What’s on Neal Mohan’s Mind for thinkDoubleClick? Social, Native Formats and More

Ahead of our thinkDoubleClick digital advertising summit on June 4th, we caught up with Neal Mohan, Google’s Vice President of Display Advertising, to hear what’s on his mind heading into the conference.

The theme for thinkDoubleClick this year is “Connect & Accelerate.” Why did that resonate with you?

I get asked all the time why I'm so bullish about the future of digital media. It's a long answer, but if I had to boil it down, it comes down to two things. First, I think there’s a $200 billion opportunity as brand spend shifts online that I think will help grow the pie for everyone. Second, digital has an unparalleled ability to connect the things that will help marketers and publishers address that opportunity - their businesses, their partners and their customers. We'll be talking about this at the conference, as well as how technology can help accelerate our partners’ growth.

What discussions are you looking forward to at thinkDoubleClick?

I’m looking forward to some honest conversations about brand-building in today’s connected world, how marketers are re-thinking their marketing mix, and how publishers are embracing new models, like native formats.

We really hope that people walk away from this event with actionable insights from our fantastic lineup of speakers featuring Coca Cola’s Wendy Clark, Omnicom Digital’s Jonathan Nelson, and CBS Interactive’s Jim Lanzone.

Will there be any announcements?

I’m not going to give away too much, but I think what might surprise people is that we’ll be talking about social’s role in the customer journey, as well as the growing importance of native formats to our publisher partners at a level of detail we haven’t to date. I hope everyone tunes in next week to learn more.

thinkDoubleClick is being live-streamed publicly on June 4th from 9am - 12:30pm PDT.  If you haven’t done so already, you can register here.

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Display Insights Series: Insight #1

Just a reminder that, on Tuesday, June 4th, we’ll host our annual digital leadership summit, thinkDoubleClick, with provocative conversations about the future of digital marketing and media, and you’re invited to join via live stream by registering here!

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Last week, we announced the launch of our DoubleClick Display Benchmarks Tool -- a tool that lets you pull benchmarks on the ad industry to help you better understand your own display campaigns. Today, we’re kicking off a series of posts that will dive into the insights we’re finding with the tool. 

Today’s insight: rich media engagement metrics have been increasing since last summer, indicating that users are engaging with ad content more frequently and for longer amounts of time. 

One of the great things about rich media formats is that they provide built-in engagement metrics that allow agencies to understand consumer’s interaction with brands, beyond the simple click. Our benchmark data suggests that since the summer of 2012, rich media engagement metrics have been consistently increasing.

Since the summer of 2012: 

• The frequency with which people interact with an ad when they see it on the page has grown ~60%. 
• The time that people spend interacting with an ad has grown ~21%. People are spending on average 10 seconds of time interacting with an ad. 
• The frequency with which people expand an ad has grown ~50%. On average, people spend ~19 seconds with the ad in the expanded state.
• The frequency with which people complete a video has grown ~24%.  
• The average amount of time that an ad is displayed on the page has increased by ~23%. 

The take-away: 

Consumers interact, expand, and watch ads when advertisers take advantage of engaging rich media formats and provide ad content that allows users to engage. So consider incorporating these types of ads into your campaigns -- instead of a static banner ad, make a rich media ad with a video, or an ad that expands or lets users engage. By making your ad creative more engaging, you’ll entice consumers to interact with your brand online. 

Tune in next week for our second installation of the “Display Data Insights Series.” And in the meantime, check out our new DoubleClick Display Benchmarks tool to find interesting tidbits on your own.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing - DoubleClick

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DoubleClick Search industry perspectives video series: Search marketing is now faster

Just a reminder that, on Tuesday, June 4th, we’ll host our annual digital leadership summit, thinkDoubleClick, with provocative conversations about the future of digital marketing and media, and you’re invited to join via live stream by registering here!

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What are some of the big questions about search that keep you up at night?

That’s what we asked search marketing leaders from top agencies in a series of interviews, to understand what excites them -- and challenges them -- about the state of search today.

We caught up with Eric Papczun, US President of Performics, Erica Barth, VP of Products and Partnerships at Resolution Media, Jeremy Hull, Associate Director of Paid Search at iProspect, and Sean McDonald, VP and Group Director at Digitas to learn about their perspectives on those “big questions” and how DoubleClick Search fits in. And overwhelmingly, we heard three key themes: the need for search marketers to streamline workflows and act faster, to make smarter decisions with all of their data in one place, and to drive performance for better results. We’re highlighting their perspectives on these themes of faster, smarter, and better with a series of videos -- starting today with Search Marketing is Now Faster.

This video explores how search marketers must keep pace in a digital marketing landscape that's moving faster than ever before, and highlights how the right tools can help search teams work more efficiently to maximize their marketing campaign results.

