‘PubTalk’ is a new program highlighting publishers’ perspectives on display products and industry trends. In our first installment, we spoke with Billy Shipp of Flixster on managing ad operations in the face of rapidly changing technology.

If you love movies, you’ve probably visited Flixster or RottenTomatoes on your desktop or mobile device. Every month, over 30 million people visit Flixster communities to post comments, read reviews and watch movie trailers. Managing ad operations across these sites for different devices and formats is complex. Billy Shipp, Director of Ad Operations at Flixster, is always on the lookout for solutions that increase his team’s operational efficiency. Accordingly, Flixster recently upgraded to the next generation of the DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) ad serving platform.

For Flixster, many aspects of DFP increased productivity, including improved user interfaces that are familiar to users of other Google products, faster reporting and better forecasting. “A lot of this business is built around emerging platforms and emerging ad formats”, says Billy. Having to use multiple ad serving platforms to manage ads across devices created a lot of inefficiency. DFP helped Billy solve this problem by seamlessly integrating with DFP Video and DFP Mobile.

“Not having to go to a separate interface to manage inventory, to set up campaigns, to pull reports, to optimize campaigns - having all of that in a single workflow makes it so much easier for ad operations folks to be effective,” remarks Billy. “It gives them that global view of how a campaign is performing, without having to manually download reports and aggregate them.”

40% in time savings with DFP Video
The Flixster team reduced the time spent managing video campaigns by 40% after switching to DFP Video. “We can just take a video file, upload it to DFP and throw in any third-party tracking. You guys encode it in all the various formats and have it just work across different browsers and plugins and we don’t even have to think about the connectivity of the user - you guys will handle all that. With other video ad serving solutions I’ve used in the past, there’s usually a lot more effort that goes into setting up video ad campaigns,” says Billy. “When we’re reporting on campaigns that have video line items as part of the IO, you can see the whole IO - display and video - in one set of reporting.”

Operations scale easily with DFP Mobile
Although Flixster is currently in the process of migrating more of its mobile inventory to DFP, Billy isn’t too worried about the move. “Because we’re using a single trafficking interface for mobile in the overall DFP workflow, that enables us to train new folks on a single process and have them intuitively know what to do,” says Billy.

As advertising continues to expand to new formats and devices, ad ops teams need a solution that can evolve with their needs. For Billy Shipp, that solution is DFP. “The upgrade platform allows, from my experience, for a faster cycle of iteration and development, and really will be the platform for the future of ad delivery.”

Read more about Flixster’s experience with DoubleClick for Publishers here.

About Flixster:
Flixster is the leading online destination for movie enthusiasts with over 30M unique visitors per month and 2 billion movie ratings. In addition to Flixster.com and RottenTomatoes.com, Flixster also operates the leading movie applications on iPhone, Google TV, Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry.


Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Manager

We’re always adding new features to DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP). We’ll be periodically posting lists of the highlights to this blog to help you stay up-to-date with all of the latest DFP developments. The list below contains some highlights. For a more complete list, please visit the DFP or DFP Small Business Help Centers. 

Available in DFP and Small Business:

• 'As Many As Possible' Improvements: We've updated the 'As many as possible' creative display feature to prevent creatives from serving part way down a page if another line item has delivered in the first ad unit (i.e. if another line item serves to the top banner spot, we won't serve the 300x25 to the mid page since the roablock would be broken) 
• User Interface Improvements: We know your time is valuable, and we’re always working on new ways to make the DFP interface as quick and efficient for you as possible. To help with this goal, you can now quickly navigate between different tabs within DFP without requiring the page to reload. 
• Yield Reporting: The new Yield Report type makes it easier for publishers to understand their overall yield -- how your impressions and revenue breakout by deal type. This new report displays revenue and impression data for direct and indirect sales, helps you easily uncover unfilled impressions, and enables you to compare the performance of each ad type from within a single report. 

