Cross-posted from the Google Agency Blog

Measurement has been top of mind in our recent conversations with advertisers, and for good reason. As we’ve said many times, “If you can’t measure it, how do you know it worked?” Committing to measurement is critical, but just the first step. We believe that that the industry needs metrics that are trusted, transparent and easily verified. Today, we’re pleased to share several updates on the work we’re doing with third party verification and audit partners to ensure that the metrics available from Google are objective and accurate.

Transparency and trust are the core principles of our measurement strategy. We strongly believe in the need for third-party accreditation through the Media Rating Council (MRC). We gained our first accreditations back in 2006, and for over ten years we’ve partnered with the MRC, advocating for standards across the industry and contributing to ongoing discussions that set guidelines for measuring the effectiveness of ads. We currently maintain over 30 MRC accreditations across display and video, desktop and mobile web, mobile apps, and clicks, plays, impressions and viewability.

MRC accreditation for 3rd party viewability reporting on YouTube

Since 2015, we've completed integrations with Moat, Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify to enable third-party viewability reporting on YouTube. These integrations offer advertisers additional choice for measuring viewability on YouTube, alongside Active View.

Today, we’re announcing that each of these integrations will undergo a stringent, independent audit for MRC accreditation. The audit will validate that data collection, aggregation and reporting for served video impressions, viewable impressions, related viewability statistics and General Invalid Traffic (GIVT) across desktop and mobile for each integration adheres to MRC and IAB standards. In short, advertisers will have even greater confidence in the metrics returned by these third party partners about their campaigns on YouTube.

“Google’s announcement that they are undertaking an independent audit of their 3rd party viewability reporting integrations is a positive step forward for marketers. At the ANA, our goal is to create transparency for the advertising supply chain. This action from Google today demonstrates their commitment to partnering with us to deliver this goal."
—Bob Liodice, President and CEO, Association for National Advertisers

New MRC accreditations for DoubleClick and AdWords

Our commitment to MRC accreditation goes beyond our media to include our platform solutions as well. We maintain several accreditations for DoubleClick already, and today we’re announcing that we are now fully accredited for video impressions and viewability statistics for desktop web, mobile web and mobile app in DoubleClick Campaign Manager.

We are also seeking MRC accreditation for video impressions and viewability statistics and GIVT detection for display and video in both AdWords and DoubleClick Bid Manager. These MRC audits will span across all video available through these buying platforms — including YouTube and partner inventory.

"Google's commitment to MRC's initiatives has been unwavering over time, and their participation in industry standards projects has been helpful. We look forward to working on these new audits and expanding the industry's trust as it relates to YouTube's third party integrations and DoubleClick Bid Manager."
—George Ivie, CEO and Executive Director, Media Rating Council

“Google’s announcement to bring more media transparency is important progress that will help move the industry forward. At P&G;, we are encouraged by Google’s actions, which should make a positive impact on creating a clean and productive media supply chain.”
—Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer, Procter & Gamble

With so much activity underway, we know that it can be difficult to stay current. For an up to date list of all MRC accreditations, click here.

Transparency and trust are fundamental to measurement, and they’re fundamental to our strategy for giving marketers and publishers the metrics and insights they need to make better decisions. A solid foundation has been created, but there is much more work to do. In 2017, we’ll continue to seek ways to raise the bar on transparent and trustworthy measurement, and we welcome your partnership along the way.

Posted by Babak Pahlavan
Senior Director of Product Management, Analytics Solutions and Measurement, Google

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

Join me on Tuesday, July 19th at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET for a livestream broadcast of my keynote address from the DoubleClick Leadership Summit (DLS). I’ll be sharing updates on the latest innovations on the DoubleClick platform and how we’re helping advertisers and publishers adapt to today’s mobile world.

At Google, one of our enduring principles is to “focus on the user and all else will follow.” This has been an important guidepost throughout our history, and it has never been more relevant than it is today. People are more ‘mobile’ now than ever before. We spend every waking hour connected to our devices. We expect to find what we want, when we want it. But with only a split second to engage and capture attention, user experience matters more than ever.

In my keynote, I’ll share an update on the technologies we’re developing to help advertisers, agencies and publishers create better experiences for people on the go. You can expect to hear more about Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), Native Ads, as well as new, more immersive experiences like 360 video. I’ll also be unveiling new product features to help our clients and partners more effectively reach, engage, monetize, and measure audiences across screens.

I’m looking forward to the livestream on July 19th. Please register to watch here.

Posted by Paul Muret Vice President of Display, Video and Analytics, Google

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

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

The television industry is in the midst of a massive change. The rise of new content models and connected devices has led to more choice than ever--both for content creators and consumers. But with this choice and opportunity comes new challenges to solve as well.

