We're pleased to announce the new DFA Analytics beta and the beta integration of Ad Planner within the DART for Advertisers (DFA) platform. Now enhanced with Google technology, DFA offers a more unified and efficient platform to plan, execute, measure, and optimize your online display advertising campaigns.

New! DFA Analytics Beta

DFA Analytics is our new reporting and visualization tool for viewing advertising performance data. It shares similar technology with Google Analytics; if you've used Google Analytics before, you can quickly come up to speed with the easy-to-use graphical reporting tools that are now part of DFA.

With DFA Analytics, you can:

• Get frequent updates--about every three hours--of your campaign performance data.
• See account performance at a glance, in easy-to-understand charts and graphs.
• Drill down through reports at the advertiser, campaign, site, ad, and creative levels.

You can also review performance by:

• Country, designated market area (DMA), state, city, area code, or zip code.
• Hour, day, week, month, and one or more date ranges.
• Browser, operating system, and connection speed.

Here's an example of a DFA Analytics campaign report, graphed by day, with ad performance data:

New! Google Ad Planner Integration

Google Ad Planner is a research and media planning tool that can help you identify sites where audiences are likely to visit, make better-informed media planning decisions, and manage your media plans.

With the upcoming integration, you can:

• Access Ad Planner data (already used by tens of thousands of media planners each week) directly in DFA.
• Enjoy effortless transitions between planning, trafficking, and reporting features.
• Collaborate on media plans using existing account structures and permission settings.
• Take advantage of new Ad Planner features customized for large agency buyers.

Stay Tuned

Overall, this release is designed to increase the efficiency of managing online advertising campaigns with DFA. It's just the beginning to a more unified, efficient, and effective advertising platform.

Please note that DFA Analytics and Ad Planner are only available in DFA 6. To inquire about DFA 6, please fill out our inquiry form.

Yesterday, we celebrated the best creative work in digital movie marketing with top creative agencies and movie studios at the 4th Annual DMACS event. If you recall from our call for entries, this awards program invited submissions across four awards categories: Home Entertainment Rich Media Display Ad, Multi-Channel Cross Media Campaign, YouTube Creative Award and Theatrical Release Rich Media Display Ad. Take a look at the videos below to see the amazing creative work from the top nominees in each category then read on to find out who won.

Best Home Entertainment Rich Media Display Ad Nominees



Congratulations to:

• Fast & Furious by Ignited, LLC and NBC Universal
• WALL-E by Deadline Advertising and Walt Disney Studios
• Watchmen by AvatarLabs and Warner Bros.

YouTube Creative Award Nominees



Congratulations to:

• G-Force by BLT & Associates and Walt Disney Studios
• The Haunting in Connecticut by Division 13 Design Group and Lionsgate
• My Bloody Valentine by The Visionaire Group and Lionsgate

Best Multi-Channel Cross Media Campaign Nominees



Congratulations to:

• Fast & Furious by The Visionaire Group and Universal Pictures
• I Love You, Beth Cooper by Earthbound Media Group and 20th Century Fox
• Coraline by Wieden+Kennedy and Laika Studios/Focus Features

Best Theatrical Release Rich Media Display Ad Nominees



Congratulations to:

• Bruno by The Visionaire Group and Universal Pictures
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by AvatarLabs and Warner Bros.
• Star Trek by AvatarLabs and Paramount Pictures
• The Haunting in Connecticut by Division 13 Design Group and Lionsgate
• Valkyrie by Palisades Interactive and MGM

And the Winners Are...

• WALL-E by Deadline Advertising and Walt Disney Studios for Best Home Entertainment Rich Media Ad
• My Bloody Valentine by The Visionaire Group and Lionsgate for the YouTube Creative Award
• Coraline by Wieden+Kennedy and Laika Studios/Focus Features for Best Multi-Channel Cross Media Campaign
• Star Trek by AvatarLabs and Paramount Pictures for Best Theatrical Release Rich Media Display Ad

We heartily congratulate the winners for their spectacular creative executions and dedication to the craft of movie marketing.

You may have read on the Official Google Blog that the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange is open for business.

The new DoubleClick Ad Exchange helps to open the ecosystem and establish a new marketplace for buyers and sellers. For a large publisher managing multiple sales channels and ad networks, the Ad Exchange provides real-time yield management to maximize returns. Participating ad networks and agency networks get access to a large pool of inventory and the controls they need to precisely achieve their marketing goals.

