Congratulations to the winners of the fifth annual Digital Media Advertising Creative Showcase (DMACS) awards! The event took place Thursday October 14 at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles. DMACS 2010 showcased the apex of cutting-edge digital media advertising around entertainment releases over the past year. The most innovative and creative digital media talent in the industry competed in six categories to receive recognition for campaigns executed with excellence. Google's DoubleClick Rich Media Team is the proud sponsor of these awards, and we would like to extend our congratulations to the winners!

Winners of the DMACS 2010 are:

Best Home Entertainment Rich Media Campaign:

Up – Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment and Deadline Advertising

YouTube Creative Award:

The Last Exorcism – Lionsgate and The Visionaire Group

Best Television Rich Media Campaign:

The Fugitive Chronicles – A&E and The Visionaire Group

Best Video Game Rich Media Campaign:

Mass Effect 2 – Electronic Arts and Draftfcb, Sabertooth and Wieden+Kennedy

Best Theatrical Movie Rich Media Campaign:

The Expendables – Lionsgate and The Visionaire Group

Best Multichannel Cross-Media Campaign:

Dante’s Inferno – Electronic Arts/Visceral Games and Wieden+Kennedy, Kamp Grizzly and Emerge Interactive

The event was attended by approximately 150 of the entertainment industry’s leading marketing executives, agency heads, creative directors and designers. In addition to the awards ceremony, the showcase explored leading trends in digital marketing. Presentations included a panel discussion, hosted by Kevin Winston of Digital LA, on the topic of “TV Goes Tech: iTV, 3D & apps” and Eyetracking analysis and trends offered up by Lance Porter of New Media Mind.

Awards presenters included a range of talent and marketing executives from across the entertainment industry including Adam Carolla (comedian, talk-show host, author), Andrew Marlowe & Terri Miller (Creator/Executive Producer and Producer of ABC’s Castle), Janina Gavankar (The Gates, The L Word), Gordon Ho (Business development consultant for iTV and digital media and former EVP of Global Marketing at Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment) and Jamie Byrne (Head of Marketing Programs, YouTube).

Check out the videos and pictures.

Posted by Kate Macevicz, Campaign Manager

DoubleClick Ad Exchange Product Manager, Scott Spencer, recently spoke with John Ebbert at AdExchanger.com about some product enhancements and Google’s ongoing efforts around inventory quality and safety. Here is an excerpt of that interview:

What is Google announcing today?

Basically, we’re going to be rolling out a few more tools to help DoubleClick Ad Exchange buyers buy quality inventory, and to check their campaigns.

Taking a quick step back; when we launched the exchange about a year ago, we engineered it with best-in-market buyer and publishers controls, as well as extensive crawl-and-verify inventory screening. Together with the real time bidder, these were the biggest upgrades we made.

As part of a long line of improvements in this area over the past year, we’re taking the wraps off a couple of additional features to give buyers even more control, quality and transparency.

The first is “Site Packs” – these are manually crafted collections of like sites based on DoubleClick Ad Planner and internal classifications, vetted for quality. These allow buyers to get a set of high quality sites for their particular campaigns, covering anonymous and branded inventory.

Second, we’re making some changes to our Real-time Bidder (in beta). The biggest change here is for Ad Exchange clients who work with DSPs. Historically, Ad Exchange buyers were hidden from publishers behind their DSP. By introducing a way to segment out each individual client’s ad calls, inventory can be sent exclusively to an Ad Exchange buyer even when that buyer uses a DSP. It increases transparency for publishers and potentially give buyers more access to the highest quality inventory, like “exclusive ad slots” – high quality inventory offered to only a few, select buyers as determined by the publisher.

Thirdly, we’re soon going to be rolling out a beta of what we call “Data Transfer” – this is a report of every transaction bought or sold by a client on the Ad Exchange. Effectively, it’s a daily log file of everything that happened. Clients can then review every branded URL that they purchased to ensure everything was what they expected.

