isn’t compatible, show a more robust HTML5 ad. Enhanced Formats support mixed mode creatives (creatives that include Flash, HTML5 and backup image assets.) DoubleClick automatically renders the correct assets, based on the end user’s environment. Metrics for each type of asset are available in the reporting tab.

Fewer steps; elegant execution and reporting

We’ve simplified the steps needed to “enhance” your banners and built everything into the existing DoubleClick Campaign Manager workflow.

Add multiple exits: DoubleClick automatically creates exits for the clicktags in a creative and lets you customize the reporting label for each exit. You only have to traffic one creative (as opposed to a creative for every clicktag), and you get all the exits alongside the rest of your metrics in the reporting tab.
Batch upload: Upload a zip file full of assets and DoubleClick will automatically detect which assets go with which creative. Enhanced banners will be created for larger assets in the zip, and flash or HTML5 formats will be created for smaller assets in the zip.

Less expensive than full rich media

With Enhanced Formats, you get access to engagement metrics, polite load, and larger file sizes at a lower cost.

To add Enhanced Formats to DoubleClick Campaign Manager, please contact your account manager. Note that Enhanced Formats are only available in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, so if you’re still using DFA, ask your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager first.

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

Posted by Jordan Sumerlus, Product Manager, DoubleClick

“Making mobile work” for the advertising industry

Becky C. — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 14:21:00 +0000

Today, almost 50% of the US population has a smartphone* and one in five webpage views now occur on mobile devices.** Even though consumers have quickly incorporated these devices into their daily routines, advertisers haven’t necessarily followed suit. While a few of the savviest advertisers are taking advantage of the multiscreen opportunity, it’s time that the entire industry think critically about how to make mobile a first class citizen in their campaigns.

One key aspect of “making mobile work” is using mobile-compatible ad creative; HTML5 creative works on smartphones, tablets and desktops, allowing advertisers to build a single ad unit that can run across all screens. By using HTML5, advertisers open the door to cross-screen branding opportunities, as well as enable publishers to monetize their highly-trafficked mobile properties.

To call out this need, the IAB today published an open letter, signed by Google, 16 US publishers and six UK publishers, asking marketers to use HTML5 for their ad creative so that their campaigns can show up properly across screens.

This plea to marketers is the first step in a larger “Make Mobile Work” Initiative, in which the IAB, supported by Google and the other publishers, will provide additional resources to marketers to educate them on how to implement successful mobile campaigns.

By fostering the conversation and educating marketers, we hope the “Make Mobile Work” Initiative will invigorate the production of mobile-compatible campaigns, enable marketers to take advantage of the mobile opportunity, and provide publishers with the inventory they need to monetize their mobile properties.

Posted by Bonita Stewart, VP Americas Partner Business Solutions, Google

*source: eMarketer “US Mobile Phone Internet Users and Penetration, 2012-2017.”
**source: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-monthly-201012-201312

MRAID Beta Program: Bringing scale to mobile rich media through in-app advertising

Becky C. — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 19:40:00 +0000

Are you an advertiser or agency running mobile in-app ads or are you interested in testing out in-app formats?

We’re looking for advertisers or agencies willing to participate in an MRAID beta program, to run campaigns with impression volume against our tested networks and verify that the reporting and metrics are tracking properly.

In exchange for helping us test out the metrics, we’ll wave rich media ad serving fees for the duration of the beta. (Note: we may see significant reporting discrepancies during this beta period.)

Requirements to participate in the beta:

Have our “Beta Feature” language in the Advertising Platform Agreement (APA) or have a separate Beta Feature Agreement
Deliver HTML5 creative assets to DoubleClick
Run media with an MRAID compliant publisher or platform that has been tested by DoubleClick. (e.g. Greystripe, Millennial, Jumptap, New York Times, Mojiva, InMobi, AdMarvel).

Be sure to ask your sales representative for an updated list of compliant publishers.
Don't see your desired publisher on the list? Point them to our DFA publisher certification so you can run in-app ads on their network or application.

If you are interested in taking part in this beta program, please contact your DoubleClick Sales Representative.

-----------------------

Background on MRAID:

Mobile rich media advertising has historically been difficult for agencies and publishers to execute on a large scale because every publisher has maintained different standards and specs for mobile ads. With so many different standards, an agency would have to create many ads, each tailored to individual publishers -- a very manual and unscalable process.

To help make mobile rich media execution more scalable, the IAB developed the Mobile Rich Media Ad Interface Definitions (MRAID), which provide a standard for mobile rich media ads, so that all publishers can accept the same ad type (and agencies can build one ad to work across all the publishers.)

DoubleClick Rich Media and Studio is MRAID compliant, meaning agencies that use DoubleClick have the ability to serve MRAID creatives to in-app inventory offered by publishers and mobile ad networks. We have already been working with a number of publishers, confirming their ability to support our test tags. Now, we need to run live campaigns with impression volume against these tested networks, to verify that metrics are tracking properly. This is the goal of the beta program.

Making creative more intelligent

Becky C. — Tue, 21 Jan 2014 15:30:00 +0000

Your media plan is only as good as your creative message. Once you reach the right people, are you telling them something they actually want to hear?

- Pete Crofut, Creative Platforms Evangelist, Google

For the past six months, we’ve partnered with iMedia Connection on a series of articles that explore modern storytelling and the ways that new digital technologies are making ad creative more intelligent. We laid out the challenges advertisers face, examined engaging and data-infused creative examples, and discussed how to make these ads captivating across screens, measurable and scalable.

Today, we conclude this series with a final article, “Technology makes creative more intelligent,” which provides new creative examples and explains how the creative imperative fits into Google’s broader perspective on the "what,” "why" and "how" of modern brand building (entitled the Engagement Project.)

The tools and technology are available to help make your stories come to life online. Now’s the time to embrace the opportunity and think about your creative from a cross-screen, digital-first perspective, to craft messages that will engage people wherever they are.

Posted by Becky Chappell, DoubleClick Marketing

DoubleClick Rich Media Hangout Series: Lessons from our Customers, featuring Project C

Becky C. — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 18:30:00 +0000

In the motion picture industry, you live or die by your movie trailer and your pre-launch advertising. With all the action-packed creative and large-scale campaigns competing in the same space, it’s quite a task to make innovative and attention-grabbing advertisements. Yet creative agency Project C embraces the challenge.

For our third installment in our DoubleClick Rich Media Hangout Series, “Lessons from our Customers”, we’ll be interviewing Project C, next Wednesday, 12/18 @ 2pm ET.

Joey Barrus, Director of Ad Media, Matthew Jordan, Director of Strategy and Production, and Jennifer Christiano, Project C Producer, will chat with Jeff Sundheim, DoubleClick Creative Account Executive, to discuss how they come up with the next big idea for their entertainment clients.

They’ll walk us through how they built the ad creatives for the major motion picture releases Thor, Despicable Me 2, and Anna Karenina, and which tools they used to make the creative come to life. Plus, they may even divulge some stories of Hollywood’s behind-the-scenes antics.

Join us next Wednesday, Dec. 18th @ 2:30pm ET / 11:30am PT.
RSVP for the hangout here.

If, like the rest of us, you’re just counting down the hours until you can leave for Christmas break, here’s some fodder to help you pass the time: Part one and two of our hangout series.

We hope you’ll join us!

DoubleClick “Stocking Stuffers”: Festive strategies to lighten your workload this season

Becky C. — Thu, 14 Nov 2013 17:25:00 +0000

Running top-notch digital campaigns for the holidays can be a lot of work, and your to-do list can seem never-ending: on top of the festivities of the season, you’re juggling fleeting promotions, revising stale ads, and trying to balance your budget —all in hopes of reaching holiday shoppers at the moment they’re looking to buy. So how do you succeed online during one of the busiest times of the year, and reach the right people with the right message, at the drop of a (Santa) hat?

This season, we wanted to share a few of our favorite digital marketing “stocking stuffers” to put the cheer back in your holiday and help you plan, build, manage, measure and optimize your campaigns with ease. We took our best time-saving features that you can apply across your search and display campaigns, so you can find some extra time to sit back and enjoy your toasty apple cider -- while we take care of the rest.

Plan your media buys strategically:

Solve the cross-channel puzzle with display remarketing from search ads.

It’s not a miracle on 34th Street: you can get your search and display campaigns connected and performing this holiday season, and beyond. Display remarketing from search ads will help you close the loop on those last minute shoppers who searched for your product or service but didn't convert. With this feature, set up search campaigns in DoubleClick Search and re-engage your audience with display ads across exchanges via DoubleClick Bid Manager, or across Google Display Network - and do it all with an easy, tagless workflow.

Build your ad creative beautifully:

Schedule your asset swaps or make them on-the-fly with dynamic creative.

Admit it: manually updating every ad unit with new logos or creative assets can leave you feeling like a Grinch. When you know you’ll have to change the assets for a campaign, use dynamic creative to schedule the updates in advance. The new assets will automatically replace all the old ones in your ads, and you’ll be singing fa-la-la-la-la all the way home.

Don’t get tangled up with your holiday designs.

Google Web Designer lets you create beautiful HTML5 ads with ease, for free. Build cross-screen creative directly for DoubleClick Studio -- all the ad tags and rich media metrics are automatically built into the ad, so your designs can shine on every screen.

Manage your campaigns easily:

Do the work of a team of elves with automated rules from DoubleClick Search.

Stay up 'til midnight waiting for Santa -- not your campaign updates -- with a little help from automated rules. Schedule changes to specific ads and keywords, based on criteria you specify, to ensure that your holiday search campaigns are in tip-top shape. That means you can spend less time on repetitive tasks, and more time setting up those reindeer traps.

Meet mobile under the mistletoe.

As consumers turn to their devices to research and shop, you can turn to us to reach and engage them. Whether you’re running search or display, our system is device-aware. With DoubleClick Search support of AdWords enhanced campaigns, seamlessly reach your customers across locations and devices with custom mobile bid adjustments based on your Floodlight tag activities. With Bid Manager mobile-specific targeting and formats, we automatically detect if users are on a mobile device, so you can engage your audience on both mobile web and apps -- without any additional work. So cozy up with mobile this season!