We've been working for some time on rebuilding the Ad Exchange on Google technology to deliver an improved platform, with new features and functionality for our customers. Both sellers (publishers) and buyers (ad networks and agency networks) stand to benefit from the new features we've incorporated.

Key benefits for sellers include:

• Real-time dynamic allocation to maximize yield. Publishers can automatically generate the highest return for every impression, using real-time data and bids to allocate ad space to the sales channel that pays the most at that second.
• Access to many more advertisers. The Ad Exchange offers publishers access to new buyers, including AdWords advertisers, bringing higher quality ads and more competition for ad space on their sites.
• Hassle-free payments managed by Google. We manage the billing and payments from networks so publishers get one monthly payment and minimize having to manage multiple relationships.
• Greater controls. Publishers can decide what advertisers, networks, ad formats, and bid types to allow.
• New easy to use interface with enhanced reporting. We use the simplicity of Google's user design principles to help publishers easily find out how their sites are performing, to help them make the right decisions about their ad space.

Key benefits for buyers include:

• Access to more publishers and more ad space. Hundreds of thousands of AdSense publisher sites are now available on the Ad Exchange to Google-certified ad networks. And as more publishers join the Ad Exchange to take advantage of its yield management capabilities, more high quality inventory is being added all the time.
• Real-time bidder. The Ad Exchange has a new real-time bidder feature that allows buyers to use their own data, optimization and ad serving technologies to bid on their desired inventory on an impression-by-impression basis, choosing only the sites, audiences, or particular type of ad space they want to reach.
• New easy to use interface with enhanced buyer reporting capabilities. Redesigned reports are simple to use and understand, so buyers can easily see how their campaigns are performing to help them make the right decisions.
• More control and precision. Buyers control where their ads appear and don't appear. They can use frequency capping, pacing and other features to precisely control ad delivery.
• Centralized clearing system. Google makes all payments to publishers, reducing complexity with a single billing and payment point. Buyers benefit from managing one business relationship instead of many.
• A new API - Ad networks and agency networks will have access to an API which enables them to integrate their own functionality and systems when working with the Ad Exchange.

We're excited about the open marketplace that the new Ad Exchange creates and believe that it will add substantial value to the display advertising ecosystem.

Online campaigns for theatrical and home video movie releases have some of the most creative and innovative executions. To celebrate the best of movie marketing, we're opening up a call for entries to our 4th Annual Digital Movie Advertising Creative Showcase awards program. Movie marketers and creative agencies are invited to submit up to three entries per category. This year's categories are:

Theatrical Release Rich Media Display Ad(s): Any rich media ad or set of rich media ads used to promote a theatrical movie release.

Home Entertainment Rich Media Display Ad(s): Any rich media ad or set of rich media ads used to promote a home video movie release.

Multi-Channel Cross Media Campaign: Any home video or theatrical movie campaign that involves at least three interactive digital elements (one of which must be rich media ads) as part of a holistic campaign including, but not limited to:

• Website
• Rich media ads
• Search campaign
• Alternate reality game (ARG)
• Mobile
• Viral video or webisodes
• Virtual world
• User-Generated content
• Social networking
• Online game(s)
• Digital outdoor
• DVD/Blue-Ray interactive experience/extras

Multi-channel, cross media digital campaign submissions may involve more than one creative agency, but all agencies must be listed and give permission for submission

YouTube Creative Award: Any home entertainment or theatrical movie campaign creative that included YouTube in its execution -- YouTube homepage "masthead" creative, brand channels, contests, or original video creative uploaded to YouTube to engage the community.

The winners of each category will receive recognition by their industry peers, the opportunity to present to a live audience at the Director's Guild of America in Los Angeles, inclusion in the event's video reel, two award trophies (one each for the movie studio and creative agency) and two Flip Mino mini digital camcorders!

To submit an entry or learn more about the awards program, please visit the Digital Movie Advertising Creative Showcase website. The deadline for entries is Friday, September 18 -- so don't delay if you plan to enter. We look forward to seeing the amazing work in this space.

