Google Data

• 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 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.

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.

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: 

1. Make it easier to build innovative mobile rich media formats
2. Center the DoubleClick workflow on HTML5
3. 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

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

• “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

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. 

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.

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

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. 

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:

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

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 

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.

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/

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. 

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 300×250, and expands when a user hovers over the ad for two seconds. The expanded state can accommodate three YouTube videos.

• 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.