Spring brings a lot of great things - birds chirping, flowers blooming, and webinars buzzing!  

We are particularly pleased to introduce two new webinar series that focus on Reporting and Floodlight.  For some sessions background knowledge is recommend. Please note the prerequisites listed for each webinar, as this knowledge will help you get the most out of each session.

When registering, please be sure to note the regional designations before clicking the link to enroll.

DFA Fundamentals

• This session covers the basics of Trafficking in the DFA6 UI. Users new to 3rd Party Ad-Serving and DFA6 are encouraged to attend. The bulk of the session focuses on Trafficking but touches briefly upon Floodlight and Reporting. Great for beginners and anyone that wants a refresher!
• Registration: North America, Asia/Pacific

Introducing our New Reporting Series!

• Reporting: Report Builder
• This session focuses on the new Reporting tool. Understand how to slice and dice data in the Summary tab (dashboard view), run reports in Report Builder.
• Prerequisite: Basic knowledge of DFA6 (available in DFA Fundamentals webinar or eLearning).
• Registration: North America,  Asia/Pacific
• Reporting: Attribution
• This session explores the ‘Attribution’ tab in the new Reporting tool. Get a look at uses for Multi-Channel Funnels, Attribution, and Modeling.
• Prerequisite: Moderate experience with Report Builder or completion of the ‘Report Builder’ webinar session.
• Registration: North America

Introducing Our New Floodlight Series!

• Floodlight: QA & Troubleshooting
• This session will provide the information you need to make sure you’re creating, testing, and fixing your Floodlight tags correctly.
• Prerequisite: Basic knowledge of Floodlight (available in DFA Fundamentals webinar or eLearning).
• Registration: North America
• Floodlight: Custom Variables & Macros
• This session will discuss how the use of Custom Variables and Macros can help you gather a wide variety of data that may be useful for your business. This course also covers the use of Macros to pass information from Floodlight to 3rd party pixels.
• Prerequisite: Basic knowledge of Floodlight (available in DFA Fundamentals webinar or eLearning).
• Registration: North America
• Floodlight & Associated Functionality
• This course will provide you with an overview of Floodlight tags: understand what they are, which types of tags are available and some implementation tips.
• Registration: Asia/Pacific

Visit the DFA Help Center to enroll in any of the upcoming live training sessions or eLearning modules.

Stay tuned for more topics and don’t forget to sign up for the DoubleClick Digest to get the latest scoop on news, research, events and product updates from DoubleClick. Opt-in here!

(Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search blog)

Last week on March 11 and 12, our DoubleClick Search team spent two demo-packed days on the floor at the Search Marketing Expo - West, to connect with those of you who manage some of the largest search campaigns.

We set up an interactive lounge featuring demos, videos, games and product experts -- allowing us to show you how we help you go faster, make smarter decisions, and get better results to solve the most complex and demanding digital marketing challenges. Today, we wanted to share some of the topics we covered and the insights we heard from attendees. To kick off the discussion, we’re sharing a DoubleClick Search overview video, which we debuted at SMX West -- with more details that follow.

Go faster with tools for automation

Many of you told us you’re looking for ways to go faster with tools that streamline and automate your workflow across large search campaigns. Especially for marketers with large product inventory, staying on top of changing products, promotions, and seasonal trends can be cumbersome. At SMX West, we demoed inventory-aware campaigns, which integrates with your Google Merchant Center Feeds to automatically update search campaigns, based on your physical inventory. We got great feedback on the seamless workflow that cuts out repetition.

Make smarter decisions with all your data in one place
We also heard your growing need to measure digital marketing holistically -- within search, as well as across channels. So, on the SMX floor, we highlighted the different ways DoubleClick Search powers your business with the insights you need:

• Integration of Google Analytics metrics (beta), which incorporates statistics including bounce rate, page views, transactions, and revenue from Google Analytics, to get a clear picture of how search influences customer interaction on your website.
• Fast and accurate cross-channel reporting thanks to native integration with the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, to enable faster decision making, without reconciling reports or worrying about potential data drop-off from reporting on disparate tools.
• Enhanced campaigns support, which makes it easier for you to promote marketing messages across varying user contexts like location, time of day and device type, within a single campaign. In addition to basic support, we’ll soon help you take advantage of enhanced campaigns in unique and powerful ways, through bulk tools, custom-tailored mobile bid adjustments, and consultative services offered only by DoubleClick Search.

