In the coming quarters, all major browsers, including Chrome, are phasing out the use of Flash technologies in favor of HTML5. HTML5 is not only available on more devices, but also offers improved security, reduced power consumption and faster page load times for users.

We began our transition to HTML5 with display ads across Google and DoubleClick back in 2015. We are now continuing that transition by shifting video ads in DoubleClick Digital Marketing, DoubleClick for Publishers, DoubleClick Ad Exchange and the Google Display Network to HTML5 over the next few quarters as follows:

• Starting April 3rd, 2017, new Flash video ads will no longer be able to be uploaded into DoubleClick Studio, DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager, DoubleClick for Publishers or AdWords.
• Starting July 3rd, 2017, Flash video ads will no longer be able to run through DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, DoubleClick for Publishers or AdWords. Additionally, our Active View and Verification tools for video will no longer use Flash.

Transition timeline for HTML5 Video

It’s important to begin updating your ads and websites to HTML5 technologies in preparation for these dates. We fully support HTML5 Video across DoubleClick and AdWords and provide the tools to ensure advertisers and publishers can easily migrate all video ads to HTML5.

For guidance and best practices to help your team with this transition, see this Chrome one-sheeter, visit the DoubleClick help center or contact your DoubleClick sales representative.

Posted by Peentoo Patel and Sunil Gupta

In February, we announced that DoubleClick Digital Marketing, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, and the Google Display Network are going 100% HTML5. Starting June 30th, 2016, display ads built in Flash can no longer be uploaded into DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager, or AdWords.

DoubleClick advertisers who currently use Flash ads in their campaigns have several ways to ensure your creative can continue to show up in your live campaigns. Read more here.

Posted by Becky Chappell
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

Tune in on July 19^th for the DoubleClick Announcements Livestream. Watch live as Paul Muret, Vice President of Display, Video Ads and Analytics at Google, shares new product announcements and DoubleClick's vision for the future.

Register and get the link to the livestream in your inbox before the event.

The event will be streamed live on DoubleClick.com on July 19th, 2016 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET.

Posted by The DoubleClick Marketing Team

Programmatic advertising accounts for 67% of all digital display ad sales¹. When you consider that data-driven creative is the creative powerhouse behind programmatic, and that 70% of a media campaign’s performance hinges on the creative², it’s clear that knowing how to build data-driven creative is a must for any agency with an eye toward the future.

As important as data-driven creative is, adopting is easier said than done. That’s why we put together a set of resources to help marketers, media agencies, creative agencies and production teams understand how to connect the dots between data and creative, to build more effective campaigns. We launched our first piece, a guide for marketers, back in March, along with an infographic to illustrate the process.

Today, we’re excited to launch a toolkit for creative and production teams, to help you understand how data can fit into your creative process.

Posted by Becky Chappell Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

^{1 eMarketer, 2015
2 Internal data, Google Media campaigns, October 2015}

Digital platforms give brands the tools to reach audiences where they spend their time, at scale and with personalized messaging not possible through other channels—so it’s no surprise that in 2017, total digital ad spending is predicted to surpass TV for the first time.¹ With this milestone approaching, we’ve heard your excitement about the opportunities digital can bring to your organization, but also that you’re looking for help to design and implement a digital strategy that meets your unique business needs.

Today, we’re launching the DoubleClick Certified Marketing Partner program to help give you the confidence you need to win in digital. Connect with a global network of certified digital marketing experts so you can achieve your goals, from building your brand to driving sales.

Connect with DoubleClick Digital Marketing

Certified Marketing Partners provide a range of technology and service offerings. Whether you’re looking for creative or media management services, data or technology integrations, help with measurement and attribution, or access to the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, our partners can help you succeed.

Find a partner

We’re excited to welcome over 40 Certified Marketing Partners into the program, from around the world. And we’re working hard to build out the program to ensure you can reach your marketing goals by teaming up with a Certified Marketing Partner, no matter where you are.

When a partner has the DoubleClick Certified Marketing Partner badge, it means they’ve been carefully vetted and meet our rigorous qualification standards. Partners who’ve earned the badge are listed on DoubleClick Certified Marketing Partner Search, so you can find the right partner for your business.