Measure and optimize your campaigns successfully:

Get a new perspective on the year - and your performance - with data visualizations.

While Santa eagerly awaits his midnight milk and cookies, you can treat yourself to “infosnacks” - data visualizations that give you a snapshot of your campaign performance - right from the DoubleClick Bid Manager UI. Infosnacks bring information that’s commonly viewed - like conversion and CPA - to your fingertips. In addition, you can see how these metrics are trending over time. So you’ll spend less time digging through data, and more time spreading the yuletide cheer.

Race to the top with real-time bid and campaign optimization.

Looking for a solution that’ll help you go as fast as Rudolph? Put your best bid forward with the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite and DoubleClick Bid Manager automatic campaign optimization. Both suites are designed to drive campaign performance through speedy, data-driven bid optimization. Our systems use instant conversion data to update bids in near real-time, and on DoubleClick Bid Manager, we automatically shift your budget to the best performing line items.

Do you have a DoubleClick tip or trick that gets you through the busy holiday season? Email it to us at dclk-holiday@googlegroups.com with your name and title. We’ll feature the best tips on this DoubleClick blog!

*Bonus* If you want even more product-specific tips, check out our DoubleClick Search and Rich Media Gallery blogs next week!

Posted by the DoubleClick Marketing Team

Making Mobile Work Across the Advertising Industry

Becky C. — Fri, 01 Nov 2013 17:38:00 +0000

Throughout the month of October, we’ve sparked a conversation around mobile in our industry; we’ve uncovered some of the challenges preventing widespread mobile advertising adoption, and we’ve discussed potential solutions to invigorate cross-screen advertising in the ecosystem. Today, we’ll summarize our learnings and the solutions we’re working on to ease these issues.

Most people know that smartphone and tablet usage has increased drastically in the last few years. These new screens provide a golden opportunity for advertisers to place their brands in front of people through unique and personal experiences. But even though we recognize this opportunity exists, there are still many challenges throughout the industry that prevent the movement of advertising dollars onto mobile platforms.

According to our Mobile White Paper, “Unlocking the HTML5 Opportunity: What’s the Holdup?”:

Creative agencies don’t develop more mobile creative because they believe there is a lack of demand from clients, they think re-using the desktop version works adequately and they think building HTML5 is too time consuming. There is also a high switching cost due to the fact that Flash is ingrained in their processes.
Media Agencies don’t buy more mobile impressions because they don’t think there are enough validation metrics from the networks, they find it too difficult to work across network vendors, and the target audiences for tablets in particular are not available.
Only 1/4 of agencies build creative specifically for smartphones and only 1/5 build creative specifically for tablets, while 42% of agencies say they reuse their desktop creative on mobile devices.
Because creative agencies aren’t building HTML5 creative and media agencies aren’t buying mobile impressions, publishers are unable to monetize their highly trafficked mobile websites with rich mobile ads.

To begin unlocking the mobile opportunity, we need answers for publishers, agencies and advertisers, and on our end, we’re actively upgrading our platforms to provide these solutions.

To make HTML5 creation easier for creative agencies, we launched Google Web Designer, a free, professional-grade HTML5 authoring tool that provides drag and drop design elements as well as fully editable code. We also launched a number of features in DoubleClick Studio, including tight integration with both Google Web Designer and Adobe Edge Animate, to insure that developers are able to manage and run all their mobile rich media creative through DoubleClick.

To make mobile reporting and metrics more available to media agencies, we launched DoubleClick Campaign Manager with built-in mobile capabilities, so even if you don’t target mobile metrics specifically, you can still report on standard metrics (such as connection type, mobile carrier, OS and device) as well as HTML5 rich media metrics (such as avg. display time, interaction time and expansion time.)
To educate brands about the need for mobile advertising, we hosted our “Month of Mobile,” to uncover these issues and we provoked a dialogue with our Hangout on Air. We plan to continue this conversation throughout 2014 so that we can incite change and move the needle forward for mobile advertising adoption across the industry.

With continued dialogue and improved solutions, we can reach a point where mobile advertising is second nature to everyone in the industry and brands can take full advantage of the cross-screen presence of consumers today.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

Tutorial Tuesday: Create interstitial and expandable ads

Becky C. — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 16:34:00 +0000

Thanks for following along with our Google Web Designer Tutorial Tuesday series over the past few weeks. In the series, we’ve covered a number of basics to get you started with the tool: we’ve taken a tour of the user interface, created animations, and learned how to use the CSS Panel. Today, for our last post in the series, we’ll be focusing on creating interstitial and expandable ads.

Interstitial ads

Interstitial ads give users a full page ad experience at natural transition points such as page changes or app and video launches. Interstitial ads are displayed in an iFrame that floats over a web page or app, and users can click or tap a close button to hide an ad from their screen. Many people using Google Web Designer will want to design interstitial ads with multiple pages, so we’ve created three step-by-step videos to help you do just that.

Start with the first video>>

Expandable ads

Expandable ads are small banner-size ads which expand when clicked. Expandable ads are displayed in an iFrame that's the size of the expanded page, and a user can click or tap a close button to collapse an ad to its original size. As with interstitial ads, we’ve created three step-by-step videos to help you design expandable ads using Google Web Designer.

Start with the first video>>

Don’t let the learning stop here

While our Tutorial Tuesday series has come to completion, you can keep learning about Google Web Designer via our help center and YouTube Channel, and our user forum and Google+ page are additional outlets where you can both learn and share feedback about GWD.

We’ll be sure to post about other exciting developments as we release them, so stay tuned to the blog for the latest information.

Making Mobile Rich Media Front and Center in DoubleClick Studio

Becky C. — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 18:59:00 +0000

At the end of September, we announced the launch of Google Web Designer, Google’s new HTML5 authoring tool, and last week we propelled the conversation forward around Mobile and HTML5 in the industry with our iMedia article and our Digital Dialogue. Today, we want to give you the DoubleClick Rich Media perspective on building beautiful cross-screen creative and tell you about the investments we’re making to ensure you have what you need to create effective advertising across screens.

Our customers have made it clear that building for the cross-screen world continues to be a challenge. But in spite of these difficulties, we believe that adopting HTML5 is critical to success in today’s cross device world. To help creative agencies make this transition, we are focusing our efforts on the following areas of improvement within DoubleClick:

Make it easier to build innovative mobile rich media formats
Center the DoubleClick workflow on HTML5
Make sure creatives built in DoubleClick can run everywhere

Make it easier to build innovative mobile rich media formats:

We have built a first-class integration between Studio and our recently launched HTML5 authoring tool, Google Web Designer (GWD). DoubleClick Rich Media creatives built in GWD will automatically include the Studio enabler and other metrics and can be uploaded seamlessly into Studio. We plan to enhance this integration with features that will ease the workflow between applications, such as an automated push of creatives from one tool to the other.

Further, to ensure we let our developers use the tools they prefer, we have released a number of templates that can be installed into Adobe Edge Animate. A developer can use these templates as a starting point for building a variety of mobile formats. The templates will automatically include the Studio enabler and automatically “polite-load” the creative, which is important due to the larger file sizes generally seen with HTML5.

Finally, we plan to release many more HTML5 Layouts as part of our Studio Layouts Gallery to add to the growing repertoire of available HTML5 formats available in our platform.

Center the DoubleClick workflow on HTML5:

We’re making it easy to quickly add mobile features to your creatives to make them mobile-ready. We’ve built an HTML5 video player module that will work across browsers and operating systems. This will relieve developers from having to write many lines of code to deal with cross platform support. In November, we are also adding support for the new Expand-to-Full-Screen format for mobile web, which allows an in-page unit to expand to full screen regardless of the screen size.

We’re also making it easier to upload your HTML5 creative into Studio. With our relative paths support, you’ll be able to upload HTML5 creative with nested folders and maintain that folder structure in Studio. You can also upload custom fonts with your creatives (the actual fonts, not the static images), improving workflow, file size and quality of the creatives.

With our Mobile Showcase App, you can push your creative preview to a mobile device. This means you can test and preview in-app and mobile web creative on the actual device where it will appear to an end-user, before you actually publish the creative.

Make sure creatives built with DoubleClick can run everywhere:

In the desktop world, a lot of work has been done to ensure ads can run everywhere. Similar efforts are now being focused on mobile web and in-app environments. We are working to ensure our ads run on all major in-app networks, so you can be sure your creatives function properly across all desired inventory. In the coming months, we will build out support for MRAID v2, and you will see us push the boundaries on standards for serving in-app creatives.

We encourage all agencies, developers and designers to spend some time experimenting with all our new products and features. Making mobile work is one of our highest priorities at DoubleClick, and the features mentioned above are only the start of a long and exciting roadmap. We look forward to hearing your feedback and to working with you to push the industry forward!

Posted by Jordan Sumerlus, Product Manager, DoubleClick Rich Media

Join us for "Digital Dialogues: Making Mobile Work with HTML5" – 10/24 @ 10am PT

Becky C. — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 18:26:00 +0000

Following the recent launch of our Mobile White Paper, “Unlocking the HTML5 Opportunity: What’s the Holdup?”, this week we’re continuing the conversation around unlocking the mobile opportunity with a Digital Dialogues Hangout-on-Air.

There's no question that people are spending more time across screens, and the opportunity to reach them there is huge. Advertisers, media and creative agencies are still trying to figure out the best way to leverage mobile in their campaigns, optimize for it and build engaging multi-screen creatives. Publishers continue to strategize on ways to deliver and monetize engaging cross-screen consumer experiences.

Join us for a conversation on how technologies and solutions like HTML5 can make cross-screen creative and mobile advertising more accessible for the industry.