I spoke to the TV industry at the Closing General Session of the National Association of Broadcasters Show. In the keynote I discussed the rebirth of TV and how we’re helping Broadcasters and Distributors with discovery, monetization and content creation.

Discovery

Announcing new ways to find where and when to watch your favorite shows.

There are now more ways to watch your favorite TV shows than ever before. This shift has some even saying that we’re in the “golden age” of television. And what we're seeing is that more and more, viewers are turning to their phones to find out what to watch, where to watch it and when it’s available -- in fact, searches for TV shows and films on mobile have grown more than 55% in the past year alone.

Last year we launched video actions in Search to help viewers find direct options to watch the shows they are looking for on programmer and distributors mobile apps and sites or stores like Google Play.

Today, I'm excited to announce that, coming soon, Google Search will have live TV listings. So now if you're looking for a movie or TV show like The Big Bang Theory, we'll not only show you the apps and sites where you can find the latest episode, but also show which channel you can turn your tv to later in the evening or week to catch it live.

Monetization

Announcing personalized TV ads with DoubleClick Dynamic Ad Insertion

Viewers no longer expect content personalized to them, they demand it. And that includes ads.

Today we are taking big steps to bring new addressable advertising capabilities to TV Broadcasters and Distributors by announcing DoubleClick’s Dynamic Ad Insertion. This makes ads hyper relevant for viewers across any screen that they watch. By creating individual streams for every viewer using server side ad insertion, we are able to deliver a better, more personalized viewing experience that looks and feels as seamless as TV today.

And not only will this work for both live and on-demand TV but it works across directly sold and programmatic.

We put this technology to the test with two of the highest rated TV events in the last year: the Rugby World Cup Finals on TF1, the leading network in France, and the Republican Presidential Debates on Fox News, a leading news network in the US. Politics and sports are pretty personal topics, so it’s only appropriate that TF1 and Fox News created a fully addressable viewing experience for the millions of viewers that tuned in using Dynamic Ad Insertion.

Announcing smarter TV ad breaks

Today we’re also announcing that DoubleClick for Publisher clients will soon be able to seamlessly enforce the level of control that has been firmly established in TV -- across all inventory, whether it was sold directly or indirectly. That means, we are able to honor competitive separation - so two automotive ads don’t appear in the same commercial break - and other rules like making sure an alcohol and children's cereal ad don’t appear in the same commercial break.

This has been major blocker to enabling programmatic to work for TV. And now you no longer need to turn down attractive opportunities from advertisers interested in transacting programmatically because of compliance concerns.

Announcing New TV Partners

DoubleClick is focused on building advertising solutions that meet the changing needs of the TV ecosystem. We’re proud of our longstanding partnerships with industry leaders like AMC Networks in the US and Globo in South America.

Today we add three more to the list: we’re happy to welcome MCN, Roku and Cablevision as partners. They’ve all signed on to use DoubleClick for Publishers to serve ads and monetize cross-screen TV and video content.

“As the conventional TV and digital video worlds converge, people are watching more content than ever across a variety of screens. At Cablevision, we’re focused on developing innovative solutions that deliver the best experience for our viewers in this new cross-screen world and unlocking new opportunities for our advertisers. We are enthusiastic about using Google's DoubleClick for seamless advertising delivery across our set-top boxes and connected devices. Together, we are enabling more personalized and relevant ads with addressable and dynamic ad insertion.”
- Kristin Dolan, Chief Operating Officer, Cablevision

Content creation

Announcing Autodesk collaboration to enable 10x improvement in rendering efficiency

Autodesk software has been behind the past 21 Academy Award winners for Best Visual Effects and we’re bringing this capability to Google Cloud Platform. Yesterday we announced (link) that Autodesk, maker of industry-leading 3D animation and modeling software, is collaborating with Google on a new cloud-based rendering solution called Maya^® for Google Cloud Platform ZYNC Render. This allows artists to focus on creating incredible TV & movie content using the tools they already know, while shifting even the largest rendering jobs seamlessly to the cloud.

TV is the midst of a revival. And just like other media types which have been reimagined for the digital age like music, the arrival of this ‘new TV’ was preceded by change and tumult. But TV’s past was built on a rich history of creativity and innovation, and I’m incredibly optimistic that TV’s future will be as well. Our job is to help make that future become the present and we are excited to partner with the TV ecosystem to build it.

Posted by Daniel Alegre President of Global Partnerships, Google

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}

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.}

As a brand trying to reach consumers in today’s increasingly fragmented media landscape, it is critical that you understand the impact of your ads on brand metrics such as awareness and consideration.

