In February, we announced that DoubleClick Digital Marketing, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, and the Google Display Network are going 100% HTML5. Starting June 30th, 2016, display ads built in Flash can no longer be uploaded into DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager, or AdWords.
DoubleClick advertisers who currently use Flash ads in their campaigns have several ways to ensure your creative can continue to show up in your live campaigns. Read more here.
Posted by Becky Chappell Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick
When Netflix launched its new series Narcos1 in August of 2015, it faced a big global marketing challenge.
Narcos is a realistic look at the rise of the Cocaine Highway as told through the lives of legendary kingpin Pablo Escobar and the American DEA agents tracking him. It's a passionate story of crime, drugs, money, honor and politics, set in the late decades of the 20th century, with dialogue half in Spanish and half in English.
Netflix wanted to reach a global audience that included target groups like "thrill seekers" (men 25-34 drawn to the excitement of crime culture) and "conspiracy theorists" (older males fascinated by the political implications of drug trafficking). That meant Netflix and its digital agency, AvatarLabs, needed to bring the Narcos story to countries from Peru to Sweden with targeted messages that would appeal powerfully to different target viewers in each culture ― without overwhelming their budget or their marketing teams.
Ever since Weight Watchers first began as a gathering of friends in 1963, the company has been helping people lose pounds and live healthier lives. Today the Weight Watchers digital marketing team is focused on acquiring new generations of customers for those classic local meetings as well as their online products and services.
The Weight Watchers team has had ample success with search and social media, where they found it easy to test different headlines and calls to action. But they hadn't found a way to do the same kind of vigorous testing on display advertising. Building and managing dozens of creative iterations, and accurately measuring the results, seemed like a major challenge.
To tackle that challenge, Weight Watchers, its agencies, Neo@Ogilvy and OgilvyOne, chose DoubleClick Dynamic Creative.
See how they managed their creative testing to identify the best-performing creative iterations and boost acquisition volume by 56%.
Posted by Becky Chappell Product Marketing Manager, Google Web Designer
Year after year we've heard pundits announce that this is "The Year of Mobile," but we don't quite seem to get there. Still, the facts don't lie: eMarketer estimates that mobile will account for 72% of U.S. digital ad spend by 2019 and Google's tech-forward target audience spends more than 74% of its time on mobile.1
Because mobile devices are consumers' always-on, constant companions, Google Marketing wanted to deliver personalized, contextual creative programmatically via ads. To show how the Google app can add value in people’s lives, Google Marketing brought the app’s functionality into the ad units themselves. Combining aggregated search insights, geo-targeting, and dynamic creative, the ads proactively fed users with helpful, relevant information.
The Google Marketing team followed four key steps as it developed the creative for the Google app. To learn more about the approach, check out the full case study.
Posted by Kelly Cox Product Marketing Manager, Google
As the holiday season gets underway, you’re likely focused on reaching holiday shoppers as they browse for gifts for their family and friends. Dynamic creative strategies are key to getting the most relevant messages and products in front of these shoppers. But with consumers’ increased usage of mobile devices, you need to build your dynamic creative in HTML5, and this confluence of technologies can lead to complexity.
Streamlining production of dynamic creative in Google Web Designer
To make it easier for you to build relevant and engaging cross-screen creative, we’re excited to announce the launch of simplified workflows in Google Web Designer that make it even easier to build dynamic creative in HTML5. You can now easily choose which data signals/feed attributes to connect to each dynamic element, pulling directly from the dynamic profile you’ve set up in DoubleClick Studio.
We’ve already seen some teams find success with the new dynamic workflow. Kaymu, one of the largest online retail marketplaces for emerging markets, used Google Web Designer to build an HTML5 dynamic remarketing campaign and show relevant products to shoppers. This strategy drove a 580% increase in CTR compared to their previous, non-HTML5, non-dynamic campaign, and the team’s dynamic creative build time dropped from 3 days to 10 minutes.
CyberAgent, a media agency based in Japan, also used Google Web Designer for a recent dynamic remarketing campaign. To provide the time needed to focus on the creative strategy, the team first automated the bidding and targeting for the campaign. They then could build and test several dynamic templates, using advanced animations and multiple dynamic elements. Ultimately, these advanced creatives led to a 40% higher CTR and a 28% lower CPC compared to the previous dynamic remarketing campaign that didn’t use Google Web Designer.
In addition to the new dynamic support in Google Web Designer, we’re also excited to launch:
Animation improvements, which help you build smooth animations
Updates to our text authoring capabilities, which make editing and manipulating the text in your ad units much easier and more intuitive
Two new components in our components gallery: a Spritesheet component, so you can more easily build out your spritesheets, and a Streetview component, so you can add location-based imagery to your ads. (We’ve kept this component separate from the Google Maps component to help you keep your file sizes smaller.)
Upcoming Google Web Designer Hangout on Air
Want to learn more about the new features? Sign up for one of our Hangouts on Air. Sean Kranzberg, Engineering Manager for Google Web Designer, will walk through the new features and take your questions.
