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