Last year we announced the beta launch of Swirl, an immersive 3D ad format that allows people to interact with an ad in a new way. Today, we are making Swirl available to all Display & Video 360 customers globally.

Swirl lets consumers engage with a product like it's right in front of them by allowing them to rotate, zoom and expand the creative in the ad. Swirl ads allow brands to illustrate changes in behavior, new technology performance, unique product features and more.

Brands are seeing great success using Swirl ads for various campaign goals. This includes increasing consideration by showcasing product features, building brand awareness and delivering a great mobile experience. See how some brands utilized the power of Swirl over the past year.

Purina ONE attracts new customers using 3D Swirl ads

Purina wanted to show dog and cat owners how their Purina ONE pet food can make a difference in the health of their pets in just 28 days. To accomplish this, Purina partnered with creative agency Mediamonks to create a Swirl ad that demonstrates the behaviors of a healthy pet that eats Purina ONE food. The ad uniquely allows the user to “play fetch” with a 3D dog in the ad, so that consumers can visualize the same behavior in their pet. The use of this format led to a 6X increase in engagement (vs 2D ads) through its interactive experience.

Nissan showcases new automotive technologies with 3D ads

Nissan Spain was looking to increase the engagement of users with their creatives for their compact crossover SUV, the Qashaqai. The creatives would highlight the new driving features that were difficult to show in a static display ad. Nissan Spain and their agency Nissan United partnered with the creative agency QReal to create Swirl ads. They built the 3D creative to showcase new features like Lane Intervention, Intelligent Cruise Control and Lane Keep Assist. Nissan saw an engagement rate that was 8X higher than rich media benchmarks for the automotive vertical.

adidas Latin America highlights innovative product design

adidas LATAM was looking to capture user attention and showcase the innovative redesign of the adidas Ultra Boost 2019 shoe. adidas LATAM and creative agency EdgeDNA created Swirl ads that allow prospective buyers to get an up-close look without having to visit a store. Swirl ads drove a 4x higher engagement rate than rich media benchmarks and had an average viewable time of 11 seconds, which indicated that the ad captured user attention. The 3D creatives also drove a return on ad spend (ROAS) of ~2.8 for the Colombia market.

Belvedere drives brand engagement during holiday season with 3D ad

To get started creating a Swirl ad, you can upload pre-made 3D assets to Google Web Designer, our creative authoring tool, and use the new Swirl templates. Brands and agencies can also edit, configure, and publish high-quality, photorealistic models to use in immersive display ad using Google’s 3D platform Poly.

For resources and tips on how to get started using Swirl, you can find more information here.

Marketers are always looking for ways to reduce the time their teams spend on manual, repetitive tasks so they can do more strategic work—like keeping pace with what their customers are seeking and delivering experiences to match. This is especially true in times of rapidly changing consumer behavior. To help your teams be more efficient and increase your speed of execution we’ve introduced a new read/write API, which allows you to automate the end-to-end campaign process by connecting your preferred tools directly to Display & Video 360. The API enables a broad range of opportunities to be more efficient in creating, adjusting and optimizing your campaigns. Here are three examples to show how the API can help.

Efficient campaign creation

Philips Benelux wanted their media team to spend more time experimenting and less time performing manual tasks prone to errors which could delay launches and waste budget. So they asked Cape, their technology partner, to help them automate their campaign processes. Philips Benelux and Cape started by mapping the entire campaign setup workflow for each objective, such as online purchases or awareness for new product launches, in order to find repetitive tasks that could be automated. Based on this audit, Cape developed campaign templates for each objective. When Philips’ team started using the new approach, they could just select a template that automatically included information such as campaign and creative names, bid strategies, environments, audiences, and other fields. By connecting these templates to Display & Video 360 via the new API, Philips Benelux is now able to push campaigns live in a matter of minutes rather than hours.

Customize campaigns based on changing conditions

Many businesses are impacted by external or environmental conditions, like the weather, but it can be time consuming to manually edit your campaigns to reflect these changing conditions at scale. This was the challenge facing Kepler Group, a certified Google Marketing Platform sales partner, when working with an insurance company client. They realized that consumers were more likely to purchase home insurance in the days following a storm. With Display & Video 360’s API, they were able to automatically activate campaigns by tapping into local weather data and use dedicated creatives to remind consumers to check their coverage.

Automatic campaign monitoring

In addition to campaign setup and editing, Display & Video 360’s API can also help marketers monitor their campaigns so that they can quickly identify and fix any issues affecting performance. Google Media Lab, the team that manages all advertising campaigns for products like Pixel, YouTube TV, Nest, etc., used Display & Video 360’s API to create a dashboard that automatically surfaces in real time which campaigns are not spending their budgets as planned. This way, teams can quickly move budget from low to high performing campaigns. The team is also looking to further automate campaign optimization beyond budget adjustments. Next they’re planning to use Display & Video 360’s API to analyze performance by URL and automatically exclude the low performing sites from the campaign settings.