Viewability is the starting point, an initial understanding of whether the ad had a chance to be seen. We have talked before about why measuring the viewability of advertising matters.

In December 2014, we shared insights on the state of display ad viewability across the web. As a continuation of that effort, in May we released new insights from our video ad platforms, including YouTube, to start the discussion about the state of video ad viewability.

We wanted to take this research a step further, by analyzing the relationship between viewability and brand metrics.

To do so, we took our Brand Lift solution, which gives you insights into what impact your ads have on the consumer journey - from awareness, to ad recall, to brand interest - and tied the data to viewability metrics from our Active View technology for a set of YouTube TrueView ads. By connecting these two solutions, we were able to draw out some insights about the relationship between viewability and brand metrics.

Sight, sound and motion combined drive higher lift

When it comes to brand metrics, ad recall is a foundation for measuring the impact of your ad. As a brand advertiser, knowing if your ad breaks through with users is a key first step to understanding the overall impact of an ad on a suite of brand metrics. In this analysis, we were able to analyze how being able to hear and see your ad affected a user’s ability to recall your ad.

Our data shows that users exposed to even one aspect of your video ad (audio or video only), exhibit significant lift in ad recall. However, the full immersive experience of sight, sound and motion delivers more ad recall than either audio or video alone. In fact, the impact on ad recall was 23% higher when users were exposed to ads with audio and video together versus ads with just audio alone.

The longer in view, the better you do (on brand metrics)

Time in view also plays a large role when it comes to moving the needle on brand awareness and consideration. We recently introduced the ability for Active View users to measure average viewable time - the average time, in seconds, a given ad appeared on screen - in Doubleclick Bid Manager. By connecting these measurements, we can see the relationship between viewable time and brand metrics.

We found that there is a consistent relationship between how long an ad is viewable and increases in brand awareness and consideration. The longer a user views your ad, the higher the lift in these two important brand metrics:

What the results mean for your brand

These results prompt you to think about your brand advertising in a few important ways:

• Are users viewing your creative for longer periods of time? Brand metrics continue to get higher the longer a user views your ad.
• Are you buying the right media to have an impact on brand metrics? YouTube’s opt-in TrueView ads are uniquely suited to deliver long-form video content at scale for brand advertisers.
• Finally, are you thinking beyond viewability to capture effectiveness metrics? You want your ads to move consumers at the moments that matter, and measuring the impact on brand metrics will make for more effective ad spend.

This is just the beginning of understanding what impacts brand metrics for video ads. As brands look to measure the effectiveness of their digital video advertising, a continued understanding of what factors drive brand metrics will be crucial to more effective brand spend.

Read further research on the impact of online video.

To read all of our research on viewability, check out thinkwithgoogle.com/viewability.

To see how viewability is measured, visit our interactive Active View demo.

Posted by Sanaz Ahari Group Product Manager, Brand Measurement, Google

At YouTube, over the past few years we’ve heard from clients that they want to access our marquee formats, such as TrueView, through programmatic channels. We’ve been investing to make that happen and recently made TrueView ads, which represent 85% of YouTube in-stream ads, available programmatically in DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM). Clients have been pleased with the performance: those buying TrueView this way are already seeing higher engagement and view-through rates than with other video ad formats.

To continue improving the YouTube advertising experience for as many of our clients as possible, we’ll be focusing our future development efforts on the formats and channels used by most of our partners. To enable that, as of the end of the year, we’ll no longer support the small amount of YouTube buying happening on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

With this change, we’ll be able to invest even more in creating the best and most effective YouTube advertising and buying experiences possible, continuing our efforts in TrueView and offerings like Google Preferred. Video advertising and programmatic buying are growing rapidly and being focused in our investments will help us drive them forward at an even faster rate.

Posted by Neal Mohan VP, Display & Video Advertising, Google

Today the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) announced a new pilot blacklist to protect advertisers across the industry. This blacklist comprises data-center IP addresses associated with non-human ad requests. We're happy to support this effort along with other industry leaders—Dstillery, Facebook, MediaMath, Quantcast, Rubicon Project, The Trade Desk, TubeMogul and Yahoo—and contribute our own data-center blacklist. As mentioned to Ad Age and in our recent call to action, we believe that if we work together we can raise the fraud-fighting bar for the whole industry.

Data-center traffic is one of many types of non-human or illegitimate ad traffic. The newly shared blacklist identifies web robots or “bots” that are being run in data centers but that avoid detection by the IAB/ABC International Spiders & Bots List. Well-behaved bots announce that they're bots as they surf the web by including a bot identifier in their declared User-Agent strings. The bots filtered by this new blacklist are different. They masquerade as human visitors by using User-Agent strings that are indistinguishable from those of typical web browsers.

