Publisher of popular titles like Gawker, Gizmodo and Lifehacker, Gawker Media delivers two billion ad impressions monthly to tens of millions of readers across its eight different properties. Managing ad operations at this scale efficiently is a challenging task. In an effort to increase operational efficiency, Erin Pettigrew, Gawker Media’s head of ad operations, upgraded to the new DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) platform from DART for Publishers. We recently caught up with Erin on how the team is faring following the move.

Operational efficiency increased an estimated 15%
DFP’s intuitive interface and streamlined workflows have allowed Erin’s team to operate more efficiently by approximately 15%. “With more efficient trafficking, we’re booking more revenue in our system than ever before. And fewer screens and simpler processes means we have a much happier traffic team,” says Erin.

Real-time response to client needs
DFP makes performance data available within 20 - 30 minutes of a campaign delivering (compared with 24 hours on DART). As a result, Gawker Media has been able to monitor and optimize campaign performance and handle client demands in real-time. “Being able to confirm correct delivery for a client just hours after launch has given much needed confidence to our sales and account teams,” says Erin. Furthermore, with access to the DFP interface from mobile devices and browsers, the team can respond to customer requests for campaign changes at any moment, from anywhere.

Increased focus on business optimizations
With DFP’s efficiency-driving features, Erin and her team dedicate more resources towards growing Gawker Media. As she sums up, “With the time that DFP saves, we can focus on other priorities - optimization, troubleshooting and improving client relationships - that help further build our business”.

Read Gawker Media’s full story here.

This post is part of the PubTalk series of conversations with publishers

Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Manager

Today at the London ATS Trading summit we announced the launch of Audience Extension, a new feature within DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) designed to generate more premium revenue for publishers by leveraging their audiences across the web.

Audience extension enables you to reach your audience across other publishers, bundle these impressions with your own inventory, and resell those packages to your direct advertisers at a premium. Audience extension inventory comes from the vast pool of brand safe inventory via publishers on DoubleClick Ad Exchange.  Audience Extension can be used without leaving DFP; flight dates, targeting and bid parameters are set directly within your core ad server.  

Audience extension is best suited to publishers with high value content channels within their owned and operated inventory that are consistently sold out, or who have defined audiences onsite that have a value to advertisers that transcends the context of their own site. It’s also used by publishers looking to reach a critical mass of users from a given geo-location.

Key Benefits

• A single place to manage, execute and optimize buying across owned & operated and external inventory
• Bid management capabilities integrated in the core ad server
• Integrated data management
• Cross-inventory performance reporting, analytics & insights
• Complexity hidden from sales team & ad operations

Posted by Sean Harvey, Business Product Manager

We’re always adding new features to DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP). The list below contains some highlights. For a complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.

Available in DFP and DFP Small Business:

Line Item Bulk Edit:  We’re constantly working on improving the trafficking process to enable you to create and change your campaigns more easily and effectively. You can now change the start and end date, the quantity, and the rate of several line items at once by using the bulk edit feature on the order overview page.

New AdMob SDK: The new Google AdMob SDK v6.1.0 for Android and v6.1.4 and v6.1.5 (non-UDID and UDID, respectively) for iOS are available for download. The new versions include the ability to specify multiple ad sizes in an AdView, introduce an app event listener for custom creatives that fire custom app events, and fix bugs reported from previous versions of the SDK.

Available in DFP:

Copy Creative Templates: If there is a creative template that you often use, you can now copy the template if you would like to re-use it for new creatives.

Available in DFP Mobile:

Allow non-matching images in aspect ratio creatives: Offers the ability to upload an image asset which doesn't match the aspect ratio you have selected in the line item.

Suggested ad units: You can now create mobile ad units by approving suggestions generated from actual traffic. When a not-yet existing ad unit generates impressions we will show it after some impressions as a suggested ad unit in the inventory screen of the network where users can approve them to become actual ad units. This saves you time by automatically creating ad units in advance, while still maintaining control over your overall inventory structure.

Multiple sizes for ad units in applications: You can now create ad units with multiple sizes in applications, allowing you to sell high-value custom sizes without compromising your ability to deliver standard banners or use ad networks.

Available in DFP Video:

Pausing / Archiving for Content & Sources: Content and Source will have new status: Archiving. Archiving a content source marks all of its content as archived. You can also mark video content as archived and this will persist until the user sets it back to the "video source setting"

DFP API Hangouts:
On September 18th at 11am PT join the DFP API Team and Ad-Juster in a hangout focused on how Ad-Juster integrates with the DFP API to make Publisher's lives easier. Ad-Juster, a company that helps ad operations teams automate the pulling of countless reports from multiple sources, will present a demonstration of their tool and also discuss how they integrate with the API.  Add questions before and during the live hangout and don't forget to add this event to your calendar. To ensure your computer is ready please follow the instructions prior to the event. Thanks, and see you there!

Posted by Alex Strittmatter, DFP Product Specialist

66% of the population accesses the Internet every day on their smartphone (source: Google and Ipsos Our Mobile Planet: Understanding the Mobile Consumer, May 2012), and never leaves home without their device(s).

The prevalence of mobile devices enables users to constantly connect to a publisher’s content, whether on-the-go, at work, or on the couch at home.

For a publisher’s advertising business, this means display advertising has needed to evolve from purely ads in web browsers, to ads across all screens and devices. You have to help advertisers connect with your audience in whatever setting and on whatever screen they're consuming your content.