Display & Video 360’s API is now available to all accounts globally with support for management of advertisers, campaigns, insertion orders, line items and creatives. In the next few months we'll expand support for brand controls, audience and user management. If you want to get started, sharethe developer documentation with your team and identify the use cases that can fit your needs.

Over the past few months, people have spent a remarkable amount of time watching connected TV at home. As a result, Display & Video 360's connected TV available inventory surged by 75 percent in April 2020 from the previous year. And this doesn’t include YouTube and YouTube TV, which over 100 million people watch on their TV screens each month in the U.S. Even now, as stay-at-home restrictions are being lifted, connected TV usage remains well above pre-COVID-19 levels.

The disruption of TV upfronts and suspension of live sports are also encouraging advertisers to shift to the more flexible and on-demand ad strategies that connected TV offers. As a consequence, we’ve heard from many advertisers that they are accelerating their move to video streaming advertising. To support them in this process, we are introducing a series of tools in Display & Video 360 that make it easy for digital media buyers to discover and secure ad inventory on high-quality streaming content.

Easy inventory discovery with TV in Marketplace

As more premium streaming content is made accessible to programmatic buyers via deals, it can be hard to keep up with the flurry of options available, especially when these deals are documented offline and shared over email from many different media sales teams.

To help marketers easily find the deals that best match their campaign objectives, we’ve created a dedicated TV section in Marketplace specifically for publishers and inventory that let you reach TV audiences across devices. For instance, this is where you can find deals for the Disney Media Networks: ABC, ESPN, Freeform, FX, Hulu and National Geographic.

The TV section in Marketplace simplifies the process of finding and securing premium streaming inventory. Available publisher inventory is displayed graphically so that you can easily discover and negotiate your deals. Additional filter options let you search by geo or streaming device type to quickly find the right partner for your campaigns. You can also deep dive on a specific publisher profile to explore more data around performance, audience and inventory volume. Finally, you can send requests for proposals (RFP) to publishers directly from this dedicated space.

We’ll be rolling out this new interface throughout the next few weeks. In the future we will also be adding national linear TV broadcast and cable networks as well as local TV stations to this section in Marketplace.

High-quality inventory that’s already packaged

Because time is an especially constrained resource at the moment, we’ve introduced two new ‘ready-to-buy’ options that further accelerate the process of finding the right inventory for your campaign.

First, for marketers who want to skip the negotiation process, we’ve worked closely with exchange partners such as Google Ad Manager, FreeWheel and SpotX to bundle inventory from top publishers, along with broadcast and cable networks, into ready-to-execute deals. These deals, known as auction packages, are available to all Display & Video 360 users in Marketplace. Auction packages allow you to easily select inventory that’s already assembled by publishers based on genres, popularity, seasonality, formats or audiences. For example, you can easily add available themed packages from publishers, such as "Hulu - Parents", or from exchanges, like Telaria's "Cord Cutters" bundle.In addition to being a convenient and fast way to access pre-packaged inventory, auction packages are also a great way to harness publishers’ data to reach the right people in the right context.

Second, we’re making YouTube Select’s dedicated streaming TV lineup available to Display & Video 360 buyers in the U.S. YouTube watch time on TV screens jumped 80 percent year over year in March 2020 and this new streaming TV lineup will help you reach the growing number of people watching YouTube on the biggest screens in their homes.

Streamlined buying experience

Once you have secured your deals, you need a place to set up and optimize your TV ad campaign. That’s why this month we’re adding the “OTT line item”, a new workflow in Display & Video 360 tailored for buying TV ads across screens. To avoid configuration errors, this streamlined buying experience only features options that are relevant for connected TV ads, with appropriate configurations selected by default.

This line item also automatically picks inventory from connected TV apps. If the content on these apps can be viewed on other devices too, the new line item will seamlessly include these environments. For example, this means you can easily buy video ads from Disney Media Networks across connected TV, laptop, smartphone or tablet.

If you’re exploring options to harness the streaming boom and seamlessly add connected TV ads to your video strategy, reach out to your Google account executive today.

Automated bidding in Display & Video 360 helps advertisers respond to what consumers are seeking in the moment by using Google’s advanced machine learning to predict campaign performance and place your bids accordingly. As customer behavior changes, automated bidding adapts and tailors your bids in real time for every auction giving you more flexibility than a fixed bidding approach. Now we are making automated bidding more powerful by introducing Custom Bidding, a new way to incorporate your unique insights about what drives your business into your bidding strategies.