In this post, we take a closer look at a few examples of data-center traffic to show why it’s so important to filter this traffic across the industry.

Impact of the data-center blacklist

When observing the traffic generated by the IP addresses in the newly shared blacklist, we found significantly distorted click metrics. In May of 2015 on DoubleClick Campaign Manager alone, we found the blacklist filtered 8.9% of all clicks. Without filtering these clicks from campaign metrics, advertiser click-through rates would have been incorrect and for some advertisers this error would have been very large.

Below is a plot that shows how much click-through rates in May would have been inflated across the most impacted of DoubleClick Campaign Manager’s larger advertisers.

Two examples of bad data-center traffic

There are two distinct types of invalid data-center traffic: where the intent is malicious and where the impact on advertisers is accidental. In this section we consider two interesting examples where we’ve observed traffic that was likely generated with malicious intent.

Publishers use many different strategies to increase the traffic to their sites. Unfortunately, some are willing to use any means necessary to do so. In our investigations we’ve seen instances where publishers have been running software tools in data centers to intentionally mislead advertisers with fake impressions and fake clicks.

First example

UrlSpirit is just one example of software that some unscrupulous publishers have been using to collaboratively drive automated traffic to their websites. Participating publishers install the UrlSpirit application on Windows machines and they each submit up to three URLs through the application’s interface. Submitted URLs are then distributed to other installed instances of the application, where Internet Explorer is used to automatically visit the list of target URLs. Publishers who have not installed the application can also leverage the network of installations by paying a fee.

At the end of May more than 82% of the UrlSpirit installations were being run on machines in data centers. There were more than 6,500 data-center installations of UrlSpirit, with each data-center installation running in a separate virtual machine. In aggregate, the data-center installations of UrlSpirit were generating a monthly rate of at least half a billion ad requests— an average of 2,500 fraudulent ad requests per installation per day.

Second Example

HitLeap is another example of software that some publishers are using to collaboratively drive automated traffic to their websites. The software also runs on Windows machines, and each instance uses the Chromium Embedded Framework to automatically browse the websites of participating publishers—rather than using Internet Explorer.

Before publishers can use the network of installations to drive traffic to their websites, they need browsing minutes. Participating publishers earn browsing minutes by running the application on their computers. Alternatively, they can simply buy browsing minutes—with bundles starting at $9 for 10,000 minutes or up to 1,000,000 minutes for $625. 

Publishers can specify as many target URLs as they like. The number of visits they receive from the network of installations is a function of how long they want the network of bots to spend on their sites. For example, ten browsing minutes will get a publisher five visits if the publisher requests two-minute visit durations.

In mid-June, at least 4,800 HitLeap installations were being run in virtual machines in data centers, with a unique IP associated with each HitLeap installation. The data-center installations of HitLeap made up 16% of the total HitLeap network, which was substantially larger than the UrlSpirit network.

In aggregate the data-center installations of HitLeap were generating a monthly rate of at least a billion fraudulent ad requests—or an average of 1,600 ad requests per installation per day.

Not only were these publishers collectively responsible for billions of automated ad requests, but their websites were also often extremely deceptive. For example, of the top ten webpages visited by HitLeap bots in June, nine of these included hidden ad slots -- meaning that not only was the traffic fake, but the ads couldn’t have been seen even if they had been legitimate human visitors. 

http://vedgre.com/7/gg.html is illustrative of these nine webpages with hidden ad slots. The webpage has no visible content other than a single 300×250px ad. This visible ad is actually in a 300×250px iframe that includes two ads, the second of which is hidden. Additionally, there are also twenty-seven 0×0px hidden iframes on this page with each hidden iframe including two ad slots. In total there are fifty-five hidden ads on this page and one visible ad. Finally, the ads served on http://vedgre.com/7/gg.html appear to advertisers as though they have been served on legitimate websites like indiatimes.com, scotsman.com, autotrader.co.uk, allrecipes.com, dictionary.com and nypost.com, because the tags used on http://vedgre.com/7/gg.html to request the ad creatives have been deliberately spoofed.

An example of collateral damage

Unlike the traffic described above, there is also automated data-center traffic that impacts advertising campaigns but that hasn’t been generated for malicious purposes. An interesting example of this is an advertising competitive intelligence company that is generating a large volume of undeclared non-human traffic.

