DoubleClick Bid Manager: Overview for New Users
Tuesday, Oct 30, 2012 - 12pm EDT

Join us for a live webinar covering the fundamentals of DoubleClick Bid Manager. This two-hour session is designed for new users to the system, where we will go through the steps to build a new campaign. If you have recently upgraded to Doubleclick Bid Manager, are new to the system, or will upgrade soon, this webinar is a great place to begin. Please register in the DoubleClick Bid Manager Help Center.

DoubleClick Bid Manager: Reporting Webinar
Thursday, Nov 1, 2012 - 2pm EDT
Thursday, Nov 15, 2012 - 3pm GMT

Please join our two-hour live webinar on generating reports and reading inline statistics in DoubleClick Bid Manager. We will discuss how these reports can help you optimize prospecting, audience, and remarketing campaigns. If you run reports, review data, or make optimizations, this session is for you. This is also useful for anyone who will soon upgrade from Invite Media to DoubleClick Bid Manager. Please register in the DoubleClick Bid Manager Help Center.

Posted by Molly Larrison, DoubleClick Bid Manager Product Trainer

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

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

Start your fall off right and join us for a DFA training. Visit the DFA Help Center to enroll in any upcoming DFA classroom sessions or our recently launched DFA Basics for Traffickers eLearning which allows you to go at your own pace and navigate to the topics you want to learn.

Classroom Training
DFA Fundamentals: This full-day course (10am-5pm) is for new DFA users looking to understand the fundamentals of third-party ad serving including best practices for campaign trafficking, serving ads and pulling reports.

• Los Angeles - October 23
• Chicago - October 24
• Minneapolis - November 5
• San Francisco - November 8
• Dallas - November 14

DFA Trafficking Lab: Get more practice trafficking campaigns. These sessions cover the basics such as assigning landing pages to creatives, updating campaigns, setting up geo-targeting and using creative rotation.
Class Prerequisite: Attendees should have taken the DFA Fundamentals class in the previous two months or have less than two months trafficking experience.

• Los Angeles - October 24
• Chicago - October 25
• San Francisco - November 9

MediaVisor Fundamentals: Learn more about planning and creating campaigns, advertisers, site placements and IOs as well as how to send RFPs.

• Minneapolis - November 6
• New York - November 6

Webinar Training
DFA for New Users - October 30
Learn the fundamentals of trafficking in DFA from creating an Advertiser through exporting Tags.

Be sure to check back with us on this blog for upcoming trainings. We look forward to seeing you in class.

Posted by Amanda Gangl, DFA Product Trainer

Today's marketers and agencies are looking for tools to help them navigate the complex digital landscape and make smart decisions about their media buys. It's with this in mind that we're investing in DoubleClick Digital Marketing, to give them a holistic picture of how all their digital marketing works together.

A few weeks ago we shared the latest updates to DoubleClick Digital Marketing and the continuous investments we are making in our products, such as Attribution Modeling in DFA, as we build a unified platform.

Today, we’re introducing another powerful tool for agencies and marketers -- DoubleClick Verification, an ad verification solution built directly into DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA).

We think this will benefit our partners in a few key ways:

• Accessible. It’s as simple as signing in to DFA and navigating to the reporting interface to start using DoubleClick Verification. There’s no need to implement another tag or sign another contract to get started.
• Holistic. DoubleClick Verification not only provides a seamless experience for clients, it’s enabled across all ad impressions and campaigns in DFA today. In the future, as part of DoubleClick Digital Marketing, it will cover the entire scope of your display buy across the platform.
• Actionable. The information in DoubleClick Verification helps you to reconcile the terms of your media buy with your media partners. It answers the questions of did my ads serve as they were intended?

Currently, DoubleClick Verification offers site content monitoring to help highlight potential content issues with your ads. Our system analyzes content at the URL level for each page that your ad serves on and employs 18 classifiers for “unsafe” content categories -- such as gambling, adult, drugs, profanity -- across 11 common languages.

In addition, we also allow you to customize content profiles so you can define for yourself the kinds of sites that are okay or not safe, and place them accordingly on a white list or flagged list. Geo verification is available to help identify ads serving outside your preferred geo. For more information on current features, download our fact sheet.

More to come
We’ll continue to invest in verification tools in the months and years to come. We’re actively working on the best approaches to incorporate other verification service lines as defined by IAB guidelines. To learn more about our philosophy on building verification features in the ad server, download our white paper, Smarter Media Buying with Ad Verification, here.

Register for our upcoming webinar, Introducing Ad Verification with DoubleClick, on October 17, 2012 at 1:00 pm EDT/10:00 am PDT to find out more about the current set of features and what’s under development. We look forward to hearing your feedback and questions during the webinar.

Posted by Aaron Nelson, Product Manager

Last week, we gave an update on the progress we’re making with DoubleClick Digital Marketing to help marketers run cross-channel campaigns seamlessly in an increasingly complex digital landscape. Today, we’re shining light on one of the key features we mentioned - display remarketing from search ads - which allows agencies and advertisers using DoubleClick Search to use search ad clicks as a signal in display campaigns, re-engaging users through display ads when it’s most effective. Read more about this exciting new feature in the DoubleClick Search blog.