Getting Real with DoubleClick Bid Manager

In 1994 an unassuming display ad appeared on hotwired.com. A few curious people waited 15 seconds for the ad to load over their 14.4 Kbps connections. And when they clicked on the ad, they changed the world of advertising forever. Display ads ushered in the digital revolution of advertising, as well as the innovations that followed in search, video, mobile and social ads. In recent years, the adoption of real-time bidding, exchanges and audience data has resulted in a step-change in efficiency and precision, laying the foundation for how display ads will be transacted for years to come. This week, display advertising turns 18, and our emergence from adolescence as an industry has been characterized by the move to programmatic buying.

Today, we’re happy to announce the general availability of DoubleClick Bid Manager, a platform for programmatic buying built from the ground up on Google infrastructure and fully integrated into the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform. The last few years have been busy, as we’ve worked to take the best of Invite Media, DoubleClick, and Google to build a demand side platform that helps our agency and advertiser partners buy display better.

Agencies and marketers use DoubleClick Bid Manager for a number of key benefits:

Unified, streamlined workflows
As we worked on DoubleClick Bid Manager, our agency, trading desk and advertiser partners have given us great insights into the operations of their business and the everyday challenges they face. Based on their feedback, we’ve focused on workflow optimizations that will help them operate more easily and efficiently. Usability studies show that it takes 18% less time to carry out common tasks in DoubleClick Bid Manager, as compared to Invite Media.

Further, integrating DoubleClick Bid Manager into our buy-side platform, DoubleClick Digital Marketing, has allowed us to eliminate some of the most tedious trafficking tasks. We now sync everything from creatives, to conversion pixels, to remarketing lists for DFA advertisers. All DFA remarketing lists are visible in DoubleClick Bid Manager without any data loss, leading to better reach and performance for remarketing campaigns.

Powerful targeting, based on years of expertise
Building on top of Google infrastructure means that we can now offer some of Google’s tried and tested advertising technologies, such as keyword contextual targeting and our proprietary conversion optimization engine. We can also reach more inventory from our exchange partners through the scale of Google’s infrastructure. Early results from these innovations show double digit performance gains over Invite Media across a variety of campaigns with CPC and CPA goals.

Cross-channel opportunities
Marketers have long known that running cross-channel campaigns can yield the best results, but increasing media fragmentation over the years has made it challenging to act on this seamlessly. Thanks to our unified DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, DoubleClick Bid Manager can be a seamless part of cross-channel marketing efforts. Display remarketing from search ads is an early proof point of how marketers can take advantage of powerful cross-channel features on our platform.

With this launch, DoubleClick Bid Manager is available globally—both to international advertisers and for media buying in 40+ countries. Some of our largest advertisers are already fully upgraded from Invite Media to the new platform, and we look forward to upgrading the remainder of our customers over the coming months.

We’re excited about programmatic buying, but also know that advertising is about more than just clicks and conversions. Relationships matter. Marketers want to craft compelling stories that resonate. While real-time bidding has fundamentally changed the transaction mechanism for display advertising, the importance of trusted interactions between buyers, their agencies and publishers is as critical as ever. With DoubleClick Bid Manager, we’re committed to bringing great efficiency and performance to this space by getting technology out of the way, so that buyers and sellers can focus more on the relationships that matter.

Posted by Payam Shodjai, Senior Product Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager

Case Study: DoubleClick Ad Exchange helps NetReer build brands at scale

Brand advertisers are shifting budgets to the programmatic advertising channel to find perfect viewers for their campaigns across the web. But great brands won't put their ads just anywhere so advanced media buyers like NetSeer come to DoubleClick Ad Exchange to find safe, high-quality content for their clients.

Finding Scale
NetSeer’s technology uses a proprietary 'concept graph' of over 50+ million concepts and over two billion relationships derived from deep analysis of the web. Using concepts instead of keywords, NetSeer scans the content of web pages to understand their true meaning to find the best ad placements for brand campaigns across the web. No wonder clients like AT&T, General Mills, BP and Dell have asked NetSeer to help them promote their brands in the programmatic advertising channel.

To implement their ‘concept graph’ technology, NetSeer chose Ad Exchange because it has the largest pool of premium brand-safe inventory. "To scale any kind of brand targeting, you need a lot of volume and a lot of diversity," notes Sanjiv Ghate, NetSeer’s VP of Product. "Once you have diversity plus quality, you can build a great campaign across any vertical."

Branding in action: New Orleans
The New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation and their agency, eBrains asked NetSeer to help bring more visitors to their website, particularly those who would consider New Orleans as a tourist destination. Using its ‘concept graph’ technology, Netseer created a brand-building solution with relevant programmatic channels for a wide variety of target audiences, and AdX provided the quality inventory.

The results "really blew all our expectations," says Ghate. A Vizu study showed an overall lift of 58.3%, and a lift of 69% for those saying they were "very likely" to consider New Orleans as a vacation destination. A campaign based on music and nightlife reached a lift of an impressive 96.8%.

Read the full NetSeer story here.

Posted by Alex Shellhammer, Product Marketing Manager

The Great Programmatic Debate

On Tuesday, October 2nd, Neal Mohan, Google's VP of Display Advertising, moderated a presidential-style debate about programmatic buying and building brands online at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s MIXX conference. He was joined on-stage by Jon Suarez-Davis, VP of Global Digital Strategy and North America Media at Kellogg’s, and Curt Hecht, Chief Revenue Officer at The Weather Channel, who represented the advertiser and publisher sides in this debate.

When it first emerged, programmatic buying promised to transform how digital media was bought and sold. However, some publishers equate programmatic with the loss of advertiser connections and the death of premium inventory. This leaves the industry to confront key questions: Can the whole industry benefit from this transformation? How should publishers and advertisers work together in this new world order? This debate emphasized the importance of transparency to grow the industry for both advertisers and publishers. The lively discussion emphasized the need for marketers and publishers to partner not just for inventory but also for better data and audience analyses.

Posted by Emily Wright, Product Marketing Manager