Constantly innovating: the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform

Earlier this summer we announced we were bringing together DoubleClick’s advertising technology products into the DoubleClick Digital Marketing (DDM) platform for advertisers and agencies.  



Over the coming months we’ll be giving you regular updates on this journey as we launch upgrades of the DoubleClick products, implement cross-product integrations, and deliver innovative, new features within the individual products.

We’ve had a busy summer, and are excited to share the following details:

• Platforms upgrades -  An important first step to delivering on the vision of DDM is upgrading the individual DoubleClick products to take advantage of Google’s technology. Today we’re highlighting the progress we’ve made upgrading two platforms: DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick Studio.

DoubleClick Bid Manager -- Google acquired the Invite Media demand-side platform in 2010, and since then we have completely rebuilt the platform.  We announced during the summer that Bid Manager was going into beta and now, with a notable volume of traffic flowing through the system, we’ll be making this new version available to all customers in October.  Customers using the new Bid Manager to target, optimize, and buy display media have seen improved performance, including seeing 16% more inventory due to infrastructure improvements that reduce our latency with exchanges.

DoubleClick Studio version 2 -- We have also upgraded our rich media production tool, DoubleClick Studio, which facilitates a streamlined workflow between media and creative agencies for the web’s most engaging ad formats. Almost 80% of creative agencies using DoubleClick Studio have already transitioned to the new version, which delivers a faster and more responsive UI and integrated dynamic content capabilities.

Upgrading the individual platforms also gives us the opportunity to make sure that they work better together to unlock even more opportunities for our customers.

• Streamlining cross-product interactions:  When we asked leading agencies and advertisers how much time their staff could save by working in an integrated ad platform, they estimated they could save about a third of hours spent per week -- or about an extra month every year each team member could invest in other activities -- just by reducing manual processes and working in a single system.

With the DoubleClick Bid Manager upgrade and its integration with DDM, buyers can now access cross-channel opportunities that are only available through a unified system.  For example,  we’re excited to announce the ability for agencies and marketers using DoubleClick Search to show consumers display ads via DoubleClick Bid Manager based on their interactions with paid search ads. Marketers have struggled to coordinate their search and display marketing efforts, and this new integration makes it easier, with no new site tags and no new products to learn.  

Another subtle step toward cross-product interaction is the rollout this week of a new universal navigation bar and application switcher for users of DoubleClick Search, DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick Studio. While a simple change, we believe this new UI will facilitate seamless switching between DoubleClick products, saving time for marketers who are using our platform to manage their campaigns across multiple channels.   

• Innovation across the platform:  In addition to integrating our platforms, we are continuing to invest in our existing products.  As an example of this, we’re excited to announce the launch later this month of Attribution Modeling in Multi-Channel Funnels in DoubleClick for Advertisers.

Advertisers use a variety of channels, messages and ads to engage customers. Determining which of these efforts is most effective in converting customers can be difficult (see related post here).  Attribution analysis can help identify what is driving customers, but until recently it’s only been practical for the most sophisticated advertisers.  By the end of September, we’re making attribution modeling available to anyone using DFA -- for free.

Some benefits of this approach include:

1. Ready to use data -- the attribution modeling data will live within DFA, so there’s no delay between when you want to run an analysis, and when you can actually start.


2. Flexible, customizable, transparent models -- you can take advantage of five standard attribution models in DFA, or build your own custom model tailored to the needs of your business


3. It’s free -- no need to build your own system for this kind of analysis. We’re giving it to you as part of DFA, with your data loaded and ready to go.

We're rapidly delivering on our vision for a fully integrated experience and common workflows across DoubleClick solutions -- from ad serving to buying and analytics.  We’re excited to be on this journey with our customers and believe that by delivering an integrated experience, we can help the industry truly unlock the full potential of digital marketing. Stay tuned for more updates, there’s a lot more to come!

Posted by: Jason Miller

DoubleClick Search gets UI, control, and transparency improvements with new Performance Bidding Suite

As a search marketer, you know that bid optimization is one of the critical aspects of managing search at scale, providing sophisticated technology to meet your unique business goals. Over the past 18 months, the DoubleClick Search team has been focused on enhancing our automated bidding tools -- understanding that this is the engine that drives campaign performance. We've rebuilt our bid optimization platform from the ground up -- no single line of code is the same! -- and our users are already seeing some impressive results: 88% have experienced significant improvements in campaign performance, with 50% doubling their conversions at half the CPA (1).



Our investments in bid optimization span beyond revamped technology and algorithms. We wanted to make it easier for you to state your goals and monitor performance, to better harness and discover the power of automated strategies. The result is our new Performance Bidding Suite, which includes updates to the user interface (UI), new strategy options, and increased transparency into bid engine decisions. With our Performance Bidding Suite, you can:

• Quickly find the right goal with a refreshed user interface. Easily express bid optimization goals that match your business objectives. Whether you’re looking to maximize revenue or target a position, the new UI makes it even easier to find the right strategy for your unique goals. Our updated UI is designed to capture new bid strategies as they are released.