 
As Eric Papczun notes, “The ability to change a campaign -- modify a strategy, in the moment -- is what speed is all about.” At DoubleClick Search, we’re investing in features that give search teams a simple, intuitive way to manage their accounts at scale across engines. Many of our newest features, including bulk editing enhancements and new scheduling options help eliminate tactical or repetitive tasks across as many as 150 million keywords in a single day(1), while instant conversions offer up-to-the-minute feedback on campaign performance to let marketers quickly act on real-time feedback. 

Agile, responsive tools are just one piece of the puzzle. Marketers also need the right tools to help make smarter decisions within search, as well as across other online channels. Next week, we’ll hear from our thought leaders on how platforms are critical in enabling smarter decisions in digital, with our second video: Search Marketing is Now Smarter.

To learn more about DoubleClick Search, visit our Youtube channel and stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog.

1. Google internal data, 2013

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Reminder: register for thinkDoubleClick

Just a reminder that, on Tuesday, June 4th, we’ll host our annual digital leadership summit, thinkDoubleClick, with provocative conversations about the future of digital marketing and media, and you’re invited to join via live stream by registering here!

Hear executives from advertising, agencies and publishers discuss some of the big questions in digital such as:

• How do creatives leverage, but not be overwhelmed by, technology to deliver next-generation consumer experiences?
• What unique experiences are publishers developing that add value to consumers and advertisers alike?
• How do CMOs best use social with other marketing channels to build strong brands?  

For more details on our thinkDoubleClick leadership summit, visit our earlier blog post here. 

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Cutting Complexity, Adding Value: Unified Ad Tech Efficiencies Could Save Marketers 33%

Digital marketing delivers powerful results for advertisers -- but running digital campaigns has become too complex. Google commissioned The Boston Consulting Group to better understand the potential to improve efficiency for marketers and create more value in digital campaigns.

Using “lean” methodology to map and measure the end-to-end process of 24 digital campaigns across 15 digital marketers in Europe, here’s a summary of what BCG found:

• Campaign teams were spending on average only 1 day in 5 on ‘value-creation’ activities, with 80% of their time spent on low-value activities such as trafficking.
• Using a unified ad technology stack (a combined solution from a single vendor) generates resource-productivity improvements on average of 12% and up to 33% across the campaign lifecycle.
• Marketers realise further productivity gains by combining a single ad technology stack with wider organizational change -- which frees up talent for higher-value activities, such as strategy development, analysis and creativity.
• These are still “early days,” and marketers achieved these gains with even an early version of the unified technology stack. Further gains are possible as technology continues to advance.
• Increased efficiency means better performance. Marketers that re-invested efficiency gains into value-creating activities created an important competitive advantage in campaign performance.
• It takes a pragmatic approach. Marketers should use a step-by-step lean approach to address pain points in processes, structure and technology.
• It also takes an ecosystem. Advertisers, agencies, publishers and technology providers, working together, all have a role in cutting complexity and adding value to the overall industry.
  
  
  

We’re releasing the full report today.

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The New DoubleClick Display Benchmarks Tool: Put Context Around Your Display Campaigns

NOTE: On Tuesday, June 4th we’ll host our annual digital leadership summit, thinkDoubleClick, with provocative conversations about the future of digital marketing and media, and you’re invited to join via live stream by registering here!

Imagine: you’ve built a beautiful digital marketing campaign and it’s finally live. You get your reports back with a list of data points and while the numbers seem good, it’s pretty hard to understand them without any reference points. That’s the crutch: data doesn’t take on meaning when it’s just floating around in the ether; you need to build context around your data and anchor it to other relevant data points to better understand what your own numbers mean. 

Industry benchmarks -- reference points aggregated from ad campaigns across the industry -- give you these comparisons. And today, for the first time, we’re launching the DoubleClick Display Benchmarks Tool, an easy-to-use webpage that lets you pull benchmarks to help you make better decisions about your campaigns.  

Whether you're after comparisons by country, industry vertical, ad size or ad format, our tool offers up-to-date benchmarks across 10 key display metrics, such as interaction rate and time, expansion rate and video completions. Here’s a quick demo of how to pull the benchmarks. 

We've been playing around with the tool and identified some interesting trends around user engagement in our industry. Here's a bit of what we've seen:

Trend #1: User choice leads to more engagement: People want to choose how and when they consume content online. We’re starting to see new ad formats, such as the TrueView and Engagement formats, that let people choose whether to watch or skip an ad. Our benchmark data shows that people are increasingly choosing to interact with these ads. Video completion rates are the highest we’ve ever seen, with people completing 60% of the videos that they watch.  

Trend #2: Richer ads lead to more engagement: Longer interaction also stems from more beautiful and compelling ads, which advertisers are increasingly incorporating in their campaigns. Interactive video ads, such as this one from Cadillac, allow advertisers to layer information about their brands on top of their video commercials. Dual-channel ads, such as this Skyfall ad, let viewers turn their mobile phones and tablets into controllers that dictate what happens within the content on their desktop. These ads represent the new creative formats that are closing the gap between advertising and awesome content. And we’re seeing the results: since last summer, people are interacting with rich media ads ~50-60% more frequently and spending ~20% more time interacting. 

Trend #3: Optimize your campaigns for engagement: Advertisers used to rely solely on click-through rates and reach/frequency reports to measure their campaigns. Now, these new rich media formats provide a better set of metrics, which help advertisers understand what’s best for users and optimize their campaigns. For example, from the benchmarks tool we’ve learned that interaction rates correlate strongly with larger ad area - the bigger the ad, the more frequently people will interact with it. Similarly, we’ve learned that rich media expanding formats are better for getting people to interact frequently, while in-page formats are better for getting people to interact for longer amounts of time. These types of insights are instrumental in making improvements to an advertiser’s campaign.

These findings confirm what we've heard from our partners -- as ads become more engaging and relevant to users, their performance improves. If you’re still hungry for more data, don’t worry --  next Tuesday, we’ll be kicking off a “Data Insights Blog Series,” where we’ll deep-dive into one trend a week and explain how the insights apply to your campaigns. 

As you check out the tool for yourself, let us know if you find any nuggets you think we’ve missed. We just might feature your insight in one of our blog posts.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

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Explore the Future of Digital Marketing with Google and Industry Executives on June 4th

On Tuesday, June 4th we’ll host our annual digital leadership summit, thinkDoubleClick, with provocative conversations about the future of digital marketing and media, and you’re invited to join via live stream by registering here!

Hear executives from advertising, agencies and publishers discuss some of the big questions in digital such as:

• How do creatives leverage, but not be overwhelmed by, technology to deliver next-generation consumer experiences?
• What unique experiences are publishers developing that add value to consumers and advertisers alike?
• How do CMOs best use social with other marketing channels to build strong brands?  

The full agenda for the thinkDoubleClick event is listed below.  You can join in the conversation on June 4 by using the #thinkDCLK hash and commenting during the live stream at www.youtube.com/doubleclick.

Register here for the thinkDoubleClick summit

June 4, 2013

9 am - 12:15 PDT

9:00 - 9:30 am	Connecting Digital, Accelerating Growth Neal Mohan, VP Display Advertising, Google
9:30 - 10:00 am	The Coca-Cola Company's Liquid & Linked Marketing: How a 127-year-old company is pivoting for success in a real-time, socially-connected world The Coca-Cola Company sells over 500 brands in 207 countries, with over 700,000 System associates and 1.8B+ servings of their beverages everyday.  Hear insights and lessons learned on how the world's most valuable brand is remaining relevant by becoming more connected, transparent and nimble in real-time. Wendy Clark, Senior Vice President, Integrated Marketing Communications and Capabilities, Coca-Cola
10:00 - 10:35 am	Advertisers Must be Inventors This year, Volkswagen and Deutsch LA partnered with Google to work on a briefto re-imagine how to build a stronger, bigger community around its brand.  In today’s connected world, telling stories alone isn’t enough; we need to create tangible value and utility to bring the brand’s promise to life. In this session the creative team from Deutsch LA will be talking about the process for developing more rewarding and shareable experience. Winston Binch, Partner/Chief, Digital Creative Officer, Deutsch LA David Kim, Group Creative Director, Deutsch LA
10:35 - 11:15 am	Time to Rethink the Marketing Mix? Emerging trends in digital marketing -- including new ad formats, the rise of social media, and proliferation of channels -- are creating new challenges and opportunities for brand marketers. What are the key trends marketers should be concerned about -- and how should they respond? AdAge deputy editor Michael Learmonth poses the hard questions in an executive dialogue on what’s next for brand marketing. Fireside chat with: Michael Learmonth, Deputy Managing Editor, Advertising Age Lorraine Twohill, VP, Global Marketing, Google Jonathan Nelson, CEO, Omnicom Digital
11:15 am - 12: 15 pm	New and Native: Extending the Conversation Technology has had a profound impact on the media industry. This disruption, though, has brought along significant opportunities for creative publishers to thrive. In this session we’re bringing in three executives to show how they’ve leveraged the digital revolution to deliver more engaging content and differentiated solutions to advertisers. Randall Rothenberg, President & CEO, Interactive Advertising Bureau  (provocateur) Jim Lanzone, President, CBS Interactive Peter Horan, President & Chief Operating Officer, Answers Meredith Kopit Levien, Group Publisher & Chief Revenue Officer, Forbes Media

We look forward to seeing you on June 4th at thinkDoubleClick.

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