 Available in DFP:

• DFP Mobile: Capture opportunities beyond the desktop with DFP’s full service mobile ad serving module to deliver dynamic, interactive ads across your mobile web pages and applications. Read more. 
• DFP Tag Troubleshooter (TagShooter): The new DFP TagShooter allows you to easily view the real-time decision making process DFP is using to determine which ad to serve. With this information, you'll be well equipped to quickly identify why an ad isn't delivering or why another ad is appearing in its place. Try it now. 
• Enhancement to Sponsorship Line Items: For Sponsorship line items, you can now set an impression goal in order to monitor progress of impressions you’ve contractually sold with the progress bar.
• Multi-level Ad Unit Reports: There are now three different options for viewing data in ad unit reports. These new views are particularly useful for multi-level ad units, and will help you view data for all of your ad units at once rather than just parent or child ad units.

Posted by Alex Strittmatter, DFP Product Specialist

Last March, Google introduced the +1 button on search results to make it easier for people to get recommendations from the people they trust right when they’re searching. And then in October, the +1 button and social annotations were made available to display ads from AdWords that win in the Ad Exchange auction.

Today, we’re excited to expand this capability to publishers who sell their ad space directly to advertisers using a new creative template available in DART for Publishers and the new DFP. Using the Image or Flash with Google +1 custom creative template, you can now add the Google +1 icon to your ads so that people can share your advertisers' offers with people across the web.

As results become more personal and relevant, we believe that users are not only more likely to click, but they're more likely to act as well. Personalized annotations bring you pre-qualified users, who are not only actively looking for your content, but are actively engaged after seeing recommendations from friends and contacts. In fact, 71% of shoppers say that recommendations from friends and family impact their purchasing decisions (Harris Interactive, June 2010). This powerful combination may result in more conversion and deeper engagement with your business overall.

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

For more information on how to incorporate the +1 button into your ad, please visit the DART or new DFP Help Centers.

Posted by David Flinner, Product Manager

(Originally posted on the Official Google blog)

In June, we announced that we are acquiring Admeld, a New York-based company that helps large publishers (also known as the “sell-side” by people, like me, who live and breathe display advertising) maximize their revenues from online advertising. We’re pleased that the U.S. Department of Justice has today cleared this deal. We’ll close the acquisition in the coming days and then start the real work—building improved products and services that help our publisher partners to make more informed decisions across all their ad space, and to grow their revenues.

The opportunity for major online publishers is huge...and growing. People are spending more and more time consuming online content across numerous devices, advertisers are running more online and mobile campaigns to reach them; and ads continue to get more engaging and relevant. This represents an unprecedented moment for publishers. We believe that improved technology and services can help publishers seize it and make online advertising work much better.

For now, it’s business as usual—Admeld’s products will operate separately to Google’s existing solutions (such as DFP and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange). But over time, there are opportunities to bring the best of both businesses together in a variety of ways; and to develop entirely new solutions, too.

As we do this, Admeld and Google are guided by some core shared beliefs:

• We want to give publishers more control over their ad space, and offer more flexible ways to manage and sell it. Publishers’ businesses should influence the technology they use; not the other way around
• We believe that publishers can make better decisions to maximize their revenues when they have better insights at their fingertips
• We envisage a much simpler system that enables publishers to manage and sell their ad space—across desktop, video, mobile, tablets and more

The content produced by Google’s and Admeld’s publisher partners is the lifeblood of the Internet. We can’t wait to start building the next generation of tools and services that will help them grow their businesses.

Update December 6, 2011: Our acquisition of Admeld has now closed.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display Advertising

Yesterday, we announced DFP Mobile, our new mobile module for the DFP ad serving platform. DFP Mobile gives publishers access to an expanded set of mobile features including extended mobile rich media capabilities, advanced targeting options, better support for feature phones, and tighter integrations with Google AdSense, AdMob, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and mobile ad networks.

To learn more about DFP Mobile, join us at OPS Mobile, AdMonsters' mobile advertising conference, which will be held December 7, 2011 in New York. Register today to hear Marcel Gordon, DFP Mobile Product Manager, and Chris LaSala, Director of Mobile Partnerships, speak about how you can capture opportunities beyond the desktop with DFP Mobile.

You can also view Marcel’s recent Q&A with AdMonsters about DFP Mobile here.

Posted by Stephen Kliff, Product Marketing Manager