Is programmatic safe for brands? Join us tomorrow, Friday, 3/22 at 1:30 ET/10:30 PT as Digiday's Brian Morrissey seeks the answer to this question in a conversation with Media6Degrees' Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Pancer, and Michael Brunick, Mediabrands Audience Platform's VP of Strategic Solutions.

To tune in, log into your Google+ account and look for the Hangout on Air in the Think with Google +page stream. Hit play! Comments and questions are welcome.

Missed the other conversations in the 'Programmatic in the Future' series?
Find them at: http://www.youtube.com/DoubleClick

Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Team

As we’ve said before, we’ve entered the next wave of digital marketing, as major brands like L’Oreal, Audi and Kay Jewelers embrace digital media and make it a core part of their marketing strategy. We’ve seen a 65 percent increase in the last quarter alone in the number of brand advertisers using our brand formats and buying tools.

This influx of brand investment is translating into meaningful results for digital publishers.

• We looked at the 50 top publishers that enable brand-friendly ad formats on their sites. Over the past three months we found that, on average, they experienced a CPM increase of 2x or more when running these engagement-driven ads, such as our Lightbox ad, which expands to a full page only after a user has deliberately engaged with the ad. "We've seen CPM increases of more than 3X, and our advertisers love the large canvas and pay for engagement model," says Rich Dredge, Answers.com's Chief Revenue Officer.
• We’ve seen an overall increase in higher CPMs across our exchange -- in the U.S., CPMs over $5 have increased 24% year-over-year while those over $10 have increased 23% year-over-year. Brand spend is a critical piece of these increases.

Fueling brand adoption
To continue this momentum, we’ve been investing in a suite of brand solutions over the past year to help these advertisers make the most of what digital marketing has to offer:

• New Ways to Buy -- Last year, we introduced Active View, offering for the first time the ability to not only measure whether ads are viewable, but actually buy based on it. Brands are able to “reserve” a guaranteed number of impressions on brand-friendly sites across the web -- and they pay only for impressions that are viewed. 
• Over the past year, the number of advertisers using the reserve option has increased fourfold.
• Nearly two-thirds of those are Ad Age top 100 brands. 

• New Ways to Engage -- Last year, we introduced a new family of brand-friendly, engagement-focused ad formats. Engagement formats are already showing terrific early returns. For example, L’ORÉAL PARiS was one of the first brands to run a campaign using engagement ads. They ran an expandable ad in Germany as part of their “Beauty Minute” campaign and found that 30% of those who expanded the ad watched the entire 30-second embedded video. 

• New Ways to Measure -- We’re committed to providing meaningful metrics for brands, measurement that goes beyond just clicks and conversions. Earlier this week, we introduced Brand Lift in AdWords, which will enable marketers to run surveys along with their ad campaigns, to determine how their ads helped their marketing objectives (i.e., whether their ads helped build awareness, increased favorability towards their brand, etc.). Brand Lift complements our other investments in brand measurement, like Active View and Active GRP. 

Digital media represents an amazing opportunity for both brands and publishers, bringing together sight, sound, motion, interactivity and measurement in ways we’ve never seen before.

Over the coming year, we’ll be continuing to invest in our products and systems that will help brands thrive in the digital space, as well as help publishers capitalize on the shift...so stay tuned for more to come.


Posted by Neal Mohan

At DoubleClick, we’re constantly developing new ways to help publishers provide valuable, highly engaging solutions to advertisers. Recently we launched the new LightBox full page expandable ad - an innovative format to drive greater campaign performance and deliver rich creative options for publishers.

Today we’re adding to our toolkit for publishers with new innovations for mobile and video ads available on the DoubleClick publisher platform. We’re happy to announce new features that make it easier for our partners to create memorable brand experiences for their advertisers and maximize the revenue from all their mobile and video inventory. 

Mobile Rich Media is easier with DoubleClick Studio and DFP
Brand advertisers want a partner that can not only offer them a great audience, but also deliver a highly engaging memorable campaign. With DoubleClick Studio’s integration of HTML5 capabilities with DFP, publishers can utilize all of Studio’s tools to create and deliver impactful, measurable rich media campaigns across devices with ease.