Many advertisers are already seeing value working with our Certified Marketing Partners:

"In the fast-moving and often chaotic world of programmatic advertising, MightyHive has been a trusted partner that we have come to rely upon. In addition to strong strategic advice, we appreciate their product recommendations, campaign execution and intelligence on the latest trends in the marketplace. MightyHive has consistently delivered."
-Scott Jensen, Senior Vice President of Digital, Partner Fusion

“We needed a partner to assist and lead the transition into the DoubleClick technology stack, and Acceleration has been first-rate. This partnership allowed our agency to reach our goals, and because of Acceleration we continue to exceed them in terms of growth.”
-David Taylor, Digital Director, Accord Group Ltd

“FiveStones brings effective digital strategy and optimization solutions. This partnership has helped us advance our brand marketing strategy and our ability to capitalize on the shift to digital."
-Karen Tsang, Head of Marketing, Openskools Limited

To Find a Partner, visit www.doubleclickbygoogle.com/certified-marketing-partners/

Posted by Chip Hall
Managing Director of Media Platforms, Google


¹eMarketer ‘Digital Ad Spending to Surpass TV Next Year’ 2016

Today, we’re excited to introduce an entirely revamped UI for Google Web Designer and responsive design capabilities that help creative developers make true responsive ad units a reality.

New UI lets you customize your workflow

We’ve given the UI a Material Design-inspired makeover, to make it easier and sleeker for you to use.
You can customize the UI so it fits the way that you work best:

• Re-order and move the panes on the right for Color, Library and Components panels as easily as you do for your browser tabs. You can separate them into panels of their own, or combine them onto one panel.
• Choose from ten new color themes for our code editor. (So you can see your code in whatever color doesn’t hurt your eyes!)
• Choose from a number of popular key mappings (keyboard keys mapped to on-screen functions) to make code view even easier to use.
• Set default text styles (font, size, color) and apply them throughout a single document and across documents.
• Save these stylistic preferences for next time. When you log in again, the tool will remember your last-saved customizations.
• Bonus: When you add a component to your stage, you can preview it with the actual asset, instead of as a gray “placeholder” box. This way, you get a better sense for how your creative will actually look.

Media rules for responsive ad units

Media rules help you build a single ad unit that can change its layout based on the height and width of the screen it shows up on. The easy-to-use interface creates color-coded ranges of ad sizes (see the red, yellow and purple bars along the top of the gif below and the blue and green bars along the left). You can build rules into your ad unit around which creative assets and layouts should show up for each size range.

For example, say you want to build an ad that can work in a large full screen space on a mobile phone, in a regular 300x250 space on a desktop, and in a small 300x50 space. You can build a single ad unit, then define the styling and layout the ad unit should use for each size. So when the ad renders on a screen, it recognizes the size and renders the correct styling and layout for that size. Of course, this works on a sliding scale, so all sizes in between the cut-off points will render appropriately as well. Learn more.

Example of the GWD UI for building responsive ads:

The resulting ads for the most popular sizes:
We’re really excited to bring this new and improved Google Web Designer to creative developers. We hope the responsive design capabilities help you create ads for multiple sizes more easily, so you can bring your experiences to life across screens.

Want to learn more?

Our training and engineering teams are hosting a hangout on air on May 26 @ 12pm ET to walk through these features in more details. RSVP here.

As a reminder, if you’ve already downloaded Google Web Designer, it will automatically update to reflect these new features. If you haven’t yet downloaded the tool, you can download it for free here.

Posted by Becky Chappell Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

This is part five of a five-part series introducing the creative process for data-driven campaigns as outlined in our new guide: The Creative Process for Programmatic: A Guide for Marketers.

Until quite recently, the launch of an ad campaign marked an end-point for most of the parties who created it. Once the campaign was out in the world, it was time to crack a few celebratory beers and move onto the next thing: whether that meant coming up with new creative executions that built tangentially on the campaign’s success, or scrapping it for something new entirely.

Today, data-driven marketing empowers brand advertisers and agencies to closely monitor not just how successful a campaign is after launch, but which elements are driving that success. Teams can optimize live campaigns mid-way through the flight and make tweaks to improve performance and update assets for future flights, rather than starting from scratch each season.

As data-driven campaigns have become more sophisticated so, too, have the tools for measurement. It’s no longer just about CTR: now, teams can measure elements such as post-view and view-through conversions as well as engagement metrics such as video completes and interaction rates. This paves the way for more specific and nuanced KPIs, allowing teams to consider what success means for individual campaigns and brands as a whole.

