In today's digital marketing landscape, it's becoming increasingly crucial for campaigns to span multiple screens and ad formats in a cohesive way. Online video is the fastest growing form of display advertising, projected to grow 2.5 times to $6.5B by 2016. (1) And total mobile ad spend is projected to grow ~4.5 times to $22.4B in 2016, representing ~35% of all digital ad spend by 2016. (2)

Given these transformations, we are working hard to build best-in-class tools for our integrated platform that make it easier for you to create, buy and manage successful campaigns across all formats and devices. Today, we’re announcing a series of improvements that aim to help you accomplish this.

The DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform now helps you:

Create more beautiful video and mobile ads in DoubleClick Studio.

Build robust interactive in-stream video ads in DoubleClick Studio, and use the new IAB Rising Star formats to turn your standard 15-second TV commercial into a longer, engaged viewer experience. Check out our demo below!

Preview and test your mobile ads as they will actually appear on mobile and tablet devices. Scan a QR code on your phone or use our Mobile Ads Showcase App to push your ads to mobile and tablet for testing.






Buy video inventory in real time on DoubleClick Bid Manager, and access more mobile and video inventory on DoubleClick AdExchange.

With DoubleClick Bid Manager (DoubleClick's DSP and real-time bidding platform), you'll soon be able to programamtically buy and report on your video campaigns in the same place as the rest of your display media. We'll be offering a video beta for select clients in the coming weeks. Contact your sales rep for more info.

Buyers can now find skippable in-stream video inventory and expandable/interstitial mobile inventory from across the web on DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Ad Exchange continues to grow its available inventory across high-quality content, helping you expand your creative palette.

Manage all of your ads - across devices, formats and channels - with enhanced campaign support in DoubleClick Search and a single reporting interface in DoubleClick for Advertisers.

DoubleClick Search will be supporting AdWords enhanced campaigns over the next few weeks, to help you better reach your customers across locations and devices. By using enhanced campaigns through DoubleClick Search, you additionally gain holistic measurement, a streamlined workflow and better bidding decisions based on your floodlight conversion data.

Track all the metrics for your TrueView in-stream video ads in DFA. Even though the ads aren't served through DFA, thanks to a single trafficking tag, you can still pull the metrics back into the DFA reporting interface and compare them to the rest of your placements.



With an integrated platform of DoubleClick products that work better together, you not only benefit from top-notch individual products, you also benefit from the efficiencies, insight, and performance gained when all of your campaign's assets and data exist in one spot.

For more information about the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, visit our website.

Posted by Jason Miller, Director of Product Management for DoubleClick

Sources:
(1) ThinkEquity, comScore, and Google proprietary data
(2) eMarketer: data is from the January 2013 J.P. Morgan report titled "U.S. Internet."

Display doesn't have to be difficult. At DoubleClick, we're empowering creative agencies, media agencies and publishers to build amazing rich media ads easily. We're working hard to ensure that we bring you the best tools and resources to help you to build innovative, high-performing ads.

And we want to make sure that all of our expert users can get recognized for their expertise. That’s why we put together our DoubleClick Studio Certification program.

What’s the Studio Certification Program?
The program is a way for creative designers and developers to test their skills on the product and promote their expertise after successfully completing the tests.

We have many different qualifications that cover both essential and specialized knowledge.

• The first is our core Studio Certification, a qualification that demonstrates a user’s knowledge and ability to build high quality rich media ads within DoubleClick Studio that function as intended when displayed by the DoubleClick ad server.

• Once you complete this test, you can take one of our specialized product tests, which include the QA Certification, Masthead Badge Certification, HTML5 Badge Certification, and HTML5 QA Badge Certification. Learn more about the tests on our site >>

Why should you care?

Developers and designers can promote their expertise to clients and partners.

• Upon completion of each test, you receive a badge that you can put on your website. You also get your name on our list of Certified Users. In both cases, you get to promote your expertise in the product to potential partners and clients.

Gain access to beta releases, industry insights, and special DoubleClick Events.

• Certified users have access to innovative beta products and gain exclusive insights that can make the difference to get ahead of the competition.

• Invitations to events such as Developer Days and HTML5 workshops, which give you first-hand experience and knowledge that increases your chances of running innovative campaigns.

Media agencies gain increased confidence in their creative partners and can reduce turnaround times.

• Working with a creative agency who assigns a Studio Certified User to the creative build gives you the added confidence that the work is being done by an experienced Studio developer.
• This expertise can also reduce turnaround times of the build, because the developer knows the product in and out.

Achieve faster and easier quality assurance.

• You won’t need to wait for DoubleClick’s QA feedback anymore. QA Certified Users will be able to determine the quality assurance and transfer the creative themselves, directly to the associated DFA account. This means a smoother process for both creative and media partners.

Ready to get Certified?
Visit our new certification landing page, learn more about the tests and get started!

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager - DoubleClick Studio

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search blog.

Let’s face it: managing your search campaigns can seem a lot like being in a relationship. Both can be fickle, require lots of work and time, and need the right amount of attention to get the best results -- especially during Valentine’s Day. When everything is going smoothly, you’re feeling confident and on top of your game; but, without commitment and focus, your search management romance can quickly fizzle.

Here at DoubleClick Search, we know it's important for you and your campaigns to be getting along well as more consumers turn to search to find the best deals. This is especially true during high-traffic retail holidays; in fact, online sales are up 28% over last 2 years(1), with $210 billion in web-influenced sales expected for this year(2). This means huge opportunities for search marketers to reach shoppers looking for deals -- but it can also mean a lot of extra work.  

