This post is part of the with DoubleClick series, highlighting stories and perspectives from industry leaders about how they’re succeeding with an integrated digital marketing platform.

You may have seen the research we shared with you last month that looks at how programmatic buying is changing advertising. Today’s with DoubleClick episode takes a personal spin on that study, focusing on a few of the people who are both seeing and driving those changes.

We talked to leaders from Universal McCann, VivaKi, MAGNA Global, and The McClatchy Company to find out how they’re thinking about the shift to programmatic. Reach and relevance were top of mind. With greater efficiency and richer audience insights, they’re achieving both goals across screens and formats. As Deborah Gaudette, SVP and Group Partner at UM, points out, this ultimately helps create advertising that consumers want to be part of. That’s a promise we can all get behind.

Check out this short video to hear more.

For ideas on how to adopt a programmatic strategy, take a look at last week’s webinar with Aaron Fetters, Director at the Kellogg Company.

You can stay on top of updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on Google+ and Twitter.

For the past week, we’ve discussed the ways that advertisers can pair smart creative with their media buying strategies, to produce successful digital campaigns. Today, we’ll talk about our fourth and final creative and media pairing around in-stream video -- advertisers should make sure they have the right video ad creative to run in their video ad placements. 

Did you know? In 2014, over a third of mobile phone users streamed or downloaded video on their mobile devices. In 2015, the percent of people watching video on their phones is expected to jump to 40%. (1)

Rather than simply reusing TV commercials for their digital campaigns, advertisers can make their video ads work better for digital by building in interactivity. Interactive in-stream video (VPAID) allows advertisers to add additional layers of information on top of their video assets. This functionality turns a linear video into an experience that resembles a micro-site -- consumers can interact and learn about the brand all within the single ad unit, without having to navigate away from the original page. 

Easy, automated in-stream video 

Our new VPAID Layout allows advertisers to take an existing video asset, upload it into the Studio Layouts tool, and create an interactive ad unit in minutes. Here’s a demo of the process:

Smart serving technology for mobile video ads

When you build ad units with video in them and then serve them to mobile devices, you have to remember that video files are large, and mobile devices have slower and often fluctuating bandwidth connectivity. DoubleClick Campaign Manager has smart serving technologies to allow you to provide the best quality video to consumers based on their available bandwidth.

DoubleClick will now transcode and segment your videos so they can be served in a file size that will load on the viewer’s mobile connection (3G, 4G or wifi). The video can even be altered on the fly, if the connection changes during playback. 

It’s important that advertisers pair smart creative with their media buying strategies. A campaign is only as good as the creative that shows up, so developing creative strategies that align with the media buy from the outset of the campaign is critical to campaign success. Advertisers that do this will benefit from more successful and engaging digital campaigns.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

(1) eMarketer Comparative Estimates, August 2014

Last week, we talked about how creative strategies support the media buy in successful campaigns. Without ad creative that is engaging and relevant to people, a campaign will fall short of its advertising goals. Further, with consumers spending much of their time on smartphones and tablets, these engaging and relevant experiences need to work across screens. 

Our third creative and media pairing focuses on creating successful cross-screen advertising: If your media agency is including mobile inventory in the media buy, your creative agency needs to build mobile-compatible creative to be served to those placements. The best way to build those ads is in HTML5, which allows you to provide the same interactive experiences for mobile as you do on desktop.

Did you know? There are more people in HTML5-compatible environments today than in Flash-compatible environments (1) yet 84% of rich media ads are still built in Flash. (2) 

Here are four best practices for building cross-screen ads to pair with your mobile media buys:

Build in HTML5

Building mobile-compatible ads in HTML5 is getting much easier, as new tools come onto the scene to help expedite the transition from Flash. With our HTML5 and in-app layouts, advertisers can upload their existing creative assets and create multiple formats in minutes. For more custom HTML5 units, Google Web Designer provides a robust and intuitive suite of design and animation tools to allow for more creative flexibility.

Build for apps

80% of the time that people spend on their smartphones is spent within a mobile application. (3) Mobile web is very different from a mobile app, so what works on a website experience doesn’t necessarily work in a mobile application. Make sure to build ad creative that is designed for the app experience.

Use device form-factor

Desktops, smartphones and tablets all have different form-factors, or device-specific attributes and interaction modes. Smartphones and tablets have touch screens and accelerometers or motion sensors that sense movement and orientation of the device, while a laptop does not. Smartphones have much smaller screens, while tablets and desktops have larger, “lean-back” screens. Smartphones also have calling and texting capabilities. These are all opportunities for incorporating cool things about the device into your ad creative. 