The new creative process is significantly more iterative and cyclical than what we saw in the past:

• Teams are now actively involved in the evolution of the campaign, closely monitoring which audiences respond to which elements of data-driven creative and proactively optimizing on the fly.
• There are greater opportunities for learning, as teams work together to analyze why audiences may be responding favorably (or not-so-favorably) to different elements.
• Teams can use these learnings for future campaigns and, at the same time, pull in learnings from other data-driven campaigns to inform the work that’s currently live.

You can learn more about this campaign, as well as get a full picture of best practices for data-driven creative campaigns, in our new guide The Creative Process for Programmatic: A Guide for Marketers.

Join us for a webinar on our creative research, focused on how agencies can bring data-driven creative to life. Thursday, April 21st @ 12pm ET. RSVP here.

Posted by Becky Chappell Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

This is part four of a five-part series introducing the creative process for data-driven campaigns as outlined in our new guide: The Creative Process for Programmatic: A Guide for Marketers.

Broadway shows have done it for decades. Bars and restaurants have been doing it for years. More recently, retailers have gotten on board—and now, smart brands are using the soft launch approach when mounting data-driven advertising campaigns.

Thanks to the sophistication of digital media buys, the soft launch is now not only possible, but recommended. Digital — and, particularly, programmatic—allows your campaign to “sneak” out into the real world, where your team can review it in its live environment before launching in full force.

As part of our recent study of best practices for data-driven creative campaigns, we found that soft launches can save significant time, money, and hassle for marketers and their creative, media, and production teams.

What is a soft launch?

A soft launch allows you to run your campaign for a short amount of time (experts recommend 4-7 days) at a minimal daily budget (as low as $10 day). You and your teams can use this time to look for bugs and make sure everything is performing correctly. During this time, you should:

• Make sure that all of your platforms are integrating. If you’re not using an end-to-end solution, make sure that your buy-side, sell-side, and creative platforms are integrating correctly and not interfering with each other, as this may affect how ads are served.
• Review how the creative looks in context. No matter how carefully you craft your creative template and variables, your work may look different once it’s live. Make sure everything is lining up properly and rendering correctly—and as long as you’re at it, give the copy one more solid proofread.
• Ensure that the correct metrics are tracking. Have your media agency pull reports at both the campaign level and the dynamic creative level. This will give you a birdseye view of your campaign, as well as a sense of which dynamic elements are performing best and should be optimized.

Once you’ve evaluated your campaign in a real-world context, you can ratchet your budget up to your desired daily spend.

When should you do a soft launch?

The soft launch is a crucial step that should never be skipped with data-driven campaigns; but if you have the flexibility it’s worth considering for all digital campaigns, even those with a more traditional bent. It occurs at the end of Step 4 in our recommended process for data-driven creative campaigns: after your team has:

• Gathered data signals.
• Collaborated on an all-hands kick-off.
• Designed and developed creative.

Before moving on to the soft launch, your team will also traffic the campaign and conduct a cross-agency QA.

To learn more best practices for trafficking and QA’ing data-driven campaigns, as well as see examples of real campaigns in action, please visit The Creative Process for Programmatic: A Guide for Marketers.

Posted by Becky Chappell Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

This is part three of a five-part series introducing the creative process for data-driven campaigns as outlined in our new guide: The Creative Process for Programmatic: A Guide for Marketers.

A major shift is occurring in the way agencies work together to design and develop digital creative campaigns. Previously, teams were siloed: the media agency used data to determine ad types and sizes, and served the creative production agency with a spec sheet off of which to build executions.

Today, we’re moving toward a model in which all teams work together, using sophisticated digital tools for increased efficiency. In the model we put forth in our new guide for marketers, the brand and media team now share data with the creative production team, which uses it to create a strategy for the campaign’s creative based on audience insights and real-time environmental and media triggers.

We explored the topics of gathering data signals and getting all teams on board in previous blog posts. Here, we’ll talk a bit about how creative production agencies are using tools for increased flexibility, efficiency, and control in building dynamic creative.

What is dynamic creative?

Dynamic creative allows for variables such as copy, imagery, font, and color to easily change based on data signals, such as who is viewing the ad, where they’re viewing it, and when. It consists of two complementary pieces: the creative template, and the dynamic creative feed.