So with that, we want to make sure your search management relationship doesn’t fall flat this year. Below are a few DoubleClick Search solutions to put the kick back in your step and help you keep focus on those other three little words this Valentine’s Day: return on investment.

Communication is key
Good communication is a fundamental part of a healthy relationship; after all, being left in the dark can quickly compound problems and stifle new opportunities to grow. Stay connected with a few tools from DoubleClick Search that’ll help you better understand and capture new opportunities:

	Chart bid history. Take the guesswork out of the relationship. With the ability to chart your bid history, DoubleClick Search gives you full transparency into bidding decisions to visually represent your keyword bids over time, and help you better manage to your unique goals.
	Bi-directional sync. Communication is a two-way street. With bi-directional sync, the changes you make in AdWords or adCenter show up in DoubleClick Search with the click of a button. You can even schedule syncs to automatically occur or repeat. (Now, if only it were this easy in a relationship!)
	Display remarketing from search ads. Don’t leave the conversation hanging. Leverage cross-channel opportunities from the DoubleClick integrated platform with display remarketing from search ads, which lets you “follow up” on search ad clicks and remarket to specific audiences across ad exchanges, via DoubleClick Bid Manager or the Google Display Network, based on their interaction with your paid search ads.

Explore together
Being routine with your campaigns can quickly have you falling into a rut. Exciting launches filled with new keyword additions and optimization can turn into the comfortable complacency of ordering in pizza, watching reruns on TV, and running your campaigns on autopilot. Don’t settle for the ho-hum; stay committed to the next chapter of your search campaigns with DoubleClick Search tools, to make sure they pay off:

	Landing page testing. Show your search campaign some love by pairing your keywords with the best landing page. With landing page testing in DoubleClick Search, split traffic between several landing pages and then compare the results to help choose the landing page that delivers the best results.
	Formula columns. Be creative -- ditch the spreadsheets and explore new surroundings with Formula columns that allow you to create your own customized columns directly in the DoubleClick Search interface. Access a wide variety of different metrics computed from DoubleClick Search data, or rename columns.

Don’t wait until the last minute
...Not with dinner reservations, and certainly not with your search campaigns. Relationships require regular maintenance; read the signs early and understand your campaign needs to make the most informed decisions for the best results. Here are a few DoubleClick Search tools that can help you analyze your campaigns up to the minute, so you can plan accordingly:

Instant conversions. Stop the procrastination blame-game and act on every signal, as it happens. DoubleClick Search now loads instant conversion data from Floodlight in all its reports -- in addition to the engine performance data we already update in near-real time -- to bring you the freshest, most reliable campaign data. Conversion data in DoubleClick Search is updated automatically throughout the day, minutes after a conversion happens.

Happy Valentine’s Day from DoubleClick Search!

To follow more updates from DoubleClick Search, subscribe to the DoubleClick Search Blog.

(1) Source: ComScore Inc. Press Release, 2011
(2) GroupM research: From intent to in-store: Search’s role in the new retail shopper profile, 2011

We hope you've been following our series "Programmatic in the Future", featuring conversations with publishers, advertisers and Google's product development team, on how programmatic technologies are going to evolve.

Join us on Thursday, 2/21 at 1:30 ET/10:30 PT, as we speak with Mike Finnegan, Director of Product Development at Xaxis, on how WPP's largest audience buying company is leveraging programmatic channels to meet brand demand.

In case you missed our last edition with IAB's VP of Ad Technology, Steve Sullivan, and Scott Spencer, Google's Director of Product Management for DoubleClick Ad Exchange, here's a snapshot:

Or you could watch the video:

Posted by Alex Shellhammer, Product Marketing Team

featuring Joanna O’Connell, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research Inc.
and Danny Huynh, Managing Director of Digital and Client Leadership, Mindshare
hosted by Chip Hall, Director of Media Platforms Sales, Google

Digital ad spend is growing. Programmatic is on the rise. DSPs are gaining traction. But for marketers and media buyers, this often becomes just another channel to add to the many they already manage. So how do we get from simply buying RTB to a seamless, data-driven, multi-channel approach to media management?

Please join DoubleClick on February 19th for a webinar in which we explore the trend of consolidated media buying and management. In this webinar:

Joanna O’Connell, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research will present findings from new commissioned research produced by Forrester on Navigating the Road to the Consolidated Buying Platform. Forrester interviewed a range of experts including agency and trading desk executives as well as marketers in order to delve into the challenges and opportunities they face in today’s media buying and management landscape. What emerges is a picture of an industry ripe for consolidation but in need of a path to get there.

Danny Huynh, Managing Director of Digital and Client Leadership at Mindshare will share his experiences in consolidating clients on a single platform, including benefits they are seeing, obstacles they faced, and advice for other organizations embarking on the their own journey to consolidation.

Register here for the webinar to be held on Tuesday, February 19, 2013 at 10:00am PST / 12:00pm CST / 1:00pm EST. The full study conducted by Forrester on the topic will be available for download following the webinar.

Posted by Emily Wright, Product Marketing Manager

In our next edition of Programmatic in the Future, join us on Thursday, February 7 at 1:30 PM ET/10:30 AM ET as Steve Sullivan, Vice President of Ad Technology at IAB speaks with Scott Spencer, Director of Product Management at Google, about why Google is investing in programmatic buying and selling technologies.  Log into your Google+ account and look for the Hangout on Air in the Think with Google +page stream. Hit the play button to tune in.

Previously, we spoke with Joel Aranson, Vice President of Media Operations & Technology and AOD Liaison for Digitas, and David Chiang, Vice President of Monetization at CBS Interactive on how they’re working together via programmatic channels. In case you missed it, this is what they had to say:

Or, you could watch the hangout:



Posted by Alex Shellhammer, Product Marketing Team