At the heart of DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), we've built a single platform that enables publishers to seamlessly manage all of their digital advertising under one roof. In the most recent release of DFP, we’re excited to bring even more DFP desktop features to mobile so that trafficking a campaign to your website is no different to trafficking a campaign to your mobile site and application. New features include:

• Frequency capping: You can now enforce frequency caps on mobile web sites and in mobile applications. Frequency caps can be applied to mobile campaigns and to mobile ad units, allowing you fine-grained control over the advertiser and user experience.
• Suggested ad units: You can now create mobile ad units by approving suggestions generated from actual traffic. This saves you time by automatically creating ad units in advance, while still maintaining control over your overall inventory structure.
• Multiple sizes for ad units in applications: You can now create ad units with multiple sizes in applications, allowing you to sell high-value custom sizes without compromising your ability to deliver standard banners or use ad networks.
• Data transfer for mobile: If you are using the data transfer beta, you will now have access to mobile-specific reporting data, including device, carrier and OS information.

In addition to bringing the best-in-class desktop functionality of DFP to mobile, we recognize that mobile is indeed different, and presents publishers with unique advertising opportunities not found on desktop. To help publishers capitalize on new opportunities and the uniqueness of mobile, we’ve recently released the following mobile functionality:

• SDK mediation: You can now connect with major in-app advertising networks, including iAd, via the networks’ own SDKs. You can choose which SDKs to include in your application with our adapter-based approach, minimising application size and giving you control over updates. You also have the option to serve ads from a sequence of ad networks to maximize fill rates and improve RPMs.
• App events: You can now provide a custom advertising experience by extending the Google AdMob SDK. Creatives can pass messages to the application, allowing the application to respond (for example, to change the background color). This enables truly integrated ad formats while still using the SDK to do the heavy lifting.
• Support for pre-loading ads: You can now pre-load ads from DFP Mobile. This enables you to improve the user experience, whether to mitigate the effect of slow mobile connections, or to match the smooth user experience of the rest of your application.

With DFP, we’re committed to giving publishers the tools they need to seamlessly manage and deliver all of their digital advertising in order to take full advantage of the multi-screen world. 

Posted by Marcel Gordon, Product Manager

Our engineers have been hard at work during the last few weeks to provide you with some new, exciting features in DFP. For a complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers.

Available in DFP:

Teams: Imagine that your organization operates an East and West coast sales team, and you'd like to restrict access to your East coast orders and advertisers so only users on your East coast team can view and edit the campaigns. With the new Teams functionality in DFP, you can now group your network's users into teams, defined by you, enabling you to restrict access to any combination of companies, orders and inventory. Learn more.

Auto-Macro Insertion for Creative Templates: The key to successfully serving third-party creatives and minimizing discrepancies is to make sure that you are properly inserting macros into the third-party code. A macro is a short piece of code provided by DFP that will enable your third-party tags to properly track clicks or track impressions.  In addition to automatically inserting macros for reconginzed third-party creatives, DFP will now also recognize and insert macros for  third-party code in custom creatives and custom creative templates. This provides you with the same macro-insertion support and efficiencies you are used to when trafficking regular 3rd party creatives.

Ad Exclusions: There are situations when you will want to avoid an advertiser running on a competitor's website. For example, if you've got a news story about a plane crash, you probably don't want to run airline ads next to it. Ad Exclusions provide controls to prevent labelled line items to deliver on specific inventory. These labels can additionally be added per default on company level to ensure a smoother workflow for your trafficking operations.

Creative Upload for Standalone Creative Library: The recently launched Standalone Creative Library now supports the ability to upload creatives and creatives sets directly, which can be stored for later use.

Local Time Zone Trafficking: In addition to being able to change the role and language you use DFP in, you can now change a DFP user's time zone to match the user's location. When you do, the displayed times throughout the trafficking sections of DFP will be adjusted to match the time in the location you've set for the user.

Available in DFP and DFP Small Business:

Additional Reporting Scheduling options: We’ve added further  granularity to reporting scheduling options to give you more insights into the health of your inventory. You can now schedule your reports with additional breakdowns such as year-to-date, quarter-to-date, month-to-date, and lifetime.

SDK Mediation for Mobile: SDK Mediation is a form of ad network optimization for mobile in DFP which allows you to set up a waterfall (or daisy chain) of networks, where one network after another is called until an impression is filled. Use this new feature to send impressions from mobile applications to ad networks via the ad networks' own SDKs.This is useful when:

• An ad network only accepts requests from its own SDK
• Certain custom formats are only available in the ad network's SDK
• Information provided by the SDK, such as location information or a unique user ID, enables higher CPMs

Available in DFP Mobile:

Frequency Capping: Frequency capping is now available for mobile in two ways:

• Line item frequency capping: For mobile web, this uses cookies in a similar fashion as desktop (the DoubleClick cookie where possible; otherwise the DFP first party cookie). For mobile applications, this uses a double-anonymised identifier generated by the Google AdMob SDK.
• Ad unit frequency capping: Ad unit frequency capping now works for mobile in cases where there is an identifier available.

Available in DFP Video:

• Fallback Image for VAST Non-linear ads: It’s now possible to display a fallback image when VAST non-linear ads fail to render.
• VPAID Creative Validation: DFP will validate hosted linear and non-linear VPAID creatives and notify the user if it's invalid.

Posted by Alex Strittmatter, DFP Product Specialist