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

Yesterday, we announced several exciting new additions to Google+, including open signups. We’d like to announce one more addition for our DoubleClick Ad Exchange publishers, +1 on display ads from AdWords.

Starting in October, the +1 button and social annotations will begin to appear on display ads from AdWords that win in the Ad Exchange auction. With a single click, people will now be able to endorse specific ads and make them more likely to appear to their social connections. We believe that these recommendations could lead your audience to notice ads on your site more, leading to more clicks and higher returns for you over time.

For example, take Susan, who sees an ad for a good deal on flights. She +1’s the ad, thinking her friends might value this deal. Now, when Susan’s friends and contacts are signed in to their Google accounts, they’ll be able to see Susan’s picture across the bottom of the ad, with a note saying she +1’d it.

The +1 button and recommendations will appear at the bottom of display ads.

Susan’s friends and contacts will also be more likely to see the ad. While the dynamics of the AdWords and Ad Exchange auctions aren’t changing, the +1’d ad will now be included in AdWord’s bid on the Ad Exchange for the pages Susan’s friends visit, as we know that recommendations from friends can be a strong signal of an ad’s relevance.

All eligible ads from AdWords and other networks will continue to compete in the ad exchange auction, and we’ll continue to show the ones that have the highest CPM. +1 button clicks are not counted as clicks on ads. Although you won’t receive any revenue for +1 button clicks, +1’s will help Ad Exchange to deliver more useful AdWords ads to your users.

On mobile, the +1 button will replace the existing ‘g’ logo and recommendations will appear for several seconds, then fade out.

If you’d prefer not to see the +1 button on ads that AdWords delivers, you can opt out by contacting your account manager.

Display ads become much more powerful when people can see which of their social connections have chosen to endorse them, leading to a better advertising experience and higher returns for you.

If you’d like to learn more about the +1 button on AdWords display ads served via the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, please visit the Ad Exchange Help Center.

Posted by Christian Oestlien, Product Manager