For example Burberry took advantage of device form-factor in their Burberry Kisses campaign. This campaign captured the shape of someone’s lips, digitized it and put it onto a digital letter that could be emailed to a loved one. To provide the same experience on different devices, the designers had to be smart about form-factor. 

On desktop, they could use the video camera on the computer to capture a person’s lips. But smartphones and tablets don’t have a front-facing video camera that would work. Instead, the developers used the touch screen capabilities of these devices to allow people to kiss their screen. The device was able to understand the size and shape of the person’s lips via the touchscreen and digitize the image. This provided the same overarching brand experience for the user, but utilized a different way of executing it on different devices.

Use geo-location

Smartphones have the unique characteristic of travelling with us wherever we go. When a user opts to share their location information, the advertising they see has the opportunity to become more relevant to the physical world around them. Advertisers can send specific messages about their store or retail outlet to people who are traveling within a specified area around it.

By building HTML5 ads that work for apps, use device form factor, and provide geographically-relevant info, advertisers can ensure their ads reach consumers successfully on every device and environment. 

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

Sources:

1) StatCounter

2) Internal DoubleClick Data, Sept. 2014

3) Flurry analytics, Apr. 2013

As we introduced on Wednesday and explained further yesterday, it’s critical to pair your media buying strategies with smart creative strategies to develop more successful digital campaigns. A media buy is only as good as the creative that goes into it! 

Our second creative and media pairing revolves around the idea of programmatic: When you are buying your media programmatically (automatically, in real-time, with granular information about each viewer) you should also be building your creative messages automatically, in real time, for every viewer. Dynamic creative is a technique that advertisers can use to accomplish these real-time messages.

Did you know? Consumers are twice as likely to engage with real-time advertising than they are with generic ads.* 

Dynamic creative is a powerful and flexible system that lets marketers create a single ad template and then swap in creative variations to fit each viewer. What's more, it does it in real time: changing headlines, images, copy and calls to action depending on variables like the user's demographic, their location and the device they're using at the moment they see the ad. 

People may be familiar with the idea of dynamic creative for direct response campaigns (i.e. showing a product based on what someone already viewed), but there are also clever ways to incorporate dynamic creative for brand awareness campaigns. 

For example, Nike used dynamic creative to fuel their real-time “Phenomenal Shot” campaign for the World Cup. Nike wanted to deliver experiences that related to live moments in the soccer matches. They used an HTML5 dynamic template, which allowed them to create and manage one flexible ad—instead of hundreds of custom-built ads—that could run across screens. 

To accommodate dozens of ad alternatives localized for 15 different languages, they created a Google Spreadsheet template that served as their dynamic feed to generate ads. Once the dynamic feed was set up, they could generate the ads quickly by updating the spreadsheet, which minimized the effort and speed of releasing ads in real time. The spreadsheet was robust yet simple enough that the ads could be updated without assistance from technical or creative employees.

Nike cleverly used dynamic creative as a way to bring live moments into their ad campaigns in real-time. Knowing that their viewers were on their phones as they were watching the soccer matches, Nike made sure their ads could show up on smartphones and tablets, to grab users’ attention and engagement during commercials or breaks in the game. 

As brands buy more reservation-based ads through programmatic channels, using the information about their audiences in their creative is going to become increasingly important. To accomplish these smart creative campaigns, Advertisers must include both the media agency and the creative agency in the room at the outset of the campaign. This will enable the agencies to develop creative and media plans that are aligned. 

To learn more about how to pair dynamic creative with your programmatic media buy, visit our dynamic solutions page and select the vertical that is relevant for you. 

And come back on Monday for our third pairing: Mobile media buys and HTML5 creative. 

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

*source: “Media Economy Report: How Data is Changing our Business,” Jan. 2014, Magna Global

This is the second in a series of posts on real-time advertising. Last week, we wrote about the real-time gap and how access to real-time data can positively affect online sales and results. This week, we’re writing about how real-time data can help you optimize text ads and Shopping campaigns.


Don’t underestimate the long tail 
Retailers today often have hundreds or thousands of products, but a recent study shows they only advertise an average of 49% of their inventory with search ads. There are two main reasons for this. One is that advertisers just can’t manage millions of keywords and bids on their own. The other is that they often don’t see the value of their long-tail inventory items.

However, forgetting the long tail can mean missed opportunities. While each additional item advertised may not contribute a lot of sales on its own, aggregated sales for long-tail items can have a significant bottom-line impact.

Create and optimize Shopping Campaigns with inventory-aware campaigns 
Our customers have told us Shopping campaigns are a critical tool to automate ad creation, management, and bid optimization. Integrating with Google Merchant Center - from feed to ad creation - helps retailers be “real-time” in responding to the many seasonal assortment changes, new product launches and inventory status changes. They can afford to traffic and manage the full product catalog, without risking losing track of a promotion or out-of-stock and paying for that “ad to nowhere”. Last year Piston saw big success with inventory management, with over 50% gains in both ROAS and conversions.