The creative template

Much like the blueprint for a house, this serves as the structure of the ad unit. When you use a blueprint, variables such as the type of flooring and color of the exterior may change, but the “bones” of the house will remain the same.

Similarly, the creative template provides parameters for variables such as:

• Character counts for copy
• Length of animations
• Size and location of images

Within those parameters, the team can experiment with different headlines, images, and types of animations, as well as other factors.

The dynamic creative feed

This houses the creative assets that will get plugged into the creative template, as well as the logic that dictates which assets will be served to which viewers based on your data signals and campaign strategy. Using a feed to control your dynamic campaign strategy gives you maximum flexibility, allowing you to quickly and easily make changes to your creative on the fly.

The template and feed in action

When we worked with L’Oreal on a campaign for their Vichy sunscreen brand, the team selected several dynamic creative elements that would change based on data signals, including lifestyle imagery, product image, and call-to-action. Additionally, messaging driving to the nearest store could populate based on the user’s postal code.

The design team created a simple yet elegant template that accounted for all of these variables, and the dynamic creative feed signaled which variables would appear to which users based on their data signals.

To see examples of the creative from this campaign and learn more about best practices for data-driven campaigns, please visit our marketers’ guide to data-driven creative campaigns.

We’re also hosting a hangout on air on Tuesday, April 5th at 12pm ET, to discuss the research and provide some key takeaways from the guide. RSVP here.

Posted by Becky Chappell Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

This is part two of a five-part series introducing the creative process for data-driven campaigns as outlined in our new guide: The Creative Process for Programmatic: A Guide for Marketers.

Anyone who’s managed an ad campaign knows that there are two kinds of success. The first is executional: hitting KPI’s. But there’s a second metric that can be just as important, and may even influence your numbers: how everyone feels when the campaign is over. Is the team bursting with new learnings and toasting a job well done, or reaching for the Advil while muttering: “never again”?

To help ensure that your campaigns run smoothly from start to finish and end in beers instead of tears, we recommend incorporating a single, crucial step into your process: the all-hands-on-deck collaborative brief.

We recently tested several methodologies for executing data-driven creative campaigns, which we explore in detail in The Creative Process for Programmatic: A Guide for Marketers. We universally found that including a collaborative digital brief-building session can lead to more positive results, setting the stage for a campaign that runs smoothly from start to finish.

The new all-hands kickoff

You’ve probably had an all-hands kick-off before: one in which you gathered all of your agencies and gave them their marching orders. This is different. Instead of briefing your media, creative, and production agencies, you’re soliciting their expertise.

This briefing process may seem more open-ended, collaborative, and cyclical than the process you’re used to. Consider that involving your agencies in developing a collective digital brief changes the approach from: “here’s what I want you to do” to “here’s what I’m thinking, what are your thoughts?” It enables you to take advantage of the knowledge on your team and creates a stronger sense of investment from everyone involved.

Meet in person if possible and use this time to review project goals and start building the digital brief. We also encourage extensive whiteboard usage. Writing down all the data signals you gathered in Phase 1 can help everyone visualize the campaign map and generate ideas together.

When we worked with Royal Bank of Canada on their campaign for a premium credit card, the team successfully used the collaborative briefing meeting to bring together marketing, media buying, creative and data analysts. As a group, we discussed the brand’s overall goals for the campaign, the target audience, and the data signals that could be used to reach that audience. We also decided on the creative strategy that would be used for the campaign.

Check out phase two of “The Creative Process for programmatic: A guide for marketers” to learn more about RBC’s approach and how you can follow suit.

We’re also hosting a hangout on air on Tuesday, April 5th at 12pm ET, to discuss the research and provide some key takeaways from the guide. RSVP here.

Posted by Becky Chappell Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

This is part one of a five-part series that will walk through the creative process for programmatic campaigns, which is outlined in The Creative Process for Programmatic: A Guide for Marketers.

If there’s one thing the programmatic revolution has undeniably given us, it’s data. We know more about how to reach the right people and understand how they respond to campaigns than ever before. But even as we’re drowning in data, we don’t always know what to do with it.

Data can play a powerful role in running more effective campaigns only after we learn to harness and apply it strategically. Recently, we teamed up with several brands and agency partners to do just that, and last week we launched our findings.

Today, we’ll explore Phase 1 of our five-phase creative process. Phase 1 is all about gathering data, sifting through the dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of data signals available and using them to inform your creative strategy.

So what’s a data signal?

