(Originally posted on the Inside AdSense blog)

It’s no secret that I watch a lot of video ads. It’s one of the perks (or pains!) of working in the video advertising business. And yet, I was surprised to see that my younger cousins were gathered around a laptop showing each other their favorite ads over the weekend. Maybe it runs in the family. More likely, people just love watching great content and engaging ads. Every statistic we’ve seen shows that sharing and watching online videos has become a part of everyday life, and that the gap between video ad spend and audience attention is slowly narrowing. At Google, we’re always trying to improve the experience of watching video ads. With that in mind, we’re rolling out a new ad format called TrueView to our network of video publishers.

TrueView ads, pioneered on YouTube, differ from traditional video ads in two main ways. First, they give viewers choice - for example, the ad may be skippable or present a choice of ads to watch. Second, TrueView ads are sold through a Cost Per View (CPV) basis. You may be familiar with Cost Per Click (CPC) where the advertiser pays when someone clicks on their ad; similarly with CPV ads, advertisers are charged when a viewer chooses to watch the ad.

For example, say you're about to watch an interview with the makers of a new movie on The Hollywood Reporter. A TrueView in-stream video ad will start to play and a counter will appear giving you the option, after five seconds, to skip the ad and continue watching the video.

We believe TrueView is a win for users, publishers and advertisers. Users have more control over the ads they see. Advertisers get to combine the engagement of video with the precision of online advertising. And publishers see higher returns, since advertisers value a truly engaged audience.

A small group of our AdSense for video publishers are already using TrueView ads on a portion of their video inventory, and have seen RPMs equal or better than standard pre-roll ads, while dramatically improving the user experience. TrueView video ads also help to decrease audience drop-off rates by 40% on YouTube Partner sites when compared to regular in-stream ads, which means more viewers are continuing to watch videos.

One of our partners The Hollywood Reporter has been experimenting with TrueView ads and has already seen a significant increase in viewer retention. Product Manager Reed Halstrom tells us, “We’ve seen video views increase by 21% and viewed minutes increase by 17% since we started using TrueView ads.”

If you have existing video content on your site and are interested in gaining access to TrueView video ads through AdSense for video, please leave your details by completing our online form. We’re committed to improving the overall online video viewing experience and will continue to work with our publishers and advertisers to make that happen - which should come as no surprise.

Posted by Payam Shodjai, Lead Product Manager, Video Monetization

For websites that sell display advertising, the ad tag is the essential link between a publisher's ad server, such as DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), and website content. An ad tag is a snippet of code that is inserted into the source code of a web page in order to display ads.

Properly implementing your ad tags is a vital piece of your ad operations since it directly affects your visitor's experience to your website and bottom-line. Tagging errors can prevent the correct ad from being displayed, or prevent ads from displaying altogether. Slow loading ads can also slow down the loading of content, resulting in long wait times for your site's visitors.

This is why we're so excited to introduce the next generation of the DFP ad tag: The Google Publisher Tag. The new tag provides publishers with several key benefits including:

Speed:

We've designed the new tags with speed in mind since we know that long load times can lead to a poor user experience and lost revenue opportunities. The new tags can deliver your ads asynchronously, meaning that your web page will render creatives as they are received from DFP so slow loading ads will not slow down your content.

Flexibility:

The Google Publisher Tag supports all formats and devices, simplifying ad delivery to your web, mobile, and video content. The tag also supports:

• HTTPS Environments: Deliver ads into secure HTTPS environments. 
• E-mail Ad Serving: Non-JavaScript tags available for use in email or other environments that don't support JavaScript rendering. 
• Passbacks: Tag can be used in a third-party ad server. 
• Asynchronous ad refresh: Refresh ads in environments that don't require page reloads. 
• Single-Request Mode: Fetch and deliver all creatives simultaneously.
• Interstitial (out-of-page) creatives. 
• Guaranteed roadblocks. Sign up for early access here. 

For publishers using the premium edition of DFP, the new tags allow you to segment your inventory using five levels of hierarchy, enabling you to better map your inventory to your sales strategy.

Efficiency:

If you've found yourself navigating through your website in efforts to get your ads to show with no success, the Google Publisher Console is here to help.

The Publisher Console can be used on any webpage you manage that contains the Google Publisher Tag, and allows you to easily view the real-time decision making process DFP uses to determine which ad to serve, the time DFP took to generate each ad, and information about missing or incorrect ad tags.

To take advantage of the new functionality introduced above, you will need to re-tag your pages using the new tag. If you're already using any of our older ad tagging formats, you won't be required to re-tag any of your pages to continue using DFP.

We're committed to providing ad tags that are easy for publishers to implement, and provide the best possible experience for end users.

Posted by Ajay Surie, Product Manager and Phil Lee, Software Engineer

We’re always adding new features to DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP). We’ll be periodically posting lists of the highlights to this blog to help you stay up-to-date with all of the latest DFP developments. The list below contains some highlights. For a more complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.