Get better results with tools that drive performance
As a performance marketer, you know it’s ultimately all about results. Over the past few months, we’ve focused on enhancing our Performance Bidding Suite for automated bidding -- understanding that smart bidding technology is the engine that drives campaign performance. At SMX West, we demoed our intuitive bidding UI, which lets you easily express flexible goals that align with your business objectives, and highlighted how fresh data, smart algorithms, fast operations, regular software updates, and the right transparency and controls help you achieve those goals.

To extend the conversation, DoubleClick Search will be at SES New York next week, and we look forward to another great opportunity to show you how we can help make search marketing faster, smarter, and better. We hope to see you there!

Is programmatic safe for brands? Join us tomorrow, Friday, 3/22 at 1:30 ET/10:30 PT as Digiday's Brian Morrissey seeks the answer to this question in a conversation with Media6Degrees' Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Pancer, and Michael Brunick, Mediabrands Audience Platform's VP of Strategic Solutions.

To tune in, log into your Google+ account and look for the Hangout on Air in the Think with Google +page stream. Hit play! Comments and questions are welcome.

Missed the other conversations in the 'Programmatic in the Future' series?
Find them at: http://www.youtube.com/DoubleClick

Posted by Alex Shellhammer, Product Marketing Team

Just give me the skinny:

Hangout-on-Air this Friday, 3/22 

We’ll chat with the team that built Cadillac’s interactive video ad, “The Standard of the World,” and discuss the benefits of incorporating interactive video into your digital advertising campaigns.

Input your info here and visit our G+ page @ 2:30pm ET / 11:30am PT on 3/22 and click “Join Hangout.”

I'll read the longer version:

We're all used to the idea that you watch a video from beginning to end without stopping; this concept of “linear and sequential” video hasn’t changed much since movies got started. But we also know that there are situations when you don’t want to wait until the end of a video to learn more about what you’ve just seen. 

Say you’re watching a snippet of a TV show, and they mention an actor you like; you might want to pause the video, open another browser tab, and look up the actor’s background or the movies he’s been in. Once you’re satisfied with the info, you go back to the video and keep watching. 

This is the concept behind interactive video ads, a type of ad format that is becoming a mainstay in the world of digital advertising. Rather than merely repurposing your TV commercials for smaller screens, take advantage of the inherent interactivity available on desktops, mobile phones and tablets, and allow people to dive deeper into your ads. 

With interactive in-stream ads, we can bring the best of the lean-back experience (watching TV in a full episode player) together with lean-forward active brand engagement. Interactive in-stream video ads allow you to add panels of content on top of your main video ad, presenting viewers with the option to learn more directly in the ad unit, rather than having to open that extra browser tab. 

From a business perspective, this not only gives you more space for messaging, it also means that you can buy a 15 second ad spot, yet obtain 30 or 40 seconds of user interaction for no extra cost. 

These new interactive video formats also open the door to more creativity and innovation. You now have the ability to layer on additional graphics, designs, and other creative executions on top of the original video asset to showcase the brand’s message. It’s like creating a pop-up book instead of a 2D picture book - suddenly you have many more surfaces to work with. 

The IAB recently announced their rising star formats for interactive video, a couple of which we contributed to, including “Timesync” and “Full-screen.” While the official formats are still being defined, we’ve built a demo to exemplify one of the new formats and why these ads are great for brands. 

This Friday, March 22, we’ll be hosting a hangout-on-air on our new DoubleClick Google+ page to deconstruct this demo, Cadillac’s “The Standard of the World” ad. We’ll chat with the team that built the ad and discuss the benefits of incorporating interactive video into your digital campaigns. 

