Tag Archives: Creative

Ads Take a Step Towards “HTTPS Everywhere”

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


Out with unwanted ad injectors

Cross-posted from the Google Online Security Blog

It’s pretty tough to read the New York Times under these circumstances:

And it’s pretty unpleasant to shop for a Nexus 6 on a search results page that looks like this:

The browsers in the screenshots above have been infected with ‘ad injectors’. Ad injectors are programs that insert new ads, or replace existing ones, into the pages you visit while browsing the web. We’ve received more than 100,000 complaints from Chrome users about ad injection since the beginning of 2015—more than network errors, performance problems, or any other issue.

Injectors are yet another symptom of “unwanted software”—programs that are deceptive, difficult to remove, secretly bundled with other downloads, and have other bad qualities. We’ve made several recent announcements about our work to fight unwanted software via Safe Browsing, and now we’re sharing some updates on our efforts to protect you from injectors as well.

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

Unwanted ad injectors aren’t part of a healthy ads ecosystem. They’re part of an environment where bad practices hurt users, advertisers, and publishers alike.

People don’t like ad injectors for several reasons: not only are they intrusive, but people are often tricked into installing ad injectors in the first place, via deceptive advertising, or software “bundles.” Ad injection can also be a security risk, as the recent “Superfish” incident showed.

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

How Google fights unwanted ad injectors

We have a variety of policies that either limit or entirely prohibit, ad injectors.

In Chrome, any extension hosted in the Chrome Web Store must comply with the Developer Program Policies. These require that extensions have a narrow and easy-to-understand purpose. We don’t ban injectors altogether—if they want to, people can still choose to install injectors that clearly disclose what they do—but injectors that sneak ads into a user’s browser would certainly violate our policies. We show people familiar red warnings when they are about to download software that is deceptive, or doesn’t use the right APIs to interact with browsers.
On the ads side, AdWords advertisers with software downloads hosted on their site, or linked to from their site, must comply with our Unwanted Software Policy. Additionally, both Google Platforms program policies and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) Seller Program Guidelines, don’t allow programs that overlay ad space on a given site without permission of the site owner.

To increase awareness about ad injectors and the scale of this issue, we’ll be releasing new research on May 1 that examines the ad injector ecosystem in depth. The study, conducted with researchers at University of California Berkeley, drew conclusions from more than 100 million pageviews of Google sites across Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer on various operating systems, globally. It’s not a pretty picture. Here’s a sample of the findings:
  • Ad injectors were detected on all operating systems (Mac and Windows), and web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE) that were included in our test.
  • More than 5% of people visiting Google sites have at least one ad injector installed. Within that group, half have at least two injectors installed, nearly one-third have at least four installed.
  • Thirty-four percent of Chrome extensions injecting ads were classified as outright malware.
  • Researchers found 192 deceptive Chrome extensions that affected 14 million users; these have since been disabled. Google now uses the techniques we used to catch these extensions to scan all new and updated extensions.
We’re constantly working to improve our product policies to protect people online. We encourage others to do the same. We’re committed to continuing to improve this experience for Google and the web as a whole.

Posted by Nav Jagpal, Software Engineer, Safe Browsing

Out with unwanted ad injectors

Cross-posted from the Google Online Security Blog

It’s pretty tough to read the New York Times under these circumstances:

And it’s pretty unpleasant to shop for a Nexus 6 on a search results page that looks like this:

The browsers in the screenshots above have been infected with ‘ad injectors’. Ad injectors are programs that insert new ads, or replace existing ones, into the pages you visit while browsing the web. We’ve received more than 100,000 complaints from Chrome users about ad injection since the beginning of 2015—more than network errors, performance problems, or any other issue.

Injectors are yet another symptom of “unwanted software”—programs that are deceptive, difficult to remove, secretly bundled with other downloads, and have other bad qualities. We’ve made several recent announcements about our work to fight unwanted software via Safe Browsing, and now we’re sharing some updates on our efforts to protect you from injectors as well.

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

Unwanted ad injectors aren’t part of a healthy ads ecosystem. They’re part of an environment where bad practices hurt users, advertisers, and publishers alike.

People don’t like ad injectors for several reasons: not only are they intrusive, but people are often tricked into installing ad injectors in the first place, via deceptive advertising, or software “bundles.” Ad injection can also be a security risk, as the recent “Superfish” incident showed.

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

How Google fights unwanted ad injectors

We have a variety of policies that either limit or entirely prohibit, ad injectors.

In Chrome, any extension hosted in the Chrome Web Store must comply with the Developer Program Policies. These require that extensions have a narrow and easy-to-understand purpose. We don’t ban injectors altogether—if they want to, people can still choose to install injectors that clearly disclose what they do—but injectors that sneak ads into a user’s browser would certainly violate our policies. We show people familiar red warnings when they are about to download software that is deceptive, or doesn’t use the right APIs to interact with browsers.
On the ads side, AdWords advertisers with software downloads hosted on their site, or linked to from their site, must comply with our Unwanted Software Policy. Additionally, both Google Platforms program policies and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) Seller Program Guidelines, don’t allow programs that overlay ad space on a given site without permission of the site owner.

To increase awareness about ad injectors and the scale of this issue, we’ll be releasing new research on May 1 that examines the ad injector ecosystem in depth. The study, conducted with researchers at University of California Berkeley, drew conclusions from more than 100 million pageviews of Google sites across Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer on various operating systems, globally. It’s not a pretty picture. Here’s a sample of the findings:
  • Ad injectors were detected on all operating systems (Mac and Windows), and web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE) that were included in our test.
  • More than 5% of people visiting Google sites have at least one ad injector installed. Within that group, half have at least two injectors installed, nearly one-third have at least four installed.
  • Thirty-four percent of Chrome extensions injecting ads were classified as outright malware.
  • Researchers found 192 deceptive Chrome extensions that affected 14 million users; these have since been disabled. Google now uses the techniques we used to catch these extensions to scan all new and updated extensions.
We’re constantly working to improve our product policies to protect people online. We encourage others to do the same. We’re committed to continuing to improve this experience for Google and the web as a whole.

Posted by Nav Jagpal, Software Engineer, Safe Browsing

Turner Sports reaches fans across screens for March Madness


Consumers’ constant connectivity means that people can now satisfy their desire for information and entertainment at any moment during their day. This “in-the-moment” behavior requires marketers to focus on building cross-screen advertising strategies to capture the moments that matter.

With March Madness upon us, today we will shine a light on how one marketer, Turner Sports, developed smart cross-screen advertising strategies to play to the needs of sports fans. We will then explore five new mobile features we are launching in DoubleClick Digital Marketing that enable advertisers to more easily develop and run cross-screen campaigns.

How Turner engaged fans across screens
Turner knows that at the outset of the tournament, consumers watch the games via the March Madness Live desktop stream and mobile app. So driving traffic to the video stream and driving app downloads at the outset of the Tournament are the brand’s most important metrics. 

As the tournament progresses, the focus shifts from the app to live TV tune-ins, to capture the excitement around the final match-ups. By understanding how and where consumers interact with March Madness content, Turner can build a better digital strategy and reach their users more effectively throughout the Tournament.

Turner used Google’s Lightbox format to create an expandable ad that drives people to the March Madness Live mobile app:


Five new features to help marketers run cross-screen campaigns
To help marketers like Turner accomplish their cross-screen advertising strategies, we’re excited to announce five new features across the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform. 

Build cross-screen creative more easily: 
  • For basic Flash ads: DoubleClick Bid Manager now supports automatic Flash-to-HTML5 conversion. HTML5 ads can run across mobile inventory where Flash ads cannot, expanding your mobile reach while offering a richer, higher performing creative. Initial results from our beta show that converting Flash assets to HTML5 increases mobile reach by 400% and drives a 2-3x increase in average click-through rate (CTR).
  • For interactive HTML5 ads: In the next few weeks, Google Web Designer will be launching starter templates to help advertisers quickly build mobile ad units from a pre-set format. Over 80 ad templates will be available, including 29 in-app templates, and all of them will be certified to work on DoubleClick Bid Manager. We’ll be adding additional templates for responsive GDN Lightbox formats next quarter. Google Web Designer will also integrate with the Asset Library in DoubleClick Studio, meaning users can access the same library of assets from Google Web Designer and DoubleClick Studio. 
Reach your audiences across screens more effectively: 
  • Based on geography: Last November, we announced that for users who opt in to location-based targeting, marketers can use geofence targeting in DoubleClick Bid Manager to reach people based on their proximity to a specified chain store. We are now expanding geographic coverage to over 100 countries, increasing the types of business chains available for your campaigns, and improving the workflow for the feature, including building better forecasting and reporting. 
  • Based on brand safety: We are making app buying on brand-safe placements much easier. With app brand safety targeting, we have expanded our Digital Content Label algorithm to include even more Play Store and App Store apps, widening your mobile in-app reach while ensuring your ads only run on brand-appropriate apps.
Track and optimize app install campaign performance: 
  • DoubleClick Digital Marketing will support third-party app tracking solutions in early Q2. This means advertisers can track their in-app installs (app downloads from an in-app ad) using supported third-party app trackers and attribute them back to impressions and clicks for in-app ads run on DoubleClick Bid Manager and Doubleclick Campaign Manager. Contact your DoubleClick rep to learn more. 

Whether you’re reaching sports fans during the March Madness tournament, or more generally trying to reach your consumers in the moments that matter, these tools can help you build successful advertising campaigns that will run seamlessly across screens.

Posted by Becky Chappell, DoubleClick Marketing

Rich Media Gallery redesign: Simplifying complexity and optimizing for mobile


We’re excited to unveil our redesigned Rich Media Gallery website, Google’s destination for digital creative inspiration and education. The new design provides a seamless experience across screens, and makes it easier to find the right product and ad format you need to build your campaign. 

Two and half years of content:
The original website launched two and half years ago, in September 2012, and since then, we’ve added over 1000 creative examples to the gallery and seen 50% year over year growth in unique viewers.
Why the redesign?
The new design optimizes the website experience for every device and removes complexity, allowing users to quickly reach the right answers. 

Seamless, cross-device experience: We used Google’s Material Design Principles to create a consistent look and feel across smartphones, tablets, and desktops. The site incorporates mobile-friendly elements, such as easy scrolling, full-screen interactive gallery examples, and clever transitions.

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The Rich Media Gallery website is now fully responsive, resizing content automatically based on the size of the device you’re viewing it on.

Get to the right answer quickly: We want the Rich Media Gallery to be an intuitive guide to Google’s creative solutions, to help you identify the best tools and ad formats for your campaign.
  • Filter the gallery by ad type or feature, to see the most relevant creative examples for your campaign. 
  • Check out the Creative Recommendation Tool, which provides a recommendation for the best product to use for your campaign, based on your answers to a few questions.

Start Exploring:
  • The new homepage offers a curated set of the best creative examples from the gallery. You can “deconstruct” these ads to uncover which formats and features were used to build it. (See below)

  • The new Ad types section will provide an overview of each format type, and then aggregate the build guides, gallery examples, and other relevant resources in one place, so you have everything at your fingertips to build your own version. 

    • Make sure to check out the new HTML5 Lightbox format. It's Google’s first truly responsive framework that allows you to build your creative once and deploy it on any device or screen size. Think of these like a DoubleClick Studio Layout, except that the expanded state of the Lightbox is completely responsive to screen size. (Overview video here.) 

    • If you’ve already downloaded Google Web Designer, you have the option to open HTML5 templates from the website directly in Google Web Designer, so you can immediately get started on a project.

Interested in building your own mobile-optimized website?
Read the behind-the-scenes scoop from the Rich Media Gallery design and development team to better understand their strategy and approach to this redesign. They discuss how they applied Material Design principles to create a mobile-optimized experience, and they walk through the various challenges they faced as they built the new site.

Posted by the Rich Media Gallery Team

For Brand Marketers: 5-Step Guide to Programmatic Buying

A lot has changed for marketers over the years. But one thing remains constant: the need to connect with and move an audience in the moments that matter. Brand marketers are beginning to truly embrace programmatic buying to do just that. The challenge is, many marketers don’t know where to start in order to successfully embrace programmatic for their brand campaigns.

To help address this challenge, we’re pleased to share our five-step guide: "Programmatic: A Brand Marketer’s Guide," to provide context and ideas for how marketers and their agencies can successfully embrace programmatic buying. It covers the essentials that brand marketers need to know in order to:

  1. Organize audience insights
  2. Design compelling creative
  3. Execute with integrated technology
  4. Reach audiences across screens
  5. Measure the impact

Our guide includes seven case studies with brands including Nike, KLM, Talk Talk, Kia, GOL, Burberry, and Kellogg so that brand marketers new to programmatic can learn from their peers.

We hope this guide can help you realize the ultimate promise of advertising in the digital age: to effectively run highly relevant, creative, and measurable campaigns, at scale. To make the most of programmatic buying, we invite you to explore the five steps to programmatic success.

You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on our Google+ page.

Posted by Kelly Cox, Product Marketing Manager

Library, Groups, Expandables… oh my! Google Web Designer spruces up for the holidays.


Today, we are excited to announce a new local library and new grouping functionality in Google Web Designer, which make it easier to add, edit, manage and group creative assets. We’ve also spruced up many of the components in the gallery, which build on the updates we launched in August, to help designers and developers make interactive and engaging HTML5 ad units for cross-screen campaigns. 

Manage your assets with ease:
  • Add, edit, and manage your assets in one place in the new local library: Add assets from the stage or within the library workflow, drag and drop from your desktop, or use the new import dialogue under File. Then, customize your folders and organize your assets to your liking. 
  • Group elements together: Once you group elements together, they are stored in your local library. You can drag and drop groups onto the stage and edit them all at once. 
Create more engaging, interactive ads:
  • Build ads that expand in all directions: The “view mode” will allow you to see the expanded state as an overlay, and move it to the desired expanded position. Learn more.
  • YouTube autoplay feature: You can now use the YouTube component to build a masthead that automatically plays the embedded video.
  • Other enhancements to the components gallery allow you to:
    • Add “navigation” (the dots or thumbnails at the bottom of a gallery that show that multiple images exist.)
    • Auto-scale images: stretch, resize or crop images to fit within the gallery 
    • Snap to ‘n’ frames: advance by a specified number of frames in the swipeable or carousel gallery (i.e. 3 images show on the first page of gallery, swiping moves to the next 3). Learn more.
  • SVG (scalable vector graphics) support: Google Web Designer now supports uploads of SVGs and provides a set of basic features, including 2D editing, cut, copy & paste, and selection tool support. 
Share your awesome Google Web Designer ad units with us! Submit them to the Rich Media Gallery and we’ll promote them to the ~35,000 people who view the site each month.

If you don't yet have Google Web Designer, you can download it for free here.

Posted by Tony Mowatt and Sean Kranzberg, Product Manager and Engineering Lead for Google Web Designer

P.S. It may take a couple hours for the updates to show up in your version of the product. 

Mobile momentum in digital + 3 tools for easy cross-screen campaigns


Marketers know that building cross-screen campaigns is important to overall campaign success. But many have been slow to adopt the HTML5 standards and mobile-compatible formats that are needed to achieve that success. 

Today, more than 25% of pageviews occur on a mobile device (1) and more people consume content in HTML5-compatible environments than Flash-compatible ones (2), yet 83% of digital creative is still built in formats that don’t work on mobile devices. (3)

The “Make Mobile Work” Initiative
To help marketers make the transition to cross-screen campaigns, we have partnered with the IAB for the past year on the “Make Mobile Work” Initiative. Through an open letter signed by 22 publishers globally, a mobile check-list for marketers, and a quarterly webinar series, we increased awareness of the need for cross-screen campaigns and provided the steps to successfully create, target and measure these campaigns. 

Positive momentum:
Efforts like this one appear to be working. Marketers’ trepidation toward mobile is beginning to melt away, as evidenced by strong growth metrics this year for HTML5 adoption and mobile inventory (metrics pulled from internal DoubleClick data, Nov. 2014):
  • 250% growth in HTML5 impressions in DoubleClick Studio 
  • 130% growth in the percent of DoubleClick Campaign Manager impressions being served to mobile devices
  • Almost half of the mobile inventory available in DoubleClick Bid Manager is now in-app inventory

Three easy-to-use tools for cross-screen campaigns
As marketers begin to incorporate cross-screen strategies into all of their campaigns, we want to make sure that every marketer has easy-to-use tools to help them scale. So we recently launched three new features in the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform that make cross-screen creative, targeting and measurement easy to incorporate into every campaign:
  • Easy HTML5 creative: Our platform will automatically create an HTML5 version of every Flash banner you upload, with automatic Flash-to-HTML5 conversions for reservation campaigns (available in beta for programmatic campaigns). When your ads run on mobile devices, the interactive HTML5 ad will show up instead of a static backup image, helping expand your reach on mobile. You can also report on HTML5 impressions separate from Flash impressions. Learn More>>
  • Precise mobile targeting: For users who opt-in to location-based targeting, marketers can use Geofence Targeting in DoubleClick Bid Manager to deliver highly relevant messages to people based on their proximity to a specified chain store, across a broad geographic area. You can easily target all your store locations with a single click, enabling you to reach the right consumer and drive foot-traffic into your stores. For example, if you’re a hotel company, you can reach people who are close to your hotel, and offer them a discount to get them to choose your business. Learn more>>
  • Re-engage your app users: People are spending 86% of their time on mobile devices in applications. (4) DoubleClick now allows marketers to remarket to existing app customers inside other apps, for both reservations and programmatic buys. Using Floodlight tags, you can create audience lists around any engagement that takes place in-app (e.g. people who added an item to a shopping cart, top spenders in the last 30 days, or gold member app users). This lets you improve ROI by offering relevant ads to people who are already in the purchase funnel. Learn more>>

As 2015 approaches, we hope to see even more marketers incorporate cross-screen techniques, to successfully reach the right audiences on every device. 

Published by the DoubleClick Marketing Team

sources:
1. Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report, Apr. 2014
2. StatCounter Sept. 2013 data
3. Internal DoubleClick Data, Nov. 2014
4. Flurry Analytics Report, Mar. 2014

DoubleClick for Publishers back up and running

DoubleClick for Publishers experienced an outage this morning impacting publishers globally, across their video, display, native and mobile formats. Our team has worked quickly to fix the software bug and it's now back up and running, so our publisher partners can return to funding their content.