Umut Dincer, The Home Depot’s Director of Online Marketing shares: “Our strong partnership with DoubleClick Search has been a great source of revenue for The Home Depot using the Google Merchant Center and Shopping campaigns to merchandize inventory.”

Organize products intelligently with Adaptive Shopping Campaigns
Beyond expanding product coverage, advertisers can also improve performance with sound product group structure. Adaptive Shopping campaigns leverage real-time conversion data to automatically change Shopping Campaign structure to optimize performance gains. When items in product groups have similar conversion rates, DoubleClick Search can assign better bids and reduce inefficiencies in spend.

By looking at advertiser data, we found, for example, that 90% of the median advertiser’s Shopping campaign cost came from only 9.5% of its products.* Often, it turned out, advertisers were lumping high-performance products into product groups with other, lower-converting products. The end result: bids that were too low for their top-selling products and bids that were too high for their lower-revenue items.

Andrea Bywater, Marketing Coordinator of Paid Search at BuildDirect says, “Adaptive shopping campaigns will be incredibly helpful in grouping ‘winning’ SKUs together—especially when things get busier with the holidays, and with Black Friday around the corner. Not only will this save time; it’ll help us save money on products with lower conversion rates.”

Link purchases to ads with Purchase detail reports 
A third way for retailers to increase their advertising efficiencies with real-time data is to allow them to connect their ads with product sales. Linking ads and sales used to be a complex task requiring deep analysis and a lot of data. As a result, advertisers often skipped over this analysis, missing out on key insights like which keywords sold which products. We designed Purchase detail reports to meet this customer need.

Purchase detail reports help advertisers:

• Identify the impact of advertising on business goals like maximizing profitability or selling off inventory
• Improve ad targeting by matching ads to products that consumers are most interested in
• Understand the value of brand and general terms in selling your highest margin or most important products

Justin Johnson, Paid Search Manager at Cabela’s explains, “Having insights into where we spend our money, in addition to what people are looking for, has been invaluable in helping us make better decisions. We have a better look into where we may not have adequate coverage, and are able to quickly make changes to address that. Being able to pull in margin data to see if certain keywords are better or worse at driving profitable traffic than we anticipated helps us be more thoughtful with our spend.”

Real-time in real life 
In the next edition we’ll shift our focus to a real-time use case: smartphone launches. We’ll have a look at how real-time capabilities make a difference on big sales days, where competition and volatility are high.

*DoubleClick Search internal data, 2014

This is the second in a series of posts on real-time advertising. Last week, we wrote about the real-time gap and how access to real-time data can positively affect online sales and results. This week, we’re writing about how real-time data can help you optimize text ads and Shopping campaigns. 


Don’t underestimate the long tail 
Retailers today often have hundreds or thousands of products, but a recent study shows they only advertise an average of 49% of their inventory with search ads. There are two main reasons for this. One is that advertisers just can’t manage millions of keywords and bids on their own. The other is that they often don’t see the value of their long-tail inventory items.

However, forgetting the long tail can mean missed opportunities. While each additional item advertised may not contribute a lot of sales on its own, aggregated sales for long-tail items can have a significant bottom-line impact.

Create and optimize Shopping Campaigns with inventory-aware campaigns 
Our customers have told us Shopping campaigns are a critical tool to automate ad creation, management, and bid optimization. Integrating with Google Merchant Center - from feed to ad creation - helps retailers be “real-time” in responding to the many seasonal assortment changes, new product launches and inventory status changes. They can afford to traffic and manage the full product catalog, without risking losing track of a promotion or out-of-stock and paying for that “ad to nowhere”. Last year Piston saw big success with inventory management, with over 50% gains in both ROAS and conversions.

Umut Dincer, The Home Depot’s Director of Online Marketing shares: “Our strong partnership with DoubleClick Search has been a great source of revenue for The Home Depot using the Google Merchant Center and Shopping campaigns to merchandize inventory.”

Organize products intelligently with Adaptive Shopping Campaigns
Beyond expanding product coverage, advertisers can also improve performance with sound product group structure. Adaptive Shopping campaigns leverage real-time conversion data to automatically change Shopping Campaign structure to optimize performance gains. When items in product groups have similar conversion rates, DoubleClick Search can assign better bids and reduce inefficiencies in spend.

By looking at advertiser data, we found, for example, that 90% of the median advertiser’s Shopping campaign cost came from only 9.5% of its products.* Often, it turned out, advertisers were lumping high-performance products into product groups with other, lower-converting products. The end result: bids that were too low for their top-selling products and bids that were too high for their lower-revenue items.

