DART for Advertisers Strengthens Ties Between Media Planning, Ad Serving and Reporting

We're pleased to announce the new DFA Analytics beta and the beta integration of Ad Planner within the DART for Advertisers (DFA) platform. Now enhanced with Google technology, DFA offers a more unified and efficient platform to plan, execute, measure, and optimize your online display advertising campaigns.

New! DFA Analytics Beta

DFA Analytics is our new reporting and visualization tool for viewing advertising performance data. It shares similar technology with Google Analytics; if you've used Google Analytics before, you can quickly come up to speed with the easy-to-use graphical reporting tools that are now part of DFA.

With DFA Analytics, you can:

• Get frequent updates--about every three hours--of your campaign performance data.
• See account performance at a glance, in easy-to-understand charts and graphs.
• Drill down through reports at the advertiser, campaign, site, ad, and creative levels.

You can also review performance by:

• Country, designated market area (DMA), state, city, area code, or zip code.
• Hour, day, week, month, and one or more date ranges.
• Browser, operating system, and connection speed.

Here's an example of a DFA Analytics campaign report, graphed by day, with ad performance data:

New! Google Ad Planner Integration

Google Ad Planner is a research and media planning tool that can help you identify sites where audiences are likely to visit, make better-informed media planning decisions, and manage your media plans.

With the upcoming integration, you can:

• Access Ad Planner data (already used by tens of thousands of media planners each week) directly in DFA.
• Enjoy effortless transitions between planning, trafficking, and reporting features.
• Collaborate on media plans using existing account structures and permission settings.
• Take advantage of new Ad Planner features customized for large agency buyers.

Stay Tuned

Overall, this release is designed to increase the efficiency of managing online advertising campaigns with DFA. It's just the beginning to a more unified, efficient, and effective advertising platform.

Please note that DFA Analytics and Ad Planner are only available in DFA 6. To inquire about DFA 6, please fill out our inquiry form.

Posted by Sally Cole

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Recap from the 4th Annual Digital Movie Advertising Creative Showcase (DMACS)

Yesterday, we celebrated the best creative work in digital movie marketing with top creative agencies and movie studios at the 4th Annual DMACS event. If you recall from our call for entries, this awards program invited submissions across four awards categories: Home Entertainment Rich Media Display Ad, Multi-Channel Cross Media Campaign, YouTube Creative Award and Theatrical Release Rich Media Display Ad. Take a look at the videos below to see the amazing creative work from the top nominees in each category then read on to find out who won.

Best Home Entertainment Rich Media Display Ad Nominees

Congratulations to:

• Fast & Furious by Ignited, LLC and NBC Universal
• WALL-E by Deadline Advertising and Walt Disney Studios
• Watchmen by AvatarLabs and Warner Bros.

YouTube Creative Award Nominees

Congratulations to:

• G-Force by BLT & Associates and Walt Disney Studios
• The Haunting in Connecticut by Division 13 Design Group and Lionsgate
• My Bloody Valentine by The Visionaire Group and Lionsgate

Best Multi-Channel Cross Media Campaign Nominees

Congratulations to:

• Fast & Furious by The Visionaire Group and Universal Pictures
• I Love You, Beth Cooper by Earthbound Media Group and 20th Century Fox
• Coraline by Wieden+Kennedy and Laika Studios/Focus Features

Best Theatrical Release Rich Media Display Ad Nominees

Congratulations to:

• Bruno by The Visionaire Group and Universal Pictures
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by AvatarLabs and Warner Bros.
• Star Trek by AvatarLabs and Paramount Pictures
• The Haunting in Connecticut by Division 13 Design Group and Lionsgate
• Valkyrie by Palisades Interactive and MGM

And the winners Are...

• WALL-E by Deadline Advertising and Walt Disney Studios for Best Home Entertainment Rich Media Ad
• My Bloody Valentine by The Visionaire Group and Lionsgate for the YouTube Creative Award
• Coraline by Wieden+Kennedy and Laika Studios/Focus Features for Best Multi-Channel Cross Media Campaign
• Star Trek by AvatarLabs and Paramount Pictures for Best Theatrical Release Rich Media Display Ad

We heartily congratulate the winners for their spectacular creative executions and dedication to the craft of movie marketing.

Posted by Sally Cole

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Announcing the New DoubleClick Ad Exchange

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

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

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

Key benefits for sellers include:

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

Key benefits for buyers include:

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

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

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Call for Entries to the Digital Movie Advertising Creative Showcase

Online campaigns for theatrical and home video movie releases have some of the most creative and innovative executions. To celebrate the best of movie marketing, we're opening up a call for entries to our 4th Annual Digital Movie Advertising Creative Showcase awards program. Movie marketers and creative agencies are invited to submit up to three entries per category. This year's categories are:

Theatrical Release Rich Media Display Ad(s): Any rich media ad or set of rich media ads used to promote a theatrical movie release.