Available in DFP and DFP Small Business:

• Targeting presets: If you frequently traffic your campaigns using the same set of targeting criteria, entering the same targeting criteria across multiple campaigns can become a repetitive process. To help make this process quicker and more efficient for publishers, we’ve introduced the ability to save a set of targeting criteria to reuse across your other campaigns and availability forecasts. Learn more. 
• Sequential creative rotation: Sometimes advertisers want to display a set of creatives to the user in sequence in the same ad unit. This is called storyboarding and it allows the advertiser to control a user’s experience of an ad campaign across multiple views. Now you can "storyboard" a series of creatives by serving them sequentially to a user as they click through your site. Learn more.
• Mobile Reporting Filters: To help make it easier to identify ad impressions delivered to your mobile web content or applications, you can now easily filter your reports to see only “web” or “mobile” line items.

Available in DFP:

• Line item grace periods: Imagine you’re working with one of your most valued advertisers and you want to ensure their campaign delivers in full, even if this means extending the campaign beyond its original flight date. You can now indicate a line item grace period in order to allow critical line items to deliver after they’ve passed their end date in order to meet their goals. Learn more.

Posted by Beah Burger, DFP Product Specialist

Watching a funny video ad is one of the special pleasures of life. Trafficking that same video ad is considerably less amusing. In fact, it can take publishers longer to traffic a video ad than it takes to get a root canal. And that’s often the least painful part of growing a video advertising business. We decided to embark on an ambitious project: to build an entirely new video ad server that is both powerful and simple to use. We listened carefully to feedback from over a hundred video publishers and designed our solution around the complex needs of broadcasters, video portals and the world’s largest sports, entertainment and news sites. They told us about the need to traffic a variety of video ad formats, across all devices, governed by complicated syndication agreements and changing business rules.

From the start, we focused on clean design, efficient workflow and scalability to meet the needs of large video publishers, such as YouTube. We then spent hundreds of hours carrying out usability studies with publishers as we refined the user experience, meticulously reducing clicks, eye movement and manual inputs. We also took advantage of Google’s infrastructure to offer the scalability and reliability that publishers expect. Finally, we made sure that every feature has a direct impact on revenue or cost savings, so that publishers would immediately see the impact on profitability.

DFP Video

Today, we’re happy to announce that DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Video is available to publishers globally. By offering a truly video-centric approach to ad serving in DFP, publishers can now manage their entire display advertising business with video at its core through one platform. No longer do publishers need to deal with the operational complexity of splitting off their video inventory into a separate ad server. We’ve signed up dozens of beta publishers for DFP Video and our impression volume has grown 55% month-over-month for most of this year. The feedback we’ve received has been encouraging: the simplicity and power of DFP Video has reduced costs and increased revenue. For Alex Boyce, GM of The Hollywood Reporter, DFP Video has improved the efficiency of his ad operations team by 25%. Peter Slaughter, Director Advertisement Operations of the Financial Times has told us, “We expect the new system to drive significant improvements to our ad operations workflow, and believe that this may prove to be an effective tool with which to deliver incremental revenue benefit from our video offering."

Here are some more reasons why publishers have made DFP Video the cornerstone of their video advertising business:

Video Content at the Center
By synching to video Content Management Systems (CMS), fresh content automatically appears in DFP for targeting, providing real-time insight into video inventory. We’ve made the process of connecting to a CMS so turn-key, that The Hollywood Reporter was able to ingest their extensive library in a matter of minutes, without any custom set-up or coding.

Trafficking in Minutes
We’ve made trafficking as simple as sending an email attachment: Set the targeting, drag and drop the video ad creative into the browser, and watch it get transcoded in real-time into outputs that work on iOS, Android and other platforms. All in just a few minutes. We’re also getting a hand from YouTube’s massive infrastructure for hosting and transcoding the creatives, which means that ads are delivered as fast and reliably as the billions of daily YouTube video views.

Syndication Simplified
The majority of videos are consumed on distribution sites, and DFP offers a comprehensive partner and financial terms module to manage syndication relationships. Whether publishers are syndicating their content to distribution sites such as YouTube or monetizing videos that belong to different content owner, DFP allows them to set revenue shares and takes care of all the accounting.

Business Rule Flexibility
DFP Video allows publishers to define the ad experience for any section of their inventory. For example, ad rules can set pre-rolls for clips, define pods and bumpers for long-form content, and turn off monetization entirely for subscribers - without making a single player change.

To learn more about DFP Video, contact your account manager or drop us a note.

DFP Small Business Video (Beta)

We also learned a lot from publishers that are just starting off with video, and we’re thrilled to announce a set of beta video features in DFP Small Business that make it easy to get started with video ads.

Turn-key and Free
First, we’ve lowered the barrier to entry by partnering with the folks at Brightcove and LongTail to provide a turn-key video player and CMS integration with DFP Small Business. Publishers can get up and running with a video player, a CMS, hosting and ad serving in about 20 minutes. No SDK integration, no custom coding, no extensive testing. Best of all, ad serving is free (including hosting!) up to a certain volume of impressions, and we’ve negotiated great deals for video player and hosting packages with our partners that range from free to a low monthly fee.