For every online display campaign, advertisers must decide what ad formats to use for best results. To help, DoubleClick teamed up with Dynamic Logic to study the impact of ad format selection on branding goals. In the joint report titled "The Brand Value of Rich Media and Video Ads," we compare the branding strengths of four common display advertising formats:

• Image - GIF or JPG ads
• Simple Flash - Ads with a short animation and single click-through link
• Rich Media with Video - Ads capable of responding to user interaction, such as mouseovers, keyboard inputs, or clicks without a click-through, that also contain video
• Rich Media without Video - Ads capable of responding to user interaction, such as mouseovers, keyboard inputs, or clicks without a click-through, that do not contain video

The report provides detailed information on how each of these formats impacts aided brand awareness, online ad awareness, message association, brand favorability and purchase intent. For example, study findings show that, on average:

• Rich Media formats are the most successful at driving purchase intent
• Rich Media without Video is unique among the formats in its ability to positively impact all five brand metrics
• Simple Flash is the least effective of the ad formats studied
• For brand favorability, aided brand awareness and purchase intent metrics, Rich Media with Video provides a statistically significant improvement over Simple Flash at a 90% confidence level

The report concludes with a cheat sheet to help guide your ad format decisions and suggests best practices for achieving branding goals.

Download the PDF report here for free, no registration required.

Advertisers and agencies who work on display ad campaigns often wonder "How do I know if my display ad campaigns are doing well?" and "What credible benchmarks can I use to compare the results on my current campaign?"

Some might rely on past campaign performance metrics while others might compare across multiple campaigns and advertisers within their client roster. All are fine means in the absence of larger, more comprehensive industry benchmarks.

This is why we're particularly pleased to make available DoubleClick benchmarks so that marketers, agencies, and publishers have a reference by which to evaluate the performance of online display advertising campaigns in the U.S., relative to industry norms.

These benchmarks are derived from a robust data set across DART for Advertisers, based on rigorous methodology with input from the Advertising Research Foundation. Benchmarks in this report cover those for 2008 and transect ad format, ad size, and industry vertical. The benchmarks are normalized across hundreds of advertisers, thousands of campaigns, and tens of billions of ad impressions.

You can download the report here. More in-depth benchmarks by industry are available exclusively to DoubleClick clients so contact your account manager to discuss further.

If you're interested in learning more you can attend our webinar, "Benchmarking Ahead: IAB Reveals the DoubleClick Benchmarks Report," co-hosted with the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) on June 24th at 12pm EST. Register here for the webinar.

At DoubleClick, we've had the privilege of picking the brains of several of the industry's thought leaders and innovators in digital marketing. We've captured a few of these key insights through our ThreeQuestions for Innovators video interview series: These interviews span the gamut of key industry themes and issues, including current trends and influencers, ad exchanges, social media, emerging media, and the future.

This month we're honored to highlight interviews with Carla Hendra, Chief Executive Officer of Ogilvy North America, as well as Ian Schafer, CEO and Founder of interactive marketing agency Deep Focus. Carla speaks to us on the challenges in the brave world of digital marketing, while Ian shares his insights on rich media, video, and the role of the agency in the advertising process.

We're excited about our lineup of thought leaders and the conversations they spark - whether it's about opportunities in a challenging economic environment, trends to watch for in 2009 or ground-breaking insights from innovative fields such as neuromarketing, watch this space for upcoming interviews.

Over the last several months, we've been working hard to develop a new tool for creative teams who build rich media ads and the media agencies and publishers they work with. The result of our efforts is DoubleClick Studio, a free rich media production and web-based workflow tool designed to streamline development processes for creative teams and to provide more control over turnaround times. We've designed DoubleClick Studio to significantly improve upon the existing Ad Kit, and pave the way for future innovation in rich media.

To learn more about DoubleClick Studio or to fill out a form showing your interest, please visit studio.doubleclick.com. As creative teams migrate to this new tool, users will also be able to log in here, download components for Flash, and access the web-based workflow.

Here are a few of the features we think creative teams will really like:

• Improved workflow that gets preview links into client's hands faster
• A fully searchable archive of work structured by clients, campaigns and creatives
• Integrated QA processes that get errors identified and fixed earlier in the process
• Full range of intuitive Flash components and full APIs in both AS2 and AS3
• Direct upload to DART for Advertisers ensures smooth transition to traffickers for approved creatives

Testimonials

Josh Race of Ogilvy RedWorks, a member of the DoubleClick Studio beta program, has this to say: "DoubleClick Studio has a clean interface and you will never get lost trying to figure out where you are, which is uncommon amongst ad-serving tools. Our developers are all now self-sufficient and not depending on the one guy who knows his way around some wonky interface."

Will Campbell, also a beta member and owner of ARC Media Group, a creative agency based in Southern California, says, "DoubleClick Studio can greatly improve the workflow for any interactive studio working with Flash. From development to getting creatives ready for publishing it has increased our productivity and decreased the amount of steps we take to accomplish different tasks. It really shows that DoubleClick has given a lot of thought into not only increasing productivity on the development side, but also improving the workflow on the administrative side."

Benefits for Media Agencies

Although not direct users of the authoring tool, media agencies will also benefit from DoubleClick Studio and its integration with DART for Advertisers (DFA), enabling agencies to streamline the process for getting rich media campaigns approved and live. With DoubleClick Studio rolling out on a global basis, it is now easier than ever to manage local, regional and global campaigns on a single authoring platform. Here are some of the benefits:

• Direct link between DoubleClick Studio and DART platforms for instant transfer of creative
• Automated creative checks reduce approval time for campaigns to go live
• Preview links include a view into all rich media events that can triggered by the ad for easy testing, review and sign-off

More Details

For a quick tour of DoubleClick Studio, take a look at this short video from Shamim Samadi, product manager for DoubleClick Rich Media.



For those of you who have used DoubleClick Rich Media tools in the past, we will continue to support the Ad Kit though we do not plan to make future upgrades. We also want to note that, while we intend for DoubleClick Studio to make rich media production more efficient for agencies, advertisers and publishers who would like to own the entire process themselves, we remain fully committed to the highest levels of customer service.

To learn more, visit studio.doubleclick.com or contact your DoubleClick representative.

Today we're happy to announce the general availability of DoubleClick Network Builder, a complete toolkit for building and managing networks of partner sites to create new revenue opportunities, expand reach and increase efficiency.

We first introduced this initiative a little over a year ago in response to the audience fragmentation challenge facing many of our publisher clients. This challenge is even more pronounced today. The overall number of websites and blogs has continued to grow in tandem with online audiences, increasingly fragmenting consumer time and attention across more and more online destinations. In response, many publishers continue to leverage their brands to build vertical networks of partner sites to expand their overall reach and grow advertising inventory.

With the potential revenue opportunity that vertical networks offer also comes a number of operational challenges. These include efficiently managing network inventory, partner management, billing and reconciliation and reporting. In our customer surveys, publishers also expressed the need for better inventory forecasting and reporting that was more tightly integrated with the systems they were already using to sell their owned and operated content. Similarly, our ad network customers voiced the need for a better solution to manage their numerous and often complex partner relationships and inventory.

With these needs in mind, we built DoubleClick Network Builder to provide a comprehensive solution for brand-name publishers and ad networks to solve many of the challenges involved in managing networks including:

• Integration with core ad systems - Seamless integration with our DART for Publishers (DFP) ad serving platform unifies data and workflow across both owned and operated content as well as partner sites. This streamlines and enhances key sales and operations tasks including inventory packaging, forecasting, reporting, and trafficking. Publishers also benefit from DFP's industry-leading reliability, scalability, and service.
• Efficient network management and control - We designed DoubleClick Network Builder to help increase efficiency and visibility through intuitive partner management, automated tag generation, simplified network inventory setup, and extensive controls for revenue adjustments.
• Managing partner relationships - DoubleClick Network Builder's partner portal allows large publishers and networks to more easily provide the service and transparency needed to retain partners, enabling more rapid and profitable network growth. The partner portal provides partners with the ability to login and view their sites' performance, access detailed reporting, pick-up tags and receive messages from the network.
• Managing complex financial reporting and partner payments - DoubleClick Network Builder's revenue and financial reporting can help publishers drastically simplify the partner payment process and improve overall profitability. DoubleClick Network Builder gives publishers the flexibility to accommodate a number of complex partner financial terms and features a complete set of reconciliation tools including expense deductions and partner payout calculations. The product's detailed revenue reporting makes it easy to monitor the performance of site partners and provide visibility across the network and for each individual partner.