A recent report suggested that exchange inventory is unsafe for marketers. How does Google respond?

You won’t be surprised to hear this, but when it comes to the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, I disagree. We have high quality DoubleClick and AdSense publishers.

Of course, it’s always possible to find a single page among millions that is objectionable in one way. But we’ve built extensive checks to ensure the quality and safety of our inventory, including strict participation policies, continuous automated scanning of all publisher sites, and automated inventory review to identify improper traffic patterns. A flag can trigger either a human review or an automatic blocking. These validation tools apply to our combined pool of AdSense and Ad Exchange publisher inventory. They operate at a page-level granularity, pre-screening individual ad units, then report to the client in great detail afterwards.

We’ve also developed ways for marketers to choose high quality inventory, like through the Ad Planner 1000 filter, and the ability to buy or exclude specific publishers, URLs or categories of content.

You can read the full interview here.

Posted by Jon Nevitt, Product Marketing Manager

We’re happy to announce that we’ve acquired Invite Media, an innovative start-up based in New York and Philadelphia.

The team at Invite Media has developed technology that enables advertisers and agencies to use “real time bidding” to buy display ad space, and to optimize display ad campaigns, across multiple advertising exchanges, all in a single interface.

As we’ve regularly said lately, we’re investing significantly in the display advertising ecosystem and are seeing great momentum. We’ve developed, and are continuing to develop, tools that help both publishers and advertisers take advantage of the opportunities that display advertising offers. These investments are really bearing fruit: publishers are getting improved returns from our suite of publisher solutions; and advertisers and agencies are running effective and creative display campaigns with Google across the web.

Real time bidding technology is an important part of this ecosystem. It enables advertisers and agencies to tailor their bids on an impression-by-impression basis, based on their own data, when bidding on websites that choose to make their ad space available through an advertising exchange. Exchanges that enable real time bidding to all, or some, of their buyers include the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, along with a number of other exchange platforms.

For example, using real time bidding, a retailer running a display ad campaign for a shoe sale can bid $5 CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) for ad impressions on a particular news website, but specify that it will bid $10 CPM and show an ad for running shoes if it knows that browser has previously visited the athletics part of its website. Details of the ad impression are passed to the retailer’s bidding platform in real time by the exchange, and the auction takes into account the retailer’s increased bid. This technology lets advertisers and agencies continuously tailor and hone their display ad campaigns, and alter their bids and ads, to reach potential customers they want to attract.

We’re big believers in the benefits and future of this type of display ad buying. But we’re all just at the beginning. It can, and will, be much bigger than it is today, which will benefit the entire ecosystem - advertisers and agencies who can run more effective campaigns, demand-side platforms who offer real-time bidding services to advertisers and agencies, publishers who will get higher prices and more competition for their ad space (while controlling what space they make available, and to whom), and users who will see more useful ads that load faster.

For those who are involved in display advertising, you’ll know that there’s a lot of momentum and buzz in this particular area. In recent months, many agencies and advertisers have been asking us to make a bidding platform available directly to them, as they want to take advantage of the opportunities that real time bidding presents. We’re going to continue to invest significantly in improving Invite Media’s technology and products as a separate platform and, in time, make it work seamlessly with our DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) ad serving product. DFA enables advertisers and agencies to effectively plan, target, serve and measure display ad campaigns across the web. Integrating Invite Media’s technology will help DFA’s clients to easily buy ad space across multiple ad exchanges, as part of managing their broader display ad campaigns. Invite Media’s platform will of course continue to be available to any agency or advertiser, whether they use DFA or not.

Invite Media enables ad space to be bought across multiple exchanges and platforms, with its clients in control of where their ad dollars are spent. It’s going to continue that way. Think of Invite Media as just like DFA itself - technology that delivers ads across multiple websites.

One final note about how this fits in with the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Just as Invite Media works across multiple exchanges, this announcement changes nothing about the operation of the Ad Exchange - it will continue to provide exactly the same open and neutral access to ad space for multiple buyers, partner support and API availability as it has always done.