Speakers:

Zach Chapman, VP of Digital Sales, ESPN.com
Matt Cooper, Founder of Addroid
Sissie Hsiao, Group Product Manager, Google

What: Digital Dialogues Hangout on Air: Making Mobile Work with HTML5

When: Thursday, 10/24 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET

Where: Think With Google G+ page.

RSVP here.

While you’re waiting, here’s some background reading:

“Build Creative Campaigns Across Screens” -- Pete Crofut’s fourth iMedia article in his series “How Technology Makes Creative More intelligent”.
“Unlocking the HTML5 Opportunity: What’s the Holdup?” -- DoubleClick/Illuminas Research White Paper and infographics

We hope you’ll be able to join us!

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing

Tutorial Tuesday: Add a new dimension to your work with the Google Web Designer CSS Panel

Becky C. — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 16:30:00 +0000

Welcome to week three of our Google Web Designer Tutorial Tuesday series. So far, we have given you an overview of the tool’s interface and have helped you get started with animation. This week, we’re going to teach you about Google Web Designer’s CSS panel, which brings design and dimension to your creative.

The CSS panel shows the styling for any element that you select. The panel has:

All the basic features you need...

View and edit existing CSS values
Create new styles for a single element or multiple elements
Add properties, classes and rules

...plus a full 3D authoring environment...

Rotate elements in 3D with the 3D Object Rotate Tool
Change the position of an element in 3D with the 3D Translation Tool

You can learn more about designing in 3D in the Help Center, and you can learn more about the CSS panel in our latest YouTube video.

….and cross browser publishing

We take cross-browser support very seriously and we want to be the default choice for users building HTML5 content. For this reason, we’ve worked to ensure that Google Web Designer allows you to publish your content across a number of different browsers. While GWD’s CSS rules only show webkit browser prefixes, the tool generates additional CSS rules that make your creative compatible with IE10, Firefox and Opera in addition to webkit based browsers. Both the components and Javascript generated work with all evergreen browsers.

See you in two Tuesdays

There will be no Tutorial Tuesday post next week, as we want to give you time to catch up on everything we’ve covered so far. We’ll be back with our last Tutorial Tuesday post on 10/29, where we’ll walk through how to create interstitial and expandable ads. We have three instructional videos to help you with each type of ad, and you can view them all on the our YouTube Channel.

Share your feedback

We hope this blog series has been helpful for you. Please don’t hesitate to share your feedback with us on our user forum or our Google+ page. We’re always working to improve Google Web Designer, and your feedback counts.

Posted by Jasmine Rogers, Program Manager, Google Web Designer

DoubleClick Rich Media: Lessons from our Customers — A Hangouts Mini-Series

Becky C. — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 16:42:00 +0000

At DoubleClick, we’re inspired every day by the experiences that our customers create using our platform. So we thought we would host a hangouts mini-series to present some of the great creatives we’ve seen from our customers and walk through the things we’ve learned from these campaigns.

On Tuesday, 10/15 @ 1:30pm ET, Jeff Sundheim, Creative Account Executive for DoubleClick Rich Media, will host a conversation with Daniel Weisinger and Brick Rucker from Unfold Agency to discuss their recent creative for Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell. Daniel and Brick will walk through some of the thoughts underlying their ad unit, what tactics they used to add depth to the experience, and what technologies they are most excited about.

Next Friday, 10/18 @ 1:30pm ET, Dana Summers and Katie Erbs, DoubleClick’s dynamic creative experts, will go behind-the-scenes of some of our customers' recent dynamic campaigns. They’ll uncover key techniques that each of these campaigns used and provide recommendations for how you can build your own dynamic campaigns for success.

Recap:

“DoubleClick Rich Media: Lessons from our Customers -- Featuring Unfold Agency”

Tuesday, Oct. 15th @ 10:30am PT / 1:30pm ET

RSVP here. Please add any questions for the panelists on the Event page.

“DoubleClick Rich Media: Lessons from our Customers -- Dynamic Creative Techniques”

Friday, Oct. 18th @ 10:30am PT / 1:30pm ET

RSVP here. Please add any questions for the panelists on the Event page.

We hope you’ll be able to join us!

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

Google Web Designer: Thoughts from the Field

Becky C. — Wed, 09 Oct 2013 15:12:00 +0000

Last week, we announced the public beta of Google Web Designer, a pro-grade HTML5 authoring tool that helps you create HTML5 ads with ease. We caught up with two creative professionals who participated in the private beta of Google Web Designer -- Francois Girardot, Creative Director and Co-founder of Biborg, and Marius Veltman, Rich Media Expert at Artis Universalis -- to get their thoughts on the new product.

How would you describe the importance of HTML5 to creative development?

Francois: By 2015 there will be more tablet sales than desktop computer sales. As a result of this shift, advertisers need ads that work across all screens. Flash can’t do that, but HTML5 can. We’re focused on responsive advertising and we believe HTML5 is the key to effective multi-screen ad campaigns.

Marius: Since Flash isn’t supported on mobile devices, HTML5 is filling the gap. HTML5 is great because it allows you to develop quickly and add complexity to your designs with each iteration.

How was your transition from Flash to HTML5? Which HTML5 tools did you use before Google Web Designer?

Francois: For us, the transition from Flash to HTML5 has been gradual over the past two years. Clients want more and more campaigns that run on all devices.

Marius: We've been working with Flash for about 15 years. The transition from Flash to HTML5 has not been without frustration.  I've always felt I was missing the essential tools to create fast and efficient workflows.

What are your thoughts on Google Web Designer?

Marius: The learning curve is very manageable, and even if you only have a basic level of knowledge you can build cool HTML5 creatives in a relatively short time.   

Francois: The code generated is clean, which makes it easier for designers and developers to work together. GWD will surely become the reference for HTML5 animation.

What impact will Google Web Designer have for creative developers and designers?

Marius: Google Web Designer offers an easy way to create HTML5 content. This enables more people to build multi-screen content in the future.

Francois: Designers typically use After Effect or Flash to provide developers with the animation they want. With Google Web Designer, they will have a tool they can use to experiment with animation and code.

What feature/functionality of Google Web Designer are you most excited about?

Marius: I’m most excited about the 3D functionality - it offers new ways of animating content in HTML5. The speed with which the GWD development team launches iterations is impressive. Clearly Google is really serious about pushing HTML5 onto the market. And we feel that there is much more to come.

Francois: We’re most excited about the integration of Google Web Designer with other Google tools, like DoubleClick. We know that Google will do everything they can to enable creativity and increase advertising quality, especially for ads on mobile.

**Bonus: Marius was the winner of our Google Web Designer Beta competition with his “Magic Island” HTML5 ad. Check out his ad on the Rich Media Gallery!

Tutorial Tuesday: Bring your creative to life with Google Web Designer’s animation tools

Becky C. — Tue, 08 Oct 2013 16:21:00 +0000

Last week, we launched our “Tutorial Tuesday” series where we’ll be writing about important aspects of Google Web Designer throughout the month of October. Our first post helped you learn the Google Web Designer Interface, and this week, you’ll learn how to make your creative come to life with motion.

While static images work fine for highway billboards, digital creative is most effective with animation. Google Web Designer provides two ways for you to animate your creative: Quick Mode and Advanced Mode.

1) Quick Mode is the easy way to get started with animations. In this mode, you build animations scene by scene by adding a new view of the entire page, animating your elements, and then modifying your transition times and easings. Learn more>>

2) Advanced Mode gives you more granular control of your animations. In this mode, you use the Timeline to animate your elements individually and then modify transition times and easings. Since layers are shown in this mode, you can easily change the location of each element within the stack of elements. Learn More>>

Can’t wait until next Tuesday?
In our next Tutorial Tuesday post, we’ll talk about how to create and manipulate 3D content with CSS. If you want to get ahead of the game, you can watch our CSS Panel Demo video or our other videos on YouTube.

Join the conversation
As always, please send us feedback on our user forum or our Google+ page. We’d love to hear what you have to say, so we can continue to improve Google Web Designer.

Posted by Jasmine Rogers, Program Manager, Google Web Designer

Tutorial Tuesday: Learn the Google Web Designer Interface

Becky C. — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 16:37:00 +0000

Yesterday we launched the public beta of Google Web Designer – a professional-quality design tool that makes it easy to design HTML5 creative, for free.

While we built the tool to be fairly intuitive, we want to make sure you have the resources you need to get started. So beginning today and continuing through the month of October, we’ll be posting “Tutorial Tuesday” blog posts to highlight important aspects of the tool.

This week, we’ll give you a general overview of the tool and show you how to add text and tags to your projects. Over the next few weeks, we’ll post on additional topics such as making your projects more interactive with motion, making them more beautiful with design elements, and transforming your work into rich media ad creative.

Take a tour of Google Web Designer
When you first download Google Web Designer, you’ll want to get to know the interface. With Google Web Designer, you can:

Start designing immediately with familiar menus and panels
Design the way you like by toggling between Design view and Code view
Test your work in a number of browsers with the Preview button
Get your work on the ad networks of your choice by publishing your projects

Take a full walk-through of the Google Web Designer interface in this video.

Add text

With Google Web Designer, it’s easy to add text to your projects. You can transform text into headings, paragraph text, and links, and make your text stand out with hundreds of free, open source web fonts. Learn more.

Add tags

Google web designer has a Tag menu that helps you add div img, video, or custom HTML elements to your documents. You can change the color and the border radius of your tags in just a few clicks. Learn more.

Can’t wait until next Tuesday?

In our next Tutorial Tuesday post, we’ll talk about how to use Google Web Designer’s Timeline to add motion to your creative. If you can’t wait until next week, you can watch our two Timeline videos here and here, and you can watch all of our videos on the Google Web Designer YouTube Channel. You can also check out our getting started guide for more information.

Join the conversation

We want to hear what you think of Google Web Designer, so feel free to send us feedback on our user forum or our Google+ page. We’re excited to have you help us shape the future of our new tool.

Posted by Jasmine Rogers, Program Manager, Google Web Designer

Google Web Designer beta now available: Build beautiful HTML5 creative with ease.