Here’s how it works: first, you identify a key performance indicator (KPI), such as revenue or brand lift, that you want to optimize. Next, you define the proxy signals that help predict success with your KPI. For example, you might select transaction value as a proxy for revenue or creative dimension as a proxy for brand lift -- you can choose as a signal anything that is measurable as a Floodlight activity or a goal in Google Analytics 360. Finally, you build a script that uses these signals to assign scores to ad impressions in order to define how much each impression is worth to you, based on its expected ability to drive your chosen KPI. Once the campaign starts, Display & Video 360 will use the scoring model built on your script to predict the value of each impression and adjust each bid accordingly.

Custom Bidding will be available to all Display & Video 360 accounts in the next few weeks. Support for including Analytics 360 goals as Custom Bidding signals will launch in the next few months.

Office Depot wanted to improve campaign performance by tuning its ads to specifically drive high value purchases, instead of optimizing for total transactions. They turned to their agency partner, Wavemaker, to see how they could tailor their bidding strategy to optimize for revenue and not conversions. Wavemaker recommended using Custom Bidding to inform Google’s machine learning with Office Depot’s transaction values. They then put it to test with the cost per acquisition (CPA) automated bidding strategy and saw an immediate improvement in their return.

Make better use of your advertising budgets

Joyn, one of the largest digital video streaming services in Germany, used outcome based buying to support the launch of their new subscription service. They wanted to see if paying only for clicks would result in lower cost per acquisition (CPA) compared to their previous auto bidding strategy to minimize CPA. So they ran an A/B test and discovered that outcome based buying delivered a 69 percent lower CPA.

These new bidding features will help you be more responsive to changing consumer behavior by giving you the flexibility and choice you need to make every marketing dollar count across your brand and performance campaigns.

Media consumption habits are rapidly changing. Planning tools that are tightly connected to your media buying platform can help you reassess your media plans and quickly adjust your ad strategy to reach people where they are now.

We’re expanding the reach forecasting capabilities in Display & Video 360 to offer a deduplicated view of expected campaign reach across open auction display, video and YouTube so that media planners can have a comprehensive and accurate view of their potential audience. And to better support collaboration between planning and buying teams, the planning workspace is now more easily accessible to media planners, thanks to a new dedicated user role.

A deduplicated view of your Display & Video 360 reach 

Media planners aim to get the most comprehensive view of all the media available so they can design relevant and effective plans. In Display & Video 360, you could already forecast the reach of your video campaigns in the plan workspace. For planners to effectively plan across all their programmatic buys, we have added support for display formats.

That means that media planners no longer have to rely on reach metrics from past campaigns to guesstimate the reach of their upcoming display ad campaigns. They can now rely on display forecasts that take into account insights that are unique to Display & Video 360 such as brand safety settings and Google audience details. For example, it is now possible to accurately estimate the reach of a display campaign aimed at reaching the Google affinity audience “Aspiring Chefs” as they enjoy content suitable for general audiences.

But the primary objective of media planning is to understand how many people are likely to be exposed to your brand across formats and inventory. So building on Google's Unique Reach methodology, we also enabled fully deduplicated reach forecasts in Display & Video 360 across open auction display, open auction video and YouTube.

With this capability, you can now answer questions such as “how many unique people can I expect to reach with my overall campaign across any open auction display and video inventory as well as YouTube?” In addition to reach, you can also see projections for other important campaign metrics such as frequency, viewability and cost as you plan. And you can see how many people you will reach if you apply Google audience segments or if you choose to use your own audience data.

A dedicated user role for planners

Media planners are increasingly being held accountable for how well an ad campaign actually delivers against the plan that was shared with clients or other teams. As a result, we are seeing stronger collaboration across media planning and buying teams.

To help foster this collaboration, we just introduced a dedicated user role for media planners. For the first time, agencies and advertisers can invite their media planners directly into Display & Video 360. This new role enables access just to the relevant elements of Display & Video 360 for media planners, giving them visibility into the critical media planning information they need to collaborate, learn, iterate and build more impactful media plans.

For example, media planners can access accurate forecasts for campaigns bought programmatically in Display & Video 360 and discover new publishers and inventory. With the Partner account owner’s permission, they can also start a negotiation with a publisher or renegotiate an existing deal. This gives them tools to better inform their planning process and freedom to check and update their plans and recommendations whenever they need.

Before launching your next programmatic campaign, give your media planning team access to the Display & Video 360 planning workspace so they can accurately estimate how many people are likely to be exposed to your brand across formats and inventory, and design the best media plan to deliver on your objectives.