Since October 2008, we have been testing a beta version of DoubleClick Network Builder with a number of premium publishers and networks, including Real Girls Media and InvestingChannel. These publishers realized a number of immediate benefits including significant improvements in the efficiency and accuracy of their network operations, enabling more rapid growth. Today, we're excited to extend these benefits by making DoubleClick Network Builder available to all publishers using our DART for Publishers ad serving platform. If you're a publisher who is ready to start using DoubleClick Network Builder to help create and manage your network, contact your DoubleClick account manager or click here to learn more. If you aren't already a DoubleClick client, please contact us here.

Today, the Online Publishers Association (OPA) announced that over two dozen members plan to introduce larger format ads on their sites by July 2009. They've proposed the following units:

• The Fixed Panel (recommended dimension is 336 wide x 860 tall), which looks naturally embedded into the page layout and scrolls to the top and bottom of the page as a user scrolls.
• The XXL Box (recommended dimension is 468 wide x 648 tall), which has page-turn functionality with video capability.
• The Pushdown (recommended dimension is 970 wide x 418 tall), which opens to display the advertisement and then rolls up to the top of the page.

For publishers and agencies looking to get a head start, these units can be done with DoubleClick Rich Media today and are easily implemented in either the DART for Publishers or DART for Advertisers ad serving systems.

Yesterday, the AdWords team announced the launch of their beta test for expandable rich media ads on the Google content network (GCN). The beta test is open to U.S. advertisers and agencies participating in Google's third-party ad serving program, of which DoubleClick is a certified vendor.

DoubleClick Rich Media has received an additional level of certification from Google for the expandable format. This extra level of certification is necessary because expanding ads on GCN need to intelligently expand in the correct direction depending on the placement of the ad slot on the page. For example, if the ad is displayed in a skyscraper on the right side of the page, the ad needs to "know" in real time to expand to the left.

Due to this special consideration during ad creation, DoubleClick clients that wish to run expandable ads on the GCN should be sure to loop their account manager and campaign manager in as early as possible. We look forward to helping you take advantage of this exciting new feature to make your campaigns more effective.

Think you have social media checked off on your marketing plan because you have a blog, podcast, vodcast and active forum? Think again. Now that you've hit your stride with social media, it's time to accelerate the conversation by drawing in new participants. We'd like to share three ways to use rich media ads to do this:

Plug Your Blog: Embed your blog feed into an ad unit. Include a call-to-action in the unit to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Add Media to the Ad: Advertise new podcasts or vodcasts as they become available. Include part or all of the podcast in the ad unit. Promote links to subscribe to your feeds in addition to offering individual download links.

Bring it All Together: Package all your social media channels -- blogs, podcasts, vodcasts, comments feeds -- into one comprehensive widget. Allow people to share it on their blog or social network of choice. Seed the widget by running it as a shareable ad on relevant paid media.

DoubleClick data shows a strong correlation between larger creative sizes and results, such as higher interaction rates and click-through rates. So, this large format unit by Las Vegas Convention & Visitor's Authority and R&R Partners is sure to please. You can view the impressive 976x250 creative in our gallery here, or by clicking the screenshot below.

This ad puts a Vegas vacation top of mind through a video contest for the YouTube community. The contest invites viewers to create a video about why they need a Vegas vacation. Viewers of the ad are directed to the contest homepage on YouTube or the landing page at VisitLasVegas.com.

Check out our latest widget. For publishers looking to boost CPMs by increasing the value of premium inventory and optimizing yield for non-premium inventory, DoubleClick's DART Adapt Valuator lets you determine how much revenue you can generate – or retain – by simply flipping the DART Adapt “On” switch. See how much DART Adapt can be worth to your business – and share the widget with your colleagues!

Before the election, we hosted an informal web poll that asked our visitors the following question, "Which issue do you think the next U.S. president should make a primary focus during his or her first 100 days in office?" Visitors resoundingly voted for the issue of economy/recession. Here's how the 1760 responses broke out:

• Economy/Recession 62.27%
• Foreign Policy 11.59%
• Environment 8.01%
• Healthcare 7.50%
• National Security 5.85%
• Immigration 4.77%

If you're ready to get even more participatory, head over to The Davos Debates on YouTube where The World Economic Forum invites you to send in your solutions and suggestions for the key issues facing us today. The focus issues include the state of the economy, the environment, US politics and business ethics. The four questions up for public discussion through the YouTube platform are:

• Are you confident that global growth will be restored in 2009?
• Will the environment lose out to the economy in 2009?
• Will the Obama administration improve the state of the world in 2009?
• Should company executives have a code of ethics similar to doctors and lawyers?