This company uses bots to scrape the web to find out which ad creatives are being served on which websites and at what scale. The company’s scrapers also click ad creatives to analyze the landing page destinations. To provide its clients with the most accurate possible intelligence, this company’s scrapers operate at extraordinary scale and they also do so without including bot identifiers in their User-Agent strings.

While the aim of this company is not to cause advertisers to pay for fake traffic, the company’s scrapers do waste advertiser spend. They not only generate non-human impressions; they also distort the metrics that advertisers use to evaluate campaign performance—in particular, click metrics. Looking at the data across DoubleClick Campaign Manager this company’s scrapers were responsible for 65% of the automated data-center clicks recorded in the month of May.

Going forward

Google has always invested to prevent this and other types of invalid traffic from entering our ad platforms. By contributing our data-center blacklist to TAG, we hope to help others in the industry protect themselves. 

We’re excited by the collaborative spirit we’ve seen working with other industry leaders on this initiative. This is an important, early step toward tackling fraudulent and illegitimate inventory across the industry and we look forward to sharing more in the future. By pooling our collective efforts and working with industry bodies, we can create strong defenses against those looking to take advantage of our ecosystem. We look forward to working with the TAG Anti-fraud working group to turn this pilot program into an industry-wide tool.

Posted by Vegard Johnsen, Product Manager Google Ad Traffic Quality

We’ve explained how Programmatic Guaranteed in DoubleClick Bid Manager and Native Ads in DoubleClick for Publishers help ensure your brand shows up in the right place and context. But once you’re present, you have to show a relevant, engaging message to each viewer. Today, we’re excited to launch three new mobile video formats for DoubleClick and a new Creative Preview App, to make it easier to deliver compelling experiences across screens.

Bring interactive video to mobile devices: Video Cue Points component in Google Web Designer

The Video Cue Points component, now available for download, allows developers to build an interactive video ad that looks like VPAID, except that the video runs directly within the display ad on mobile devices. Interactive HTML5 banners with video might take 2-3 weeks of developer time to hand code, but with Google Web Designer and our Video Cue Points component, it can take as little as 3-4 hours. 

“Teaser Reels” mobile video component in DoubleClick Studio

With Teaser Reels, you can easily create an HTML5 display ad with an autoplay video teaser. Imagine an interstitial between game levels or directly within mobile web content - a user sees the teaser video automatically and then can click to play the entire video on their device. This will be launching in mid-July, so check back on our help center for more details. (Studio login required)

New mobile in-app templates in Google Web Designer

Our mobile starter templates make it easy to create rich in-app experiences, such as this expandable HTML5 video unit, built by the creative agency Think Jam to promote the release of Warner Brother’s Hobbit film. Learn more about Google Web Designer templates here. 

The new Creative Preview App

Once you've built ads specifically designed for mobile, you'll want to preview them across device types to ensure the user experience is positive in every environment and size. We’ve launched the Creative Preview App, now available for Google Play and coming soon to iOS, which allows you to push mobile ads from DoubleClick Studio directly to your mobile device. Now you can preview and test mobile ads in an actual mobile environment. You can also test the exits in your ads to see reporting metrics come through in the DoubleClick Studio output console on your desktop. 

We’re working to make the process of building rich, engaging ads for every environment more seamless for brands and agencies, from creative authoring through to delivering the right ad to the right customer at the right time. 

Posted by Karin Hennessy, Product Manager, DoubleClick Creative Solutions

At the DoubleClick Leadership Summit, we discussed the implications for brands, broadcasters and publishers of the shift from Primetime to All-the-time.

As part of our presentation, we focussed on four ways for brands to break through the noise and cut through the cross-screen complexity to drive more effective video advertising:

• Be on the best screen for the moment
• Connect and engage with every interaction
• Buy smarter across every screen
• Focus on impact not views

Read the article on the new DoubleClick.com to learn what each of these mean for advertisers, broadcasters and publishers?

-
Published by 

Rany Ng, Director of Product Management, Video & TV Advertising, Google

Anish Kattukaran, Product Marketing Manager, Video Platforms & Brand Measurement, Google

Laura Desmond, Global CEO at Starcom Mediavest Group, will be keynoting the live stream from the DoubleClick Leadership Summit on June 17th. We caught up with Laura for a quick glimpse of what she’ll be speaking to and what owning the moment means to her. 

Register now to hear her live on June 17 at 9AM ET.

The rate of change is only accelerating, driven by rapid technology advancements and evolving consumer behaviors. FOMO isn’t just for millennials anymore—it’s a pressure our industry feels everyday.

Brands need to shift from mass-market strategies to precision ones that deliver relevancy along with immediacy. Core to delivering is keeping the consumer at the center, understanding them deeply, and delivering experiences that match their pace and purpose. 