Andrea Bywater, Marketing Coordinator of Paid Search at BuildDirect says, “Adaptive shopping campaigns will be incredibly helpful in grouping ‘winning’ SKUs together—especially when things get busier with the holidays, and with Black Friday around the corner. Not only will this save time; it’ll help us save money on products with lower conversion rates.”

Link purchases to ads with Purchase detail reports 
A third way for retailers to increase their advertising efficiencies with real-time data is to allow them to connect their ads with product sales. Linking ads and sales used to be a complex task requiring deep analysis and a lot of data. As a result, advertisers often skipped over this analysis, missing out on key insights like which keywords sold which products. We designed Purchase detail reports to meet this customer need.

Purchase detail reports help advertisers:

• Identify the impact of advertising on business goals like maximizing profitability or selling off inventory
• Improve ad targeting by matching ads to products that consumers are most interested in
• Understand the value of brand and general terms in selling your highest margin or most important products

Justin Johnson, Paid Search Manager at Cabela’s explains, “Having insights into where we spend our money, in addition to what people are looking for, has been invaluable in helping us make better decisions. We have a better look into where we may not have adequate coverage, and are able to quickly make changes to address that. Being able to pull in margin data to see if certain keywords are better or worse at driving profitable traffic than we anticipated helps us be more thoughtful with our spend.”

Real-time in real life 
In the next edition we’ll shift our focus to a real-time use case: smartphone launches. We’ll have a look at how real-time capabilities make a difference on big sales days, where competition and volatility are high.

*DoubleClick Search internal data, 2014

Yesterday, we announced 13 updates to our DoubleClick Creative Solutions and explained how advertisers can develop more successful campaigns by pairing their media buying strategies with smart creative.

Pairing #1 from yesterday’s post centered on scalability: Creative agencies need robust creative management tools to keep up with the scale and complexity of increasingly large media buys. The new Asset Library tab that launched this week in DoubleClick Studio provides just that -- it allows creative agencies to easily scale and manage their assets across their creatives. 

With Asset Library, you can host, manage and update all of your creative assets for free, from a single cloud-based location within DoubleClick Studio. Easily manage your assets across all of your DoubleClick campaigns and update live campaigns immediately with new creative.

Six things to know about the new Asset Library tab:

1. No waiting: You don’t have to wait for a hosted URL from the DoubleClick team, so you can get your ads live faster.
2. Larger file sizes: Upload individual creative assets up to 60MB, and upload any total file size that you want. 
3. Share assets easily: Advertisers can use Asset Library to share their creative assets directly with their creative shops, all in one place.
4. Batch Update: Automatically update a batch of creatives with one click in Asset Library. You can also refer to assets uploaded to Asset Library within your dynamic creative feeds.
5. Automatic video transcoding: Asset Library automatically transcodes videos into all necessary formats when uploaded into the platform.
6. Update live campaigns immediately: Edit your asset in Asset Library and push it live to the locations you want in your campaign immediately, no 24-hour review cycle or re-trafficking required. 

Here’s what some of our beta testers have said about Asset Library:

"We’ve used the asset library to host HTML5 assets and then pull them in dynamically within DoubleClick Studio. This has made file management more efficient and enabled us to change assets quickly when pricing, messaging changes and creative tweaks have been necessary." ~David Morgan, Director, 22Design 

"We use DoubleClick Studio to build 99% of our creative and appreciate how Asset Library has simplified video serving. Instead of handing off files, we can manage the serving ourselves through our Asset Library folder." ~Kate Bush, Associate Director of Project Management, Isobar Detroit

"I have been using Asset Library with a dynamic ad campaign for one of our major clients. Having all of the assets accessible in DoubleClick Studio...in one place has saved me so much time and energy. I can keep all my assets in a well documented and simple way. It also makes the data feed that I put into Google Docs a lot smaller and easier to manage when dealing with vast amounts of data in the dynamic ads. It is the most beneficial upgrade to date." ~Darren Stevenson, Head of Digital Display at UK creative agency Partners Andrew Aldridge

Over the next couple quarters, we’ll be integrating Asset Library into Google Web Designer, DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager, so you’ll be able to access your creative assets from every management tool within the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform.

Ready to give it a try?

Simply login to your DoubleClick Studio Account and click on the new Asset Library tab in the top navigation bar. You can also check out our Getting Started guide. 

Come back tomorrow for creative and media pairing #2 around programmatic. 

