Since the acquisition of DoubleClick over 10 years ago, we’ve continuously evolved our platforms to help our partners grow their revenue and create sustainable businesses with advertising. That’s why, for the last three years, we’ve been doing more to bring DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) and DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) together into a truly unified platform. Today’s DoubleClick has also evolved beyond our roots in the web to become an ad platform for the next generation of content, from mobile applications by developers like King, to multi-platform video from publishers like Cheddar.

With these changes, we needed a new name that better reflects how our platform helps you earn more and protects your brand, wherever your audience is engaging and however advertisers are looking to work with you. As we announced today, that name is Google Ad Manager.



Over the next few months, you’ll start seeing the Ad Manager name reflected across your existing DoubleClick UI. Read on to learn more about our journey and vision.

Not just an ad server or Sell-Side Platform (SSP)—a complete ad platform

Automation continues to change the way we do business, with advertisers looking to transact all their campaigns, guaranteed or not, programmatically. That’s why we broke away from the traditional constraints of “ad servers” and “SSPs” to build new programmatic solutions directly into the product we now call Ad Manager—from our programmatic deals framework to features like Optimized Competition that help you maximize yield across reservations, private marketplaces, and the open auction. Ultimately, with Ad Manager, you get a complete ad platform that helps you earn more and grow revenue, no matter how you sell.

Optimizing revenue across all buyers

When we launched Ad Exchange nearly a decade ago, we created a marketplace to help you earn more from real-time competition for your inventory. Today’s exchange is not just an auction, but also a complete sales channel. With Ad Manager, you can curate who has access to your inventory, alongside all your reservation and programmatic demand, and optimize your relationships for yield.

So, with the integration of AdX into Ad Manager, we're retiring the Ad Exchange brand. The programmatic buyers and networks formerly called “AdX buyers” will now be known as “Authorized Buyers,” a name that reflects the close relationship you have with these partners. You’ll start seeing this change in the Ad Manager UI over the next several months.

Monetizing the new places where people are watching, playing or engaging

People now spend more time on their phones than anywhere else, and are watching more video—live or on demand—on a variety of large and small screens. This shift has created new opportunities for monetization, along with more challenges for managing ads across different screens, SDKs, and content distribution platforms.

Ad Manager gives you a single platform for delivering, measuring and optimizing ads wherever your audience is engaging—including connected TVs, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), mobile games and other apps, and platforms like YouTube and Apple News.

With Advanced TV solutions like Dynamic Ad Insertion for live and on -demand video, formats like native and six-second bumper ads, and yield optimization solutions like rewarded mediation and Exchange Bidding for mobile apps, we’ve evolved Ad Manager to keep up with your customers and support your new distribution channels.

Protecting you from bad actors

Over the last year, the digital advertising industry has faced a lot of challenges, from brand safety to ad fraud. These issues can degrade user experience with inappropriate ads and annoying creatives—or, even worse, harm users with malware-laden ads, and hurt advertisers with invalid, domain-spoofed inventory and non-human bot traffic.

With Ad Manager, you can be confident the ads we deliver will respect your brand and keep your users and advertisers safe. We have more than 30 controls to help you manage the type of ads you allow to make sure they meet your brand values. In 2017, our industry-leading spam detection and policy enforcement tools took down more than 3.2 billion ads before they reached users. To ensure you don’t lose money to domain spoofing, Google was the first to integrate the IAB TechLab’s ads.txt standard into all our ads platforms. Rest assured, you have a partner invested in protecting your brand and business as the industry continues to evolve.

A solid foundation for innovation

“Google's complete and integrated ad platform has helped accelerate revenue growth while freeing our team to focus on important relationships with our advertising partners and users”
Chris Janz, Managing Director of Fairfax, Australian Metro Publishing

We’re committed to making sure that Ad Manager supports your advertising business both today and in the future. While we may be bidding a fond farewell to the DoubleClick name, we are excited for the next chapter in our journey with you—one that’s focused on sustainable growth in an industry where the only constant is change.