Becky C. — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 16:10:00 +0000

By now, it’s evident that multi-screen consumption is the way of the future; mobile and tablet devices are becoming consumers’ first screens, so the content that is developed needs to work seamlessly across these screens. There are already more end-users in HTML5-compatible environments than there are in Flash-compatible environments, and HTML5 ad spend is expected to overtake Flash spend within the next two years. (1) But until recently, advertisers didn't have the tools they needed to easily develop content fit for today's cross-screen experiences.

“Unlocking the HTML5 Opportunity: What’s the Holdup?”
To shine a light on the issues, we commissioned a research study with Illuminas to uncover the barriers that agencies face when buying on and developing for mobile platforms. We found that advertisers expect the amount of mobile and tablet work they do to increase by 41% over the next 12 months, and over 67% of respondents believe that it’s important to design specifically for mobile campaigns.

However, even though the amount of mobile and tablet work is expected to increase, cross-screen creative can be difficult to adopt. In our white paper, “Unlocking the HTML5 Opportunity: What’s the Holdup?” we present four main challenges that agencies face when approaching mobile advertising. One key challenge is that there are too many choices to make when developing for mobile -- too many platforms, browsers, and devices to build for, and no tools that simplify the development process.

Build once, run anywhere
We’re working hard to solve this development challenge by offering agencies powerful yet easy-to-use tools for HTML5 production. In this vein, we announced DoubleClick Studio Layouts for HTML5 back in August, which lets you create HTML5 ads in minutes, and last week we announced Ready Creatives in AdWords, which creates HTML5 ads for you in seconds.

Today, we’re excited to announce the public beta of Google Web Designer, a new professional-quality design tool that makes HTML5 creative accessible to everyone from the designer to the dabbler.

Google Web Designer enables you to:

Create animated HTML5 creative, with a robust, yet intuitive set of design tools.
View and edit the code behind your designs and see your edits reflected back on the stage automatically.
Build ad creatives seamlessly for DoubleClick and AdMob, or publish them to any generic environment you choose.
Receive updates to the product automatically, without having to re-download the application.
Access all of this entirely for free.

Watch the Demo: A quick glimpse of Google Web Designer

Ready to give it a spin?

Download Google Web Designer.
Read through our getting started guide.
Send us feedback! We need your input to make this tool even better, so share your ideas with us in our user forum or on our Google+ page. We’re working hard over the next couple quarters to add new features and improvements to make the product an even more robust offering.

HTML5 is a universal language for building beautiful, engaging content that can run across desktops, smartphones, and tablets. We think that Google Web Designer will be the key to making HTML5 accessible to people throughout the industry, getting us closer to the goal of “build once, run anywhere.”

Posted by Sean Kranzberg, Engineering Manager, Google Web Designer
(1) StatCounter, Top 12 Browser Versions in North America, February 2012 to August 2013

The Layouts Series: Upgrade to rich media and HTML5 ads and get better creative and better metrics

Becky C. — Fri, 16 Aug 2013 14:17:00 +0000

Because of it’s ease of use, Studio Layouts makes rich media ad units much more accessible. Where before it took too long to crank out standard rich media ads that actually worked, now it can take the same amount of time to build a rich media ad as it can to build a standard image or flash ad. So why not trade up?

According to the Doubleclick Display Benchmarks, rich media interaction rates are up almost 60% since April of 2012. During the same period, interaction time has grown 21% and people are now watching videos to completion over 60% of the time. Standard flash and image ads on the other hand, don’t provide opportunities for viewers to interact and therefore can’t provide metrics on how people are actually engaging with your brand.

Rich media ads give you access to:

Larger file sizes -- so your ads can be more beautiful and engaging.

Engagement metrics -- all standard rich media metrics are baked into Studio Layouts (no custom-coding required), so you can show interaction rates, video completion rates, and other engagement metrics to prove the performance of your ads.

HTML5 layouts -- replace a backup .gif with an engaging HTML5 ad and get your creative onto mobile and tablet devices.

With a tool that makes it so easy to reuse your creative assets to build rich media ads, there’s no reason not to upgrade your standard banners to rich media. You'll provide a more engaging experience for your customers and get access to the metrics that prove the success of your campaign.

If you’d like to learn more about the Studio Layouts product, join us on Monday, Aug. 19th, for a Hangout on Air. The Studio Layouts product team will discuss the use cases for Studio Layouts, the features and formats that are currently available and what’s coming up on the product roadmap.

RSVP for the Hangout here and visit our DoubleClick Google+ page on Monday at 1:30pm ET and click “Join Hangout” to participate. We hope to see you there!

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

The Layouts Series: Get more mileage and reach from your existing assets

Becky C. — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 16:14:00 +0000

Yesterday, we heard from Maureen and Zeena about how Studio Layouts can drastically improve your efficiency when building and QAing rich media ads. With time savings averaging around 4 days and 80% of total turnaround time being slashed, Studio Layouts helps you get the job done faster.

Today we’re going to focus on a slightly different use case: Studio Layouts helps you easily extend a campaign’s reach across channels and devices.

Let’s imagine a large auto company. These days, even though they are increasing their spend online, they still probably allocate more than 50% of their budget to TV and print.* So their creative agencies are already building beautiful assets for TV and print, but these assets probably aren’t getting used to their fullest online. The company’s online campaigns likely contain only standard flash or image ads, with a couple rich media ads thrown in.

Layouts enables them to re-use those beautiful assets in online rich media ads and get more mileage out of all the work they put into that creative. Because it takes hardly any time to build an ad using Layouts, and because all you have to do is upload your existing image and video assets into the tool, you can build many more units for digital, reusing the assets you’ve spent so much time to create and garnering more impressions for those messages. Plus you get the larger file size and expanded canvas that a standard ad just can’t provide, so you have adequate space for those big, shiny creative assets.

Additionally, Layouts offers HTML5 formats, which ingest the same assets as Flash, meaning you can take the image and video assets you have, upload them into an HTML5 Layout, and suddenly have a campaign that is accessible on smartphones and tablets. In this way, you reach a whole new set of users.

So a video that may have originally been intended for TV can get repurposed into both flash and HTML5 rich media ad units that can be served across the internet on desktop, mobile and tablet devices, exponentially increasing the total number of people who see the creative.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

*http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/television/traditional-media-share-of-global-ad-spend-expected-to-gradually-decline-29068/

The Layouts Series: Efficiency and ease for rich media production

Becky C. — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 14:07:00 +0000

Yesterday we announced the launch of DoubleClick Studio Layouts, a rich media production tool that makes it easy to build and publish rich media and HTML5 ads. With Studio Layouts, all you have to do is select a layout, upload your existing assets and publish.

Our customers are seeing an average 80-90% reduction in turnaround time for the production and approvals of their rich media creative. To get a first-hand view of the impact of Studio Layouts, I spoke with some of our campaign experts -- Maureen Carroll and Zeena Husami, DoubleClick Rich Media Campaign Managers for some of our largest clients. Here are their thoughts on the new tool.

Tell me about the process of building a rich media ad unit prior to Studio Layouts.

Zeena: Before Studio Layouts, the assets we needed from the creative agency were much more involved and complex (fully functioning Flash assets built by the creative agency). There was often some time-consuming back and forth just to ensure we received the assets in the exact format that we needed.

Maureen: Creative agencies would then hand off those flash files and other creative assets and we’d add in DoubleClick Studio components and custom events for tracking before uploading into DoubleClick Studio. Often times we’d have special instructions which needed to be communicated back to the Doubleclick production and QA teams, thereby delaying the start of post-production.

Zeena: Once in QA, the DoubleClick QA team would thoroughly test the unit to make sure it functioned properly on all browsers and the tracking fired as intended.

Maureen: Even for a QA-only campaign in which creative agencies built directly in DoubleClick Studio themselves, there might be several rounds of QA revisions due to functionality issues and/or spec requirement violations.

How long would this whole build process usually take?
Maureen: Creative agencies might spend several days developing the creative in flash (prior to asset delivery or publishing to QA). Then rich media post-production normally took at least 4-5 business days, and in some cases up to 9-10 business days if high in complexity and/or creative volume.

So what’s the process look like now, with Studio Layouts?

Maureen: Creative agencies can quickly produce a creative by uploading basic image assets, inputting video IDs and making setting selections. No flash development is needed on the part of creative agencies.

Zeena: Once they add the assets, they preview and publish the ad unit and we have a fully functioning rich media ad (including custom rich media tracking). Since Layouts uses a shell that has been tried and true, these creatives typically pass QA in their first round of testing!

And how long does it take, on average, for you to build an ad using layouts?
Zeena: For the most complex unit I’ve built, it took about eight minutes. For less complex units, it takes about three!

Maureen: And we’re seeing an average time savings of 4-5 days spent on post-production and revisions. As a result, creative agencies and advertisers have greater flexibility and are able to launch engaging rich media creatives within shorter timelines.

What are some of the other benefits you have noticed as you use Layouts?
Maureen: Layouts is a great way to get more value out of creative, repurposing creative assets for additional executions to extend a campaign’s reach with minimal effort. Layouts also come with a comprehensive set of custom metrics, providing advertisers with a deep understanding of a user’s interaction with their creative.

Zeena: Layouts simplifies the production of HTML5 ads too, so creative agencies can now spend their time focusing on the content of the ad (images, video, copy) rather than the tedious coding and testing on the back end. Additionally, these Layouts formats were built using best practices from the best performing rich media ads, so they typically perform above benchmark metrics because they are clean and engaging.

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Check back here tomorrow for our next post in “The Layouts Series”, focusing on the extended reach that Layouts can provide. And find more information about the product on the Rich Media Gallery.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

Announcing DoubleClick Studio Layouts: Build rich media ads in minutes and get your ads live in hours.

Becky C. — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 15:49:00 +0000

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of DoubleClick Studio Layouts, a rich media production tool that makes it easier to build and publish rich media and HTML5 ads.