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Creative Solutions

Savvy advertisers know they need to pair smart creative with their media buying strategies, to accomplish successful digital campaigns. Today, we're making it easier than ever to do just that with 13 new tools across our DoubleClick Creative Solutions. These updates help advertisers succeed with four key creative + media pairings:

1. Powerful creative management tools support large-scale campaigns
2. Dynamic creative tools support programmatic media buys
3. HTML5 and in-app creative tools support mobile ad targeting
4. In-stream video tools support video ad targeting

Pairing #1: Powerful creative management tools support large-scale campaigns

Display campaigns are getting larger and more complex. To keep up, creative agencies need tools that help them build ads to suit every shape and size required by that campaign, in a fast and seamless way. 

Asset Library is a creative management layer launching today in DoubleClick Studio and rolling out across the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform in the next couple quarters. Asset Library allows advertisers to host assets for free in DoubleClick and easily manage and bulk update creative, even in live campaigns, without having to re-traffic them. 

“We have cut our development time considerably using Asset Library as part of our daily work flow. It's hard to imagine how we survived without it.” ~ Michael Douglas, Head of Production, SapientNitro

Pairing #2: Dynamic creative tools support programmatic media buys

Advertisers can use the audience information from their media buy to craft relevant ads for every viewer. Our new dynamic tools focus on making the process easier to manage:

• A lightweight version of dynamic creative for retail and hotel clients is available in DoubleClick Bid Manager (Premium US users). Use six HTML5 templates to build dynamic ads that are aligned with the programmatic media buy. They work for Facebook right-hand side inventory too!

• Advertisers can now pull their Google Merchant Center Feed into a dynamic remarketing creative in both DoubleClick Studio and DoubleClick Bid Manager. This makes it much easier to build complex retail campaigns without having to re-input the data.

• Understand which products in your dynamic ad lead to which website conversions, using the new u-reporting feature in DoubleClick Studio. 

Pairing #3: HTML5 and in-app creative tools support mobile ad targeting

To show a successful ad unit on mobile and tablet placements, you have to build HTML5 ad creatives in formats that work well on smaller screens.

• Build mobile-compatible ads in minutes, with 20 new HTML5 and in-app Studio Layouts. 
• To build more custom HTML5 ads, agencies can use Google Web Designer and then publish their ads in one click to DoubleClick Studio. 
• For a dynamic creative campaign, DoubleClick Studio supports HTML5 dynamic creative, so advertisers can ensure their real-time messages reach consumers wherever they are. 
• Publish with confidence: DoubleClick supports MRAID 2.0 (the IAB’s latest mobile in-app standard) and has certified over 90 of the largest publishers and networks, to make sure their websites will support DoubleClick in-app ads. 

Pairing #4: In-stream video tools support video ad targeting

Make your TV commercials work for digital by building in interactivity. Serve your video ads alongside the rest of your digital campaign so that your data and reporting are consolidated. This can lead to better campaign insights. 

• Our new VPAID Layout lets you easily build interactive in-stream video ads (VPAID). Simply upload your video asset and add interactive elements to create a complex ad unit in minutes.
• You can also ensure people have a smooth viewing experience with your mobile video ads. DoubleClick Campaign Manager will transcode and segment your videos so they can be served in a file size that will load on the viewer’s mobile connection (3G, 4G or wifi). The video can even be altered on the fly, if the connection changes during playback. 

Digital campaigns are nuanced and complex, so having the right support resources at your disposal is important. We built the Creative Recommendation Tool to help you identify the best product to use based on your project’s resources. We’ve also integrated Chat Support into the Studio UI, so you can get in touch with a real person immediately, get your problem solved and get on with your work. 

While advertisers may be focused on scaling campaigns across big bets like mobile, video and programmatic, smart creative is a critical element of every successful campaign and can’t be an afterthought. Advertisers will achieve the best results when they combine creative strategies with media strategies from the outset of their campaigns. 

Over the next few days, we’ll dive into each of the four creative strategies listed above, to provide best practices for combining creative and media strategies in your campaigns. Stay tuned!

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Creative Solutions

This post is part of the with DoubleClick series, highlighting stories and perspectives from industry leaders about how they are succeeding with an integrated digital marketing platform.

T-Mobile is one of the largest mobile providers in the US. As a cutting-edge company, it was fitting that they create a cutting-edge brand experience when it came time to showcase the powerful new Samsung Galaxy S5.

The team was looking to maximize reach on mobile devices for the digital campaign. But ads built using Flash - the animation standard for many years - was a big obstacle in getting mobile reach, as the format won’t render on mobile at all. So instead of engaging with rich ads, mobile users are served a static backup image. With over 25% of all global web usage occurring on smartphones or tablets*, that's a bad experience for users, and lost opportunity for advertisers.

T-Mobile, along with its agencies, Publicis Seattle and Optimedia, turned to the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, and built rich, engaging HTML5 creatives to solve this shortcoming. HTML5 is a universal language for display ads that ensures they render seamlessly across any screen - smartphone, tablet, or desktop. Beyond improving campaign reach, the team would no longer need to build separate creative assets for desktop and mobile, saving lots of creative time and resources.