Posted by Jonathan Bellack
Director of Product Management

We launched AdWords nearly 18 years ago with a simple goal—to make it easier for people to connect online with businesses. A search for eco-friendly stationery, quilting supplies, or for a service like a treehouse builder gave us an opportunity to deliver valuable ads that were useful and relevant in the moment. That idea was the start of our first advertising product, and led to the ads business we have today.

A lot has changed since then. Mobile is now a huge part of our everyday lives. People quickly switch from searching for products, to watching videos, browsing content, playing games and more. As a result, marketers have more opportunities to reach consumers across channels, screens and formats. The opportunity has never been more exciting, but it’s also never been more complex. Over the years, Google ads have evolved from helping marketers connect with people on Google Search, to helping them connect at every step of the consumer journey through text, video, display and more.

That’s why today we are introducing simpler brands and solutions for our advertising products: Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform, and Google Ad Manager. These new brands will help advertisers and publishers of all sizes choose the right solutions for their businesses, making it even easier for them to deliver valuable, trustworthy ads and the right experiences for consumers across devices and channels. As part of this change, we are releasing new solutions that help advertisers get started with Google Ads and drive greater collaboration across teams.

Google AdWords is becoming Google Ads

The new Google Ads brand represents the full range of advertising capabilities we offer today—on Google.com and across our other properties, partner sites and apps—to help marketers connect with the billions of people finding answers on Search, watching videos on YouTube, exploring new places on Google Maps, discovering apps on Google Play, browsing content across the web, and more. For small businesses specifically, we’re introducing a new campaign type in Google Ads that makes it easier than ever to get started with online advertising. It brings the machine learning technology of Google Ads to small businesses and helps them get results without any heavy lifting—so they can stay focused on running their businesses. To learn more, visit this post.

We'll introduce more new campaign types at Google Marketing Live. Sign up to watch the livestream on July 10th.

Stronger collaboration with Google Marketing Platform

We’re enabling stronger collaboration for enterprise marketing teams by unifying our DoubleClick advertiser products and the Google Analytics 360 Suite under a single brand: Google Marketing Platform. We’ve heard from marketers that there are real benefits to using ads and analytics technology together, including a better understanding of customers and better business results. Google Marketing Platform helps marketers achieve their goals by building on existing integrations between the Google Analytics 360 Suite and DoubleClick Digital Marketing. The platform helps marketers plan, buy, measure and optimize digital media and customer experiences in one place. To learn more, visit the Google Marketing Platform blog.

As part of Google Marketing Platform, we’re announcing Display & Video 360. Display & Video 360 brings together features from DoubleClick Bid Manager, Campaign Manager, Studio and Audience Center to allow creative, agency, and media teams to collaborate and execute ad campaigns end-to-end in a single place. We’ll share more details about Display & Video 360 in the coming weeks, including a demo during the keynote at Google Marketing Live.

Google Ad Manager: A unified platform

We recognize that the way publishers monetize their content has changed. With people accessing content on multiple screens, and with advertisers’ growing demand for programmatic access, publishers need to be able to manage their businesses more simply and efficiently. That’s why for the last three years, we’ve been working to bring together DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange in a complete and unified programmatic platform under a new name–Google Ad Manager. With this evolution, we’re excited to do even more for our partners—earning them more money, more efficiently, wherever people are watching videos, playing games or engaging with content, and however advertisers are looking to work with them. To learn more, visit the Google Ad Manager blog.

Transparency and controls people can trust

We know that the media and technology advertisers and publishers choose to use impacts the relationships they have with their customers. As always, our commitment is to ensure that all of our products and platforms set the industry’s highest standard in giving people transparency and choice in the ads they see. For example, we recently announced new Ads Settings and expanded Why this ad? across all of our services, and almost all websites and apps that partner with us to show ads.

You'll start to see the new Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform and Google Ad Manager brands over the next month.