The person who submits the best video will be invited, all expenses paid, to attend The World Economic Forum's upcoming Annual Meeting in Davos-Klosters and interact with world leaders in person.

To learn more, watch the video about joining The Davos Debates:



Visit youtube.com/davos to join in.

Every year since 2003, the ClickZ Marketing Excellence Awards has recognized "the technologies, companies, and campaigns that made a positive difference in the online marketing industry." To win, a product or solution must be selected by a judging committee of industry practitioners, which includes contributors to ClickZ and Search Engine Watch. This year, DoubleClick was recognized as a winner in three categories: Ad Management, Mobile Marketing Tool, and Video Ad Format or Platform. We are very honored to receive these awards and would like to share the judges' thoughtful comments with you for each award.

On DART for Advertisers' win in the Ad Management category, Tessa Wegert, Interactive Media Strategist with Enlighten and ClickZ Media Buying columnist commented, "DFA remains the industry gold standard for ad serving and ad management. This is the technology that's behind the majority of the more notable and impressive campaigns we see and a sure bet for any advertiser on the fence about which company can offer the most seamless, streamlined campaign solutions."

On DoubleClick Mobile's win in the Mobile Marketing Tool category, Courtney Jane Acuff, VP and Director with Denuo and ClickZ Mobile Marketing columnist commented, "It is critically important for mobile advertising (buyable off-the-shelf solutions) to have a standard serving and reporting platform. The DoubleClick Mobile product enables digital buyers and planners to have consistency in reporting and publishers the ability to sell through integrated mobile packages."

On DoubleClick Rich Media's HD Video format win in the Video Ad Format or Platform category, Christine Beardsell, VP Creative Director with Digitas's Third Act and ClickZ Online Video Advertising columnist commented, "You want the creative and content you develop for your brands to look great. But, unfortunately, video placements in general have suffered from low-bandwidth specifications and site-publisher limitations. So any media partner that can make your content look its best, and that won't degrade your original vision, is a partner worth having. The new DoubleClick HD looks great. And if your content already has a compelling idea and creative execution behind it, HD quality is really the icing on top!"

Thank you Tessa Wegert, Courtney Jane Acuff and Christine Beardsell for your support and to all the other ClickZ judges.

Last week, DoubleClick hosted the third annual Digital Movie Advertising Creative Showcase awards event. This event honors the best rich media creative work in digital movie advertising. This year five finalists were recognized for their work in three categories: best home entertainment rich media ads, best theatrical rich media ads and best multi-channel digital campaign.

In the home entertainment category, congratulations go out to:

• AvatarLabs and Warner Bros./New Line for Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay

In the theatrical release category, congratulations go out to:

• AvatarLabs and Sony Pictures for Pineapple Express
• Backward Heroes and New Line Cinema for Journey to the Center of the Earth

In the multi-channel digital campaign category, congratulations go out to:

• Backward Heroes and New Line Cinema for The Golden Compass
• Palisades Interactive and MGM for COLLEGE

We would like to give an extra congratulations to Palisades Interactive and MGM for the Best in Show award for their work on the multi-channel digital campaign for COLLEGE. This campaign used rich media expanding ads, a widget ad, Flash banners and a large social media presence to position COLLEGE as a hilarious, must-see movie.

To make it possible for you to learn more about these winning campaigns, we've made the show guide available for download here.

Today, Tessa Wegert contributed an article to The ClickZ Network that perfectly sums up our new "Creative Insights on Rich Media" report. Check out her article here, then download the report.

Among the report's main takeaways:

• Consider using video within rich media units when performance goals include click-through rate, expansion rate or expanding time
• More specifically, consider using in-page video when performance goals include interaction rate or video complete rate
• Additionally, consider larger creative sizes when performance goals include click-through rate or interaction rate

Thanks for the mention, Tessa!

Today we launched DFA 6, the new version of DART for Advertisers, which includes a completely revamped trafficking interface. Based on feedback from our agency and advertiser clients, we know that trafficking can be one of the most complicated and time-consuming activities. As a result, we focused this release on improving the speed and simplicity of the DFA trafficking workflow.

For example, we:

• Reduced the number of webpages required to perform the most common tasks.
• Built quick links to tasks via simple icons and menus.
• Developed inline editing to help you move through the workflow more quickly.
• Enabled Excel imports and exports to eliminate duplicate data entry and reduce potential errors.