Whether offering a full service solution or dealing with creative built by an advertiser, this integration allows publishers to seamlessly push rich media creative, including HTML5, directly from Studio to DFP. The creatives will automatically appear in DFP’s creative library, associated to the correct advertiser and be ready for delivery on both desktop and mobile devices. Then when the campaign begins, the rich media reporting will appear alongside the basic campaign metrics like impressions and clicks. To see examples of HTML5 rich media creatives that leverage DoubleClick Studio, see our mobile creative gallery here.

Video monetization with DoubleClick Ad Exchange
Selling inventory through programmatic channels can be a powerful method for publishers to increase their revenue from their inventory. DoubleClick Ad Exchange provides publishers a full set of monetization tools to sell not only desktop, but also mobile and video impressions while maintaining full control of their inventory. Publishers can maximize their revenue by accessing Ad Exchange’s video demand for in-stream VAST, VPAID and skippable TrueView formats to sell :15s and :30s inventory.

To learn more about DoubleClick’s technology for publishers, visit our website.


Posted by Marcel Gordon, Product Manager for DFP and Ari Feldman, Product Manager for Ad Exchange

In 2010, in order to help publishers maximize the value of every impression, we introduced the new version of DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP).

In the years since, we’ve continued to invest in this platform, including new features that we heard were most important to our publisher partners - like the ability to manage desktop, mobile and video on a single ad server, and tools that help publishers better optimize campaign performance and save time. Today, thousands of publishers, such as The Weather Company, Gawker Media, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal and YouTube, are all leveraging DFP. And over two-thirds of our overall publisher ad impressions run through this new platform, up from one-third last year.

As far as we’ve come, we are just getting started with innovation to help publishers build for the future. To preview just a few of our 2013 plans, we’ll be helping publishers grow with new data-driven revenue models by enabling Audience Extension from directly within DFP. We’re increasing their ability to tap into the accelerating brand opportunity with new ways to measure such as Active View reporting for viewable impressions. We’re investing to make it easier for publishers to manage advertising across devices with tools like the Google Publisher Tag, which automatically selects the appropriate ad for the screen size (aka “responsive design”). And we’ll also be making it faster to access online content: since the new DFP is roughly twice as fast at serving as DART, when we’re done upgrading we’ll be saving Internet users 63 years a day in waiting for ads to serve.

This year our team is shifting all of our effort and investment to DFP to deliver even greater innovations for our partners. With this in mind, we’ll be ending support for our DART for Publishers legacy ad serving platform on September 1, 2013. To ensure continuity of ad serving, support and training, publishers who haven't upgraded to DFP by that date will be automatically scheduled for an upgrade date between September 1 and December 31, 2013 when ad serving on the DART for Publishers legacy platform will cease. Note that publishers using the DFP Small Business platform do not need to take any action and are already supported on the new DFP.

We strongly advise all publishers to complete their upgrades to DFP before September 1 to make sure you are able to use the new DFP to its full potential during the busy 2013 holiday season. Please contact your account manager as soon as possible if you don’t have an upgrade date scheduled. And if you’re not sure who to contact, you can always reach out to our customer support team.

We know our partners are looking for tools that can grow and adapt to the needs of their business not just today, but also for tomorrow, the next year and ten years from now. That’s why we’re fully committed to the new DFP. We’re ready to accelerate our pace of innovation on our platform, and we look forward to helping publishers as they break new ground in digital.


Posted by Jonathan Bellack, Director of Product Management

Update: Due to unexpected circumstances, this hangout has been canceled on Thursday, March 7. Stay tuned for more information when it is rescheduled.

This will be the discussion in our next installment of "Programmatic in the future". Join us on Thursday, 3/7 at 1:30 ET/10:30 PT as Digiday's Editor-in-Chief Brian Morrissey, interviews Penry Price, President, Media6Degrees, and Nate Stricker, VP, Group Account Director for Digital at Initiative.

In case you missed our last conversation with Mike Finnegan, Xaxis' VP of Product Development, here's a snapshot:

Or you could watch the video:

Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Team