Home Entertainment Rich Media Display Ad(s): Any rich media ad or set of rich media ads used to promote a home video movie release.

Multi-Channel Cross Media Campaign: Any home video or theatrical movie campaign that involves at least three interactive digital elements (one of which must be rich media ads) as part of a holistic campaign including, but not limited to:

• Website
• Rich media ads
• Search campaign
• Alternate reality game (ARG)
• Mobile
• Viral video or webisodes
• Virtual world
• User-Generated content
• Social networking
• Online game(s)
• Digital outdoor
• DVD/Blue-Ray interactive experience/extras

Multi-channel, cross media digital campaign submissions may involve more than one creative agency, but all agencies must be listed and give permission for submission.

YouTube Creative Award: Any home entertainment or theatrical movie campaign creative that included YouTube in its execution -- YouTube homepage "masthead" creative, brand channels, contests, or original video creative uploaded to YouTube to engage the community.

The winners of each category will receive recognition by their industry peers, the opportunity to present to a live audience at the Director's Guild of America in Los Angeles, inclusion in the event's video reel, two award trophies (one each for the movie studio and creative agency) and two Flip Mino mini digital camcorders!

The deadline for entries is Friday, September 18 -- so don't delay if you plan to enter. We look forward to seeing the amazing work in this space.

Posted by Sally Cole

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New Report Highlights How to Align Ad Format Choice to Branding Goals

For every online display campaign, advertisers must decide what ad formats to use for best results. To help, DoubleClick teamed up with Dynamic Logic to study the impact of ad format selection on branding goals. In the joint report titled "The Brand Value of Rich Media and Video Ads," we compare the branding strengths of four common display advertising formats:

• Image - GIF or JPG ads
• Simple Flash - Ads with a short animation and single click-through link
• Rich Media with Video - Ads capable of responding to user interaction, such as mouseovers, keyboard inputs, or clicks without a click-through, that also contain video
• Rich Media without Video - Ads capable of responding to user interaction, such as mouseovers, keyboard inputs, or clicks without a click-through, that do not contain video

The report provides detailed information on how each of these formats impacts aided brand awareness, online ad awareness, message association, brand favorability and purchase intent. For example, study findings show that, on average:

• Rich Media formats are the most successful at driving purchase intent
• Rich Media without Video is unique among the formats in its ability to positively impact all five brand metrics
• Simple Flash is the least effective of the ad formats studied
• For brand favorability, aided brand awareness and purchase intent metrics, Rich Media with Video provides a statistically significant improvement over Simple Flash at a 90% confidence level

The report concludes with a cheat sheet to help guide your ad format decisions and suggests best practices for achieving branding goals.

Download the PDF report here for free, no registration required.

Posted by Sally Cole

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Introducing DoubleClick Display Benchmarks

Advertisers and agencies who work on display ad campaigns often wonder "How do I know if my display ad campaigns are doing well?" and "What credible benchmarks can I use to compare the results on my current campaign?"

Some might rely on past campaign performance metrics while others might compare across multiple campaigns and advertisers within their client roster. All are fine means in the absence of larger, more comprehensive industry benchmarks.

This is why we're particularly pleased to make available DoubleClick benchmarks so that marketers, agencies, and publishers have a reference by which to evaluate the performance of online display advertising campaigns in the U.S., relative to industry norms.

These benchmarks are derived from a robust data set across DART for Advertisers, based on rigorous methodology with input from the Advertising Research Foundation. Benchmarks in this report cover those for 2008 and transect ad format, ad size, and industry vertical. The benchmarks are normalized across hundreds of advertisers, thousands of campaigns, and tens of billions of ad impressions.

You can download the report here. More in-depth benchmarks by industry are available exclusively to DoubleClick clients so contact your account manager to discuss further.

If you're interested in learning more you can attend our webinar, "Benchmarking Ahead: IAB Reveals the DoubleClick Benchmarks Report," co-hosted with the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) on June 24th at 12pm EST.

Posted by Pamela Eng

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Insights from Thought Leaders and Innovators in Digital Marketing

At DoubleClick, we've had the privilege of picking the brains of several of the industry's thought leaders and innovators in digital marketing. We've captured a few of these key insights through our ThreeQuestions for Innovators video interview series: These interviews span the gamut of key industry themes and issues, including current trends and influencers, ad exchanges, social media, emerging media, and the future.

This month we're honored to highlight interviews with Carla Hendra, Chief Executive Officer of Ogilvy North America, as well as Ian Schafer, CEO and Founder of interactive marketing agency Deep Focus. Carla speaks to us on the challenges in the brave world of digital marketing, while Ian shares his insights on rich media, video, and the role of the agency in the advertising process.

We're excited about our lineup of thought leaders and the conversations they spark - whether it's about opportunities in a challenging economic environment, trends to watch for in 2009 or ground-breaking insights from innovative fields such as neuromarketing.

Posted by Min Li Chan

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