Earlier this summer we held #HTML5Week to introduce you to resources that can help you develop engaging and relevant HTML5 creative. Now that Chrome has rolled out updates to Flash support, we're heading back to the virtual classroom to provide you with the latest information you need to make the transition to HTML5.
In this vein, we’re kicking off an HTML5 Hangout series, where over five weeks we’ll set aside an hour to explore topics ranging from how to QA HTML5 ads to building dynamic creative (See the complete Hangout schedule).
Our first hangout on September 10th (3pm - 4pm EST) will introduce you to HTML5 development tools and best practices. Register here.
Note: If you’re new to HTML5, we recommend walking through our Rich Media Fundamentals training before attending the HTML5 Hangout series.
We hope to see you in the classroom!
Posted by Hemmy Edge DoubleClick Rich Media Product Trainer
Last year we started the Make Mobile Work initiative in partnership with the IAB to foster adoption of HTML5 and cross-screen creative, and it quickly became the IAB Mobile Center’s lynchpin for marketer outreach as interest in the program accelerated.
For 2015, we’re excited to bring back Make Mobile Work for another round of educational and practical conversations for brand marketers, to help them succeed in our increasingly mobile-first world.The importance of HTML5 for digital marketing continues to be at the center of the Make Mobile Work message, building on the success of the HTML5 Week we hosted last week.
Make Mobile Work webinars will address three important topics over the remainder of 2015. These webinars are curated with marketer business decision-makers in mind—they will keep the jargon to a minimum and focus on sharing practical examples and learning.
The IAB’s Tech Lab is also working to update their standard ad units to reflect the file size needs of HTML5-based ads. This is a timely effort as connectivity technologies have changed along with the rise of HTML5 and it’s vital to realign buyer and seller expectations around ad file weights that will enable engaging ads, while not harming webpage or ad-load performance. Make Mobile Work will help to spread the word about this process and its outcomes and implications.
Along with the other members of the Mobile Center, we’re looking forward to continuing to help brands large and small, novice and experienced, get the know-how they need to make mobile work for them.
Posted by Becky Chappell, DoubleClick Product Marketing
We dubbed last week #HTML5Week and launched multiple HTML5 resources, hangouts and product updates to help make it easier to build all your ads in HTML5. Today, we are pleased to announce the launch of our Google Web Designer Certification exam and training resources.
Google Web Designer helps you create engaging HTML5 content. Use animations and interactive elements to bring your creative vision to life and enjoy integrations with other Google products, including a shared asset library and one-click-to-publish integration with DoubleClick Studio, compatibility with AdWords, and the ability to collaborate on works-in-progress in Google Drive.
The new Google Web Designer Fundamentals Certification allows new users to demonstrate proficiency and understanding of the Google Web Designer interface and features. The exam will help you learn:
How to use the Google Web Designer interface
How to create templates and animations
How to build interstitial ads
How to build advanced expandable ads
The program consists of a step-by-step eLearning that takes you through the basics of Google Web Designer and helps you get trained quickly in building HTML5 ads using the tool. Once you finish the eLearning and build a few test ads, you can take a certification exam to test your knowledge and demonstrate your proficiency. If you pass the certification, you can get your name listed on the Certified User list in the Rich Media Gallery.
We hope this new certification exam helps you learn the ins and outs of the Google Web Designer tool, so that you can more easily create your HTML5 ads.
Posted by Becky Chappell, Google Web Designer Product Marketing Manager
For the past week, we’ve shared best practices and new resources to help you learn how to build HTML5 ads. To cap off #HTML5Week, we're making it even easier for our DoubleClick Campaign Manager clients to run mobile-friendly HTML5 ads by offering unlimited file sizes...for free.
HTML5 ad files are much larger than Flash ads, meaning they need a larger file size (k size) allowance and should utilize a polite load function to be publisher friendly.
We launched Enhanced Formats in DoubleClick Campaign Manager early last year, as an option for media agencies to upload larger creative files to DoubleClick Campaign Manager directly. Now that all ads need to be built in HTML5 to show up properly across screens and browsers, we’ve decided to offer the unlimited file sizes free of charge. Starting August 3rd, we will be automatically upgrading all DoubleClick Campaign Manager accounts to support Enhanced Formats. [No action necessary by clients.]
In addition to unlimited file size, Enhanced Formats offers automatic polite load functionality (which allows main web page content to load before the ad unit finishes loading,) a way to easily add basic engagement metrics to standard banner ads, and the ability to track metrics such as multiple exits, interactions, backup image views, HTML5 views, and display time. You can learn more about Enhanced Formats in the help center.
During the month of August, we’ll also be making some other changes to the way we handle campaigns that contain Flash ads:
In DoubleClick Campaign Manager, our systems will automatically show the HTML5 version of an ad, where available. (Before, the HTML5 version would only show in environments where Flash wasn't supported).
DoubleClick Bid Manager will stop supporting bids for Flash ads in Chrome (which pauses Flash ads automatically). This means advertisers won't end up paying for ads that will be paused by default.
While making the switch to HTML5 may seem daunting, we hope that these product updates, combined with the resources and training provided this week, will help you tackle the challenge. Here is a recap of the resources that are now available:
