Google has 1,000-plus engineers globally working on display advertising, and now – to hear display ad product chief Neal Mohan tell it – all their hard work is about to pay off.
In a presentation to DoubleClick customers today, Mohan will outline imminent plans to consolidate DoubleClick’s fragmented menu of advertiser-facing technologies into a single platform – called DoubleClick Digital Marketing. (Read more on the DoubleClick Advertiser blog.)
In the coming weeks and months, Dart for Advertisers, Invite Media, DoubleClick Search, creative platforms (DoubleClick Studio, DoubleClick Rich Media and Teracent), and Google Analytics will all cease to be point solutions and begin working in concert with each other through integrated media creation, placement and reporting. This will happen in part through a series of engineering changes on the back-end that will result in several of the individual products – Teracent and Invite Media, for example – being completely rewritten.
It’s a large project. Mohan, a DoubleClick employee since 1997, calls it the biggest ever overhaul of the DoubleClick ad platform. “The idea is a comprehensive single platform for the world’s largest advertisers and agencies to manage all their media buying across channels – display, auction display, search, video, mobile – in a seamless, truly integrated fashion,” he said.
Google is not shying away from big claims about DDM’s upside for marketers, saying they will benefit through improved efficiency (saving up to six weeks of busy work a year, per employee, for some clients); better reporting, as advertisers can more easily compare search, video, display, and other campaign elements; and ultimately improved performance and ROI, as cross-channel optimization speeds up.
But DoubleClick customers shouldn’t expect an overnight transition. “It’s going to be more of a rolling thunder approach, as opposed to big bang,” says Mohan. Key initial changes will include front end upgrades to create common workflow, as well as unified reporting and tighter integration between DFA and Google Analytics. The goal is to launch something new each month. “Over next year-plus, substantial capabilities will be brought to market, whether that’s more sophisticated mobile support, whether that’s tighter integration with bid manager.”
Here are a fw specifics on what ad buyers can expect from DMM:
–Invite Media Refresh. The demand-side platform, acquired in Tkdate, yas been rebuilt for the Doubleclick platform and will now be known as DoubleClick Bid Manager. A new buying platform. Google says spending on Invite Media grew 50 percent last year.
–Ad server name change. The DoubleClick ad server, used for directly bought ad space, is now known as DoubleClick Digital Marketing Manager.
–No DoublecClick DMP. The launch does not include, as some expected, a new data management platform. Mohan says, “What’s implicit in here is a backplane of capabilities that allows our advertisers and agencies to be able to manage data, report on data, etc. whether you call that a data platform or not… our belief is there probably doesn’t need to be a standalone data product. Frankly a lot of the data capabilities should be built in natively.”
–Publisher tools. While Mohan will focus on DDM, he will also touch on a development around Google’s publisher facing products. The company will soon bring to market an offering called Ad Exchange Market View, which he says will deliver more seamless integration of third party data into DoubleClick for Publishers.
Mohan is sharing the changes with an audience of 200 at the company’s DoubleClick Insights event, an annual gathering of customers, with more than 3,000 expected to tune in to the online stream.
Watch it here:
By Zach Rodgers