We’ll be sharing more about these changes—and many other new Ads, Analytics and Platforms solutions designed to help you grow your business—at Google Marketing Live. Register now to watch live on July 10, 9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy
Senior Vice President, Ads & Commerce

Sign up to join the live streamed keynote at Google Marketing Live:

When: Tuesday, July 10, 2018 at 9 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET

Duration: 1 hour

Where: Here on the DoubleClick Publisher Blog It’s that time of year again! Join us as we unveil the latest Ads, Analytics and Platforms innovations at Google Marketing Live. Get a first look at new features and tools that will help you transform your business. Also gain access to the latest insights and trends that are shaping the future of the industry.

Register for the keynote live stream here. We’ll also make a recording available after the live stream for advertisers in other time zones.

Until then, subscribe to Think With Google, and follow us on Twitter, Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn for a sneak peek of what’s coming soon.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy
Senior Vice President, Ads & Commerce

Today, the majority of the internet is supported by digital advertising. But bad ad experiences—the ones that blare music unexpectedly, or force you to wait 10 seconds before you get to the page—are hurting publishers who make the content, apps and services we use everyday. When people encounter annoying ads, and then decide to block all ads, it cuts off revenue for the sites you actually find useful. Many of these people don't intend to defund the sites they love when they install an ad blocker, but when they do, they block all ads on every site they visit.

Last year we announced Funding Choices to help publishers with good ad experiences recover lost revenue due to ad blocking. While Funding Choices is still in beta, millions of ad blocking users every month are now choosing to see ads on publisher websites, or “whitelisting” that site, after seeing a Funding Choices message. In fact, in the last month over 4.5 million visitors who were asked to allow ads said yes, creating over 90 million additional paying page views for those sites.

Over the coming weeks, we’re expanding Funding Choices to 31 additional countries, giving publishers the ability to ask visitors from those countries to choose between allowing ads on a site, or purchasing an ad removal pass through Google Contributor. Also, we’ve started a test that allows publishers to use their own proprietary subscription services within Funding Choices.

How Funding Choices works

Funding Choice gives publishers a way to have a conversation with their site visitors through custom messages they can use to express how ad blocking impacts their business and content. When a visitor arrives at a site using an ad blocker, Funding Choices allows the site to display one of three message types to that user:

A dismissible message that doesn’t restrict access to content.

A dismissible message that counts and limits the number of page views that person is allowed per month, as determined by the site owner, before the content is blocked.

Or, a message that blocks access to content until the visitor chooses to allow ads on the site, or to pay to access the content with either the site’s proprietary subscription service or a pass that removes all ads on that site through Google Contributor.

On average, publishers using Funding Choices are seeing 16 percent of visitors allow ads on their sites with some seeing rates as high as 37 percent.

Ad blockers designed to remove all ads from all sites are making it difficult for publishers with good ad experiences to maintain sustainable businesses. Our goal for Funding Choices is to help publishers get paid for their work by reducing the impact of ad blocking on them, and we look forward to continuing to expand the product availability.

Posted by Varun Chirravuri
Product Manager

It’s not uncommon for a single TV episode to cost millions, if not tens of millions of dollars to produce. Everyday, teams of studio executives, producers, writers, and actors, all set out to do one thing–create the next big TV moment. But what about the moments in between the content? Commercial break experiences can play a big role in whether someone keeps watching your shows. By bringing the best parts of digital advertising like addressability to broadcast TV, we’re helping our partners keep their audiences captivated during ad breaks and watching longer.

Today, we’re sharing the momentum partners are seeing on our platforms and some of the ways in which we’re working with the industry to bring the performance of digital advertising to traditional linear broadcasts.

Delivering better ad experiences on Connected TVs for more partners

Our continued investments in products such as Dynamic Ad Insertion and Smarter TV ad breaks have delivered better ad experiences for people watching on Connected TVs and over-the-top devices; and created more value for our partners. In fact, across our platform, ad impressions served on living room screens have more than doubled in the past year.¹ And we expect this growth to continue as more broadcasters like Major League Baseball and Cheddar partner with DoubleClick to monetize their media.