Rich media formats are becoming a mainstay for brand advertisers, who are expected to increase their rich media spend by ~150% over the next four years.* Rich media’s continued growth is due in large part to it’s ability to help brands bring their stories to life online. (Check out our recent iMedia article for examples of great digital storytelling.) But although rich media ads are recognized as a critical vehicle for digital advertising, the tools to produce these ads are still too complex and time-consuming. The insurgence of mobile advertising and HTML5 has only made the process even more complicated. In fact, ad production can consume up to 80% of a creative agency’s time, leaving only 20% for the strategic, innovative thinking.

We want to invert that statistic.

With today’s launch, you no longer have to toil through the hand-coding of a long tear sheet, or undergo multiple creative revisions for a simple ad. Studio Layouts provides a pre-built rich media ad shell, so you can simply select a layout, upload your existing assets and publish. You can even build HTML5 ads using the same basic assets. Because the structure of the ad is already created for you, there are fewer places for the creative to break, meaning your ads can get through QA with few to zero revisions. With Studio Layouts, you can build rich media and HTML5 ads much faster, reach more people with your existing assets and upgrade your basic image ads to rich media. Let’s see how these benefits came to life with Samsung Turkey for their recent Galaxy S4 campaign. (Full case study here.)

Efficiency: Build rich media and HTML5 ads faster
Samsung Turkey launched a rich media campaign in 90% less time than they could have before Layouts. They built a Google Display Network Lightbox ad in 15 minutes and completed quality assurance in three hours with no revisions. Not only was the turn-around time greatly reduced, but the campaign was also successful in driving consumer engagement. In one month, 20 million impressions were served to 2.4 million unique users, with an engagement rate of 2.73%. More than 60,000 viewers watched the videos through to the end, and the cost per engagement was low, at less than 10 cents US.

Samsung’s Google Display Network Lightbox unit begins as a 300x250, and expands when a user hovers over the ad for two seconds. The expanded state can accommodate three YouTube videos.

Reach: Get more mileage out of existing assets
Samsung was able to take their YouTube videos and quickly turn them into a rich media ad, syndicating their existing content across the internet. They could also take those same assets, plug them into an HTML5 layout and reach people on mobile and tablet devices as well, without having to code a thing.

Performance: Upgrade standard flash and image ads to rich media
Finally, by using rich media to distribute their videos, Samsung gained access to rich media metrics, such as interaction and video completion rates. “The campaign data showed that we were reaching the right customer at the right place and at the right time,” says Seda Gumustas, digital marketing manager for Samsung Turkey. This data gives advertisers the ability to understand how users are engaging with their brands and gauge success of their campaigns in ways not possible before.

What’s Launching today?
Today, we’re launching Studio Layouts to the public, and we’ll continue to roll out new Layouts formats and features over the next six months. In the coming weeks, we’ll be launching Layouts for the IAB Rising Star formats Cascade, Billboard, and Sidekick, as well as an HTML5 Google Display Network Lightbox format.

If you are already a DoubleClick Studio user, you’ll notice the new Layouts tab in the top green navigation bar of the UI. There you’ll find the Layouts Gallery with descriptions for how to begin using the tool.

To learn more about Studio Layouts, visit our landing page on the Rich Media Gallery.

Posted by Tal Snir, Product Manager, DoubleClick Rich Media and Video

*eMarketer, “US Ad Spending: Mid-2013 Forecast and Comparative Estimates”, July 31, 2013

Display Insights #4: It’s prime-time for programmatic video

Becky C. — Mon, 24 Jun 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Video is the rising star of digital advertising. As we discussed in last week’s post, our new research, “Video Advertising Momentum,” found that brand advertisers are upping their video campaigns to reach their audiences across the web. In this installment, we uncover another rising trend: advertisers are increasing their video budgets in programmatic channels.

We’ve seen quite an uptick in video ads across the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, with volume tripling in the first quarter of 2013 compared to last year. The stars of programmatic video are Automotive and Retail advertisers. They were the top two video advertiser categories overall, and both of them quadrupled programmatic video spend in Jan - March compared to last year. But growth seems to be occurring across the board - nearly every advertiser category posted double-digit growth in spend and impressions. Take a look at the full research New ways of buying and selling video ads: The programmatic channel in “Video Advertising Momentum”.

Why would an advertiser or publisher consider video advertising on the Ad Exchange? The reasons are numerous, but we’ve distilled it down to four:

Efficiencies: The Ad Exchange streamlines workflow between advertisers and publishers, with campaigns running across multiple sites and viewing devices.
Emerging technology: Advertisers can now optimize their buys across destinations using advanced bid controls and analytics. The Ad Exchange brings new formats such as skippable video ads and comprehensive methods of measuring campaign performance to more advertisers and publishers.
Expanding audiences and revenue: Programmatic video buying through AdX helps advertisers extend their reach and gain frequency to new audiences. Publishers can expand their demand sources and gain increased revenue for their video inventory.
Evolving video advertising: As digital video gains even more momentum, publishers and advertisers are forging new ways to create shared value, including private exchanges and preferred deals.

For a discussion about programmatic video from both advertiser and publisher perspectives, check out the Q&A between TubeMogul and Silver Chalice “What’s the value in programmatic video?”. Next week, we’ll take a look at how choice is changing the way we think about video advertising.

Posted by Mel Ann Chan, Product Marketing

Celebrating 10 years of shared success

Becky C. — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 11:00:00 +0000

Ten years ago we launched AdSense to help publishers earn money by placing relevant ads on their websites. I can still remember the excitement and anticipation as AdSense went live that first day. Our small team huddled together in a cramped conference room, and right away we saw that publishers were as excited about AdSense as we were.

Fast-forward ten years, and AdSense has become a core part of Google’s advertising business. The AdSense community has grown to include over two million publishers, and last year alone, publishers earned over $7 billion from AdSense. AdSense is a community that thrives because of all the content creators we are so fortunate to partner with. Their stories inspire us to do our part to make AdSense great.

On this occasion, it’s especially inspiring to hear the stories of partners who have been with us since the very beginning. Like a retiree in New Zealand who was able to pursue her dream of writing about her garden, a tech support expert in Colorado who can spend more time with his kids, and a theme park reviewer who now sends employees around the world to test and review rides -- all thanks to money earned from AdSense.

As part of our 10th anniversary celebration, we hope you’ll tune into our live Hangout on Air today at 10am PDT (5pm GMT) on the AdSense +page. I look forward to joining several of our partners to share stories from the early days of AdSense, talk about how we’ve all grown since then, and discuss the future for publishers and online advertising. And if you want even more 10th anniversary celebration, just visit our AdSense 10th anniversary page at any time.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki

Display Insights Series: Insight #3 – Lights, Camera, ACTION for Video Advertising

Becky C. — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 13:02:00 +0000

[cross-posted from the DoubleClick Publishers Blog.]

When we think about the multi-billion dollar future of digital advertising, we believe that much of that growth will be driven by video. Video advertising is a very compelling way to connect and grow an audience, especially when we layer on technology’s creative possibilities. What’s driving its astronomic growth?

Last Thursday we walked through our second display insight, around selecting the right creative formats to match your campaign goals. Our “Display Insights” Series continues today, where we’ll begin to explore the opportunities in video advertising.

We took a look at video ads across DoubleClick’s advertising platforms to identify areas of opportunity for advertisers and publishers, and shared these areas of growth in a three-part research collection: “Video Advertising Momentum”. We exclusively analyzed in-stream video ads that played against video content, and focused on ads served on sites globally, excluding Google owned and operated sites like YouTube. We’re going to unpack the findings over the next two weeks, kicking it off with this infographic:

Digital video advertising is essential for brand campaigns.

Advertisers are getting into digital video in a big way: two out of five video ads on the DoubleClick advertising platforms came from advertisers new to digital video in 2013 - and many of them were large brand advertisers.
68% of video ads in the last 12 months came from four advertiser categories dominated by large brand advertisers. The top video advertiser categories were Automotive and Retail, with Consumer Packaged Goods and Technology advertisers rounding out the top four.

Publishers are growing audiences and revenue with more video.

News publishers are redefining the way they deliver the news. As they increase their focus on video news content, they’re running 3 times more video ads this year than last.
Video content is coming from all across the web - not just from TV or entertainment publishers. Sites that have benefit from increased video spending include Automotive & Vehicle, Sports, Computers & Electronics, and Shopping sites.

For video, the opportunity is clear: brand advertisers are using video to reach their audiences across the web, and publishers are powering their content strategy with more video. We can’t wait to see how video rockets digital advertising to new heights.

Stay tuned for next week’s edition of Display Insights, as we dive into how programmatic video has hit its prime-time. And if you can’t wait that long, check out the full Video Advertising Momentum collection to explore them on your own.

Posted by Mel Ann Chan, Product Marketing

Calling all Studio Certified Users: Enter the Studio Certification Awards Contest to Win a Nexus 7!

Becky C. — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 14:32:00 +0000

Are you a Studio Certified user? Do you design and build Rich Media ads in DoubleClick Studio? Then enter our Studio Certification Awards Contest and you could win a Nexus 7!

How to Enter:

Submit your best rich media ad via this form between June 10th and July 31st, 2013.

The Prizes:

The contest is divided into three regions: EMEA, APAC, and Americas. One winner and one runner-up will be selected from each region.

The Winner from each region will receive:

1 new 32GB Nexus 7 (retail value $199) or equivalent.
Gold Award Badge
Creative featured in exclusive blog post

The Runner-up from each region will receive:

Silver Award Badge

Judging Criteria:
Our jury will look for work that highlights the following:

Innovation - How have you used innovative features to create something that’s never been done before?
Creativity - Is your ad uniquely new or creative?
Design - Does your ad design maximize our innovative rich media features?
Autonomy - Was your ad built using our self-help resources and with minimal or no guidance from our support teams?

Who is Eligible?

