Advertisers want to manage their mobile display campaigns with the accountability and ease provided by the DoubleClick platform. Toward this goal, in November 2011, we introduced a streamlined workflow for mobile display campaigns by adding support for a "Mobile In-App" rich media format in DoubleClick Studio and DoubleClick for Advertisers. Today we’re happy to announce that advertisers can serve mobile ads, in both standard and rich media formats, from DoubleClick for Advertisers into the AdMob network with no beta restrictions and new options for easily creating beautiful, mobile rich media ads.

This ad serving solution makes it easier to build, traffic, serve and measure mobile rich media ads, allowing easy integration of mobile into the overall workflow. Media teams gain access to interaction rate and clickthrough rate for their mobile rich media ads and can compare this to these metrics for their other ads. There is no need to fuss with multiple reports from different publishers, all information can be aggregated with our robust reporting system.

Building mobile rich media ads can start in DoubleClick Studio, where creative agencies upload HTML5 assets to build and test their creatives. Or, our services team can assemble any one of eleven mobile rich media designs ideal for showing your videos, retail locations or products via a rich ad placed within AdMob mobile apps. These designs make it easy for advertisers to create beautiful and highly interactive ads with no HTML5 expertise.

With desktop display and rich media, advertisers have enjoyed the ability to build an ad once and run it in multiple places. We are continuing to work towards making this a reality for mobile display advertising by extending our reach beyond the AdMob network and integrating with other mobile in-app networks, and are actively performing initial testing. As our reach grows, so will our ability to help advertisers manage their mobile display campaigns with accountability and ease.

To learn more about how DoubleClick’s mobile solutions can meet your needs, download the DoubleClick Guide to Mobile Rich Media.

Posted by Jen Klimas, Wook Chung and Shamim Samadi

In the 1950s, brands slowly moved to TV, just as they have started to move online today. In both instances, buying and selling systems improved; audiences and new content quickly moved to the new medium; and the creative possibilities inspired great ad campaigns.

However, a key moment for TV came in the 1950 with dramatic improvements in measurement—like ratings and quantitative market research. Once major brands could see who they were reaching and what impact their campaigns were having, they fully embraced the medium, creating a multi-billion dollar industry...and TV’s golden age began.

Making better decisions with actionable brand metrics

Unlike the early days of TV, digital advertising is already incredibly measurable. The only problem is a very old and well-known one: the standardized metrics today are largely clicks, user interaction rates and conversions.

But as brand advertisers - such as movie studios or consumer goods companies - know, it’s a challenge to measure changes in brand favorability of a movie or whether an online campaign is driving more consumers to the store. And it’s even harder to take quick action on any such insights.

That's why today, at the Ad Age Digital Conference I'll be introducing the Brand Activate Initiative, an ongoing Google effort to address these challenges and re-imagine online measurement for brand marketers. With this effort, we're partnering with the cross-industry Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative. We believe that the industry’s significant investment in brand measurement efforts can substantially grow the online advertising pie, for all.

Is a particular ad in your campaign especially useful at improving brand recall in Illinois? You should be able to immediately increase your coverage throughout the Midwest. Is one ad slightly less effective at driving purchase intent and in-store sales? Tweak the creative, straight away.

The first Brand Activate solutions

We’re working to build truly useful brand metrics into the tools that advertisers already use to manage their campaigns, so they’ll be actionable within seconds, not months.

Here’s a video describing the Brand Activate Initiative:

The first two Brand Activate solutions are rolling out today:

Active View: Advertisers have long looked for insight into whether consumers saw an ad on page 145 of a magazine, or switched the channel during a TV commercial break. It’s similar online, so we’re rolling out a technology, which will be submitted for Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation, that can count “viewed” impressions (as defined by the 3MS’s proposed standard, this is a display ad that is at least 50% viewable on the screen for at least one second).

Called Active View, this will first be available in coming weeks within Google Display Network Reserve. We’ll also be making this metric a universal currency, ultimately offering it within DoubleClick for Advertisers, as well as to our publisher partners. Active View data will be immediately actionable—advertisers will be able to pay only for viewed impressions. Going forward, we’re working on viewed impression standards with the 3MS, and our agency and publisher partners.

Active GRP: GRP, or a gross rating point, is at the heart of offline media measurement. For example, when a fashion brand wants their TV campaign to reach 2 million women with two ads each, they use GRP to measure that. We’re introducing a new version of this for the web: Active GRP. Active GRP has two key features:

• Built-in: Active GRP is built right into the ad serving tools that our publishers and marketers already use every day. Active GRP will enable real-time decision making, allowing advertisers to make adjustments to their campaigns at the speed of the web. We’ve kicked off a pilot program for DoubleClick for Advertisers clients as a first step, and will roll it out to other products, with brands able to specify a range of audience GRP segments.
• Robust methodology: Active GRP is calculated by a statistical model that combines aggregated panel data and anonymous user data (either inferred or user-provided), and will work in conjunction with Active View to measure viewed impressions. This approach overcomes problems of potential panel skewing and reliance on a single data source. This approach also has the advantage of never using personally identifiable information, not sharing user data with third parties, and enabling users, through Google’s Ads Preferences Manager, to opt-out. We will be submitting our methodology for MRC accreditation.

More to come

We look forward to bringing other measurement initiatives into our suite for brand marketers, including a brand impact survey pilot with Vizu, our brand lift measurement product (Campaign Insights) and various cross-media measurement research projects globally.

This is just the beginning of the Brand Activate Initiative, with much more to come for brands and publishers. We think that with brand new metrics comes a new brand moment - one that will encourage brands to invest in the web, help publishers show the value of their digital content, and stimulate digital media’s own golden age.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Display Advertising

• Mobile web inventory. According to internal data from October, mobile web inventory on DoubleClick Ad Exchange from high-end phones and tablets already makes up around 9% of global inventory and 15% of U.S. inventory.
• Mobile in-app inventory. In the coming weeks, AdMob publishers and application developers will be able to make their in-app mobile inventory available on DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Read the full announcement here.
• In-stream video. Q3 was our first full quarter of making in-stream video inventory available to buyers. Between the beginning of Q3 to now, we’ve tripled the number of buyers accessing this inventory.
• Rollover to expand. We’ve added the rollover to expand rich media format to our existing click-to-expand and in-page formats.

Recently at OMMA Display, Chip Hall, Director, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, spoke about these innovations in a presentation titled, “Unlocking Opportunities With the First Truly Cross-format Exchange.” In case you missed it live, you can watch it here:

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

This Saturday we added support to DoubleClick Studio and DoubleClick for Advertisers for “Mobile In-App” AdMob rich media formats. With this addition, it’s much easier for creative agencies and media agencies to work together to build, preview, manage and serve mobile display campaigns across AdMob inventory. AdMob’s mobile display ad network is comprised of 89,000+ mobile sites and apps across 230 countries. Mobile advertisers will benefit by combining the efficiency of DoubleClick tools with the scale of AdMob inventory.

Here’s what the creation of a new “Mobile In-App” creative looks like in the DoubleClick Studio interface:

You can preview what your “Mobile In-App” creative will look like on a tablet or phone. The preview tool in DoubleClick Studio includes options to view the ad in landscape and portrait mode and the ability to zoom to 100% or 50% resolutions. Here’s what a tablet preview of a “Mobile In-App” creative looks like:

Just as you can with other rich media formats in DoubleClick Studio, you can now push a “Mobile In-App” creative directly to DFA. The ad will show up to traffickers when they import advertiser-level creatives, as in the screenshot here:

Once the “Mobile In-App” creative is in DFA, traffickers can change properties of the creative, such as its landing page, much like they do for other rich media formats. Here’s how a “Mobile In-App” creative looks in DFA:

Initially, all campaigns and creatives using this new workflow will run through our full-service team. Please contact your DoubleClick Rich Media representative if you're interested in running Mobile In-App creatives or campaigns.

Research shows that rich media campaigns across multiple screens work better than those targeting just one screen. By making the mobile rich media workflow easier, we hope this helps you include captivating mobile display ads in your next campaign and drive campaign performance across screens.

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

In 2009, we launched the DoubleClick Ad Exchange as a way to simplify the process of buying and selling display advertising, drive performance for our advertiser and publisher partners, and open up the display marketplace. In the two years since, exchange-based trading has taken off -- we’ve seen the volume of trades on our own exchange grow by more than 150% in the past year. At the same time, display, as a medium, has evolved.

Display started as just banner ads on websites, but has grown to include a range of formats as diverse as the web itself -- rich media ads that bring a page to life, in-stream ads that play before your favorite online video, and ads that run in the mobile version of your daily newspaper. To reflect this growing diversity, we have been expanding the types of formats in the Exchange. We support the most popular types of rich media ads, including units that run in-page with video, or expand when you click or mouse over them. It’s also possible to buy ads across the mobile web. Earlier this year, we announced that in-stream video formats were coming to the Exchange, and we’ve seen huge demand since launch: the number of buyers for in-stream video has tripled over the past quarter.

Today, we are announcing another step forward -- in the coming weeks, AdMob developers will be able to make their in-app inventory available on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Initially, a small number of pre-qualified buyers will be able to compete for this inventory. Over time, we'll be rolling it out more broadly. Ultimately, this will give app developers and publishers access to a wider pool of buyers like demand-side platforms and agency trading desks, improving their potential returns, and helping grow the overall mobile web economy. And marketers on our Exchange will be able to buy, in real time, ads that run inside people’s favorite mobile games, news apps and more. With this important addition, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange will be truly cross-format...and will become the first exchange to support this full range of ad formats.

VivaKi, one of our key partners on the Exchange, is gearing up to start buying in-app ads on the Exchange. “We are delighted to be working with Google as they open up the DoubleClick Ad Exchange to include AdMob in-app inventory, and to deliver this opportunity to our clients,” says Kurt Unkel, Senior Vice President, VivaKi Nerve Center. “We anticipate this experience will help us bring mobile to scale to our partners, and will provide insight into the operational elements and the creative assets that work best in this environment.”

A cross-format exchange is just one of the ways we’re looking to simplify the process of buying and selling display advertising, but one we think will create tremendous value for advertisers and publishers. We will continue to work with our partners to help them get the most out of what the evolving display market has to offer -- today, tomorrow, and in the years ahead.