Since Opening Day, Google has been working with Major League Baseball to monetize the live streams of their games on the MLB.TV app across Connected TVs and other OTT devices. Similarly, Cheddar is partnering with us to ensure no matter where people are accessing news, they’re getting seamless ad experiences.

Bringing addressability to traditional TV

We believe addressable TV ads provide a better experience for the viewer. On our path to enable addressability across the TV ecosystem, we’ve partnered with the National Association of Broadcasters and technology providers such as Unisoft, ATEME, S&T, OpenZNet, and Vewd in a new experiment, now on display at the NABShow.

This demo brings addressable ads into over-the-air broadcast streams via Smart TVs that support the ATSC 3.0 standard. It will feature two TV sets meant to simulate different personas or household types. While tuned to the same broadcast, DoubleClick will serve different ads to each of the TV sets.

In addition to being more relevant, the ads will also feature an interactive element. We’re looking forward to exploring more in this space as this technology evolves to make advertising experiences better for people, wherever they’re watching.

Connect with Google at the 2018 NABShow

To learn all the ways Google is working to improve the advanced TV audience experience, connect with us at the 2018 NABShow. For a full listing of our speaker sessions, visit our Google at NABShow event website here. Or stop by our booth in South Upper Hall #SU218.

Justin Bradbury Product Marketing Manager

¹ DoubleClick Internal Data, Sep 2016 - Aug 2017

The first ad server was created in 1995 with the goal of helping websites deliver ads online. Over the next twenty years, what was once a simple technology with limited capabilities would evolve into one of the most fundamental and advanced aspects of a media organization’s business.

Through that time, DoubleClick’s mission has remained the same: to help publishers maximize revenue and create sustainable businesses. It’s why we’ve been focused on providing our partners with deeper insights into their businesses with initiatives like the Insights Engine Project, and collaborating with the industry on products like Exchange Bidding.

When we first announced Exchange Bidding, we hoped that it would help publishers earn more money from their ad partners without sacrificing user experience across their properties. Exchange Bidding is now a significant revenue driver for hundreds of publishers who have grown their programmatic revenue by an average of double-digit percentage points.¹

Today, we’re excited to announce that Exchange Bidding is available with new features to all customers using DoubleClick for Publishers* globally.

Greater revenue, greater transparency

With Exchange Bidding, publishers can increase revenue by allowing multiple exchanges to compete with each other -- and with DoubleClick Ad Exchange -- in a unified auction. In addition to boosting CPM’s, Exchange Bidding provides publishers with a holistic view of each ad partner’s performance and a streamlined billing and payment process. Today we are rolling out new reporting capabilities to provide publishers with greater insights and transparency into each ad partner’s performance.

For example, Exchange Bidding customers can now generate reports across several new dimensions including demand channel, exchange partner, yield group or advertiser on a per-impression level. With these new insights, publishers can make smarter and faster decisions to ensure they’re getting the greatest value from every impression.

“Consolidated reporting through Exchange Bidding means that we can accurately track performance and trends for our demand partners in respect of our full ad stack. We're excited about Google's further developments in this area and look forward to utilising these new capabilities.”

- Alex Payne, VP Ad Platforms, VICE Media

Read how VICE Media boosted revenue across 500+ websites with Exchange Bidding. 

A growing network of global partners

As publisher adoption of Exchange Bidding has grown, so has our network of exchange partners. Publishers can now access real-time demand from more than 10 exchanges including new partners like Triplelift and Aerserv directly in DoubleClick.

Not only are publishers benefitting from Exchange Bidding, but our exchange partners are also seeing a positive impact on their business. RhythmOne, for example, has seen a 40% increase in programmatic revenue among their customers using Exchange Bidding. They’ve also benefited from access to higher quality inventory with cookie match rates exceeding 80%. Index Exchange also cites a 40% increase in total Exchange Bidding revenue attributed to mobile apps.

“Index Exchange’s partnership with Google provides new points of entry to publishers across the globe and allows us to rapidly grow our quality app supply. We’re excited more publishers now have access to these additional tools that will bolster revenue and drive demand for their business.”

