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 the engine that drives campaign performance.



Earlier last week at SES San Francisco, the DoubleClick Search team announced UI, control, and transparency improvements to their newly-launched Performance Bidding Suite for bid optimization, making it easier than ever before for search marketers to harness and discover the power of automated strategies. Learn more about the new improvements and the impressive results users are already seeing at the DoubleClick Search blog!

DoubleClick Search: Manage your search campaigns around the clock

For improvements in search management worflow, DoubleClick Search has just announced two new features for increased automation: scheduled uploads (available now) and scheduled interface edits (coming soon).



These new features will enable advertisers to work during their regular hours and still have DS work on their campaigns 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The addition of scheduled uploads and scheduled interface edits contribute to one of DS’s key strengths - providing a powerful, flexible workflow that lightens the management load on your team, allowing them to concentrate on higher-level tasks.



 For more information on these two automation features, visit the DoubleClick Search blog.

DoubleClick Search: Compare performance by date range

DoubleClick Search has just announced its date range comparison feature, one of the many new product features that will be launching this summer to help marketers easily manage search campaigns, at scale.

Date range comparison now gives search marketers the ability to evaluate campaign performance over time and see the impact of changes -- all part of our mission to drive insights (not just data) to improve your campaign results.

For more information on the date range comparison tool, visit the DoubleClick Search blog. 

A digital marketing platform to win the moments that matter

Editor's note (Tuesday, June 5, 2012, 6:15pm PST): We have updated the YouTube link to show a recorded version of the DoubleClick Insight livestream event.

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 recording of the 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