Owning the moment requires more than just being “real-time.” Winning now depends on the ability to mix velocity and relevancy, drawing upon data, unification, personalization and agility. 

On Wednesday, I’ll be sharing how against a backdrop of great change, brands can drive impact with velocity marketing. Today’s best marketers are much like the hottest EDM mix artists -- leveraging technology, data, and collaboration to own the moment, deliver relevancy, and spur action. 

Register now to hear more from Laura on Wednesday, June 17th at 9AM ET.

Guest post by Laura Desmond, Global Chief Executive Officer, Starcom Mediavest Group

The abundance of choices consumers have today means people are consuming content in more places and actively tuning out what’s not relevant in the moment. In this environment, programmatic buying is redefining how marketers can connect with consumers in all the moments that matter. And to take advantage of its benefits, advertisers are adopting programmatic at dramatic rates. In fact, eMarketer predicts that 83% of all display buys will be bought programmatically by 2017.

However, achieving the promise of programmatic is not a guarantee. It takes partnering with the right platform to effectively craft, execute, and manage a programmatic strategy. But with so many options, how should advertisers choose the right platform to reach their unique goals today, and in the future with programmatic buying?

To help marketers better understand what to look for when Choosing a Programmatic Buying Partner, we uncover the five areas of expertise to look for in a potential platform.

This buyer’s guide will help marketers define and prioritize selection criteria for a programmatic buying platform that’s the right fit for your short- and long-term goals. Download the whitepaper here.


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Kelly Cox, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

This post is part of DoubleClick's Evolution of TV series. In this series we identify the risks and opportunities around 7 dynamics transforming the advertising landscape as TV programming shifts to delivery over the Internet.

Recently, at the National Association for Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas, we released the fourth installment of our Evolution of TV series where we explore the impact of the cloud on TV's transformation. The premise of this new whitepaper is that everything we know about TV delivery and viewing is about to change.

Everything from the way we watch TV to how it's distributed is changing. The delivery and production of the TV content we're viewing—and sometimes binge-watching on so many screens—is on the cusp of industry-wide innovation as TV delivery shifts from over the air, satellite, or cable to the internet. To support TV programming over the internet, those responsible for delivering the content—the programmers and distributors—are beginning to migrate their operations to a more flexible, agile environment: the cloud

In short, migrating TV to the cloud not only affords programmers and distributors cost savings and efficiency but also enables innovation that could change TV as we know it today into a far more dynamic, personalized, and addressable medium.

Download the PDF to get the entire scoop on how parallel transformations in other industries show us that the cloud will encourage innovation and necessitate agility for programmers and distributors, as well as create a vastly different viewing experience for users.

Anish Kattukaran,

Product Marketing, DoubleClick Video & Brand Measurement

A lot of ink has recently poured onto the subject of digital advertising fraud—which is a great thing. Fraud is a real and serious problem, but some, we think, still hold a mental image of fraudsters as one-off bad actors sitting in a dark room racking up clicks on ads on their site to make a few extra bucks. The truth is far more troubling: the majority of ad fraud today is perpetrated by sophisticated organizations that devote vast resources to build and operate large scale botnets run on hijacked devices, to reap multi-million dollar payouts [1,2].

Stopping these bad actors requires an industry-wide, long term commitment to identifying and filtering fake traffic from the ecosystem. This is not a task any one company can take on alone. We need everyone across the industry to take steps toward making digital advertising more secure and transparent. Here are some actions we’re taking to help move the entire industry forward. (We hope others join us.)

Describing threats in common, precise language

Many of the statistics and headline-grabbing disclosures in the market today do a great job of creating panic, but share very little detail to help anyone actually solve the problem.

Imagine if police officers looking for a bank robber could only describe the criminal as “suspicious”. The robber would be free for life. And yet this is disappointingly how advertising fraud is policed today. “Fraud” and “suspicious” are seen as synonymous and applied to everything from completely legitimate ad impressions to fake traffic generated by zombie PCs infected with malware. Before we can stop advertising fraud, everyone needs to start using common, precise language to disclose fraudulent activity.

The IAB introduced its Anti-Fraud Principles and Proposed Taxonomy last September providing the industry with this common language and we strongly support these standards. But these are early steps – as an industry we can’t stop there. When fraud is identified it should be shared in a clear structured threat disclosure, mirroring how security researchers release security vulnerabilities. By increasing the amount of data we share in a transparent, helpful way, others in the industry will be able to corroborate any claims being made, remove the threat from their systems, removing it from the ecosystem. Further, if a public disclosure could lead to further damage, then vulnerable parties should be notified in advance.