Posted by Chip Hall, Director, DoubleClick Ad Exchange

Display started as just banner ads on websites, but has grown to include a range of formats as diverse as the web itself -- rich media ads that bring a page to life, in-stream ads that play before your favorite online video, and ads that run in the mobile version of your daily newspaper. To reflect this growing diversity, we have been expanding the types of formats in the Exchange. We support the most popular types of rich media ads, including units that run in-page with video, or expand when you click or mouse over them. It’s also possible to buy ads across the mobile web. Earlier this year, we announced that in-stream video formats were coming to the Exchange, and we’ve seen huge demand since launch: the number of buyers for in-stream video has tripled over the past quarter.

Today, we are announcing another step forward -- in the coming weeks, AdMob developers will be able to make their in-app inventory available on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Initially, a small number of pre-qualified buyers will be able to compete for this inventory. Over time, we'll be rolling it out more broadly. Ultimately, this will give app developers and publishers access to a wider pool of buyers like demand-side platforms and agency trading desks, improving their potential returns, and helping grow the overall mobile web economy. And marketers on our Exchange will be able to buy, in real time, ads that run inside people’s favorite mobile games, news apps and more. With this important addition, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange will be truly cross-format...and will become the first exchange to support this full range of ad formats.

VivaKi, one of our key partners on the Exchange, is gearing up to start buying in-app ads on the Exchange. “We are delighted to be working with Google as they open up the DoubleClick Ad Exchange to include AdMob in-app inventory, and to deliver this opportunity to our clients,” says Kurt Unkel, Senior Vice President, VivaKi Nerve Center. “We anticipate this experience will help us bring mobile to scale to our partners, and will provide insight into the operational elements and the creative assets that work best in this environment.”

A cross-format exchange is just one of the ways we’re looking to simplify the process of buying and selling display advertising, but one we think will create tremendous value for advertisers and publishers. We will continue to work with our partners to help them get the most out of what the evolving display market has to offer -- today, tomorrow, and in the years ahead.

Posted by Chip Hall, Director, DoubleClick Ad Exchange

Dynamic Creative with DoubleClick Rich Media
Use multiple headlines, offers, calls-to-action, product images, landing pages -- even videos -- all within a single creative.

QR Code in a DoubleClick Rich Media Ad
Provide a bridge from online display ads to consumers’ smartphones with QR codes.

Augmented Reality in a DoubleClick Rich Media Ad
With augmented reality in an ad, all people need is a webcam and a simple printout or camera phone to experience immersive games or stunning 3D product demonstrations.


Credits: Carmichael Lynch for the Living Sasquatch example (www.livingsasquatch.com); Euro RSCG, Media Contacts and Volvo for the Volvo S60 augmented reality ad

+1 Button in a DoubleClick Rich Media Ad
The +1 button in an ad allows consumers to recommend advertised products or services to contacts and connections across the Internet.


Credits: AKQA for Gears of War 3

Twitter in a DoubleClick Rich Media Ad
Combine social media with the reach of paid advertising by including Twitter in a DoubleClick Rich Media ad.


Credits: Media Contacts for Volvo XC60 and Tribal DDB for VW Passat

Social Toolbar in a DoubleClick Rich Media Ad
Bring sharing to the forefront of any ad with a social toolbar.

Interactive Page Takeover with DoubleClick Rich Media
Use an interactive page takeover to transform a user's favorite web page into a full-screen ad that surprises and delights.


Credits: Discovery Communications for River Monsters; OMD, Tag Worldwide and Intel for Intel Core i5

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

Data and scale are two things Quantcast embraces. For example, across DoubleClick Ad Exchange, Quantcast achieves an amazing callout rate close to 100%, which means they can respond to almost all of the impressions DoubleClick announces to them. This matters in RTB because the best impressions for a campaign become easier to pick when the buying system sees them all. And since the start of 2011, Quantcast has doubled the number of impressions it handles from DoubleClick Ad Exchange and its overall data processing capability grows rapidly. Quantcast’s system currently generates a live feed of 400,000+ events a second, adding up to over five petabytes (five million gigabytes) of data processed a day with an incredibly high frequency of data points.

Quantcast especially appreciates DoubleClick Ad Exchange as a source of real-time inventory.

As Crispin Flowerday, Real-time Platform Manager at Quantcast says, "Quantcast helps advertisers and publishers get the right impression to the right person at the right time, so we seized on DoubleClick Ad Exchange's real-time bidding API as soon as it was available to us in 2009. RTB is a key pillar of our efforts to make advertising relevant and audiences valuable and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange is helping us make that dream a reality."

For more details on how Quantcast Lookalikes are used on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, download the full case study here.

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

Starting now, advertisers have the option to include the +1 button in any DoubleClick Rich Media ad. This provides advertisers with the ability to include the +1 button in our third-party rich media creatives and to control the inclusion of the +1 button at the creative level. This new option provides rich media advertisers with a simple and scalable way to increase positive and public advocacy of their brand online.

Xbox and AKQA London have worked with DoubleClick to include the +1 button in their upcoming rich media ads for the Gears of War 3 release.

Beginning in October, the +1 button will also appear across display ads served directly through Google Display Network (GDN) and in select mobile inventory. Wherever a +1 action originates, be it from Google’s search engine, in a display or mobile ad on GDN, in a DoubleClick Rich Media ad or from a web page, the +1 endorsement applies universally to a single page. Each +1 action adds to the overall +1 count for a page.

We look forward to helping advertisers accelerate social recommendations of their content by adding the +1 button to DoubleClick Rich Media ad units. For more details and best practices on including the +1 button in DoubleClick Rich Media ad units, please download our overview here. To get started with +1 in your next campaign, contact your DoubleClick Rich Media account representative.

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

While buyers and sellers have been transacting with anonymous inventory in the DoubleClick Ad Exchange auction for more than a year, it was clear that the industry was also ready for yet another evolutionary step in exchange buying. Both buyers and sellers wanted even more flexibility, control and pricing certainty for some transactions. In tandem, we’ve continued to evolve the Ad Exchange to meet these needs by rolling-out a new solution called Ad Exchange Direct Deals.

For buyers, this creates a bridge between the spot and reserve markets for display inventory. It helps buyers benefit from the high quality publisher inventory that the reserve market is known for while preserving the audience targeting power that the data-driven spot market is known for. With Direct Deals, buyers keep the efficiency of the exchange transaction, such as “insertion-orderless” buying and an ability to buy on an impression-by-impression basis, all while enjoying the pricing certainty of the directly negotiated deal. Accessing inventory through Direct Deals in combination with using brand-friendly formats like in-stream video and rich media will help advertisers execute brand campaigns against specific audiences and further unlock the branding potential of exchange-based buying.

Premium publishers, such as Washington Post and About.com, have been early testers of this feature working with leading exchange buyers such as re-targeting network, Criteo. For Criteo, this feature has meant new opportunities to connect with publishers. Jonathan Wolf, Chief Buying Officer at Criteo says, “Working directly with publishers has always been critical for Criteo, as a way to access the best inventory and deliver the highest CPMs to publishers. We are delighted to be using Direct Deals as a new way to achieve this, with all the advantages of a real-time mechanism.”

Here at Google, we are excited to introduce this new level of flexibility to Ad Exchange to help buyers improve the effectiveness of their campaigns and sellers profit from real-time display buying on their terms. DoubleClick Ad Exchange advertisers and publishers can contact their account manager to join the Direct Deals beta program.

Posted by Scott Spencer, Director of Product Management

In September 2009, the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange (ADX), built on Google technology, opened for business with support for real-time bidding (RTB). Since then, we’ve witnessed explosive growth in RTB. For example, RTB spend as a percent of spend on ADX has risen from 8% in January 2010 to 68% as of May 2011. Plus, the volume of impressions purchased via RTB for the first half of 2011 is 6.4x that of the first half of 2010.

At Google, we believe that the overall display advertising pie can get bigger and see RTB as one of the technologies that can help get us there. In February 2011, we did a “Real-Time Display Advertising State of the Industry Survey” with Digiday, which found that advertisers and agencies are reporting that they will spend more on digital advertising in 2011 because of the benefits of RTB.

To help buyers achieve the benefits they expect from RTB, we’ve published a white paper that shares our view of real-time bidding for online display advertising. Based on research and primary interviews with Google’s RTB experts across our product, sales and services organizations, this paper provides a clear definition of what real-time bidding is and how buyers can get involved with it. Whether you are a large or small advertiser, an agency or a trading desk or a media buying intermediary, Google would like to help you succeed with real-time bidding. We hope that this paper helps.

Download the free white paper (PDF)

Update posted 8/4/2011: Figure 1 in this white paper was missing the demand-side platform LucidMedia. We have now added them.

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

Last week, we participated in an IAB Interactive Insights Webinar titled, “The Arrival of Real-Time Bidding.” In this webinar, Scott Spencer, Director of Product Management for DoubleClick Ad Exchange joined guests from Forrester Research, Inc. to define real-time bidding (RTB) and walk attendees through its impact on the marketplace for online ad inventory. Joining from Forrester Research, Inc. were Senior Analyst Joanna O’Connell and Analyst Michael Greene. Joanna explored how advertisers view the RTB trend and Michael explored how publishers view it. Scott, our foremost expert on RTB, discussed how Google works with advertisers and publishers on RTB.

For those of you who missed the webinar, we’ve posted the full recording here:

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

For those of you who missed the webinar, we’ve posted the full recording here:

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

• There’s a big opportunity for advertisers and publishers to deliver an enhanced user experience by employing dynamic rich media formats, delivering ads customized for each user, adopting user-centric metrics to measure campaign success, and offering users much more control over their advertising they see.
• Initial steps publishers and advertisers can take today toward this user-centric goal include looking closely at and listening to their audiences and experimenting with new formats and user experiences.
• The mobile revolution presents new opportunities for advertisers and publishers looking to connect with users in new and more meaningful ways.

Following his keynote address titled "There's a Perfect Ad for Everyone" at New York's IAB Innovation Days @ Internet Week, Neal Mohan, our VP of Display Advertising was interviewed by Willow Duttge.