They then targeted a tech-savvy audience across devices. Optimedia was even able to target users of competing mobile providers, to entice them to switch to T-Mobile, thanks to the targeting capabilities available in DoubleClick Campaign Manager.

T-Mobile's campaign results confirmed the power of HTML5:

• Eliminated 85% of all instances of static mobile creatives. There was a 1.1% creative backup rate on HTML5 impressions, versus 7.3% for Flash.
• Mobile CTR was 400% that of desktop. The team believes this improved result was due largely to HTML5 providing a more richly engaging experience for more mobile users.
• Equal or better performances than Flash desktop ads in key conversion categories. Once on T-mobile.com, users who had clicked on HTML5 smartphone ads were just as likely or more likely than Flash desktop users to explore content, interact, and show intent to purchase.
• Lower serving fees. "HTML5 uses cloud technology, so its file sizes are much smaller than Flash," says Nelson Fortier. "This results in lower ad serving fees, saving T-Mobile valuable media dollars."

Armed with these results, T-Mobile and Publicis Seattle have begun using HTML5 for other campaigns with DoubleClick.

"We saw a huge difference with HTML5 compared to similarly-targeted Flash banners," says Nelson Fortier of Publicis Seattle. "It’s compelling proof that with HTML5 and DoubleClick, T-Mobile's reach on both desktop and mobile devices far eclipsed that of Flash-based ads."

To learn more about the team's approach and results, check out the full case study here.

You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on Google+ and Twitter.

* "2014 Internet Trends," by Mary Meeker. Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, Byers, May, 2014.  http://goo.gl/DxrLAJ

We’ve all heard it: marketing is at its best with the 3Rs in place -- the right message, to the right person, at the right time. There is no doubt programmatic buying is enabling this by automating marketing across channels for better targeting, relevance, and impact. A recent study Ad Age conducted for DoubleClick shows programmatic is top of mind for more than 40% of agencies and marketers when a media plan is being designed.

But how much of the opportunity is truly being capitalized? Register now to join Aaron Fetters, Director of Insights and Analytics Solutions Center at Kellogg Company, and Emel Mutlu, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Google, for a discussion on the study's findings, and:

• Why brands and marketers are incorporating programmatic into their media buys
• The essentials marketers need to know for success in a programmatic world
• How the industry must evolve to realize the promise of programmatic

Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Team

To better align with other solutions in the DoubleClick Digital Marketing (DDM) platform, we’re moving DoubleClick Search (DS) from https://www.google.com/doubleclick/search to https://ddm.google.com/search.

Over the coming weeks you may notice that you’re automatically redirected to the new URL when hopping into DS. When this happens you may receive a message that informs you about the redirect and encourages you to update your bookmarks. It’s important to note that DS user credentials will continue to work as expected and existing bookmarks/saved links will redirect to the new URL.

Reach out to your DoubleClick Search representative or our support team at ds-support@google.com with any questions.

Understanding retailers and their relationship to real-time 
In a recent post, we announced a study we ran with Forrester to understand how retailers were leveraging real-time data in their online advertising efforts. What we learned was that they believe real-time data presents both opportunities and challenges. Retailers see the potential for including this type of data in their campaigns, but they also think it can be too much work to respond to changes that can come and go in an instant.

DoubleClick Search makes real-time easy 
At DoubleClick Search, we want to make it easy to integrate real-time data into your campaigns. We’ve worked hard to build tools that give you the data you need to make quick decisions for your business. We also want to make your campaign optimization easy and automated, so you don’t need hours of planning to respond to sudden changes in demand.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll share stories of how advertisers are using real-time data to reach customers in their time of need, faster. This first post in our series is on the real-time gap and how DoubleClick Search helps you to bridge it. The “real-time gap” is the difference between retailers’ current SEM practices and their best possible performance.

Fact: Real-time data is important 
Any number of factors can affect consumer demand for your products and services—many of which are unpredictable. Heat waves and cold snaps appear unannounced, fashion trends crop up, and wild card sports teams make it into the playoffs. From weather concerns to new shoes to baseball playoffs, search queries give marketers insight into what matters most to people in a specific moment. And with today’s proliferation of smartphones and tablets, consumers search all day, every day, providing real-time data on what’s happening right now.

Barriers to adoption for real-time data 
If real-time data is so important, you would think that all retailers would integrate it into their campaigns, but it turns out there are a few common barriers to adoption.

First, many retailers believe it takes too much time and energy to respond to unplanned events. One respondent in our Forrester study explained: “I’m sure there are quick wins to be had. But we don’t have the experience or manpower needed to chase everything.” Another said, “I have so many demands on my time, managing for something unexpected isn’t convenient for me.”

