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