- Alex Gardner, SVP Partner Development, Index Exchange

Paving the path for greater innovation

These results for our customers and exchange partners are just the beginning. To ensure publishers continue getting the greatest value for all their ad inventory, we’re expanding Exchange Bidding to more ad formats like video ads and transaction types such as programmatic deals. Both of these products are currently in closed alpha and will be released to beta in the upcoming months.

If you are interested in using Exchange Bidding on DoubleClick, please reach out to your account manager or sign up here.

*Exchange Bidding is currently available in closed beta to publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business

¹Google Internal Data, May 2017

Posted by Jonathan Bellack Director of Product Management, Publisher Platforms

In May, Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect. Google is committed to complying with the GDPR, and in preparation, we’ve been working with our customers and partners to inform them about changes we’re making to our policies across our various products.

Today we’re informing advertisers and publisher partners about changes to our ad policies. Google already requires publishers and advertisers using our advertising services to get consent from end users to use our services, as required under existing EU law. However, the GDPR will further refine these requirements.

To comply, we will be updating our EU consent policy when the GDPR takes effect and the revised policy will require that publishers take extra steps in obtaining consent from their users. Before May, we will launch a solution to support publishers that want to show non-personalized ads, and we are working with industry groups, including IAB Europe, to explore proposed consent solutions for publishers.

We’re aware that our customers and partners - European and international - have significant obligations under these new laws, as does Google. Publisher and advertiser partners can expect further updates as we approach the date when GDPR takes effect.

Posted by Carlo D’Asaro Biondo
President, EMEA Partnerships

In an industry moving increasingly towards automation and efficiency, traditional reservations (the one-to-one selling and management of direct media buys) represented $26B in global display and video spend in 2017.¹ While media buyers and sellers may still prefer to negotiate their premium reservations directly, new research from The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) suggests that using Programmatic Guaranteed for the setup and management of direct media buys can save both parties significant time and add value. The report concluded that publishers and agencies/advertisers save 57% and 29% more time, respectively, when using Programmatic Guaranteed deals versus traditional reservations; while still maintaining the same level of control over their campaigns.²

BCG’s report, “A Guaranteed Opportunity in Programmatic Advertising”, investigates the end-to-end direct deal workflows of over 40 advertisers, agencies, and publishers across 12 countries running both Programmatic Guaranteed and traditional reservation deals. The primary objective of the research is to quantify the operational efficiency of each buying methodology. It also explores the performance lift advertisers can gain from Programmatic Guaranteed’s advanced features, like Audience List Guarantees, Custom Creatives, and Frequency Management.

Get the full report to find out how Programmatic Guaranteed can save you time, as well as to learn:

• The expected growth of programmatic reservations over the next 3 years
• The (8) areas where Programmatic Guaranteed improves operational workflows for buyers and sellers
• The (4) levers you can pull to make the most of your Programmatic Guaranteed deals

Download the report here.

Justin Bradbury Product Marketing Manager

Source:

¹ Magna Global, “Programmatic 2017,” September 2017.

² The Boston Consulting Group, “A Guaranteed Opportunity in Programmatic Advertising, February 2018. The Boston Consulting Group, “A Guaranteed Opportunity in Programmatic Advertising, February 2018.

The best ads tell stories that pull people in, capture their attention and make them want to believe in what they’re being told. Digital video has given advertisers the canvas to do just that on more screens than ever before. And they’re taking note–digital video spend grew 35% last year alone. ¹ But as powerful as video ads are, they have historically been limited to the confines of players and in-stream video content–missing important consumer moments throughout the day like reading the news, playing a game, or scrolling through a social app.

To help advertisers engage their audiences in more places, and to enable publishers to capture growing video budgets across their non-video content on sites and apps, we recently released four new programmatic out-stream video formats in a new beta on DoubleClick. We’re also working closely with the IAB Tech Lab Open Measurement Working Group to ensure that all of our new video formats are easily measurable across all platforms and devices.