Retailers also need to re-think what’s “good enough” when it comes to speed and real time feedback. Our Forrester research shows that only 20% of retailers have access to real-time click and conversion data, and that over half do not see data updated for a week. Despite this reality, 84% of these retailers who consider driving sales as a goal feel their marketing programs are either “effective” or “very effective” at achieving their goals. But, data received once a day (or even less frequently) means there are unlimited missed opportunities to capture revenue, brand awareness, or reduce cost.



DoubleClick Search makes real-time easy
We want to make it easy to collect and act on real-time data. Our smart bid optimization understands your goals, gets conversion information in real-time, and adjusts bids multiple times per day to meet those goals. And with conversion data from all channels, delivered in real-time, DoubleClick Search can react quickly to changing market conditions by optimizing based on real-time attributed conversion data.

Real-time data in action
Here’s just one example of how real-time data can positively affect sales. This is an excerpt from a recent iProspect report.

The chart below shows how one of iProspect’s clients, a top luxury apparel brand (let’s call it Brand X), looked to real-time data and execution to maximize its marketing during a busy shopping season. Brand X holds a highly anticipated three-day sale twice per year. In 2012, it used an SEM platform that did not offer real-time conversion insights or intra-day bidding. A year later, when it switched to DoubleClick Search, a tool that reacted more quickly, the difference was immense. The overall result: the company more than tripled revenue on the first day of the promotion year over year while decreasing cost per clicks (CPCs) by over 60%. 

Three-day Promotion: Better Results With Real Time 

Source: iProspect proprietary data 

Your partner for real-time data
At DoubleClick search, we want to be your partner in delivering real-time data to improve your advertising performance. In our next post in the series, we’ll talk about how retailers are taking advantage of real-time data to optimize text ads and Shopping Campaigns for their products.

In September, we added the following features to DoubleClick Search (DS):

• Adaptive Shopping campaigns: DS can monitor the performance of products in your Shopping campaigns and automatically subdivide existing product groups to give individual bids to the SKUs that drive most of your traffic. Product groups give a single bid to ads for all the products covered by the group, even if those products have varying performance. This feature helps you achieve better performance by automatically refining your product groups to focus on products with similar performance. You can then set manual bids or use a bid strategy to provide a bid on these groups.  Learn more.

• Create and apply URL templates: If you use a common set of query strings or a common redirection URL for the keyword landing pages in an engine account, you can now create a URL template and apply it to your keywords. In addition to saving time and ensuring accuracy, using a URL template simplifies landing page URLs so you can quickly scan your keywords and see where they’re supposed to land. Learn more.
  

• Upload availability timestamps using bulksheets: To optimize bid strategies that target offline conversions, you can indicate which Floodlight activities track offline conversions. If no conversions have occurred for a period of time, you can use bulksheets to indicate whether the lack of data means that no conversions have occurred or that you haven’t uploaded the data yet. Learn more.
  

We also updated the following feature:

• Executive Reports now include a Total row in tables that display segmented data: DS will add a Total row to the bottom of the table when you create or edit a table in an executive report. The Total row is displayed if the table includes at least one segment.

Watch the recorded webinar for September features to see these updates in action.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

This post is part of the with DoubleClick series, highlighting stories and perspectives from industry leaders about how they are succeeding with an integrated digital marketing platform.

Neo@Ogilvy, Ogilvy & Mather’s global media agency, manages the digital performance and media strategy for some of the world’s most innovative and respected brands.

The Neo@Ogilvy team needed the right tools in place to execute on clever, innovative campaigns for their clients, in addition to a better understanding the impact of their campaigns. To focus on these more strategic activities, they needed to change how their team worked, by spending less time on manual tasks that were time-consuming and inefficient.

They started using DoubleClick Digital Marketing to streamline the end-to-end campaign management process. With an intuitive interface that lets you view all campaign information from a single page, the platform has freed up 40 hours of Account Executive time per week - that is one full hire. Javier Oliete Vivas, Manager Director at Neo@Ogilvy told us, “DoubleClick Digital Marketing enables us to standardize analysis and have just one single approach, one way of analyzing all channels.”

Beyond the time and resource savings, the efficiencies from using a unified platform led to real campaign performance gains. Neo@Ogilvy was able to optimize their campaigns in real-time with clean, fresh cross-channel data, resulting in tremendous uplift. For one client, a major hotel chain, their conversion rate improved by 400%, and their ROI increased by 38% after moving onto the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform. At the same time, their CPA improved 40%.

To learn more about the team's approach and results, watch the video below.

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This post is part of the with DoubleClick series, highlighting stories and perspectives from industry leaders about how they are succeeding with an integrated digital marketing platform.