Ensuring bad actors can't hide: Supplier Identifiers

If you bought a designer scarf in a store only to find out it’s a knock-off with a fake label, you’d expect a refund. You’d also know which store to avoid in the future. The same should hold true for fraudulent inventory. When fraud is identified, it should also be possible to identify the seller or reseller who should take responsibility for the inventory. 

Today this doesn’t hold true. As an illustration of the problem, we are currently finding significant volumes of inventory misrepresenting where the ads will actually appear and in many instances there is no reliable and verifiable mechanism to identify who in the supply chain is responsible for this misrepresented inventory.

To address this problem, we propose that the buyer of any branded (non-blind) impression should be passed a chain of unique supplier identifiers, one for each and every reseller (exchange, network, sell-side platform) and one for the publisher. With this full chain of identifiers for each impression, buyers can establish which supply paths for inventory can be trusted and which cannot. If a buyer finds a potential issue, and it’s clear where the problem lies in the supply path, then there should be an unambiguous process for refunds. It will also be easy to avoid this supply path in the future.

Ultimately the burden for ensuring the quality of online inventory starts with those who sell it. To this end, we submitted a proposal to create an industry managed supplier identifier to the IAB Anti-Fraud Working Group in February, and we’ve heard others in the industry support this call for more transparency. We've come to take this type of guarantee for granted when we shop in a store – let's work together and make it a standard for digital advertising as well.

Cleaning up campaign metrics

Before investing your hard-earned money in a local business, you’d definitely review their financial reports to understand if it’s a good investment or not. In digital, campaign metrics are the record of truth. They help advertisers evaluate which inventory sources provide the greatest value and outline a roadmap of where ad spend should be invested. But if these metrics are polluted with fake and fraudulent activity, it’s impossible to know which inventory sources provide the best return on spend.

Now, imagine if you invested in that small business only to find out it was actually a fictional front created by an organized crime ring, complete with receipts and a cashier, to cover up their back office money laundering operation. Fraudsters work hard to disguise their bot traffic as being human by having them do things like go window shopping or plan a vacation to create a whole world of made-up conversions and interactions before directing them to their final destination.

As long as fake traffic still appears to be delivering value, advertisers’ spend will continue flowing to the operators of fake traffic sources. Of course our industry should push for 100% fraud free ecosystem. The reality, though, is that some will likely always slip through. When it does, it's also our responsibility to keep it from skewing marketers' metrics. If we can keep reporting systems from giving credit to fake traffic, this removes the incentive for publishers to buy this bad traffic from bad actors.

As an industry, we owe it to our clients and ourselves to ensure that metrics are clean and accurate. Let’s work together to identify fraudulent traffic and invest in systems to filter it out of campaign metrics. 

A fraud-free ecosystem?

Advertising fraud is a real and serious problem, one that creates significant costs for advertisers, takes revenue from legitimate publishers, and enables the spread of malware to users, among other harms. To eliminate it, we must take action to remove the incentive for bad actors to create and sell fraudulent traffic. The steps I’ve outlined above seek to do this by cutting off their access to advertising spend and making it difficult for fraudsters to hide.

Over the coming months, we’ll be taking these steps and working with the industry to help others clean bad traffic from the ecosystem. 

Posted by Vegard Johnsen, Product Manager Google Ad Traffic Quality

If an ad isn’t seen, it doesn’t have an impact, change perception, or build brand trust. That is why measuring the viewability of advertising matters. It gives marketers a clear understanding of campaign and messaging effectiveness and allows advertising spend to be allocated to the media where it will have the most impact.

We have long been advocates of viewability as a currency between buyers and sellers, which is why we’ve had viewable-only buying on our network for more than a year and have been investing in our Active View technology.

As a continuation of that effort, today we are releasing new Active View data from across our Google, DoubleClick and YouTube video ad platforms. This new research on the 5 factors of video viewability is being published today on Think with Google to start the discussion about the state of video ad viewability.

In this research we found that only 54% of all video ads served across the web, excluding YouTube, had a chance to be seen! On YouTube 91% of ads were found to be viewable.

As advertisers shift to paying for viewable video ads, rather than served impressions, understanding the drivers of viewability for video ads is more important than ever.

To learn what viewability is and how it is measured, visit our new interactive Active View demo here.