In his interview, Neal shed further insight into the new user revolution taking place in digital media and what it means for advertisers and publishers. Here are a few key takeaways from the interview:

• There’s a big opportunity for advertisers and publishers to deliver an enhanced user experience by employing dynamic rich media formats, delivering ads customized for each user, adopting user-centric metrics to measure campaign success, and offering users much more control over their advertising they see.
• Initial steps publishers and advertisers can take today toward this user-centric goal include looking closely at and listening to their audiences and experimenting with new formats and user experiences.
• The mobile revolution presents new opportunities for advertisers and publishers looking to connect with users in new and more meaningful ways.

And if you missed the livestream of Neal's keynote, watch it here.

Posted by the Google Display Team

The “pipe” provides a server-side connection to an inventory source and announces each impression individually as they become available for purchase. In June of 2010, Criteo integrated with DoubleClick Ad Exchange’s RTB API to access a “pipe” for RTB.

The “brain” is a buying system responsible for making the best inventory acquisition decisions possible, on behalf of the advertiser. Criteo’s platform, which does retargeting on a pure performance, pay-per-click (PPC) basis, is a highly intelligent “brain” of RTB. Criteo submits a different price for every single impression it sees. As an advanced buyer, Criteo manages to handle 100% of the ADX impressions it sees, and submits hundreds of millions of bids every day.

Together, Criteo and DoubleClick Ad Exchange are producing great results. Criteo’s VP of Marketing, Karen Dayan reports, “The relevance of our advertising is demonstrated by the great CTRs and great conversion rates we deliver. For many publishers we regularly deliver CTRs of 1%--which is huge, when the average display CTR is closer to .1%.”

Criteo’s Chief Buying Officer, Jonathan Wolf, says, “Real-time bidding is enabling us to further scale our business, and drive increased volume and performance for our advertisers, while also improving CPMs for publishers. We appreciate the global reach of Google and how easy it is for us to turn on RTB in a new market. That’s what makes DoubleClick Ad Exchange so valuable to us.”

Today, Criteo is a high volume, global buyer with live campaigns through ADX in 19 different countries. Google’s Head of Buyer Development for ADX, Chip Hall, says, “Criteo’s technological focus and entrepreneurial spirit has made them a great partner for DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Their sophistication in buying via real-time bidding on a global scale is impressive and has made them one of our top global partners.”

For more details on how Criteo uses DoubleClick Ad Exchange for retargeting audiences at scale, download the full case study here.

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

Today, through the mobile rich media beta with AdMob, advertisers can build HTML5 ads in DoubleClick Studio and run them across select apps on the AdMob network. AdMob’s certification of DoubleClick Rich Media covers three main HTML5 mobile rich media formats: banners, interstitials and expandables. When HTML5 ads are built in DoubleClick Studio, trafficked in DFA and run on AdMob, advertisers benefit from the integration of their mobile rich media metrics within the same reporting system they’re using for other channels such as search, online display and in-stream.

To date, advertisers have enjoyed the ability to build an ad once and run it anywhere with online display and rich media ads. Our work with AdMob gets us one step closer to making this possible for mobile display advertising too. At Google, we are committed to helping mobile scale and perform even better for brand advertisers.

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

One company contributing to this upswing is TellApart. The company’s pay-per-conversion business model brings more dollars to display by ensuring ROI for e-commerce retailers. It’s adding as much as 8% in total revenue growth for top sites like Diapers.com, eBags, Drugstore.com, CafePress, Hayneedle and more.

Josh McFarland, CEO and Co-Founder of TellApart reports, “In our move to real-time bidding, we saw both our click-through rates and the volume of clicks increase, which means we’re getting more clicks at the right price. We’re increasing our spend with the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, because we know every new dollar spent returns new revenue for our clients.”

For more details on how TellApart uses DoubleClick Ad Exchange as a core component of its model, download the full case study here.

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

To learn more about this real-time trend, we recently undertook an industry study with Digiday, surveying more than 300 digital media buyers, agencies, intermediaries and publishers about their thoughts on real-time display advertising. Highlights from these findings will be presented today at DIGIDAY:ONMEDIA in Los Angeles. Some of the revealing findings include:

• 88% of buyers plan to buy via RTB in 2011, up from 75% last year.
  
  
• 47% of media buyers say that the benefits or RTB will increase their overall digital advertising budget this year (16% said it would not, 37% were unsure).
  
  
• Spending on RTB is quickly moving out of the "test budget" range: 79% of buyers estimate that more than 10% of their digital display budgets will go to RTB in 2011. 33% estimate that 50% or more of their digital display budget will go to RTB. And 7% estimate 90-100% of their digital display budget will go to RTB.
  
  
• 29% of media intermediaries (such as DSPs, ad networks, and exchanges) anticipate their volume of real-time bidding will increase by 100% or more versus last year. 19% believe it will go up by at least 200%.
  
  
• More formats are moving to RTB: 34% of buyers say they are extremely or very likely to purchase rich media ads via RTB this year, 32% are extremely or very likely to purchase dynamic creative ads via RTB, 20% are extremely or very likely to purchase mobile display ads via RTB, 18% are extremely or very likely to purchase in-stream video via RTB and 14% are extremely or very likely to purchase mobile rich media via RTB.
  
  
• Nearly half (48%) of publishers surveyed say they plan to increase the amount of inventory they will make available via RTB. 28% are still deciding. Only 24% said they were not planning to increase RTB inventory.
  
  

Real-time bidding is a major enabling force behind this sea change in the way digital media is transacted in today’s advertising marketplace. Yet, RTB is just part of an explosion of technology advancements in display. Read more about this technological Big Bang.

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

Today, DoubleClick Rich Media makes interactive, video-rich advertisements for the mobile web possible with added support in DoubleClick Studio for HTML5. Traditionally, the core assets that rich media ads are based on have been developed using Adobe Flash. Now, with support for ads developed to the HTML5 web standard, creative agencies can manage rich media ads for the mobile web in DoubleClick Studio, right alongside the Flash-based ads that they are already managing.

HTML5 makes it possible to improve ad engagement levels among the growing number of people who browse the web from devices that don’t have Flash, such as Apple iOS devices like the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, and all Android devices without Flash installed. With continuous growth in mobile web-enabled devices, advertisers need a way to captivate and engage with mobile audiences. This release makes that possible.

If you’re interested in seeing impactful creative units on the mobile web for campaigns you’re involved with, download our information sheet. Then contact a DoubleClick Rich Media account manager or fill out the form here.

This is just one small piece of Google’s overall approach to mobile advertising. To stay abreast of all of Google’s innovations in mobile advertising, visit the Google Mobile Ads blog and Google Mobile Ads site.

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

Today, DoubleClick Rich Media makes interactive, video-rich advertisements for the mobile web possible with added support in DoubleClick Studio for HTML5. Traditionally, the core assets that rich media ads are based on have been developed using Adobe Flash. Now, with support for ads developed to the HTML5 web standard, creative agencies can manage rich media ads for the mobile web in DoubleClick Studio, right alongside the Flash-based ads that they are already managing.

HTML5 makes it possible to improve ad engagement levels among the growing number of people who browse the web from devices that don’t have Flash, such as Apple iOS devices like the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, and all Android devices without Flash installed. With continuous growth in mobile web-enabled devices, advertisers need a way to captivate and engage with mobile audiences. This release makes that possible.

If you’re interested in seeing impactful creative units on the mobile web for campaigns you’re involved with, download our information sheet. Then contact a DoubleClick Rich Media account manager or fill out the form here.

This is just one small piece of Google’s overall approach to mobile advertising. To stay abreast of all of Google’s innovations in mobile advertising, visit the Google Mobile Ads blog and Google Mobile Ads site.

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

Perhaps not surprisingly with the holidays coming up in December, department store sites and retailers saw significant gains in unique visitors on the global list. Walmart.com went up a whopping 44% in November and other retailers saw significant gains as well kohls.com (+35%), jcpenny.com (+34%), target.com (+31%), sears.com (+31%) and macys.com (+20%).

Other categories, such as news, travel and hospitality didn’t fare so well. Here in the U.S. with the November elections you would think that sites such as the huffingtonpost.com (down 24%) would experience a big increase in the unique visitors from the previous month but that wasn’t the case. Apparently it was a slow news cycle in November, at least when it came to online news sites.

Other news-oriented sites that experienced notable declines in the number of site visitors in November include:

• aolnews.com (-32%)
• abcnews.go.com (-31%)
• nytimes.com (-27%)
• telegraph.co.uk (-26%)
• time.com (-25%)
• boston.com (-25%)
• usatoday.com (-24%)
• cbsnews.com (-18%)

We also observed that technology news sites, mashable.com (-33%) and techcrunch.com (-31%), lost almost a third of their site traffic from the month before.

Travel and hospitality sites also saw declines in the number of unique visitors to their sites during the month of November. Travel search sites priceline.com (-26%), orbitz.com (-25%), kayak.com (-24%) and booking.com (-20%) all saw significant decline from their October site traffic. Hotel sites marriott.com (-25%) and hilton.com (-19%) also saw their traffic fall from October to November as well as the hotel booking site, hotels.com (-23%).

If you want to dive into the data even deeper, we now publish 21 top 100 lists in 16 languages. Select your preferred language to access the latest top 100 country lists. We have top 100 lists for November for Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom and United States.

These 21 lists are available in British English, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Thai, Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Spanish and Traditional Chinese.

Expect to see more observations with your favorite sites when we publish our next monthly update with December's data.

Posted by Pamela Eng, Product Marketing Manager

First, the product has been localized to support 15 languages. In addition to American English, Ad Planner can now be displayed in British English, Russian, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and Turkish.

Second, the Ad Planner team has published lists of the top 100 sites in each of 21 regional markets. Named the “Ad Planner 100,” these lists provide a quick reference to identify the most popular sites by country. Check out the Ad Planner 100 lists for the countries you advertise within:

Australia Belgium Brazil Canada China France Germany

Hong Kong Italy Japan Korea Netherlands Poland Russia

Spain Switzerland Taiwan Thailand Turkey United Kingdom United States

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

• Added support for several Microsoft adCenter features in preparation for the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, including Geographic Targeting, Content Targeting, and Dynamic Ad Text.
• Added support for several Google AdWords features, including Bidding Options, Delivery Method, Ad Rotation, Device Platform Targeting, and Campaign-level Negatives.
• Greatly enhanced the support for AdWords Placement Targeting and Image Ads, moving these features out of beta to full production.
• Launched an all-new Bid Strategies page, with several ways to customize the reporting data to suit your needs. Also, the new Bid Strategy Keyword History page shows detailed history of bid strategy changes for each keyword.
• Added new features to the DoubleCilck Search Reporting Center, including the ability to report on Spotlight tags, and export directly from DoubleClick Search instead of having to queue up a request and then wait for an email.
• Provided users with the ability to resubmit their own search engine tasks in DoubleClick Search.