• Easily enter your Target Spend goals. With our new Target Spend strategy, maximize important KPIs like actions, transactions, revenue or clicks within a given monthly spend. Learn more


• Efficiently set default minimum and maximum bids on a strategy. Spend more time managing bid limits for the keywords you care about most, while DoubleClick Search handles the rest through a bid strategy-wide setting.


• Exercise even more advanced controls. The Advanced Configuration tab in the new bid strategy UI is designed for those who want to even further influence bid strategies. The first option we’re releasing gives you control over how a bid strategy handles high-traffic or low-converting keywords in ROI strategies. Stay tuned for more advanced controls. Learn more

In addition to a cleaner interface, new strategies, and advanced controls, the Performance Bidding Suite provides increased transparency into bid decisions and impact. Drive more insights with features that allow you to:

• Chart your Max CPC bids to visualize trends over time. You can now chart keyword bids for a defined date range, alongside any other metric in our UI to easily analyze bidding frequency and bid changes.


• Better understand our decision-making with bid rationale summary. As part of the change history tool, our new bid rationale feature (beta) reveals the reasoning behind any changes to specific bids.


• Preview intended bids. Our bid preview feature shows the target bid DoubleClick Search intends to submit for a particular keyword. This provides insight into the range of bids the system is likely to submit, based on the current bid and performance, to offer guidance in setting bid limits.

With these transparency features from the Performance Bidding Suite, you have powerful insights into how different settings impact campaign performance, and can tweak these settings if needed.



If you'd like to get started exploring the Performance Bidding Suite, you can check out the latest release notes and updated articles in the Help Center, or view our recorded webinar here.



Posted by the DoubleClick Search team



1. Google internal data, 2012

A digital marketing platform to win the moments that matter

Today, at the DoubleClick Insights conference, we’re unveiling DoubleClick Digital Marketing: the first modern ad platform built for the modern digital world. The improvements we’re announcing today represent the biggest ever overhaul of our DoubleClick ad platform and are the result of a great deal of hard work over the last few years. This fully integrated, unified platform and its components will be rolling out to partners over the coming months.



You can click here to watch a livestream of the event:






A platform for today

Today’s consumers work, play and share, moving seamlessly between formats and devices. However, for agencies and advertisers, the process of connecting with consumers is anything but seamless. It’s hard to reach the right audience at the right moment with the right message when every channel requires its own system and you’re patching together, and switching, between ad platforms that aren’t in sync. In fact, in a recent survey of 300 clients, marketers and agencies, they told us their team members are spending almost two days a week working across various digital platforms, often on manual workflow tasks. They estimate an integrated digital platform could liberate a third of that time. That’s an extra month every year that each team member can invest in other campaigns and new business.



Based on what we’ve heard from our customers, we challenged ourselves to re-invent ad buying with a unified platform:

• Can we build an ad management platform that’s comprehensive, so that clients can manage all channels in one place, across all formats and devices?


• Can we build a seamless platform, so that clients can easily optimize, tailor, measure and compare all elements of their campaigns, using a common language and interface?


• Can we ensure that it’s customizable, so that marketers can easily plug in their own technology, data and third-party suppliers?


• Can we make ad buying faster, to dramatically speed up data analysis and slash manual campaign management activities?

A platform that works better together

DoubleClick Digital Marketing is our answer. The new platform comprises the following components, which will be fully integrated and work together to enable seamless ad campaign management for agencies and advertisers:

• DoubleClick Digital Marketing Manager, our upgraded DoubleClick ad server, used by thousands of marketers and agencies worldwide to manage directly bought ad space.


• DoubleClick Bid Manager, our new demand-side platform, rebuilt on our DoubleClick technology, making it faster and more flexible. Many Invite Media customers are currently in the process of being upgraded to the new DSP. Last year, spending on Invite Media grew by about 50%, and we believe these new investments will create even more momentum for the exchange ecosystem.


• DoubleClick Search, our cross-engine search management platform that was completely rebuilt last year and is natively integrated into the DoubleClick platform. DoubleClick Search is used by 6 of the largest 10 agencies, and is creating efficiency gains of up to 65%.


• DoubleClick Studio, our rich media creative solution, now with Teracent’s dynamic creative technology built in, which powers engaging and intelligent ad units. In 2011, rich media ads accounted for 10% of all display ads, doubling in volume over 12 months.


• Finally, Google Analytics, which will enable attribution modelling, conversion reports and site traffic reporting to be incorporated seamlessly into ad campaigns.