We’re excited by the huge potential of real-time bidding and display advertising. Together with other participants in the industry, we’re working to help them both grow significantly in the years ahead.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

This week OMMA Global takes over the San Francisco Marriott Marquis, and Google will be there. Here's an overview of what's in store.

On March 17th, get a complete view of the art and science of rich media advertising from Google's resident rich media experts, Peter Crofut and Chip Scovic.

Next day listen to Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management, deliver his keynote presentation on opportunities in online display advertising. He'll cover changes in the display ecosystem, and how everyone can embrace these changes and achieve their goals. If you miss his keynote, be sure to catch the panel right after on Online Advertising - Rapid Recovery or Recession 2.0?, or the late morning session Connect with the Google Content Network with Jason Miller, Group Product Manager, Google Content Network.

Later in the day, Baljeet Singh, Senior Product Manager, Video Monetization will participate in the panel Can Online Video Reach Scale for Clients Budgets in 2010? Hear what he, and other experts, have to say about definition, scale and measurement when it comes to online video.

Our DoubleClick, YouTube and Google Content Network teams will also be at the Trade Show to let you know what's new and to answer your product questions.

Interested in attending? Register here, and if you're a MediaPost member, your full-conference pass is FREE. You can also sign up for private networking sessions here. Use the code OGSF20 for a 20% discount.

Posted by Sally Cole

You may have read on the Official Google Blog that the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange is open for business.

The new DoubleClick Ad Exchange helps to open the ecosystem and establish a new marketplace for buyers and sellers. For a large publisher managing multiple sales channels and ad networks, the Ad Exchange provides real-time yield management to maximize returns. Participating ad networks and agency networks get access to a large pool of inventory and the controls they need to precisely achieve their marketing goals.

We've been working for some time on rebuilding the Ad Exchange on Google technology to deliver an improved platform, with new features and functionality for our customers. Both sellers (publishers) and buyers (ad networks and agency networks) stand to benefit from the new features we've incorporated.

Key benefits for sellers include:

• Real-time dynamic allocation to maximize yield. Publishers can automatically generate the highest return for every impression, using real-time data and bids to allocate ad space to the sales channel that pays the most at that second.
• Access to many more advertisers. The Ad Exchange offers publishers access to new buyers, including AdWords advertisers, bringing higher quality ads and more competition for ad space on their sites.
• Hassle-free payments managed by Google. We manage the billing and payments from networks so publishers get one monthly payment and minimize having to manage multiple relationships.
• Greater controls. Publishers can decide what advertisers, networks, ad formats, and bid types to allow.
• New easy to use interface with enhanced reporting. We use the simplicity of Google's user design principles to help publishers easily find out how their sites are performing, to help them make the right decisions about their ad space.

Key benefits for buyers include:

• Access to more publishers and more ad space. Hundreds of thousands of AdSense publisher sites are now available on the Ad Exchange to Google-certified ad networks. And as more publishers join the Ad Exchange to take advantage of its yield management capabilities, more high quality inventory is being added all the time.
• Real-time bidding. The Ad Exchange supports real-time bidding, which allows buyers to use their own data, optimization and ad serving technologies to bid on their desired inventory on an impression-by-impression basis, choosing only the sites, audiences, or particular type of ad space they want to reach.
• New easy to use interface with enhanced buyer reporting capabilities. Redesigned reports are simple to use and understand, so buyers can easily see how their campaigns are performing to help them make the right decisions.
• More control and precision. Buyers control where their ads appear and don't appear. They can use frequency capping, pacing and other features to precisely control ad delivery.
• Centralized clearing system. Google makes all payments to publishers, reducing complexity with a single billing and payment point. Buyers benefit from managing one business relationship instead of many.
• A new API - Ad networks and agency networks will have access to an API which enables them to integrate their own functionality and systems when working with the Ad Exchange.

We're excited about the open marketplace that the new Ad Exchange creates and believe that it will add substantial value to the display advertising ecosystem.