A data signal is information about your audience or their context that can influence your campaign. These can include demographic or behavioral information, information about the properties on which your ads might appear, or external factors such as the weather or market performance that may influence how people are feeling when your advertising reaches their eyeballs.

Once you understand the data signals available, you can design creative strategies that take advantage of those signals, with messaging or imagery that is relevant based on the audience, media, or environment where your ad will show up.

For example, in our research project, our brand partner L’Oreal used audience targeting lists from their programmatic buying tool to segment their audience into women and women with children, and show each segment a relevant sunscreen product coupled with relevant imagery. Another brand partner, Gilt, used top-performing keywords from previous campaigns to decide which merchandise to feature in their creative units for each of their audience segments.

Take a deep-dive into these case studies and learn more about how audience insights and data signals can help inform your creative strategy.

Posted by Becky Chappell Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

As 2016 marketing strategies kick into high gear, there’s one word on everyone’s mind: programmatic. Global programmatic ad spend is expected to reach $21.6B in 2016, and account for 67% of all digital display ad sales¹.

Programmatic advertising allows brands to reach more valuable audiences with messages tailored to their interests and mindsets in the crucial moments when decisions are made. As such, it’s not just changing how we buy and sell media—it’s also transforming the way we strategize, design, and develop creative.

At DoubleClick, we saw a need to define best practices for developing and implementing creative strategies for programmatic campaigns. In partnership with the digital creative studio, Fancy Pants Group, and the management consulting company, Accenture, we tested several approaches with three global brands: Gilt Groupe, L’Oreal Vichy, and RBC Royal Bank of Canada.

Over the course of these tests, we identified a new creative process for programmatic campaigns. Today, we’re debuting that process and the research behind it in a comprehensive guide for marketers.

Posted by Becky Chappell Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

^{1 eMarketer}

When Netflix launched its new series Narcos¹ in August of 2015, it faced a big global marketing challenge.
Narcos is a realistic look at the rise of the Cocaine Highway as told through the lives of legendary kingpin Pablo Escobar and the American DEA agents tracking him. It's a passionate story of crime, drugs, money, honor and politics, set in the late decades of the 20th century, with dialogue half in Spanish and half in English.
Netflix wanted to reach a global audience that included target groups like "thrill seekers" (men 25-34 drawn to the excitement of crime culture) and "conspiracy theorists" (older males fascinated by the political implications of drug trafficking). That meant Netflix and its digital agency, AvatarLabs, needed to bring the Narcos story to countries from Peru to Sweden with targeted messages that would appeal powerfully to different target viewers in each culture ― without overwhelming their budget or their marketing teams.

See how they made it happen.

Posted by Becky Chappell Product Marketing Manager, Google Web Designer

^{1 Narcos can been seen exclusively on Netflix.}

Over the last year, we’ve rolled out tools to encourage advertisers to build in HTML5, so you’re able to reach the widest possible audience across screens. To enhance the browsing experience for more people across more sites, DoubleClick Digital Marketing, DoubleClick Ad Exchange and the Google Display Network are now going 100% HTML5^*.

• Starting June 30th, 2016, advertisers will no longer be able to upload Flash ads into DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager, or AdWords.
• Starting January 2nd, 2017, Flash ads will no longer be able to run through DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, or the Google Display Network.

It’s important to update your ads to HTML5 before these dates.
Advertisers who currently use display ads built in Flash in their campaigns have several easy ways to navigate the transition, ensuring your creative continues to reach people successfully. Read more here.
Posted by Karin Hennessy
Product Manager, DoubleClick

^{*Note: this update applies only to display ads; video ads built in Flash will not be impacted on these dates.}

Ever since Weight Watchers first began as a gathering of friends in 1963, the company has been helping people lose pounds and live healthier lives. Today the Weight Watchers digital marketing team is focused on acquiring new generations of customers for those classic local meetings as well as their online products and services.

The Weight Watchers team has had ample success with search and social media, where they found it easy to test different headlines and calls to action. But they hadn't found a way to do the same kind of vigorous testing on display advertising. Building and managing dozens of creative iterations, and accurately measuring the results, seemed like a major challenge.

To tackle that challenge, Weight Watchers, its agencies, Neo@Ogilvy and OgilvyOne, chose DoubleClick Dynamic Creative.

See how they managed their creative testing to identify the best-performing creative iterations and boost acquisition volume by 56%.