We’ve invested significantly in this area, because we believe that such a system would dramatically improve digital marketing—growing the pie for publishers, funding great online content for users, and helping marketers grow their businesses.



What are we making possible?

With the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, we’re enabling:

• Smarter creative that works with your media buy and that dynamically responds in real-time, with the audience in mind.


• More responsive campaigns that can “learn” the channels where consumers interact and quickly respond with the most appropriate creative, message and offer across all screens (for example, using a single set of frequency capping, remarketing and creative optimization signals across the entire campaign, helping to deliver the right ad as users move through the marketing funnel—from awareness to conversion).


• Creating greater value for your business and campaigns, enabling a better understanding across channels and formats (e.g., how does rich media perform versus video?); and facilitating real-time, smarter optimization decisions to reduce cost and increase campaign performance (for example, should you reduce bids on your search keywords and exchange buying while increasing your bids to run more video ads?).

A big step forward

We’re often asked about the future of digital advertising. We’re passionate about this industry. It’s the fuel that powers the digital world and a powerful engine of growth and employment. Over the last decade, a remarkably successful industry has been built via humble web banners, repurposed pre-roll video ads, desktop computers and a patchwork of ad buying tools. However, for marketers, the combination of re-imagined creative tools, reinvented measurement solutions and re-vamped ad buying platforms can propel digital advertising into a $200 billion industry that funds and supports great content.



In the coming days on this blog, and on the DoubleClick Publishers blog, we’ll provide more details of the new buying platform and discuss other announcements from our DoubleClick Insights event, including new solutions for our DFP and Ad Exchange partners.



Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Display Advertising

Future of Advertising Event - DoubleClick Insights

There has been explosive growth in ad technology over the last 20 years. From each of our perspectives -- whether you are an agency, an advertiser, publisher or a technology provider -- we can all still see unprecedented opportunities as the digital world continues to grow and diversify.



We believe that as an industry, we’re on a common digital journey and that the next wave of innovation in ad tech will come from us all working better together.



However, like all great opportunities, there are challenges and questions, such as:

• How do we unlock the next $50 billion of opportunity for digital advertising? 


• How do we deliver those immersive, interactive experiences to today’s empowered consumer demands? 


• What do we, as part of the ad tech ecosystem, need to build to create even more value for our clients and consumers?

On June 5th we’re hosting DoubleClick Insights to start exploring some answers to these questions. Senior leaders from top agencies, advertisers and publishers will help lead the conversation -- and you’re invited to join via the live stream! Register here.



The agenda will include topics such as:


Adapting to the Empowered Consumer:

Neal Mohan, Vice President, Display Advertising at Google will be joined by David Kenny, Chairman & CEO, The Weather Channel Companies, and James Pitaro, Co-President, Disney Interactive Media Group, to discuss how technology is being used to deliver new content and advertising experiences to consumers.



If We Build It, Will They (Consumers) Come?

Terry Kawaja, CEO and Co-Founder, Luma Partners (and creator of the now legendary LUMAscape chart) will lead a conversation about the ad tech ecosystem, and what it needs to do next to add value for agencies, publishers, marketers – and ultimately consumers. Terry will be joined onstage by:

• Omar Tawokol, Chief Executive Officer, BlueKai


• Greg Stuart, Global CEO of Mobile Marketing Association


• Kurt Unkel, President, VivaKi 


• Shishir Mehrota, Vice President of Product Management, YouTube

Outside the Box: Technology = Creative Friend or Foe?

Technology is supposed to make the life of a marketer easier. For our final conversation, we’re going to focus on the question of: Is this technology exploring resulting in better marketing? Or, is it just resulting in mediocre creative and complexity for both consumers and marketers? Karim Temsamani, Vice President - New Products and Solutions, Google moderates the conversation with leaders from creative agencies, iconic brands and publishers including:

• Brad Ruffkess, Global Connection, Coca-Cola


• Mike Lowenstern, Managing Director of Digital Advertising, R/GA


• Peter Minnium, Head of Digital Brand Initiatives, IAB 


• John Caldwell, Chief Digital Officer, National Geographic

The live stream will start on June 5, 2012, at 9:00 am PDT, and you’ll
be able to watch from your computer, tablet, or mobile device. To learn
more about our highlighted speakers go to the Speakers page on our site.



Please register for this virtual event by visiting the DoubleClick Insights Live Stream page.



DoubleClick Insights

Tuesday, June 5th 2012

9:00am - 1:00pm PST

Set event reminder today



Following us on Google+ or Twitter (@DoubleClick and @DoubleClick_pub)? Use the #dclkinsights tag as you're watching the event to ask questions or share comments during the event?


Posted by Stephen Kliff and Scott Brown, DoubleClick Marketing