These features are only the beginning; stay tuned for even bigger changes in 2011. To follow just DoubleClick Search news on this blog, filter your view here.

Posted by Ariel Bardin, Product Management Director

Checking back in, we find that, based on data collected by The Nielsen Company during Q3 2010, rich media volume is up -- by a lot. Today, rich media ads make up 10% of ad serving volume -- a whopping 4 percentage point increase since our report was published.

Look for rich media volume to continue to grow as more advertisers seek out the benefits of incorporating video and interactivity into their display advertising campaigns. After all, anything Flash ads can do rich media ads can do better.

Posted by Sally Cole, Product Marketing Manager

To date in Ad Planner, advertisers have used site categories, which describe the content of websites, as a proxy for audience interests. For example, to plan an ad campaign for a pet product, advertisers would look for sites with content about pets for their media plan. While this may be an appropriate proxy, it also may overlook some great sites, since when people are interested in a topic, they don't only visit sites about that topic. Audience interests in Ad Planner helps advertisers find a wider range of sites for their media plan without compromising their ability to reach the right audience.

With the "Search by audience" tab in Ad Planner, selecting the "Pets" interest will reveal a list of sites that have a high affinity with audiences interested in pets. While some of the sites will be about pets, many additional sites will be about other topics. Take the screenshot below, which is from the Ad Planner profile for a site about politics. Although the site is not about pets, it scores a high (36.9x) affinity with audiences who are interested in pets, which means visitors to this site are 36.9 times more likely to be interested in pets than the average Internet population. A category filter on pets would never locate this site, but an interests search on pets would.

Audience interests gives advertisers a new tool for selecting the best sites for their media plans. To learn more about how we generate the data for audience interests, please refer to our methodology document. To try out the new audience interests features, visit www.google.com/adplanner.

Posted by Ben Chambers, Software Engineer

To date in Ad Planner, advertisers have used site categories, which describe the content of websites, as a proxy for audience interests. For example, to plan an ad campaign for a pet product, advertisers would look for sites with content about pets for their media plan. While this may be an appropriate proxy, it also may overlook some great sites, since when people are interested in a topic, they don't only visit sites about that topic. Audience interests in Ad Planner helps advertisers find a wider range of sites for their media plan without compromising their ability to reach the right audience.

With the "Search by audience" tab in Ad Planner, selecting the "Pets" interest will reveal a list of sites that have a high affinity with audiences interested in pets. While some of the sites will be about pets, many additional sites will be about other topics. Take the screenshot below, which is from the Ad Planner profile for a site about politics. Although the site is not about pets, it scores a high (36.9x) affinity with audiences who are interested in pets, which means visitors to this site are 36.9 times more likely to be interested in pets than the average Internet population. A category filter on pets would never locate this site, but an interests search on pets would.

Audience interests gives advertisers a new tool for selecting the best sites for their media plans. To learn more about how we generate the data for audience interests, please refer to our methodology document. To try out the new audience interests features, visit www.google.com/adplanner.

Posted by Ben Chambers, Software Engineer

• Rich Media Technical Support Coordinator - Paris
• Rich Media Technical Support Coordinator - Dusseldorf
• Interactive Designer, Rich Media Technical Services - Mountain View, CA or New York
• Rich Media Flash Developer - San Francisco, CA
• Rich Media Technical Web Consultant - San Francisco, CA

Posted by Sally Cole

According to eMarketer, Video ad spend is expected to top 40% year-over-year growth for the next five years, becoming a $5B US Market by 2014. To help fuel this growth, we’re introducing three initiatives to streamline online video advertising for marketers, agencies and publishers. First, DoubleClick now supports the IAB’s VAST 2.0 standard for video ad serving in both DFP and DFA. Second, we've launched VAST Inspector, allowing publishers and advertisers to easily review and test ad tags for VAST compliance. And third, we’ve rolled out the Interactive Media Ads SDK, a Flash library that allows publishers to display VAST 2.0 ads.

Creating Efficiencies with a Common Language

DoubleClick has worked closely with the IAB and other industry participants over the past several years to create a universal language for video advertising, resulting in the Video Ad Serving Template, or VAST. In simple terms, VAST is to video ads as HTML is to web pages - a standardized response. Just as all browsers understand HTML, eventually all video players will understand VAST. Other companies that have recently announced VAST 2.0 compliance include ADTECH, a division of AOL Advertising, and SpotXchange.

With VAST 2.0, publishers currently using DoubleClick In-Stream to monetize video assets can now benefit from third-party ad serving, allowing them to open up more video inventory and sell it more effectively. DoubleClick for Advertisers customers can use VAST to run and measure campaigns across any publisher who accepts VAST 2.0 tags.

Compliance with the latest VAST standard reduces time-consuming, error-prone and expensive trafficking work and technical implementations, allowing ads to be easily viewable in many different video players. Additionally, all DoubleClick clients can take advantage of VAST Inspector to make sure tags have been set up correctly for smooth performance and error-free reporting metrics.

Support for a Broad Range of Development Needs

Over the years, DoubleClick has released different Software Development Kits (SDKs) to support various video ad serving needs. We have now consolidated all of these SDKs into a single Interactive Media Ads SDK (IMA SDK). The IMA SDK combines the power of previous versions, and can request and display all of the most popular video ad formats, whether they are served by DFP, AdSense or any other VAST-compliant ad source. We’ve also rebuilt the IMA SDK from scratch to display ads faster and support the latest standards.

For publishers that have basic video ad serving needs, the IMA Component requires virtually no coding. For large media companies and video distributors, the IMA SDK version allows for complete customization. We’ve also worked alongside the leading video player vendors, including Brigthcove, Ooyala and Longtail Video (which distributes the JW player), to ensure compatibility with our SDK, helping publishers get up-and-running quickly with little technology overhead.

Posted by Campbell Foster

According to eMarketer, Video ad spend is expected to top 40% year-over-year growth for the next five years, becoming a $5B US Market by 2014. To help fuel this growth, we’re introducing three initiatives to streamline online video advertising for marketers, agencies and publishers. First, DoubleClick now supports the IAB’s VAST 2.0 standard for video ad serving in both DFP and DFA. Second, we've launched VAST Inspector, allowing publishers and advertisers to easily review and test ad tags for VAST compliance. And third, we’ve rolled out the Interactive Media Ads SDK, a Flash library that allows publishers to display VAST 2.0 ads.

Creating Efficiencies with a Common Language

DoubleClick has worked closely with the IAB and other industry participants over the past several years to create a universal language for video advertising, resulting in the Video Ad Serving Template, or VAST. In simple terms, VAST is to video ads as HTML is to web pages - a standardized response. Just as all browsers understand HTML, eventually all video players will understand VAST. Other companies that have recently announced VAST 2.0 compliance include ADTECH, a division of AOL Advertising, and SpotXchange.

With VAST 2.0, publishers currently using DoubleClick In-Stream to monetize video assets can now benefit from third-party ad serving, allowing them to open up more video inventory and sell it more effectively. DoubleClick for Advertisers customers can use VAST to run and measure campaigns across any publisher who accepts VAST 2.0 tags.

Compliance with the latest VAST standard reduces time-consuming, error-prone and expensive trafficking work and technical implementations, allowing ads to be easily viewable in many different video players. Additionally, all DoubleClick clients can take advantage of VAST Inspector to make sure tags have been set up correctly for smooth performance and error-free reporting metrics.

Support for a Broad Range of Development Needs

Over the years, DoubleClick has released different Software Development Kits (SDKs) to support various video ad serving needs. We have now consolidated all of these SDKs into a single Interactive Media Ads SDK (IMA SDK). The IMA SDK combines the power of previous versions, and can request and display all of the most popular video ad formats, whether they are served by DFP, AdSense or any other VAST-compliant ad source. We’ve also rebuilt the IMA SDK from scratch to display ads faster and support the latest standards.

For publishers that have basic video ad serving needs, the IMA Component requires virtually no coding. For large media companies and video distributors, the IMA SDK version allows for complete customization. We’ve also worked alongside the leading video player vendors, including Brigthcove, Ooyala and Longtail Video (which distributes the JW player), to ensure compatibility with our SDK, helping publishers get up-and-running quickly with little technology overhead.

Posted by Campbell Foster, Product Marketing Manager

To further our commitment to provide reliable data in DoubleClick Ad Planner, we have submitted it for accreditation by the Media Rating Council (MRC). The MRC is an advertising industry group that works to accredit audience measurement services that are valid, reliable, and effective. MRC accreditation is voluntary and some third-party measurement products have submitted for accreditation, as we have; some have not. Once complete, the MRC accreditation will provide independent confirmation that Ad Planner's methodologies, and the processes supporting this technology, adhere to industry standards.

As part of the MRC audit, we're sharing more details about our data sources and methodology. For our traffic measurement, Ad Planner uses a hybrid measurement methodology that combines direct-measured site traffic, through Google Analytics data that publishers have chosen to opt in to provide us, and sample aggregated data from Google products and services. We currently have over 10,000 sites that are contributing direct measured opt-in data to Ad Planner. Our sample data comes from a variety of sources including anonymized, aggregated Google Toolbar data from users who have opted in to enhanced features, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. All of this data is aggregated over millions of users and is powered by computer algorithms. The breadth and reliability of this aggregated data means that our traffic measurements are among the most accurate in the industry.

To learn more about Ad Planner's data, we invite you to read our recently updated methodology document. To start using Ad Planner, visit us at www.google.com/adplanner.

Posted by Wayne Lin

Today, the wider availability of remarketing on the Google Content Network (GCN) is a great development for DFA clients. With this latest release, you can easily develop remarketing lists via the "Audiences" tab in AdWords and remarket your ads to an even wider audience on the GCN.

Here's how the newly integrated workflow for remarketing on the GCN works for DFA users:

• Link your existing remarketing lists in DFA to your Google AdWords account
• Your existing DFA remarketing lists can be linked at the advertiser or network level and if you add a new list it automatically shows up in AdWords.
• Your lists will then be available for review and use within the AdWords user interface
• You can create remarketing lists in DFA based on your existing conversion tags without any additional work.