All Studio Certified users in these countries:

EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa): United Kingdom, Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, United Arab Emirates, Finland, Russia and Netherlands.
APAC (Asia Pacific): Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand
Americas: United States, Canada (Except Quebec), Brazil, Mexico and Argentina

Find the contest rules for your region here: EMEA, APAC, Americas.

Our contest will kick off our new Studio Certification Awards Program, in which we’ll recognize the best and brightest Rich Media designers with special awards in our Studio Certification “Hall of Fame.”

Not Studio Certified? No worries! Get Certified here.

We’ve added brand new badges to the certification program:

New Core Studio Certification exam for Flash developers
New Core Studio Certification exam for HTML5 developers
New Dynamic Badge certification
New, integrated QA certification

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

Display Insights Series: Insight #2

Becky C. — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 13:55:00 +0000

Last Tuesday, we presented our first display insight from the DoubleClick Display Benchmarks Tool around increasing engagement and interaction rates. Today, we’re continuing our “Display Insights” series with our second nugget:

Different types of rich media ads are better suited for different campaign goals.

While you may ideally want to have high engagement rates and times for every ad you create, there are most likely times when you care more around getting people to engage frequently and other times when you care more about getting them to engage for a long time. The data from the DoubleClick Display Benchmarks Tool suggests that different rich media formats may be better suited for different campaign goals.

If you’re goal is to maximize:

Click-through rate: use mobile ads, or larger ad sizes
Interaction rate: use expanding formats, or larger ad sizes
Interaction time: use in-page ad formats
Video completions: use in-page ad formats

In general, larger ad sizes and expanding formats lead to a higher frequency of interaction, while in-page ad formats lead to a longer interaction time. In addition, mobile ads seem to be the best type of ad format at driving click-through rate: the average click-through rate for mobile display ads is between two and six times greater than that of the other formats.

So what?

By understanding which types of ad formats and sizes work best for which metrics, you can better optimize your creative strategy so that you’re maximizing the metrics you care about. For example, for an ad unit that is primarily meant to generate brand awareness, you might care mainly about getting as many people to interact with the ad as frequently as possible. If there isn’t a ton of ad content for them to engage with, you don’t need them to spend a ton of time on the ad. In this case, you might use an expanding rich media ad in a large size, like the billboard or skyscraper ad size, since these units maximize interaction frequency.

However, you might have another ad unit that includes multiple panels of information about your brand as well as a demo video of your product. In this case, you care about people spending time on your ad and engaging with all of your content. So for these ads you might want to use the rich media in-page format which maximizes interaction time.

Both of these examples illustrate how you can optimize your creative strategy and output to align with the goals you’re hoping to achieve for each part of your campaign.

Join us next week for the third installation in our “Display Insights” series, where we'll begin to explore the opportunities in video advertising, and check out the DoubleClick Display Benchmarks Tool to experiment with the data yourself.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

Display Insights Series: Insight #1

Becky C. — Tue, 28 May 2013 21:41:00 +0000

Just a reminder that, on Tuesday, June 4th, we’ll host our annual digital leadership summit, thinkDoubleClick, with provocative conversations about the future of digital marketing and media, and you’re invited to join via live stream by registering here!

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Last week, we announced the launch of our DoubleClick Display Benchmarks Tool -- a tool that lets you pull benchmarks on the ad industry to help you better understand your own display campaigns. Today, we’re kicking off a series of posts that will dive into the insights we’re finding with the tool.

Today’s insight: rich media engagement metrics have been increasing since last summer, indicating that users are engaging with ad content more frequently and for longer amounts of time.

One of the great things about rich media formats is that they provide built-in engagement metrics that allow agencies to understand consumer’s interaction with brands, beyond the simple click. Our benchmark data suggests that since the summer of 2012, rich media engagement metrics have been consistently increasing.

Since the summer of 2012:

The frequency with which people interact with an ad when they see it on the page has grown ~60%.
The time that people spend interacting with an ad has grown ~21%. People are spending on average 10 seconds of time interacting with an ad.
The frequency with which people expand an ad has grown ~50%. On average, people spend ~19 seconds with the ad in the expanded state.
The frequency with which people complete a video has grown ~24%.
The average amount of time that an ad is displayed on the page has increased by ~23%.

The take-away:

Consumers interact, expand, and watch ads when advertisers take advantage of engaging rich media formats and provide ad content that allows users to engage. So consider incorporating these types of ads into your campaigns -- instead of a static banner ad, make a rich media ad with a video, or an ad that expands or lets users engage. By making your ad creative more engaging, you’ll entice consumers to interact with your brand online.

Tune in next week for our second installation of the “Display Data Insights Series.” And in the meantime, check out our new DoubleClick Display Benchmarks tool to find interesting tidbits on your own.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing - DoubleClick

The New DoubleClick Display Benchmarks Tool: Put Context Around Your Display Campaigns

Becky C. — Wed, 22 May 2013 13:31:00 +0000

NOTE: On Tuesday, June 4th we’ll host our annual digital leadership summit, thinkDoubleClick, with provocative conversations about the future of digital marketing and media, and you’re invited to join via live stream by registering here!

Imagine: you’ve built a beautiful digital marketing campaign and it’s finally live. You get your reports back with a list of data points and while the numbers seem good, it’s pretty hard to understand them without any reference points. That’s the crutch: data doesn’t take on meaning when it’s just floating around in the ether; you need to build context around your data and anchor it to other relevant data points to better understand what your own numbers mean.

Industry benchmarks -- reference points aggregated from ad campaigns across the industry -- give you these comparisons. And today, for the first time, we’re launching the DoubleClick Display Benchmarks Tool, an easy-to-use webpage that lets you pull benchmarks to help you make better decisions about your campaigns.

Whether you're after comparisons by country, industry vertical, ad size or ad format, our tool offers up-to-date benchmarks across 10 key display metrics, such as interaction rate and time, expansion rate and video completions. Here’s a quick demo of how to pull the benchmarks.

We've been playing around with the tool and identified some interesting trends around user engagement in our industry. Here's a bit of what we've seen:

Trend #1: User choice leads to more engagement: People want to choose how and when they consume content online. We’re starting to see new ad formats, such as the TrueView and Engagement formats, that let people choose whether to watch or skip an ad. Our benchmark data shows that people are increasingly choosing to interact with these ads. Video completion rates are the highest we’ve ever seen, with people completing 60% of the videos that they watch.

Trend #2: Richer ads lead to more engagement: Longer interaction also stems from more beautiful and compelling ads, which advertisers are increasingly incorporating in their campaigns. Interactive video ads, such as this one from Cadillac, allow advertisers to layer information about their brands on top of their video commercials. Dual-channel ads, such as this Skyfall ad, let viewers turn their mobile phones and tablets into controllers that dictate what happens within the content on their desktop. These ads represent the new creative formats that are closing the gap between advertising and awesome content. And we’re seeing the results: since last summer, people are interacting with rich media ads ~50-60% more frequently and spending ~20% more time interacting.

Trend #3: Optimize your campaigns for engagement: Advertisers used to rely solely on click-through rates and reach/frequency reports to measure their campaigns. Now, these new rich media formats provide a better set of metrics, which help advertisers understand what’s best for users and optimize their campaigns. For example, from the benchmarks tool we’ve learned that interaction rates correlate strongly with larger ad area - the bigger the ad, the more frequently people will interact with it. Similarly, we’ve learned that rich media expanding formats are better for getting people to interact frequently, while in-page formats are better for getting people to interact for longer amounts of time. These types of insights are instrumental in making improvements to an advertiser’s campaign.

These findings confirm what we've heard from our partners -- as ads become more engaging and relevant to users, their performance improves. If you’re still hungry for more data, don’t worry -- next Tuesday, we’ll be kicking off a “Data Insights Blog Series,” where we’ll deep-dive into one trend a week and explain how the insights apply to your campaigns.

As you check out the tool for yourself, let us know if you find any nuggets you think we’ve missed. We just might feature your insight in one of our blog posts.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

Six Trends in Digital Creativity

Becky C. — Tue, 07 May 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Today, we’re in the midst of a creative revolution being driven by technology. Code is being added to the core creative process, enabling new forms of brand expression and engagement. Yet the need for human insights, breakthrough ideas and emotional stories is still very much at the core of great advertising. Our connected world is giving brands more dimensions and touch points, but they still need something compelling to offer in order to create a real connection.

The project Art, Copy & Code is experimenting with innovative brands to bring amazing ideas to life through technology. The project outlines a series of six trends in digital creativity. For the past week, we’ve presented one trend a day on our Google+ pages and today, we wanted to bring it all together for you.

The six trends in digital creativity are:

1. Connected Objects (let’s get phygital)

2. Re-Imagined Canvases (growing new ideas in familiar ground)

3. Useful Marketing (creating tools, not just ads)

4. Audiences of One (crafted just for you)

5. Collaborative Storytelling (the audience is part of the show)

6. Data Stories (the emotional life of numbers)

Trend #1 - Connected Objects (let’s get phygital):
It used to be that there was the 'real' world and the digital world and the two rarely met. Not anymore. Thanks to ever-evolving technologies like NFC, RFID and Bluetooth, as well as real-time information like Twitter, the offline and online worlds are increasingly rubbing shoulders. Physical events are triggering actions online, and vice-versa, creating new opportunities for marketers to invite people to interact with their products through the web.

In Coca Cola’s “You Decide Who Wins” campaign, viewers saw a Coke commercial which explained a Twitter contest: people could tweet throughout the TV show they were watching and vote on which Coke commercial they wanted to see next; the commercial with the most votes was aired at the end of the TV show.

In the “Tweet for Tea” campaign, South African brand BOS Ice Tea created a “Tweet-activated” vending machine that dispensed a BOS Ice Tea every time someone tweeted the hashtag #BOSTWEET4T. They linked the real life experience of tasting BOS Ice Tea with something that was immediately shareable via people's social networks.