Frequency management helps marketers and agency partners deliver a better user experience and reduce budget waste by controlling the number of times people see their ads. That’s why, when we introduced Programmatic Guaranteed in Display & Video 360 a few years ago, we gave you a way to manage ad frequency across these deals and your open auction buys together. Once you reached your frequency goal for a specific user across both buys, the open auction portion of the campaign would stop showing ads to that user. However, Programmatic Guaranteed would continue to serve ads to a user beyond your frequency goal until you reached the total number of impressions secured in the deal, consistent with a traditional reservation deal.

Now we’re improving how frequency management works for Programmatic Guaranteed deals in Display & Video 360. Once your overall campaign frequency goal has been reached for a user, whether via open auction, Programmatic Guaranteed, or a combination of the two, Display & Video 360 will attempt to stop showing more ads to that user from your Programmatic Guaranteed deals while still prioritizing and ensuring that they deliver the agreed number of impressions. This will further reduce overexposure, resulting in an even better experience for users and less waste for advertisers.

Keep your campaigns running longer

Monitor efficiency gains in real-time

We're also introducing a new dashboard that shows you how many wasted impressions you are avoiding - and budget you are reinvesting to reach new users - for each Programmatic Guaranteed deal using Display & Video 360's frequency management tools. Having a real-time view of budget savings gives marketers and agency partners more control and precision in evaluating their campaign performance.

You can also access the same information aggregated across multiple deals, by creating an offline report with the Programmatic Guaranteed savings template in the standard Display & Video 360 reporting.

If you want to get more control over ad frequency, set a frequency goal at the campaign level and all of the campaign’s insertion orders, including the ones with Programmatic Guaranteed deals, will take that goal into account. And once the campaign is running, you can easily see how the new feature is making the most of your budget with the new dashboard.

Connected TV combines the reach and familiarity of traditional TV with the relevance and measurability of digital. For marketers to get the best of both worlds, we’re investing in connected TV advertising solutions designed to reach households at scale with messages that are relevant to users and respectful of their privacy. 

The reach of TV 

Brands have historically turned to traditional TV to connect at an emotional level with a wide range of people as they watch premium content. But as the media landscape becomes increasingly fragmented, advertisers have been left searching for new ways to engage with viewers at scale and build their brands. Good news - with more and more premium TV content available via streaming and accessible with programmatic technology, achieving reach through connected TV in a high-quality, brand safe environment has never been easier.

To help marketers quantify this opportunity, we retained Comscore to evaluate the reach of Display & Video 360’s connected TV advertising solutions in the US. Comscore’s analysis found that with Display & Video 360 marketers can now reach 76 percent of all connected TV households in the US and 89 percent of ad-supported connected TV households.¹ This accounts for more than half of all US Wi-Fi households and this number is expected to increase as connected TV penetration grows. In addition to YouTube, Display & Video 360 provides access to 9 of the top 10 most watched ad supported connected TV apps from cable and broadcast channels in the US.

Just as connected TVs are becoming mainstream devices in US homes, buying connected TV ads programmatically is also becoming a mainstream way to engage with all sorts of audience groups ranging from cable subscribers to cord-cutters, and from Gen X to more senior viewers. To test this assumption, we looked at the reach of Display & Video 360 across different household types. As it turns out, while Display & Video 360 connected TV ads remain a must-have if you’re after cord-nevers and younger viewers, they are now relevant to your strategy no matter the age and TV subscription status of your core audience.

The relevance and measurability of digital 

What makes connected TV advertising especially powerful is its ability to apply best practices from the digital world. For example, frequency management helps you spend money efficiently and avoid ad fatigue with users.

Last year, we announced that Display & Video 360 was supporting the IAB Tech Lab guidelines and using the Identifier for Advertising (IFA) to effectively manage ad frequency for connected TV. IFA is a standardized identifier that can be disabled or reset by the user. Since then, the industry has widely adopted IFA. In fact, last year alone, Display & Video 360 saw an 88 percent increase in connected TV IFA adoption by publishers on our top five video exchange partners.² Today, to further extend your frequency management capabilities, we’re working with inventory providers to support IFAs at the exchange and publisher levels. For example, we recently integrated with Telaria’s video management platform, enabling you to control frequency in a user-first way on publishers such as Hulu, Pluto TV or Lifetime.

To help you deliver a more pleasant and personalized viewing experience on connected TV, we have also integrated with audience and measurement partners investing in the IFA standard. Display & Video 360 now supports Comscore’s IFA-based audience segments across connected TV devices.

If you want to explore connected TV ads as a way to recreate your TV reach in 2020, Display & Video 360 will help you connect with a large number of streaming households. And to harness the digital capabilities of connected TV advertising, make sure you use IFA to manage how often viewers should see your spot and what is the most appropriate ad message.

_{2. Internal data, IFA coverage for top exchanges, US, Jan 2020}