Last week at the DoubleClick Leadership Summit we announced several innovations designed to help advertisers and publishers thrive in a moments-driven world. In order to capture these moments, marketers are increasingly turning to programmatic buying to deliver the right experience to the right consumer, in real-time. We are pleased to share more details on two of the programmatic buying innovations we announced last week: Programmatic Guaranteed and Marketplace in DoubleClick Bid Manager.

New Frontiers for Media Buying
Programmatic buying might be better known for helping marketers streamline the ad buying process with auction based buying but it certainly has evolved beyond these confines. As marketers continue to strive to get the content and the context right, programmatic direct has emerged as a way for brands to combine the efficiency of programmatic with traditional direct-to-publisher buys. The popularity of programmatic direct deals will continue to increase with eMarketer estimating that programmatic direct will account for 42% of digital display ads by 2016. In fact, over the last year across Google systems we’ve seen 2X YOY programmatic direct growth across desktop display and 3X YOY growth across mobile.

But to date programmatic direct deals haven’t included the reservation buys that make up a majority of marketers’ spend. Reservations are largely made in time-consuming, offline negotiations that can take up to 40 steps to complete. Advertisers not only find it difficult to optimize across different media buys but reservation buys also don’t allow marketers to set frequency caps to control for the saturation of ads to a viewer across programmatic and reservation media - resulting in a bad user experience and wasteful spending.

Introducing: Programmatic Guaranteed
Programmatic Guaranteed is a new deal type that allows advertisers to access guaranteed inventory on higher impact formats such as video and mobile rich media with programmatic targeting and frequency capping across all digital media. Marketers will be able to save media dollars by minimizing wasted impressions on users already reached, instead optimizing that budget to reach new users across all their buys. It is also possible to apply remarketing lists to reservation deals using first and third party data and to truly serve the right creative at the right time by reaching users based on where they are in the marketing funnel and not based on media type. We are currently piloting Programmatic Guaranteed, globally, and several clients are seeing great results.

"Programmatic Guaranteed is proving to be a powerful tool to drive full efficiency in the media buying process. In particular, it offers the opportunity to control each component of the media plan, at the same time, in a synergistic and systematic way. Programmatic Guaranteed represents a key application in relieving digital media planning from the time-consuming management process. Partnering with Google has allowed Amnet to test this cutting-edge solution and serve as an innovator and trend-setter in this space." -Massimo Fontana, Head of Amnet IT
"We see Programmatic Guaranteed as another important step to connect advertisers with premium publishers’ inventory. Google’s technology helps automate the buying and selling of premium inventory, which is important to ensure that we can deliver the best experience for our advertising and publisher partners”. -Darby Sieben, President of Mediative, a Yellow Pages Digital & Media Solutions Limited Division
Introducing: Marketplace in DoubleClick Bid Manager
Even with all of this functionality, discovering the right kind of publishers and inventory can be cumbersome and difficult to scale. Marketers should be able manage all of these deal types simply and easily. That is why last week we were excited to announce the global alpha launch of Marketplace in DoubleClick Bid Manager -- a shoppable storefront that will empower marketers to discover, negotiate and manage all their inventory from a single place. Advertisers will have greater visibility into publisher offerings, giving them a richer, more detailed discovery experience for all deal types, including Programmatic Guaranteed. Marketplace in DoubleClick Bid Manager is currently in Alpha and will be more generally available by end of year.

Innovating for the future
If digital is the future of media then programmatic is the future of digital. Brands no longer have to decide ahead of time where their message will get the best response. With these new innovations in programmatic, ads can fluidly reach each person in their audience at the best time, place and channel for that person - regardless of how the deal was signed.

We’re excited about the future of programmatic buying and selling and the possibilities it will bring for all of our partners. If you’re interested in learning more about Marketplace in DoubleClick Bid Manager or Programmatic Guaranteed reach out to your account manager today, and stay tuned as we look to expand our pilots to more buyers.

This is the second announcement in our post-DLS series. Join us over the next week as we release more details of all our recent product announcements. Next up, Native Ads in DoubleClick.

Posted by:
  • Roshan Khan, Product Manager, DoubleClick 
  • Steve Suppe, Product Manager, DoubleClick 
  • Kelly Cox, Product Marketing, DoubleClick