To attend:

1) Input your info here 

2) Visit our G+ page at 2:30pm ET/ 11:30am PT this Friday, 3/22. 

3) Click the “Join Hangout” button to enter the hangout. 

We hope you'll be able to make it!

Posted by Adam Smoler, Head of Format Commercialization for Platform Solutions

Standard banner ads are becoming a thing of the past as ads are increasingly becoming "rich" - incorporating sight, sound, motion and interactivity to provide better experiences for viewers. 

Studies have shown that rich media ads perform better than standard ads for both brand favorability and for driving purchase intent. But "rich" is sometimes perceived as "more difficult." At DoubleClick, we want to make the process for getting started with rich media ads as simple and painless as possible. 


So we've put together a DoubleClick Rich Media Education Program to help you through the steps to train and certify your skills:

1. Walk through the Rich Media Fundamentals course, which provides the materials needed to be proficient in DoubleClick Rich Media. This course is designed to allow any new user to ramp up on rich media basics at their own pace. 
• After completing the program, you should understand what rich media is; how to use the Studio UI; how to build Flash, HTML5 and dynamic creative; how to traffic rich media creatives and how to resolve live issues.
2. Take the DRM Fundamentals Certification (available at the end of the Rich Media Fundamentals course) and recognize your proficiency with a certificate of completion.
3. If you're a DoubleClick Studio user, take the Studio Certification to demonstrate your expertise in building rich media ads in Studio and get rewarded for it! 
4. If you're a DoubleClick for Advertisers user, take a look at the Rich Media Academy to get additional information on planning rich media campaigns. 

Ready to get started?

Register for the Rich Media Fundamentals Course and start making your digital campaigns richer! 

Posted by Hemmy Edge, DRM Training Program Manager

Update: Due to unexpected circumstances, this hangout has been canceled on Thursday, March 7. Stay tuned for more information when it is rescheduled.

In our next installment of "Programmatic in the future". Join us on Thursday, 3/7 at 1:30 ET/10:30 PT as Digiday's Editor-in-Chief Brian Morrissey, interviews Penry Price, President, Media6Degrees, and Nate Stricker, VP, Group Account Director for Digital at Initiative.

In case you missed our last conversation with Mike Finnegan, Xaxis' VP of Product Development, here's a snapshot:

Or you could watch the video:

Posted by Alex Shellhammer, Product Marketing Team

On February 19th, we held a webinar in which we discussed both the immense potential of consolidated buying platforms as well as considerations and requirements for achieving such integration. If you missed this event, you can watch it here on demand.

During the webinar, our guest Joanna O’Connell, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research presented the results of new commissioned research on Navigating the Road to the Consolidated Buying Platform. While the study began with interviews focusing on the consolidation of display buying through DSPs, it became clear over the course of the research that marketers and media execs are actually thinking in much larger terms about consolidated platforms—wanting truly integrated cross-channel solutions for media management, buying, and attribution.

Joanna believes that the future of digital media is audience-centric, programmatic, and data-driven, with the growth of real-time buying demonstrating this marketplace shift. Consolidated platforms that streamline reporting, consolidate buying, and enable cross-channel management are a natural progression of this evolution. They can offer agencies and advertisers new operational efficiencies, improved targeting and campaign performance, and more accurate reporting and insights. In this presentation, Joanna painted a picture of an industry ripe for consolidation but in need of a clear path to get there.

So how do we get from simply buying in various media channels to a seamless, data-driven, multi-channel approach to media management? According to the commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, the first step is consolidating reporting, which leads to more effective measurement as well as operational efficiencies for more accurate analyses. Beyond that, each agency and advertiser must evaluate how consolidating data, audiences, and measurement could lead to better buying, attribution, and ultimately marketing insights for their own business.*

* "Navigating the Road to the Consolidated Buying Platform," Jan 2013

Posted by Emily Wright, Product Marketing Manager