Trend #2 - Re-Imagined Canvases (growing new ideas in familiar ground):

Innovation doesn't always have to mean inventing something new. Bringing fresh thinking to established media and ad formats can be an easy and inexpensive way to stand out in a connected world. Sometimes it’s about the unexpected marriage of an idea and an existing technology. Or it can be a matter of taking a well-known ad space and making it sing with an innovative creative approach. Whether you’re crafting surprising experiences with pre-roll, giving the classic printed circular an online dimension, or simply bringing wit and charm to search ads, there are plenty of opportunities on the modern web that can be exciting without being brand new.

In Sony Picture's Skyfall campaign, Spinnaker wanted to illustrate the fun and adventure of the Skyfall movie, by allowing viewers to partake in the motorbike chase in the opening scene. They built a display campaign where viewers could scan a QR code with their mobile or tablet device and then use their mobile phone as the “video game controller” to control the action occurring on the screen.

In the “Assasin’s Creed” campaign, video game publisher Ubisoft along with Biborg created mobile ads aimed at immersing the user in a fully interactive and innovative experience. Additionally, the digital outdoor campaign used synchronized screens to catch the audience’s attention and engage them to follow character’s steps in epic adventures.

Trend #3: Useful Marketing (creating tools, not just ads)

Marketing has become less about talking and more about doing. While ideas about branded utility have been tossed around for a while, lately they’ve been getting more serious attention. Ads that make people’s lives easier, more productive and more fun can bring a brand’s promise to life in tangible ways.

Cadillac created an interactive video ad that mimicked their website. Within this ad unit, a viewer could watch Cadillac’s main commercial, but then could also also interact with a 360 degree view of the car, pictures of the inside of the car, and different colors for the car. Users got a website experience all through a single ad unit.

The KLIPPBOK by IKEA campaign is an iPad app which gives users access to IKEA products all year round. KLIPPBOK gives home decoration enthusiasts a space to mix’n’match IKEA products to create ideas for their home. It takes advantage of the tactile and immediate nature of touch screen devices and lends itself to being a freeform creative tool (in this case a scrapbook). The portability allows people to engage whenever inspiration strikes; at home, on the bus to work or when they’re on a break. It also means they can easily share ideas with family and friends.

Trend #4: Audiences of One (crafted just for you):

The best storytellers have always been able to make us feel as if they’re speaking to each one of us individually. Can technology take that idea further? Using real-time data and cues like time of day, location and interests, we can already tailor and personalize ads in ways that make them more valuable and meaningful. Instead of creating messages aimed at audiences, consumer segments and personas, we can now simply talk to people the way they want to be talked to.

In Project Re-Brief, Alka Seltzer re-imagined their original “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” campaign, to showcase the entire day that Ralph ate the whole thing. Using the power of real-time creative, they were able to build an ad that automatically stitched together video pieces that reflected the current weather, time, part of day, location, and interests of the person viewing the ad in the moment.

In Hyundai’s “Elantra Driveway Decision Maker” campaign, the company wanted to create an innovative way to help car buyers decide between the three Elantra models. The creative team combined Google Street View, projection mapping and real-time 3D animation to help viewers see what an Elantra would look like in their own driveway. Viewers began by selecting one of three Elantra models. Then with projection mapping, the chosen Elantra would drive through a colorful digital world, transitioning into Google Maps, then Google Street View where it drove down their street and arrived in their actual driveway. Once there, they could change the colors, trim levels or model.

Trend #5: Collaborative Storytelling (the audience is part of the show):

It’s an old maxim that ideas can come from anyone and anywhere, but the web has been great proof of it. Given the opportunity, people have consistently surprised us with their boundless creativity. In traditional media, audiences are passive spectators. They sit back and watch a story created by someone else. But on the web, we can harness their desire to co-create with us by building platforms that bring ideas to life which could never be accomplished alone. More and more, inspiring this kind of participation is going to be crucial for brands.

BMW wanted to celebrate the holiday season in a way that was meaningful, yet relevant to the brand. So they told a story about the journey that everyone takes over the holidays – The Road Home. They asked more than 50 employees at their agency to record their journeys on smartphones and personal cameras as they traveled home for Thanksgiving. They then took all the footage and edited it in-house. The end result was a video narrative celebrating the best road there is and an ad campaign that got right at the heart of the individual’s experience being “on the road.” Check it out here.

In the Stella Artois “Christmas Carole” campaign, fans and users created unique, personalized holiday greetings from “Christmas Carole” for their friends and family. The interactive holiday greeting showed “Christmas Carole” on a journey to perform a festive song at your friend's home. The experience used a combination of Google Street View, Google Maps and satellite imagery, Google Places, and Google's Directions and Geocoding APIs to build the custom, personalized film.

Trend #6: Data Stories (the emotional life of numbers)

Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion (that’s 2,500,000,000,000,000,000) bytes of data. To put that in perspective, 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years. It’s a crazy thought, but it’s also an exciting one.

We've begun using this knowledge for things like beautiful data visualizations and targeted messaging, but we've only scratched the surface of what's possible. In the right hands, data can be used to tell emotional stories that grow and change over time. And, because data-driven executions are grounded in cold, hard facts, they're tough to argue with. Which is also kind of a plus.

Instead of creating content for Twitter, Evian decided to create content with Twitter. They wondered, "What if Twitter ceased to be a tool and instead became a toy?" The answer to this was a "digital toy" called Evian MeloTweet, which transformed Twitter into a musical experience and let users interact with their Twitter timeline in a fresh new way. Twitter data and posts from a user’s feed is depicted as marbles in a musical “marble-factory” that the user “composes” from a library of parts. By playing with Twitter data in a new way, while still retaining the original product’s features, Evian was able to achieve a high level of user engagement and convey their “Live Young” spirit and brand.

Vodafone’s “Lost Phone Experiment” introduced Mobile Protect, an app that allows smartphones users to track their phone in case it is lost or wipe data from a distance. In this particular campaign, the app measured the phone's location, movement, and whether it was being used to make phone calls or simply to browse the web. The data was updated in real-time and visitors could browse back in time to see where the phones were dropped, where they got picked up and where they were ultimately returned.

These six trends in digital creativity highlight the fact that brands are beginning to push the boundaries of the online medium to provide beautiful, engaging, and innovative experiences to consumers.

Know of other great examples like these? Submit them to the Creative Sandbox Gallery.

Know of other trends in digital creativity? Let us know!

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

Interactive in-stream video ads allow users to engage deeper with brands

Becky C. — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 15:31:00 +0000

Just give me the skinny:

Hangout-on-Air this Friday, 3/22

We’ll chat with the team that built Cadillac’s interactive video ad, “The Standard of the World,” and discuss the benefits of incorporating interactive video into your digital advertising campaigns.

Input your info here and visit our G+ page @ 2:30pm ET / 11:30am PT on 3/22 and click “Join Hangout.”

I'll read the longer version:

We're all used to the idea that you watch a video from beginning to end without stopping; this concept of “linear and sequential” video hasn’t changed much since movies got started. But we also know that there are situations when you don’t want to wait until the end of a video to learn more about what you’ve just seen.

Say you’re watching a snippet of a TV show, and they mention an actor you like; you might want to pause the video, open another browser tab, and look up the actor’s background or the movies he’s been in. Once you’re satisfied with the info, you go back to the video and keep watching.

This is the concept behind interactive video ads, a type of ad format that is becoming a mainstay in the world of digital advertising. Rather than merely repurposing your TV commercials for smaller screens, take advantage of the inherent interactivity available on desktops, mobile phones and tablets, and allow people to dive deeper into your ads.

With interactive in-stream ads, we can bring the best of the lean-back experience (watching TV in a full episode player) together with lean-forward active brand engagement. Interactive in-stream video ads allow you to add panels of content on top of your main video ad, presenting viewers with the option to learn more directly in the ad unit, rather than having to open that extra browser tab.

From a business perspective, this not only gives you more space for messaging, it also means that you can buy a 15 second ad spot, yet obtain 30 or 40 seconds of user interaction for no extra cost.

These new interactive video formats also open the door to more creativity and innovation. You now have the ability to layer on additional graphics, designs, and other creative executions on top of the original video asset to showcase the brand’s message. It’s like creating a pop-up book instead of a 2D picture book - suddenly you have many more surfaces to work with.

The IAB recently announced their rising star formats for interactive video, a couple of which we contributed to, including “Timesync” and “Full-screen.” While the official formats are still being defined, we’ve built a demo to exemplify one of the new formats and why these ads are great for brands.

This Friday, March 22, we’ll be hosting a hangout-on-air on our new DoubleClick Google+ page to deconstruct this demo, Cadillac’s “The Standard of the World” ad. We’ll chat with the team that built the ad and discuss the benefits of incorporating interactive video into your digital campaigns.

To attend:

1) Input your info here

2) Visit our G+ page at 2:30pm ET/ 11:30am PT this Friday, 3/22.

3) Click the “Join Hangout” button to enter the hangout.

We hope you'll be able to make it!

Posted by Adam Smoler, Head of Format Commercialization for Platform Solutions

Move into the "rich" world of digital! New training materials to help you get started with DoubleClick Rich Media

Becky C. — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 15:03:00 +0000

Standard banner ads are becoming a thing of the past as ads are increasingly becoming "rich" - incorporating sight, sound, motion and interactivity to provide better experiences for viewers.

Studies have shown that rich media ads perform better than standard ads for both brand favorability and for driving purchase intent. But "rich" is sometimes perceived as "more difficult." At DoubleClick, we want to make the process for getting started with rich media ads as simple and painless as possible.

So we've put together a DoubleClick Rich Media Education Program to help you through the steps to train and certify your skills:

Walk through the Rich Media Fundamentals course, which provides the materials needed to be proficient in DoubleClick Rich Media. This course is designed to allow any new user to ramp up on rich media basics at their own pace.

After completing the program, you should understand what rich media is; how to use the Studio UI; how to build Flash, HTML5 and dynamic creative; how to traffic rich media creatives and how to resolve live issues.