A leading health care firm turned to Media Partnership, an Interpublic Group media agency, to help them increase online health insurance applications, and better understand where to invest its digital marketing dollars. Media Partnership was already using the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform to reach prospective customers with relevant messages across search and display.

In order to make the best decisions about how to allocate budget, the team needed to understand the path of exposure across channels that led to a conversion. They began using DoubleClick attribution tools, like the Path to Conversion report. Greg Young, media strategy supervisor at Media Partnership, said, "It gave us very interesting insights into the consumer journey and allowed us to develop an understanding of how certain vendors or media executions affected the end conversion."

This understanding helped the team move beyond last-click attribution, which gives all of the credit for a conversion to the last click before a conversion occurs. The team then began experimenting with the Attribution Modeling Tool to build custom models. They defined exactly how they wanted to apply different credits to different interactions, analyzed the implication on channel performance, and reallocated budget.

Just three months after beginning to adjust spend and media tactics based on their attribution analysis, the team doubled the conversion rate for the campaign, resulting in many more online health insurance applications. At the same time, they were able to drive down overall CPA by 25%.

To learn more about the team's approach and results, check out the full case study here.

Yesterday, we provided search marketers with four of our favorite tools to whip their digital strategy into shape. Today, we have five “knead to know” tips for Media Agencies to help you make your holiday promotions a piece of cake. With the right ingredients to scale and streamline your seasonal campaigns, you can find some extra time to sit back and enjoy your perfectly baked holiday pastries — while we take care of the rest. 

1. Find the recipe for success with DoubleClick Planning:

During the holidays, it’s easy to spend a lot of money—on food, gifts and decorations. But it can be hard to pull everything together to create that quintessential “holiday cheer.” This year, we have the recipe to ensure you achieve your holiday goals. DoubleClick Planning is a brand new tool that helps you simplify the planning and buying of your campaigns. The tool begins to unify programmatic and reservation inventory management, so you can carry out all of your buys in one place. Faster and more efficient cross-channel planning enables more insightful media strategies, and will ultimately help you get an ROI the size of a holiday feast. 

2. Whip up opportunities with real-time bidding and optimization: 

We get it. The holidays are busy, and you often find yourself running out of time—both in the kitchen and with your digital marketing. Forget the manual, hand-churned methods of the past that can leave your campaign results as stale as last year’s fruit cake. This year, turbocharge your campaigns with real-time automated bidding in DoubleClick Bid Manager. We’ll dynamically change a line item’s bid, based on the likeliness that an impression will perform well. Then we’ll use that near-instant conversion data to optimize bids throughout the day—helping you achieve specific campaign goals. And the best part? It’s all automatic, so you won’t have to make it from scratch.

3. Delight customers with Google Merchant Center feed integration in dynamic creative:

Knowing which product to show each viewer can be as tough as choosing what to make for Thanksgiving dinner. To ease the decision-making process, we launched support for Google Merchant Center feeds in DoubleClick Dynamic Creative. Use your existing Google Merchant Center feeds to automatically update your DoubleClick Studio or DoubleClick Bid Manager display campaigns — showing the right product to the right customers, when they’re looking to buy. In addition, retail and travel advertisers can now target dynamic campaigns to right-hand side inventory on the Facebook Exchange through DoubleClick Bid Manager. With these dynamic options on the table, the rest is gravy.

4. Handle on-the-go customers with geofence targeting: 

As a master cook, you’re moving around non-stop during the holidays—and so are your customers. But as they’re seeking deals and checking them twice across screens, how do you drive conversions - both online and offline? Geofence targeting in DoubleClick Bid Manager will enable you to deliver highly relevant messages to customers based on their proximity to a specified chain store. This means you can maximize performance for mobile by automatically adjusting the geofence, based on privacy and potential reach. Ready to make your holidays a multiscreen event this year? We’ll raise a glass of eggnog to that! 

5. Measure beyond a “pinch” with GRP and Viewability data:

A “pinch” of this and a “dash” of that won’t get you to holiday-perfect results, especially during the busy season. With our suite of solutions, we’ll give you the precise measurements you need to cook up an impactful campaign. Ensure your campaigns are actually seen, with ActiveView on DoubleClick. Reach the right audience with comScore and Nielsen GRPs, integrated seamlessly into DoubleClick. Then, optimize your campaigns in real time using audience insights gleaned from comScore vCE in DoubleClick. By accurately measuring and optimizing your campaigns, you won’t need to wait for days or weeks to make sure your holiday dollars are spent on the right audience.


Hopefully with these tips in toe, you’ll get your holiday campaigns up and running in no time, so you can enjoy some R&R with family and friends this season.

Posted by the DoubleClick Marketing Team