Designed Around the Essentials
Next, DFP SB publishers get all of the reliability and scalability of DFP through an interface that exposes only the video features they need. Whether it’s booking a campaign or using AdSense to fill unsold inventory, publishers can set up line items in a matter of minutes. The path to the full-featured version of DFP Video is seamless and publishers can continue to manage their entire display advertising business in one platform.

We think video ad serving has never been this easy. As we open up this feature to more publishers, we’ll be reaching out to those who have filled out their details here.

Our commitment to learn from every publisher, every conversation and every use-case will continue as we develop DFP Video and add video functionality to DFP Small Business. In just a few years, video advertising spend is expected to reach $10B globally and we’re excited to partner with publishers as they make this happen. Here’s to more enjoyable video ads.

Posted by Payam Shodjai, Lead Product Manager, Video Monetization

Imagine you’re a national news site with a section of your site that is popular with advertisers: a sports section reaching adult males on the West Coast. Since this is a segment that you frequently sell, and thus regularly target your DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) campaigns to, entering the same targeting criteria across multiple campaigns can become a repetitive process.

To help make this process quicker and more efficient for publishers, we’re excited to introduce the ability to save a set of targeting criteria to reuse across your other campaigns and availability forecasts.

Using the example above, the news site would define a set of targeting criteria, in this case a targeting package that includes the site’s sports inventory targeted to adult male users from the West coast, and then save the package “West Coast Sports”.

For future campaigns where the news site wants to reach the same audience, they can simply select the “West Coast Sports” targeting preset that they’ve defined, and all of the criteria selected above will automatically be added to their new line item or forecast.

Your time is valuable and we’re committed to helping publishers complete routine trafficking tasks as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Posted by David Ramos, Software Engineer

(Originally posted on the Google Mobile Ads Blog)

Good data on the smartphone user is hard to come by. Good data that enables companies to make data driven decisions on how to engage with consumers on their smartphone is even harder to come by.

Today we are launching a new resource to address that need. Our Mobile Planet www.ourmobileplanet.com is a new web site featuring an interactive tool that anyone can use to create custom charts that will deepen their understanding of the mobile consumer and support data driven decisions on their mobile strategy.

The site gives anyone access the full set of data from the “Global Mobile Research: The Smartphone User & The Mobile Marketer” we conducted earlier this year (March & July 2011) with Ipsos and in collaboration with the Mobile Marketing Association.

Example of a presentation ready chart on ourmobileplanet.com

Need to know the smartphone penetration in Singapore? It’s 62%. Trying to figure out if more consumers in France or Germany have made purchases via their smartphone? It’s France. Want to know if consumers in the UK visit a store after doing a local search on their smartphone? 41% of them do.

Now anyone - marketer, app developer, tech geek, big or small - can answer these questions and many more by drawing on one of the the most extensive, far reaching standardized surveys on smartphone user behavior ever conducted. Not to mention, this is the first time a study this extensive has been made available for free.

We commissioned this survey and have made the data available for free because we believe the shift to mobile is so fundamental that we need to do everything we can to help businesses adapt immediately.

Posted by Nicole Leverich, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

I recently had the opportunity to participate in two publisher industry events in New York. The first was a roundtable discussion with thirty of the brightest minds in the business, from major media brands to up-and-coming digital content players; the second was a live-streamed Q&A with 200 leading publishers and media companies at the paidContent Advertising Conference. Both events reinforced how publishers continue to be a leading force in creating value in display, and I wanted to share a few common themes from my conversations:

• Friction leads to waste. As we all have experienced, selling ad space is a complex business. A significant portion of every advertiser dollar is eaten up in transaction costs that add very little value. So it was great to hear more and more examples of where publishers are leading the charge in connecting with new buyers, finding inefficiencies and increased CPMs through real-time display buying and Direct Deals on the Ad Exchange. 
• Beyond the banner. Display is not just graphical - successful publishers are using video and mobile not just as added inventory, but by offering truly integrated campaigns that reach audiences across all screens. As you've heard, we continue to invest in helping publishers succeed in this goal. Publishers continue to be optimistic about direct sales, predicting that ad format and audience targeting innovations will spur most of their future growth. Today display is roughly a $25B industry - we think it could be $200 billion. 
• The user comes first. One way that we’re working towards combating ad blindness is by incorporating social signals in display. Many publishers mentioned that they’re on board with the notion of ‘fewer but better’ ads, and are actively developing methods to change audience perception of online advertising. That’s good news for us all.

I’ve said that the future of display advertising is both smart and sexy, and publishers who produce the quality content that powers this ecosystem contribute to this bright outlook. Thanks to everyone who participated in the events in New York, or who tuned in online. If you missed my Q&A, you can watch it here.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display Advertising