Posted by Becky Chappell Product Marketing Manager, Google Web Designer

E-commerce in Brazil has grown 20+% year over year for the last five years¹. In this highly competitive environment, choosing the right advertising partner is a critical strategic decision for a retail brand to ensure their message breaks through.

Netshoes is the world's largest sports retailer, selling everything from basketball shoes to fitness gear across all of Latin America. Historically they have been deeply focused on performance advertising, and at times have used up to 8 different advertising platforms and retargeters at once in search of the best results.

But recently, Netshoes decided this approach wasn't giving them the best results. They found they were competing against themselves by bidding for the same audience with multiple ad providers, driving costs up and ROI down. When they consolidated their media buys across display and video with DoubleClick Bid Manager, the results speak for themselves:

• 400% better conversion rate than with other channels.
• 30% view rate on TrueView video ads, with CPVs lower than the market average.
• 15% time savings across the Netshoes media buying team.

"The results we get from DoubleClick are simply much better than those from other partners in our past"
—Danilo Mangini, Marketing Manager, Netshoes

Learn more about Netshoes’ approach in the full case study.

Posted by Kelly Cox Product Marketing Manager, Google

^{1 Source: e-bit Webshoppers}

Year after year we've heard pundits announce that this is "The Year of Mobile," but we don't quite seem to get there. Still, the facts don't lie: eMarketer estimates that mobile will account for 72% of U.S. digital ad spend by 2019 and Google's tech-forward target audience spends more than 74% of its time on mobile.¹

Because mobile devices are consumers' always-on, constant companions, Google Marketing wanted to deliver personalized, contextual creative programmatically via ads. To show how the Google app can add value in people’s lives, Google Marketing brought the app’s functionality into the ad units themselves. Combining aggregated search insights, geo-targeting, and dynamic creative, the ads proactively fed users with helpful, relevant information.

The Google Marketing team followed four key steps as it developed the creative for the Google app. To learn more about the approach, check out the full case study.

Posted by Kelly Cox Product Marketing Manager, Google

^{1 ComScore MobileMetrix, September 2015.}

As the holiday season gets underway, you’re likely focused on reaching holiday shoppers as they browse for gifts for their family and friends. Dynamic creative strategies are key to getting the most relevant messages and products in front of these shoppers. But with consumers’ increased usage of mobile devices, you need to build your dynamic creative in HTML5, and this confluence of technologies can lead to complexity.

Streamlining production of dynamic creative in Google Web Designer

To make it easier for you to build relevant and engaging cross-screen creative, we’re excited to announce the launch of simplified workflows in Google Web Designer that make it even easier to build dynamic creative in HTML5. You can now easily choose which data signals/feed attributes to connect to each dynamic element, pulling directly from the dynamic profile you’ve set up in DoubleClick Studio.

We’ve already seen some teams find success with the new dynamic workflow. Kaymu, one of the largest online retail marketplaces for emerging markets, used Google Web Designer to build an HTML5 dynamic remarketing campaign and show relevant products to shoppers. This strategy drove a 580% increase in CTR compared to their previous, non-HTML5, non-dynamic campaign, and the team’s dynamic creative build time dropped from 3 days to 10 minutes.

CyberAgent, a media agency based in Japan, also used Google Web Designer for a recent dynamic remarketing campaign. To provide the time needed to focus on the creative strategy, the team first automated the bidding and targeting for the campaign. They then could build and test several dynamic templates, using advanced animations and multiple dynamic elements. Ultimately, these advanced creatives led to a 40% higher CTR and a 28% lower CPC compared to the previous dynamic remarketing campaign that didn’t use Google Web Designer.

In addition to the new dynamic support in Google Web Designer, we’re also excited to launch:

• Animation improvements, which help you build smooth animations
• Updates to our text authoring capabilities, which make editing and manipulating the text in your ad units much easier and more intuitive
• Two new components in our components gallery: a Spritesheet component, so you can more easily build out your spritesheets, and a Streetview component, so you can add location-based imagery to your ads. (We’ve kept this component separate from the Google Maps component to help you keep your file sizes smaller.)

Upcoming Google Web Designer Hangout on Air

Want to learn more about the new features? Sign up for one of our Hangouts on Air. Sean Kranzberg, Engineering Manager for Google Web Designer, will walk through the new features and take your questions.