Benefits of remarketing on the GCN

In addition to remarketing on the sites you run through DFA, you should think about extending your audience reach to the GCN. Why?

• You can achieve greater reach and engage with your audience more deeply. Reach a large number of users multiple times a day, week or month. Because of the large number of websites who join the Google Content Network, you can connect with many users on your lists(s) as they browse these sites.
• You can create customized audiences by building remarketing lists in creative ways. For example, you can find "abandoned shopping cart users" by reaching all the people who created a shopping cart but didn't complete a transaction and even reach people at every stage of your sales funnel.
• You can reach your audiences in different ways by adding other layers of targeting, such as by geography or placement. This would, for example, allow you to reach users only in a certain region on certain websites that you select.
• It's easy. With the integrated workflow between DFA and GCN you can easily create and manage lists in AdWords.
• The price is right. With the Google auction, you achieve efficient pricing that drives the right ROI for you. With CPM and CPC bidding, you optimize your pricing with complete control to adjust the bid higher or lower to reach your campaign goals.

What's more is that remarketing in DFA is now part of the core offering and accessible at no extra cost.

If you're on DFA, contact your account manager to find out more. If you're not, contact us to see how you can sign up for DFA and get started.

Posted by Pamela Eng

On March 17th, get a complete view of the art and science of rich media advertising from Google's resident rich media experts, Peter Crofut and Chip Scovic.

Next day listen to Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management, deliver his keynote presentation on opportunities in online display advertising. He'll cover changes in the display ecosystem, and how everyone can embrace these changes and achieve their goals. If you miss his keynote, be sure to catch the panel right after on Online Advertising - Rapid Recovery or Recession 2.0?, or the late morning session Connect with the Google Content Network with Jason Miller, Group Product Manager, Google Content Network.

Later in the day, Baljeet Singh, Senior Product Manager, Video Monetization will participate in the panel Can Online Video Reach Scale for Clients Budgets in 2010? Hear what he, and other experts, have to say about definition, scale and measurement when it comes to online video.

Our DoubleClick, YouTube and Google Content Network teams will also be at the Trade Show to let you know what's new and to answer your product questions.

Interested in attending? Register here, and if you're a MediaPost member, your full-conference pass is FREE. You can also sign up for private networking sessions here. Use the code OGSF20 for a 20% discount.

Posted by Sally Cole

On March 17th, get a complete view of the art and science of rich media advertising from Google's resident rich media experts, Peter Crofut and Chip Scovic.

Next day listen to Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management, deliver his keynote presentation on opportunities in online display advertising. He'll cover changes in the display ecosystem, and how everyone can embrace these changes and achieve their goals. If you miss his keynote, be sure to catch the panel right after on Online Advertising - Rapid Recovery or Recession 2.0?, or the late morning session Connect with the Google Content Network with Jason Miller, Group Product Manager, Google Content Network.

Later in the day, Baljeet Singh, Senior Product Manager, Video Monetization will participate in the panel Can Online Video Reach Scale for Clients Budgets in 2010? Hear what he, and other experts, have to say about definition, scale and measurement when it comes to online video.

Our DoubleClick, YouTube and Google Content Network teams will also be at the Trade Show to let you know what's new and to answer your product questions.

Interested in attending? Register here, and if you're a MediaPost member, your full-conference pass is FREE. You can also sign up for private networking sessions here. Use the code OGSF20 for a 20% discount.

Posted by Sally Cole

One of the many data points that DoubleClick Ad Planner provides is site traffic data. In line with Ad Planner's mission, we've improved how we estimate and share this data in order to provide media planners, buyers and researchers with improved data quality and more data visualization options. This builds upon the traffic improvements we made in January of 2009 and is part of our continuous effort to provide trusted insights into online audiences.

This release includes the following two significant improvements:

• Traffic estimates across a number of metrics are now more accurate (Unique user and reach estimates remain the same)
• Direct measured traffic is now included for publishers who opt-ed in their Google Analytics data

Upgrading Site Traffic Estimates

To improve the quality of our site traffic estimates, we have upgraded our traffic estimation model. Our model uses a hybrid methodology that combines sample user data, from various Google products and services, with direct measured site-centric data. The model's direct measured signal is pulled from Google Analytics customer accounts that have chosen to opt-in to sharing their data with Ad Planner. This hybrid approach allows us to use direct measured data to train our traffic estimation models and produce the best estimate for any given site. For more information about how we use opt-in Google Analytics data check out our past blog posts on how Google Analytics data is used in Ad Planner and on replacing traffic estimates with direct measured Google Analytics data.

This latest upgrade improves the accuracy of our estimates by over 10%. We look at a large amount of data and metrics to evaluate our estimates and are continuously working on improving them. We believe our model to be among the more accurate sources of traffic estimation in the industry.

Publishers who would like to complement their site listing with direct measured data are welcome to do so by opt-ing in their Google Analytics data in DoubleClick Ad Planner Publisher Center. We invite publishers who are new to Ad Planner to learn more about using Publisher Center to manage their site profile.

Providing Direct Measured Site Traffic Data

In May 2009, we announced Ad Planner Publisher Center, which made it possible for publishers to opt-in their Google Analytics data to Ad Planner. We've now upgraded site profiles in Ad Planner to display this data in the worldwide charts for Daily Unique Visitors on site profile pages. For publishers who opted-in, their direct measured data is displayed as a solid line in their chart. For example, Gamezhero, a website offering free online games, opted-in their Google Analytics data in June. Here's what their worldwide chart for Daily Unique Visitors looks like now:

In the coming months, we plan to bring direct measured site traffic data to country-level profile views in addition to the worldwide profile views that are currently supported.

Understanding the Data in Ad Planner

To offer additional transparency into how Ad Planner generates its data, we've published a new help document about our methodology. The document provides more details behind how Ad Planner generates site traffic data, in addition to other data, such as demographics, ad information, categories and descriptions.

Getting Started

Give DoubleClick Ad Planner a try at www.google.com/adplanner. We think you'll find it to be a powerful research and media planning tool that makes it easy to find audiences and create well-informed media plans.

Posted by Sally Cole

As a next step in our ongoing effort to invest in DoubleClick's technology products, we've brought Google Ad Planner under the DoubleClick brand. This better aligns Ad Planner's media research and planning tools with our efforts to enable the end-to-end planning, buying, serving and measurement of display ads across the web. In the future, we plan to bring Ad Planner's capabilities deeper into the campaign management process in innovative and useful ways.

As always, anyone can use Ad Planner whether or not they are a DoubleClick customer. The product remains free and open for everyone. The URL to access Ad Planner remains the same: www.google.com/adplanner.

Posted by Sally Cole

One of the many data points that DoubleClick Ad Planner provides is site traffic data. In line with Ad Planner's mission, we've improved how we estimate and share this data in order to provide media planners, buyers and researchers with improved data quality and more data visualization options. This builds upon the traffic improvements we made in January of 2009 and is part of our continuous effort to provide trusted insights into online audiences.

This release includes the following two significant improvements:

• Traffic estimates across a number of metrics are now more accurate (Unique user and reach estimates remain the same)
• Direct measured traffic is now included for publishers who opt-ed in their Google Analytics data

Upgrading Site Traffic Estimates

To improve the quality of our site traffic estimates, we have upgraded our traffic estimation model. Our model uses a hybrid methodology that combines sample user data, from various Google products and services, with direct measured site-centric data. The model's direct measured signal is pulled from Google Analytics customer accounts that have chosen to opt-in to sharing their data with Ad Planner. This hybrid approach allows us to use direct measured data to train our traffic estimation models and produce the best estimate for any given site. For more information about how we use opt-in Google Analytics data check out our past blog posts on how Google Analytics data is used in Ad Planner and on replacing traffic estimates with direct measured Google Analytics data.

This latest upgrade improves the accuracy of our estimates by over 10%. We look at a large amount of data and metrics to evaluate our estimates and are continuously working on improving them. We believe our model to be among the more accurate sources of traffic estimation in the industry.

Publishers who would like to complement their site listing with direct measured data are welcome to do so by opt-ing in their Google Analytics data in DoubleClick Ad Planner Publisher Center. We invite publishers who are new to Ad Planner to learn more about using Publisher Center to manage their site profile.

Providing Direct Measured Site Traffic Data

In May 2009, we announced Ad Planner Publisher Center, which made it possible for publishers to opt-in their Google Analytics data to Ad Planner. We've now upgraded site profiles in Ad Planner to display this data in the worldwide charts for Daily Unique Visitors on site profile pages. For publishers who opted-in, their direct measured data is displayed as a solid line in their chart. For example, Gamezhero, a website offering free online games, opted-in their Google Analytics data in June. Here's what their worldwide chart for Daily Unique Visitors looks like now:

In the coming months, we plan to bring direct measured site traffic data to country-level profile views in addition to the worldwide profile views that are currently supported.

Understanding the Data in Ad Planner

To offer additional transparency into how Ad Planner generates its data, we've published a new help document about our methodology. The document provides more details behind how Ad Planner generates site traffic data, in addition to other data, such as demographics, ad information, categories and descriptions.

Getting Started

Give DoubleClick Ad Planner a try at www.google.com/adplanner. We think you'll find it to be a powerful research and media planning tool that makes it easy to find audiences and create well-informed media plans.

Posted by Sally Cole

One of the many data points that DoubleClick Ad Planner provides is site traffic data. In line with Ad Planner's mission, we've improved how we estimate and share this data in order to provide media planners, buyers and researchers with improved data quality and more data visualization options. This builds upon the traffic improvements we made in January of 2009 and is part of our continuous effort to provide trusted insights into online audiences.

This release includes the following two significant improvements:

• Traffic estimates across a number of metrics are now more accurate (Unique user and reach estimates remain the same)
• Direct measured traffic is now included for publishers who opt-ed in their Google Analytics data

Upgrading Site Traffic Estimates

To improve the quality of our site traffic estimates, we have upgraded our traffic estimation model. Our model uses a hybrid methodology that combines sample user data, from various Google products and services, with direct measured site-centric data. The model's direct measured signal is pulled from Google Analytics customer accounts that have chosen to opt-in to sharing their data with Ad Planner. This hybrid approach allows us to use direct measured data to train our traffic estimation models and produce the best estimate for any given site. For more information about how we use opt-in Google Analytics data check out our past blog posts on how Google Analytics data is used in Ad Planner and on replacing traffic estimates with direct measured Google Analytics data.