In-article and in-feed formats put video ads front and center in publisher content

With out-stream ads on DoubleClick, publishers can serve video ads across their content feeds and within their articles programmatically. Both in-feed and in-article video ads seamlessly fit a user's scrolling behavior on both web and apps; and they are muted by default to ensure they don’t disrupt the user. Moreover, the ads only play when 50% or more of the ad is in view, ensuring higher viewability rates. If users choose to engage with an ad, they can tap to unmute the video.

On average, out-stream video ads are earning 8.9x higher CPMs compared to standard banner ad CPMs on DoubleClick Ad Exchange. ² And in certain regions, among the 100+ publishers who have already signed up for the beta, partners have seen substantially greater CPM lift as we’ve continued to fine tune and scale the new formats.

In-Article Video Demo

In-Feed Video Demo

Native video ads conform to perform

Native video ads are designed to fit the form and function of the surrounding page or app. Using standardized ad components like headline, description, logo, and video files, publishers can create custom ad experiences that are seamlessly integrated across their sites and apps.

Since launching their “Adapt” native video ad format with DoubleClick, Time Inc. has seen a 5x increase in video inventory available across their properties. Ashley Allen, Director of Ad Product Solutions at Time Inc. commented, “Adapt gives us the flexibility to meet the demands of our advertisers while responding to the behaviors of our audiences. DoubleClick’s native ad technology has enabled us to capture this opportunity as quickly as we’ve been able to.”

Native Video Demo

Rewarded video ads deliver value for users and engagement for game developers

Games are among the most popular types of apps, pulling in a high percentage of male and female users of all ages, 96% of whom engage with gaming apps every week.³ Game developers using DoubleClick Rewarded video ads are capitalizing on growing usage by creating non-intrusive, user-initiated ad experiences that offer users something of value (like an extra life in a game) in exchange for viewing a video ad.

In 2017, Nestlé ran a campaign in the UK with King, the gaming company behind Candy Crush, offering users an extra life or boost in their games in exchange for watching a video ad. The user-initiated placements generated a 99.5% view-through rate and a 3% click-through rate across Android devices.⁴ Performance like this underlines the fact that when users’ experiences and choices are respected, both the advertiser and the publisher benefit from increased engagement.

Rewarded Video Demo

Ensuring accountability across new video formats, devices and platforms

In addition to developing new video ad formats, we're also working to ensure that video viewability is easily measurable across all platforms and devices -- including mobile apps. To accomplish this, we’re integrating the Open Measurement SDK into both our Google Mobile Ads and Interactive Mobile Ads SDKs. Once implemented, mobile app publishers and game developers will be able to power any vendor’s measurement tools, which in turn will reduce development time and streamline deal negotiations with advertisers.

The initiative marks a significant step towards improving the measurability of in-app video ads and we're working closely with partners like King to test the Google Mobile Ads SDK integration in their gaming apps.

"For the industry at large, The Open Measurement SDK will create a universal standard for the collection of video viewability data and reduce reporting inconsistencies across the mobile app landscape. For King, the single-source solution will enable us to engage with advertisers regardless of their preferred measurement vendor. As a result, mobile in app video will become a more predictable advertising channel, which in turn will create more demand for our inventory."

--Brian Ames, President of Advertising at King

Out-stream video formats are poised to play an important role in the future of video advertising for publishers, because they create a meaningful opportunity to increase the demand for and value of their content and audiences. As advertisers continue to demand more premium video inventory, non-video publishers and game developers should take note, as they may be sitting on a treasure trove of video ad impressions. We look forward to sharing more of our work and innovations in these areas in the months ahead.

Posted by Benyah Shaparenko Product Manager, Google

¹ “Global Ad Spend Forecast”, Dentsu Aegis Network, Jan 2018 
² DoubleClick Ad Exchange Data, Sept-Dec 2017
³ ”Something for everyone,” Ipsos MORI mobile app research report, July 2017
⁴ “How Nestlé Achieved Brand Goals in Mobile App Environment”, Think with Google, May 2017