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Sanaz Ahari, Group Product Manager, Brand Measurement
Michael Giordano, Product Marketing, Brand Measurement
Anish Kattukaran, Product Marketing, Video & Brand Measurement

Since 2008 we’ve been working to make sure all of our services use strong HTTPS encryption by default. That means people using products like Search, Gmail, YouTube, and Drive will automatically have an encrypted connection to Google. In addition to providing a secure connection on our own products, we’ve been big proponents of the idea of “HTTPS Everywhere,” encouraging webmasters to prevent and fix security breaches on their sites, and using HTTPS as a signal in our search ranking algorithm.

This year, we’re working to bring this “HTTPS Everywhere” mission to our ads products as well, to support all of our advertiser and publisher partners. Here are some of the specific initiatives we’re working on:

• We’ve moved all YouTube ads to HTTPS as of the end of 2014.
• Search on Google.com is already encrypted for a vast majority of users and we are working towards encrypting search ads across our systems. 
• By June 30, 2015, the vast majority of mobile, video, and desktop display ads served to the Google Display Network, AdMob, and DoubleClick publishers will be encrypted.
• Also by June 30, 2015, advertisers using any of our buying platforms, including AdWords and DoubleClick, will be able to serve HTTPS-encrypted display ads to all HTTPS-enabled inventory. 

Of course we’re not alone in this goal. By encrypting ads, the advertising industry can help make the internet a little safer for all users. Recently, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) published a call to action to adopt HTTPS ads, and many industry players are also working to meet HTTPS requirements. We’re big supporters of these industry-wide efforts to make HTTPS everywhere a reality.

Our HTTPS Everywhere ads initiatives will join some of our other efforts to provide a great ads experience online for our users, like “Why this Ad?”, “Mute This Ad” and TrueView skippable ads. With these security changes to our ads systems, we’re one step closer to ensuring users everywhere are safe and secure every time they choose to watch a video, map out a trip in a new city, or open their favorite app.

Neal Mohan, VP Product Management, Display and Video Ads

Jerry Dischler, VP Product Management, AdWords

Today at Programmatic I/O in San Francisco, we are announcing our latest investment to help brands make the most of digital: the TrueView ad format will be available for programmatic buying within DoubleClick Bid Manager.

This launch brings together two important trends we’re seeing: the importance of user choice in advertising and the ability to reach the right person at the right time with programmatic buying.

We introduced TrueView, an innovative cost-per-view (CPV) ad format, five years ago as a way to put user choice at the heart of brand advertising. With TrueView, viewers choose to engage, and brands only pay when they do. Today, the format is a brand mainstay, representing 85% of all in-stream ads on YouTube. And based on a recent study, we’ve seen that two-thirds of TrueView campaigns deliver significant lift in brand interest.

In parallel, programmatic buying has evolved from just a real-time bidding tool for direct response campaigns to an important technology and data-driven solution for brand building. Across our own platforms, we’ve seen the volume of programmatic transactions double year-over-year. With the consumer journey now fractured into many "micro-moments" across screens, programmatic can help brands understand and reach their audiences across devices and formats.

In the coming months, marketers and agencies will be able to buy the TrueView choice-based video ad format on a cost-per-view (CPV) basis through DoubleClick Bid Manager. This is the first time TrueView has been available outside of AdWords, allowing DoubleClick clients to take advantage of features like cross-campaign frequency capping, unified audience insights, measurement and billing across campaigns.

Some of our partners are already seeing success:

"At Netflix, we have always embraced consumer choice. In the advertising world, TrueView is the epitome of that choice. The fact that we can now scale it further via DoubleClick Bid Manager represents a powerful new channel for marketing our content across the world." 

Mike Zeman, Director of Digital Marketing, Netflix

“TrueView has empowered us to give our consumers greater choice while delivering a better engaging viewer experience. As an early adopter of the TrueView beta in DoubleClick Bid Manager in the UK we have seen great success in achieving our CPV goals.” 

Nestlé UK

“We’re really excited to bring TrueView on DoubleClick Bid Manager into our video campaign arsenal. This deepens our ability to achieve client success metrics on highly relevant and viewable video inventory combined with universal controls around targeting, frequency management and reporting.” 

Ian Johnson, EVP and MD, Global Product at Cadreon

“TrueView in DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) allows us to strengthen our branding offering while benefiting from significant efficiency gains. Once we can leverage DBM’s capabilities such as 3rd party audience targeting and universal frequency capping, we will have a very powerful value proposition for advertisers.” 

Ali Nehme, Managing Director Digital, Vivaki Middle East and North Africa

This adds to our ongoing investments to help brands get the most out of the programmatic landscape like Google Partner Select, Active View, Verification and brand safety protections. We're committed to providing the most complete programmatic platform to our brand partners to help them connect with their audiences in all the moments that matter. Stay tuned for even more in the months to come.

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Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display and Video Advertising Products