This latest upgrade improves the accuracy of our estimates by over 10%. We look at a large amount of data and metrics to evaluate our estimates and are continuously working on improving them. We believe our model to be among the more accurate sources of traffic estimation in the industry.

Publishers who would like to complement their site listing with direct measured data are welcome to do so by opt-ing in their Google Analytics data in DoubleClick Ad Planner Publisher Center. We invite publishers who are new to Ad Planner to learn more about using Publisher Center to manage their site profile.

Providing Direct Measured Site Traffic Data

In May 2009, we announced Ad Planner Publisher Center, which made it possible for publishers to opt-in their Google Analytics data to Ad Planner. We've now upgraded site profiles in Ad Planner to display this data in the worldwide charts for Daily Unique Visitors on site profile pages. For publishers who opted-in, their direct measured data is displayed as a solid line in their chart. For example, Gamezhero, a website offering free online games, opted-in their Google Analytics data in June. Here's what their worldwide chart for Daily Unique Visitors looks like now:

In the coming months, we plan to bring direct measured site traffic data to country-level profile views in addition to the worldwide profile views that are currently supported.

Understanding the Data in Ad Planner

To offer additional transparency into how Ad Planner generates its data, we've published a new help document about our methodology. The document provides more details behind how Ad Planner generates site traffic data, in addition to other data, such as demographics, ad information, categories and descriptions.

Getting Started

Give DoubleClick Ad Planner a try at www.google.com/adplanner. We think you'll find it to be a powerful research and media planning tool that makes it easy to find audiences and create well-informed media plans.

Posted by Sally Cole

As a next step in our ongoing effort to invest in DoubleClick's technology products, we've brought Google Ad Planner under the DoubleClick brand. This better aligns Ad Planner's media research and planning tools with our efforts to enable the end-to-end planning, buying, serving and measurement of display ads across the web. In the future, we plan to bring Ad Planner's capabilities deeper into the campaign management process in innovative and useful ways.

As always, anyone can use Ad Planner whether or not they are a DoubleClick customer. The product remains free and open for everyone. The URL to access Ad Planner remains the same: www.google.com/adplanner.

Posted by Sally Cole

For more than 10 years, DoubleClick has been focused on helping publishers succeed in the often complex business of selling digital advertising. We have been working hard to provide online media sellers with worry-free ad delivery as well as the tools to grow revenue, improve business efficiency and provide the insights needed to capture new opportunities. During our frequent customer meetings and events, we also took a lot of great notes about the new innovations that publishers told us would help them break through their barriers to growth and take their businesses to the next level.

When Google acquired DoubleClick in March of 2008, we realized that we had the unique opportunity to combine our strengths and make even faster progress towards tackling the complexity of online advertising. Today we announced the release of our next generation ad serving platform, the new DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) from Google. This upgraded platform combines Google strengths -- such as UI design, algorithms, and processing power -- with DoubleClick's display advertising experience to help publishers more profitably deliver, measure, and optimize the advertising on their websites. This next generation solution also embraces Google's open ecosystem approach to better connect publishers to third-party developers, advertisers, and each other.

We believe these innovations will break down some of the most common barriers to publisher revenue and profit growth:

1. High Costs: Errors and discrepancies, long training times and complex processes drive up the cost of sales
   
   Google's experienced usability research team invested thousands of hours and spoke with hundreds of end-users to develop a whole new interface designed to help publishers eliminate costly errors, reduce training time and execute campaigns more quickly. The new DFP allows most key trafficking tasks to be accomplished from a single screen and features visualization tools to simplify complex tasks like geo-targeting and rich media campaign setup.


2. Missed Opportunities: Lack of visibility into ad competition and inventory prevents optimal decision-making and causes lost sales
   
   Thanks to the speed and processing power offered by Google's infrastructure, we can now provide more reporting data to help publishers understand where their revenue is coming from with a new level of granularity. Publishers can now track ad delivery down to the city level, review hourly or daily trends and analyze tens of thousands of their own custom targeting criteria. Add this all up and DoubleClick customers should have an average of 4,000 times more data at their fingertips. We have also used this unprecedented volume of data to improve the accuracy and depth of the new DFP's forecasting engine and availability forecasting reports.


3. Manual Processes: Excessive time and resources required to monitor and optimize ad performance
   
   We created the first intelligent ad server to help publishers more effectively optimize campaign delivery to save time and strengthen advertiser relationships. Our ad server now receives hints directly from the forecasting engine to adjust delivery in anticipation of changes in site traffic, helping to improve on-time ad delivery with less manual intervention from ad operations teams. DFP's optimization technology gives publishers the opportunity to utilize advanced Google machine learning algorithms to deliver even greater campaign performance lift for advertisers.


4. Limited Access: Closed systems limit customization, access to third party knowledge and effective advertiser relationships
   
   Publishers can now integrate our ad platform with their business systems easily, or take advantage of a broad new range of third party solutions. The new DFP features a modern and flexible web-services API that allows developers to use any programming language. This public API is supported by a dedicated developer relations team which hosts a developer forum and blog and provides client libraries in a number of programming languages to further support innovation and development. The new API documentation is available today and dozens of third party vendors have already started working on tools based on this new API.

As part of this announcement, we will also be upgrading Google Ad Manager customers to DFP Small Business, a simplified version of the DFP platform designed to meet the needs of growing publishers. This means that the DFP community will be larger than ever, helping to fuel a broader base of knowledge and innovation around our platform. Smaller publishers will also have a seamless upgrade path to the premium DFP solution, designed to meet the needs of the world's largest and most sophisticated media companies.

Lastly, the new DFP integrates with the DoubleClick Ad Exchange's "dynamic allocation" feature, which maximizes revenue by enabling publishers to open up their unsold and non-guaranteed inventory to bids from multiple ad networks. The DoubleClick Ad Exchange also features a real-time, impression by impression auction across many buyers including AdWords and the industry's leading ad networks.

Click here to learn more about some of the features and benefits of our next generation platform.

Looking Forward

The new DFP will serve as the foundation for our long-term commitment to advertising technology innovation. We will continue with the rapid release of additional features and modules for this platform throughout 2010 and beyond as we upgrade current DoubleClick publishers.

Finally, we think that an upgraded platform deserves an upgraded look. We're today making some changes to the DoubleClick logos - including typset changes, incorporating our new "by Google" theme, and retiring the "DART" brand. These changes reflect Google's continued investment in DoubleClick's products for agencies, advertisers and online publishers; and the central role of DoubleClick's technology products within Google's display advertising business.

We are very excited to embark on the roll-out of the new DFP platform and look forward to hearing more feedback from our publishers in the weeks and months to come.

Posted by Jonathan Bellack - Group Product Manager, Publisher Ad Platforms

New! DFA Analytics Beta

DFA Analytics is our new reporting and visualization tool for viewing advertising performance data. It shares similar technology with Google Analytics; if you've used Google Analytics before, you can quickly come up to speed with the easy-to-use graphical reporting tools that are now part of DFA.

With DFA Analytics, you can:

• Get frequent updates--about every three hours--of your campaign performance data.
• See account performance at a glance, in easy-to-understand charts and graphs.
• Drill down through reports at the advertiser, campaign, site, ad, and creative levels.

You can also review performance by:

• Country, designated market area (DMA), state, city, area code, or zip code.
• Hour, day, week, month, and one or more date ranges.
• Browser, operating system, and connection speed.

Here's an example of a DFA Analytics campaign report, graphed by day, with ad performance data:

New! Google Ad Planner Integration

Google Ad Planner is a research and media planning tool that can help you identify sites where audiences are likely to visit, make better-informed media planning decisions, and manage your media plans.

With the upcoming integration, you can:

• Access Ad Planner data (already used by tens of thousands of media planners each week) directly in DFA.
• Enjoy effortless transitions between planning, trafficking, and reporting features.
• Collaborate on media plans using existing account structures and permission settings.
• Take advantage of new Ad Planner features customized for large agency buyers.

Stay Tuned

Overall, this release is designed to increase the efficiency of managing online advertising campaigns with DFA. It's just the beginning to a more unified, efficient, and effective advertising platform.

Please note that DFA Analytics and Ad Planner are only available in DFA 6. To inquire about DFA 6, please fill out our inquiry form.

Posted by Sally Cole

New! DFA Analytics Beta

DFA Analytics is our new reporting and visualization tool for viewing advertising performance data. It shares similar technology with Google Analytics; if you've used Google Analytics before, you can quickly come up to speed with the easy-to-use graphical reporting tools that are now part of DFA.

With DFA Analytics, you can:

• Get frequent updates--about every three hours--of your campaign performance data.
• See account performance at a glance, in easy-to-understand charts and graphs.
• Drill down through reports at the advertiser, campaign, site, ad, and creative levels.

You can also review performance by:

• Country, designated market area (DMA), state, city, area code, or zip code.
• Hour, day, week, month, and one or more date ranges.
• Browser, operating system, and connection speed.

Here's an example of a DFA Analytics campaign report, graphed by day, with ad performance data:

New! Google Ad Planner Integration

Google Ad Planner is a research and media planning tool that can help you identify sites where audiences are likely to visit, make better-informed media planning decisions, and manage your media plans.

With the upcoming integration, you can:

• Access Ad Planner data (already used by tens of thousands of media planners each week) directly in DFA.
• Enjoy effortless transitions between planning, trafficking, and reporting features.
• Collaborate on media plans using existing account structures and permission settings.
• Take advantage of new Ad Planner features customized for large agency buyers.

Stay Tuned

Overall, this release is designed to increase the efficiency of managing online advertising campaigns with DFA. It's just the beginning to a more unified, efficient, and effective advertising platform.

Please note that DFA Analytics and Ad Planner are only available in DFA 6. To inquire about DFA 6, please fill out our inquiry form.

Posted by Sally Cole

Best Home Entertainment Rich Media Display Ad Nominees

Congratulations to:

• Fast & Furious by Ignited, LLC and NBC Universal
• WALL-E by Deadline Advertising and Walt Disney Studios
• Watchmen by AvatarLabs and Warner Bros.