• Wednesday, Dec. 9th @ 12pm ET / 9am PT. RSVP here
• Thursday, Dec. 10th @ 5pm PT / Friday, Dec. 11th @ 12pm Sydney time (APAC Friendly time) RSVP here

Posted by Becky Chappell Product Marketing Manager, Google Web Designer

Every day, your audience is filling their days with hundreds if not thousands of micro-moments—intent-rich moments when preferences are shaped and decisions are made. As consumers spread their attention across more and more screens and channels, those moments can happen almost anywhere, anytime. People search on their smartphones while in front of the TV. They watch YouTube videos on their tablets while texting their friends. They open a mobile app to shop for the perfect gift, then head to the store to buy it. With mobile devices never more than an arm’s length away, people can find and buy anything, anytime.

For marketers, this means the purchase funnel is wildly more complicated than it was just a few years ago.

“Brands can use programmatic to assemble a consumer’s micro-moments in just the right way—like joining puzzle pieces together—to see a detailed blueprint of consumer intent.”

It’s hard to plan for nonlinear purchase paths, but programmatic advertising can help, enabling brands to reach the right person with the right message in the moment of opportunity. Brands can use programmatic to assemble a consumer’s micro-moments in just the right way—like joining puzzle pieces together—to see a detailed blueprint of consumer intent. That’s a powerful proposition, and it’s why programmatic advertising spend is projected to grow by more than 77% this year.¹

In this article, we share four tips for using programmatic to win these micro-moments and examples of brands that are doing it right.

Visit DoubleClick.com to read the full article.

Posted by Kelly Cox
Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

^{1. IDC, Worldwide Programmatic Display Forecast, 2015.}

For the last few months, we’ve been raising awareness of the ad injection economy, showing how unwanted ad injectors can hurt user experience, jeopardize user security, and generate significant volumes of unwanted ads. We’ve used learnings from our research to prevent and remove unwanted ad injectors from Google services and improve our policies and technologies to make it more difficult to spread this unwanted software.

Today, we’re announcing a new measure to remove injected ads from the advertising ecosystem, including an automated filter in DoubleClick Bid Manager that removes impressions generated by ad injectors before any bid is made.

Unwanted ad injectors: disliked by users, advertisers, and publishers

Unwanted ad injectors are programs that insert new ads, or replace existing ones, in the pages users visit while browsing the web. Unwanted ad injectors aren’t part of a healthy ads ecosystem. They’re part of an environment where bad practices hurt users, advertisers, and publishers alike.

We’ve received almost 300,000 user complaints about them in Chrome since the beginning of 2015—more than any other issue, and it’s no wonder. Ad injectors affect all sites equally. You wouldn’t be happy if you tried to get the morning news and saw this:

Not only are they intrusive, but people are often tricked into installing them in the first place, via deceptive advertising, or software “bundles.” Ad injection can also be a security risk, as the recent “Superfish” incident showed.

Ad injectors are problematic for advertisers and publishers as well. Advertisers often don’t know their ads are being injected, which means they don’t have any idea where their ads are running. Publishers, meanwhile, aren’t being compensated for these ads, and more importantly, they unknowingly may be putting their visitors in harm’s way, via spam or malware in the injected ads.

Removing injected inventory from advertising

Earlier this quarter, we launched an automated filter on DoubleClick Bid Manager to prevent advertisers from buying injected ads across the web. This new system detects ad injection and proactively creates a blacklist that prevents our systems from bidding on injected inventory. Advertisers and agencies using our platforms are already protected. No adjustments are needed. No settings to change.

We currently blacklist 1.4% of the inventory accessed by DoubleClick Bid Manager across exchanges. However, we’ve found this percentage varies widely by provider. Below is a breakdown showing the filtered percentages across some of the largest exchanges:

We’ve always enforced policies against the sale of injected inventory on our ads platforms, including the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Now advertisers using DoubleClick Bid Manager can avoid injected inventory across the web.

No more injected ads?

We don’t expect the steps we’ve outlined above to solve the problem overnight, but we hope others across the industry take action to cut ad injectors out of advertising. With the tangle of different businesses involved—knowingly, or unknowingly—in the ad injector ecosystem, progress will only be made if we all work together. We strongly encourage all members of the ads ecosystem to review their policies and practices and take actions to tackle this issue.

Posted by Vegard Johnsen Product Manager, Google Ads Traffic Quality