Take the DRM Fundamentals Certification (available at the end of the Rich Media Fundamentals course) and recognize your proficiency with a certificate of completion.
If you're a DoubleClick Studio user, take the Studio Certification to demonstrate your expertise in building rich media ads in Studio and get rewarded for it!
If you're a DoubleClick for Advertisers user, take a look at the Rich Media Academy to get additional information on planning rich media campaigns.

Ready to get started?

Posted by Hemmy Edge, DRM Training Program Manager

DoubleClick Digital Marketing helps you create, buy and manage your mobile and video campaigns

Becky C. — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 16:59:00 +0000

In today's digital marketing landscape, it's becoming increasingly crucial for campaigns to span multiple screens and ad formats in a cohesive way. Online video is the fastest growing form of display advertising, projected to grow 2.5 times to $6.5B by 2016. (1) And total mobile ad spend is projected to grow ~4.5 times to $22.4B in 2016, representing ~35% of all digital ad spend by 2016. (2)

Given these transformations, we are working hard to build best-in-class tools for our integrated platform that make it easier for you to create, buy and manage successful campaigns across all formats and devices. Today, we’re announcing a series of improvements that aim to help you accomplish this.

The DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform now helps you:

Create more beautiful video and mobile ads in DoubleClick Studio.

Build robust interactive in-stream video ads in DoubleClick Studio, and use the new IAB Rising Star formats to turn your standard 15-second TV commercial into a longer, engaged viewer experience. Check out our demo below!

Preview and test your mobile ads as they will actually appear on mobile and tablet devices. Scan a QR code on your phone or use our Mobile Ads Showcase App to push your ads to mobile and tablet for testing.

Buy video inventory in real time on DoubleClick Bid Manager, and access more mobile and video inventory on DoubleClick AdExchange.

With DoubleClick Bid Manager (DoubleClick's DSP and real-time bidding platform), you'll soon be able to programamtically buy and report on your video campaigns in the same place as the rest of your display media. We'll be offering a video beta for select clients in the coming weeks. Contact your sales rep for more info.

Buyers can now find skippable in-stream video inventory and expandable/interstitial mobile inventory from across the web on DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Ad Exchange continues to grow its available inventory across high-quality content, helping you expand your creative palette.

Manage all of your ads - across devices, formats and channels - with enhanced campaign support in DoubleClick Search and a single reporting interface in DoubleClick for Advertisers.

DoubleClick Search will be supporting AdWords enhanced campaigns over the next few weeks, to help you better reach your customers across locations and devices. By using enhanced campaigns through DoubleClick Search, you additionally gain holistic measurement, a streamlined workflow and better bidding decisions based on your floodlight conversion data.

Track all the metrics for your TrueView in-stream video ads in DFA. Even though the ads aren't served through DFA, thanks to a single trafficking tag, you can still pull the metrics back into the DFA reporting interface and compare them to the rest of your placements.

With an integrated platform of DoubleClick products that work better together, you not only benefit from top-notch individual products, you also benefit from the efficiencies, insight, and performance gained when all of your campaign's assets and data exist in one spot.

For more information about the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, visit our website.

Posted by Jason Miller, Director of Product Management for DoubleClick

Sources:
(1) ThinkEquity, comScore, and Google proprietary data
(2) eMarketer: data is from the January 2013 J.P. Morgan report titled "U.S. Internet."

Certify your DoubleClick Studio skills

Becky C. — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 14:41:00 +0000

Display doesn't have to be difficult. At DoubleClick, we're empowering creative agencies, media agencies and publishers to build amazing rich media ads easily. We're working hard to ensure that we bring you the best tools and resources to help you to build innovative, high-performing ads.

And we want to make sure that all of our expert users can get recognized for their expertise. That’s why we put together our DoubleClick Studio Certification program.

What’s the Studio Certification Program?
The program is a way for creative designers and developers to test their skills on the product and promote their expertise after successfully completing the tests.

We have many different qualifications that cover both essential and specialized knowledge.

The first is our core Studio Certification, a qualification that demonstrates a user’s knowledge and ability to build high quality rich media ads within DoubleClick Studio that function as intended when displayed by the DoubleClick ad server.

Once you complete this test, you can take one of our specialized product tests, which include the QA Certification, Masthead Badge Certification, HTML5 Badge Certification, and HTML5 QA Badge Certification. Learn more about the tests on our site >>

Why should you care?

Developers and designers can promote their expertise to clients and partners.

Upon completion of each test, you receive a badge that you can put on your website. You also get your name on our list of Certified Users. In both cases, you get to promote your expertise in the product to potential partners and clients.

Gain access to beta releases, industry insights, and special DoubleClick Events.

Certified users have access to innovative beta products and gain exclusive insights that can make the difference to get ahead of the competition.

Invitations to events such as Developer Days and HTML5 workshops, which give you first-hand experience and knowledge that increases your chances of running innovative campaigns.

Media agencies gain increased confidence in their creative partners and can reduce turnaround times.

Working with a creative agency who assigns a Studio Certified User to the creative build gives you the added confidence that the work is being done by an experienced Studio developer.
This expertise can also reduce turnaround times of the build, because the developer knows the product in and out.

Achieve faster and easier quality assurance.

You won’t need to wait for DoubleClick’s QA feedback anymore. QA Certified Users will be able to determine the quality assurance and transfer the creative themselves, directly to the associated DFA account. This means a smoother process for both creative and media partners.

Ready to get Certified?
Visit our new certification landing page, learn more about the tests and get started!

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager - DoubleClick Studio

1 Week, 5 Hangouts, Showcasing 5 Standout Campaigns

Becky C. — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 14:53:00 +0000

Re-posted from the Google Agency Blog

Looking for fresh inspiration to start off the holiday season? We’ve invited a few of the creatives and developers who have campaigns featured on the Creative Sandbox gallery to join a series of Google+ Hangouts on Air, in conversation with Google product experts. They’ll talk about what they did, how they did it and explain their hangups and breakthroughs.

To RSVP for the series, visit the Google+ Event.

We love seeing the work our agency partners come up with using digital tools, bringing brands and ideas to life. We hope that the Creative Sandbox Hangouts will fuel your creativity. Sometimes all it takes is an example to inspire the next big idea.

Here’s the detailed schedule:

Monday: Mobile | 2:30pm EST | featuring Beattie McGuinness Bungay | Watch at http://goo.gl/ITC17

Tuesday: YouTube API | 2:30pm EST | featuring Saatchi & Saatchi LA, Stoop LA, and Ogilvy Paris | Watch at http://goo.gl/0OlFr

Wednesday: DoubleClick Rich Media | 2:30pm EST | featuring Grow and Spinnaker | Watch at http://goo.gl/xKvKp

Thursday: Google+ API | 2:30pm EST | featuring Resn, Goodby Silverstein & Partners and Hook | Watch at http://goo.gl/kdqlW

Friday: Geo API | 2:30pm EST | featuring McCann New York, Goodby Silverstein & Partners and Famous Interactive | Watch at http://goo.gl/AwQT6

Posted by Hope Friedland, Associate Product Marketing Manager

How HTML5 is changing the game for creative innovation and mobile ad development: A Q&A with Product Manager Wook Chung

Becky C. — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 20:15:00 +0000

We’ve heard a lot of talk about HTML5 and it’s potential to alter the way ads are developed and trafficked online, but we wanted more details. So we chatted with Wook Chung, Product Manager for DoubleClick Mobile, to hear his thoughts on the changing landscape.

Q: So what’s the big deal with HTML5? (Why should people care about it?)
A: We’re living in a multi-device era where people use a variety of devices to meet their daily needs. Advertisers want to reach their audience on all surface areas and HTML5/Javascript is the only known language that runs across all modern day devices. With HTML5, a given ad creative can potentially run everywhere.

Furthermore, HTML5 gives advertisers access to native device features such as touch, gyroscope, GPS, and even 3D graphics acceleration. Creatives now have access to many more primary constructs which translates to infinitely more possibilities in what content can be. With HTML5, we have an opportunity to revolutionize digital advertising. Finally, the HTML5 spec is still yet to be finalized, which means it can remain agile in adapting to hardware innovations.

Q: How does HTML5 specifically improve the possibilities for mobile ad development?
A: HTML5 is the only known language that runs across all major mobile operating systems and browsers. Without it, mobile advertising would be relegated to custom native code rendering governed by ad SDK providers. It would not be scalable and designers would be severely limited in flexing their creative muscles. With HTML5, we can now unleash all sorts of possibilities. Currently, the majority of the mobile ads seen out in the internet are static images. We can change this with HTML5.

Q: How is Google and Doubleclick thinking about HTML5?
A: Google has been a strong supporter of the HTML5 standards alongside other companies and organizations. Through our contribution to the WebKit open-source project and our Chrome browser, we continue to push the boundaries in showcasing what is possible with HTML5. You can check out the latest HTML5 innovations and experiences in our Chrome Experiments projects or HTML5Rocks.com. Another great example is Google Maps on browsers that use WebGL for 3D renderings.

Just as Google places a high priority on HTML5, we also envision a healthy ad ecosystem based on HTML5 ads. We see a world where a single creative can potentially run on any device, any screen size, and naturally respond to user interactions and device movements. To realize this vision, Google is working with industry partners to establish HTML5 ad standards, educating creative agencies on HTML5, and building products and services that can support these ads, from our DoubleClick platform to our ad networks and SDKs.

If you work on a creative team at an agency, we would love to hear from you to understand how you're currently creating HTML5 ads and how you'd like to be creating them in the future.

Please complete this short survey to let us know how we can better meet your needs. You can enter to win one of two Nexus 7 tablets if you complete the form!*
*Only participants located in the United States, who submit their email addresses, are eligible to win prizes. Winners will be selected on November 30th, 2012 and notified within 2 weeks.

Update 11/16/12: We've decided to push the deadline of the survey back until Dec. 7th, 2012. Winners will be selected on Dec. 7th and will be notified within 2 weeks.
Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Rich Media