YouTube Creative Award Nominees

Congratulations to:

• G-Force by BLT & Associates and Walt Disney Studios
• The Haunting in Connecticut by Division 13 Design Group and Lionsgate
• My Bloody Valentine by The Visionaire Group and Lionsgate

Best Multi-Channel Cross Media Campaign Nominees

Congratulations to:

• Fast & Furious by The Visionaire Group and Universal Pictures
• I Love You, Beth Cooper by Earthbound Media Group and 20th Century Fox
• Coraline by Wieden+Kennedy and Laika Studios/Focus Features

Best Theatrical Release Rich Media Display Ad Nominees

Congratulations to:

• Bruno by The Visionaire Group and Universal Pictures
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by AvatarLabs and Warner Bros.
• Star Trek by AvatarLabs and Paramount Pictures
• The Haunting in Connecticut by Division 13 Design Group and Lionsgate
• Valkyrie by Palisades Interactive and MGM

And the winners Are...

• WALL-E by Deadline Advertising and Walt Disney Studios for Best Home Entertainment Rich Media Ad
• My Bloody Valentine by The Visionaire Group and Lionsgate for the YouTube Creative Award
• Coraline by Wieden+Kennedy and Laika Studios/Focus Features for Best Multi-Channel Cross Media Campaign
• Star Trek by AvatarLabs and Paramount Pictures for Best Theatrical Release Rich Media Display Ad

We heartily congratulate the winners for their spectacular creative executions and dedication to the craft of movie marketing.

Posted by Sally Cole

The new DoubleClick Ad Exchange helps to open the ecosystem and establish a new marketplace for buyers and sellers. For a large publisher managing multiple sales channels and ad networks, the Ad Exchange provides real-time yield management to maximize returns. Participating ad networks and agency networks get access to a large pool of inventory and the controls they need to precisely achieve their marketing goals.

We've been working for some time on rebuilding the Ad Exchange on Google technology to deliver an improved platform, with new features and functionality for our customers. Both sellers (publishers) and buyers (ad networks and agency networks) stand to benefit from the new features we've incorporated.

Key benefits for sellers include:

• Real-time dynamic allocation to maximize yield. Publishers can automatically generate the highest return for every impression, using real-time data and bids to allocate ad space to the sales channel that pays the most at that second.
• Access to many more advertisers. The Ad Exchange offers publishers access to new buyers, including AdWords advertisers, bringing higher quality ads and more competition for ad space on their sites.
• Hassle-free payments managed by Google. We manage the billing and payments from networks so publishers get one monthly payment and minimize having to manage multiple relationships.
• Greater controls. Publishers can decide what advertisers, networks, ad formats, and bid types to allow.
• New easy to use interface with enhanced reporting. We use the simplicity of Google's user design principles to help publishers easily find out how their sites are performing, to help them make the right decisions about their ad space.

Key benefits for buyers include:

• Access to more publishers and more ad space. Hundreds of thousands of AdSense publisher sites are now available on the Ad Exchange to Google-certified ad networks. And as more publishers join the Ad Exchange to take advantage of its yield management capabilities, more high quality inventory is being added all the time.
• Real-time bidder. The Ad Exchange has a new real-time bidder feature that allows buyers to use their own data, optimization and ad serving technologies to bid on their desired inventory on an impression-by-impression basis, choosing only the sites, audiences, or particular type of ad space they want to reach.
• New easy to use interface with enhanced buyer reporting capabilities. Redesigned reports are simple to use and understand, so buyers can easily see how their campaigns are performing to help them make the right decisions.
• More control and precision. Buyers control where their ads appear and don't appear. They can use frequency capping, pacing and other features to precisely control ad delivery.
• Centralized clearing system. Google makes all payments to publishers, reducing complexity with a single billing and payment point. Buyers benefit from managing one business relationship instead of many.
• A new API - Ad networks and agency networks will have access to an API which enables them to integrate their own functionality and systems when working with the Ad Exchange.

We're excited about the open marketplace that the new Ad Exchange creates and believe that it will add substantial value to the display advertising ecosystem.

Theatrical Release Rich Media Display Ad(s): Any rich media ad or set of rich media ads used to promote a theatrical movie release.

Home Entertainment Rich Media Display Ad(s): Any rich media ad or set of rich media ads used to promote a home video movie release.

Multi-Channel Cross Media Campaign: Any home video or theatrical movie campaign that involves at least three interactive digital elements (one of which must be rich media ads) as part of a holistic campaign including, but not limited to:

• Website
• Rich media ads
• Search campaign
• Alternate reality game (ARG)
• Mobile
• Viral video or webisodes
• Virtual world
• User-Generated content
• Social networking
• Online game(s)
• Digital outdoor
• DVD/Blue-Ray interactive experience/extras

Multi-channel, cross media digital campaign submissions may involve more than one creative agency, but all agencies must be listed and give permission for submission.

YouTube Creative Award: Any home entertainment or theatrical movie campaign creative that included YouTube in its execution -- YouTube homepage "masthead" creative, brand channels, contests, or original video creative uploaded to YouTube to engage the community.

The winners of each category will receive recognition by their industry peers, the opportunity to present to a live audience at the Director's Guild of America in Los Angeles, inclusion in the event's video reel, two award trophies (one each for the movie studio and creative agency) and two Flip Mino mini digital camcorders!

The deadline for entries is Friday, September 18 -- so don't delay if you plan to enter. We look forward to seeing the amazing work in this space.

Posted by Sally Cole

• Image - GIF or JPG ads
• Simple Flash - Ads with a short animation and single click-through link
• Rich Media with Video - Ads capable of responding to user interaction, such as mouseovers, keyboard inputs, or clicks without a click-through, that also contain video
• Rich Media without Video - Ads capable of responding to user interaction, such as mouseovers, keyboard inputs, or clicks without a click-through, that do not contain video

The report provides detailed information on how each of these formats impacts aided brand awareness, online ad awareness, message association, brand favorability and purchase intent. For example, study findings show that, on average:

• Rich Media formats are the most successful at driving purchase intent
• Rich Media without Video is unique among the formats in its ability to positively impact all five brand metrics
• Simple Flash is the least effective of the ad formats studied
• For brand favorability, aided brand awareness and purchase intent metrics, Rich Media with Video provides a statistically significant improvement over Simple Flash at a 90% confidence level

The report concludes with a cheat sheet to help guide your ad format decisions and suggests best practices for achieving branding goals.

Download the PDF report here for free, no registration required.

Posted by Sally Cole

Some might rely on past campaign performance metrics while others might compare across multiple campaigns and advertisers within their client roster. All are fine means in the absence of larger, more comprehensive industry benchmarks.

This is why we're particularly pleased to make available DoubleClick benchmarks so that marketers, agencies, and publishers have a reference by which to evaluate the performance of online display advertising campaigns in the U.S., relative to industry norms.

These benchmarks are derived from a robust data set across DART for Advertisers, based on rigorous methodology with input from the Advertising Research Foundation. Benchmarks in this report cover those for 2008 and transect ad format, ad size, and industry vertical. The benchmarks are normalized across hundreds of advertisers, thousands of campaigns, and tens of billions of ad impressions.

You can download the report here. More in-depth benchmarks by industry are available exclusively to DoubleClick clients so contact your account manager to discuss further.

If you're interested in learning more you can attend our webinar, "Benchmarking Ahead: IAB Reveals the DoubleClick Benchmarks Report," co-hosted with the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) on June 24th at 12pm EST.

Posted by Pamela Eng

This month we're honored to highlight interviews with Carla Hendra, Chief Executive Officer of Ogilvy North America, as well as Ian Schafer, CEO and Founder of interactive marketing agency Deep Focus. Carla speaks to us on the challenges in the brave world of digital marketing, while Ian shares his insights on rich media, video, and the role of the agency in the advertising process.

We're excited about our lineup of thought leaders and the conversations they spark - whether it's about opportunities in a challenging economic environment, trends to watch for in 2009 or ground-breaking insights from innovative fields such as neuromarketing.

Posted by Min Li Chan

This month we're honored to highlight interviews with Carla Hendra, Chief Executive Officer of Ogilvy North America, as well as Ian Schafer, CEO and Founder of interactive marketing agency Deep Focus. Carla speaks to us on the challenges in the brave world of digital marketing, while Ian shares his insights on rich media, video, and the role of the agency in the advertising process.

We're excited about our lineup of thought leaders and the conversations they spark - whether it's about opportunities in a challenging economic environment, trends to watch for in 2009 or ground-breaking insights from innovative fields such as neuromarketing.

Posted by Min Li Chan

To learn more about DoubleClick Studio or to fill out a form showing your interest, please visit studio.doubleclick.com. As creative teams migrate to this new tool, users will also be able to log in here, download components for Flash, and access the web-based workflow.

Here are a few of the features we think creative teams will really like:

• Improved workflow that gets preview links into client's hands faster
• A fully searchable archive of work structured by clients, campaigns and creatives
• Integrated QA processes that get errors identified and fixed earlier in the process
• Full range of intuitive Flash components and full APIs in both AS2 and AS3
• Direct upload to DART for Advertisers ensures smooth transition to traffickers for approved creatives

Testimonials

Josh Race of Ogilvy RedWorks, a member of the DoubleClick Studio beta program, has this to say: "DoubleClick Studio has a clean interface and you will never get lost trying to figure out where you are, which is uncommon amongst ad-serving tools. Our developers are all now self-sufficient and not depending on the one guy who knows his way around some wonky interface."

Will Campbell, also a beta member and owner of ARC Media Group, a creative agency based in Southern California, says, "DoubleClick Studio can greatly improve the workflow for any interactive studio working with Flash. From development to getting creatives ready for publishing it has increased our productivity and decreased the amount of steps we take to accomplish different tasks. It really shows that DoubleClick has given a lot of thought into not only increasing productivity on the development side, but also improving the workflow on the administrative side."

Benefits for Media Agencies

Although not direct users of the authoring tool, media agencies will also benefit from DoubleClick Studio and its integration with DART for Advertisers (DFA), enabling agencies to streamline the process for getting rich media campaigns approved and live. With DoubleClick Studio rolling out on a global basis, it is now easier than ever to manage local, regional and global campaigns on a single authoring platform. Here are some of the benefits:

• Direct link between DoubleClick Studio and DART platforms for instant transfer of creative
• Automated creative checks reduce approval time for campaigns to go live
• Preview links include a view into all rich media events that can triggered by the ad for easy testing, review and sign-off

More Details

For a quick tour of DoubleClick Studio, take a look at this short video from Shamim Samadi, product manager for DoubleClick Rich Media.

For those of you who have used DoubleClick Rich Media tools in the past, we will continue to support the Ad Kit though we do not plan to make future upgrades. We also want to note that, while we intend for DoubleClick Studio to make rich media production more efficient for agencies, advertisers and publishers who would like to own the entire process themselves, we remain fully committed to the highest levels of customer service.

To learn more, visit studio.doubleclick.com or contact your DoubleClick representative.

Posted by Ryan Hayward

To learn more about DoubleClick Studio or to fill out a form showing your interest, please visit studio.doubleclick.com. As creative teams migrate to this new tool, users will also be able to log in here, download components for Flash, and access the web-based workflow.

Here are a few of the features we think creative teams will really like:

• Improved workflow that gets preview links into client's hands faster
• A fully searchable archive of work structured by clients, campaigns and creatives
• Integrated QA processes that get errors identified and fixed earlier in the process
• Full range of intuitive Flash components and full APIs in both AS2 and AS3
• Direct upload to DART for Advertisers ensures smooth transition to traffickers for approved creatives

Testimonials

Josh Race of Ogilvy RedWorks, a member of the DoubleClick Studio beta program, has this to say: "DoubleClick Studio has a clean interface and you will never get lost trying to figure out where you are, which is uncommon amongst ad-serving tools. Our developers are all now self-sufficient and not depending on the one guy who knows his way around some wonky interface."

Will Campbell, also a beta member and owner of ARC Media Group, a creative agency based in Southern California, says, "DoubleClick Studio can greatly improve the workflow for any interactive studio working with Flash. From development to getting creatives ready for publishing it has increased our productivity and decreased the amount of steps we take to accomplish different tasks. It really shows that DoubleClick has given a lot of thought into not only increasing productivity on the development side, but also improving the workflow on the administrative side."

Benefits for Media Agencies

Although not direct users of the authoring tool, media agencies will also benefit from DoubleClick Studio and its integration with DART for Advertisers (DFA), enabling agencies to streamline the process for getting rich media campaigns approved and live. With DoubleClick Studio rolling out on a global basis, it is now easier than ever to manage local, regional and global campaigns on a single authoring platform. Here are some of the benefits:

• Direct link between DoubleClick Studio and DART platforms for instant transfer of creative
• Automated creative checks reduce approval time for campaigns to go live
• Preview links include a view into all rich media events that can triggered by the ad for easy testing, review and sign-off

More Details

For a quick tour of DoubleClick Studio, take a look at this short video from Shamim Samadi, product manager for DoubleClick Rich Media.

For those of you who have used DoubleClick Rich Media tools in the past, we will continue to support the Ad Kit though we do not plan to make future upgrades. We also want to note that, while we intend for DoubleClick Studio to make rich media production more efficient for agencies, advertisers and publishers who would like to own the entire process themselves, we remain fully committed to the highest levels of customer service.

To learn more, visit studio.doubleclick.com or contact your DoubleClick representative.

Posted by Ryan Hayward

• Integration with core ad systems - Seamless integration with our DART for Publishers (DFP) ad serving platform unifies data and workflow across both owned and operated content as well as partner sites. This streamlines and enhances key sales and operations tasks including inventory packaging, forecasting, reporting, and trafficking. Publishers also benefit from DFP's industry-leading reliability, scalability, and service.
• Efficient network management and control - We designed DoubleClick Network Builder to help increase efficiency and visibility through intuitive partner management, automated tag generation, simplified network inventory setup, and extensive controls for revenue adjustments.
• Managing partner relationships - DoubleClick Network Builder's partner portal allows large publishers and networks to more easily provide the service and transparency needed to retain partners, enabling more rapid and profitable network growth. The partner portal provides partners with the ability to login and view their sites' performance, access detailed reporting, pick-up tags and receive messages from the network.
• Managing complex financial reporting and partner payments - DoubleClick Network Builder's revenue and financial reporting can help publishers drastically simplify the partner payment process and improve overall profitability. DoubleClick Network Builder gives publishers the flexibility to accommodate a number of complex partner financial terms and features a complete set of reconciliation tools including expense deductions and partner payout calculations. The product's detailed revenue reporting makes it easy to monitor the performance of site partners and provide visibility across the network and for each individual partner.

Since October 2008, we have been testing a beta version of DoubleClick Network Builder with a number of premium publishers and networks, including Real Girls Media and InvestingChannel. These publishers realized a number of immediate benefits including significant improvements in the efficiency and accuracy of their network operations, enabling more rapid growth. Today, we're excited to extend these benefits by making DoubleClick Network Builder available to all publishers using our DART for Publishers ad serving platform. If you're a publisher who is ready to start using DoubleClick Network Builder to help create and manage your network, contact your DoubleClick account manager or click here to learn more. If you aren't already a DoubleClick client, please contact us here.

Posted by Rany Ng

• The Fixed Panel (recommended dimension is 336 wide x 860 tall), which looks naturally embedded into the page layout and scrolls to the top and bottom of the page as a user scrolls.
• The XXL Box (recommended dimension is 468 wide x 648 tall), which has page-turn functionality with video capability.
• The Pushdown (recommended dimension is 970 wide x 418 tall), which opens to display the advertisement and then rolls up to the top of the page.

For publishers and agencies looking to get a head start, these units can be done with DoubleClick Rich Media today and are easily implemented in either the DART for Publishers or DART for Advertisers ad serving systems.

Posted by Sally Cole

• The Fixed Panel (recommended dimension is 336 wide x 860 tall), which looks naturally embedded into the page layout and scrolls to the top and bottom of the page as a user scrolls.
• The XXL Box (recommended dimension is 468 wide x 648 tall), which has page-turn functionality with video capability.
• The Pushdown (recommended dimension is 970 wide x 418 tall), which opens to display the advertisement and then rolls up to the top of the page.

For publishers and agencies looking to get a head start, these units can be done with DoubleClick Rich Media today and are easily implemented in either the DART for Publishers or DART for Advertisers ad serving systems.

Posted by Sally Cole

DoubleClick Rich Media has received an additional level of certification from Google for the expandable format. This extra level of certification is necessary because expanding ads on GCN need to intelligently expand in the correct direction depending on the placement of the ad slot on the page. For example, if the ad is displayed in a skyscraper on the right side of the page, the ad needs to "know" in real time to expand to the left.

Due to this special consideration during ad creation, DoubleClick clients that wish to run expandable ads on the GCN should be sure to loop their account manager and campaign manager in as early as possible. We look forward to helping you take advantage of this exciting new feature to make your campaigns more effective.

Posted by Sally Cole

Plug Your Blog: Embed your blog feed into an ad unit. Include a call-to-action in the unit to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Add Media to the Ad: Advertise new podcasts or vodcasts as they become available. Include part or all of the podcast in the ad unit. Promote links to subscribe to your feeds in addition to offering individual download links.

Bring it All Together: Package all your social media channels -- blogs, podcasts, vodcasts, comments feeds -- into one comprehensive widget. Allow people to share it on their blog or social network of choice. Seed the widget by running it as a shareable ad on relevant paid media.

Posted by Sally Cole

This ad puts a Vegas vacation top of mind through a video contest for the YouTube community. The contest invites viewers to create a video about why they need a Vegas vacation. Viewers of the ad are directed to the contest homepage on YouTube or the landing page at VisitLasVegas.com.

Posted by Sally Cole

This ad puts a Vegas vacation top of mind through a video contest for the YouTube community. The contest invites viewers to create a video about why they need a Vegas vacation. Viewers of the ad are directed to the contest homepage on YouTube or the landing page at VisitLasVegas.com.

Posted by Sally Cole

• Economy/Recession 62.27%
• Foreign Policy 11.59%
• Environment 8.01%
• Healthcare 7.50%
• National Security 5.85%
• Immigration 4.77%

If you're ready to get even more participatory, head over to The Davos Debates on YouTube where The World Economic Forum invites you to send in your solutions and suggestions for the key issues facing us today. The focus issues include the state of the economy, the environment, US politics and business ethics. The four questions up for public discussion through the YouTube platform are:

• Are you confident that global growth will be restored in 2009?
• Will the environment lose out to the economy in 2009?
• Will the Obama administration improve the state of the world in 2009?
• Should company executives have a code of ethics similar to doctors and lawyers?

The person who submits the best video will be invited, all expenses paid, to attend The World Economic Forum's upcoming Annual Meeting in Davos-Klosters and interact with world leaders in person.

To learn more, watch the video about joining The Davos Debates:

Visit youtube.com/davos to join in.

Posted by Sally Cole

On DART for Advertisers' win in the Ad Management category, Tessa Wegert, Interactive Media Strategist with Enlighten and ClickZ Media Buying columnist commented, "DFA remains the industry gold standard for ad serving and ad management. This is the technology that's behind the majority of the more notable and impressive campaigns we see and a sure bet for any advertiser on the fence about which company can offer the most seamless, streamlined campaign solutions."

On DoubleClick Mobile's win in the Mobile Marketing Tool category, Courtney Jane Acuff, VP and Director with Denuo and ClickZ Mobile Marketing columnist commented, "It is critically important for mobile advertising (buyable off-the-shelf solutions) to have a standard serving and reporting platform. The DoubleClick Mobile product enables digital buyers and planners to have consistency in reporting and publishers the ability to sell through integrated mobile packages."

On DoubleClick Rich Media's HD Video format win in the Video Ad Format or Platform category, Christine Beardsell, VP Creative Director with Digitas's Third Act and ClickZ Online Video Advertising columnist commented, "You want the creative and content you develop for your brands to look great. But, unfortunately, video placements in general have suffered from low-bandwidth specifications and site-publisher limitations. So any media partner that can make your content look its best, and that won't degrade your original vision, is a partner worth having. The new DoubleClick HD looks great. And if your content already has a compelling idea and creative execution behind it, HD quality is really the icing on top!"

Thank you Tessa Wegert, Courtney Jane Acuff and Christine Beardsell for your support and to all the other ClickZ judges.

Posted by Sally Cole