Ready to start using the new workflow? Contact your account manager to upgrade to the new DFA (which will also ensure you can take advantage of upcoming feature releases). If you aren't already a DFA client, please contact us here.

We're confident that the new DFA, plus our proven services and support, will help you meet the increasing demands of the online advertising marketplace. We look forward to releasing even more features soon. Stay tuned for more information.

Yesterday, we announced the launch of DoubleClick In-Stream support for Microsoft's Silverlight 2 player framework. The technology will be used to serve ads for the NBCOlympics.com site. This feature gives our publisher clients the ability to run ads against video on whatever framework they choose, be it Windows Media, RealMedia, Flash or Silverlight 2.

There's lots of coverage on the story. Here's a few to check out:

"Microsoft, Google Play Nice: DoubleClick to Serve Silverlight Ads" --Silicon Alley Insider

"Google's DoubleClick to Tackle Microsoft's Silverlight and the Olympics" --InformationWeek

"Google to Deliver Ads to Online Olympic Video" --CNET News.com

More information on DoubleClick In-Stream is available here.

We all know that copy is an important element in managing paid search campaigns. It’s no longer just about getting your keywords in the top positions or having 20 different bid strategies. It’s important to make smart decisions on your messaging to get the right customers and create a positive experience after the click happens. Wouldn’t it be great to see the performance of a keyword along with the ad that actually contributed to the conversion? Well now with our new Ad/Keyword Segmentation Report you can understand which pairing of keyword and copy returns the best results and further refine your ad groups.

Speak to your DART Search TAM to learn more about this report. You can find it by navigating to Search Related reports in DART Search and then choose Ad/Keyword Segmentation Report. Now that you know it’s available, be sure to look out for upcoming tips and tricks on how to better take advantage of this report.

Wondering how you can be more efficient in managing your paid search campaigns? Are there features in DART Search that you just don't know how to take advantage of? Well look no further than the weekly Dish on DART Search. We'll be bringing you tips and tricks from our very own Technical Account Managers who are dedicated to assisting our customers on implementation of DART Search and managing search campaigns.

Did you know that every DART Search Technical Account Manager is certified on both the Google and Yahoo! Engines? Each individual is required to pass a test covering all areas of managing search campaigns to become an AdWords Qualified Individual and a Yahoo! Search Marketing Ambassador. So tune in next week for the start of our series of tips and tricks on using DART Search.

The evolution of digital advertising has grown from a tool for direct marketing and brand awareness initiatives into a vehicle for content distribution and delivery. Today, DoubleClick is introducing a new rich media format for interactive agencies and marketers, Widget Ads, which provide the perfect distribution channel for this strategy. This widget format is designed to extend media dollars and reach for marketers by allowing users to "grab" an ad and place it on their personalized homepage, blog or social network.

We've focused on making widget advertising easy for our clients. Using both the creative development process and ad serving tools your teams are familiar with, you can create interactive Flash widgets for distribution on Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle, and many other social networks. With DoubleClick, widget advertising is executed by converting a new or existing rich media unit into a widget that can be shared virally, managing it in DART for Advertisers (DFA), and watching those widget impressions grow!!! Marketers will appreciate the built-in ability to keep the message fresh by updating widget creative in real-time across social networks.

Use Widget Ads to gain insight into viral distribution patterns, reach and frequency of widget display impressions, and the effect of widgets on conversion. We invite clients and online marketing professionals to incorporate widget advertising into their campaigns. Contact our sales team to get started and email us about your experiences with widget advertising.

Download the DoubleClick Rich Media Widget, which demonstrates the potential ROI and extended reach that Widget Ads can offer, or copy the embed code below and paste it onto your own website or favorite social networking page:

If nothing else, it's just fun to say the word 'widget' as often as possible and watch people's reactions...

I am pleased to share the news that Google has acquired DoubleClick. Please go here to read Eric Schmidt's blog post.

As part of a series of exciting announcements this week, we officially unveiled our DoubleClick Revenue Center positioning which highlights how our suite of publisher solutions can be used to help our clients generate revenue and reduce operational friction. The DoubleClick Revenue Center includes the DART platform at its core and can be expanded to include optimization, support for rich media, workflow tools, and a dynamic advertising exchange. As part of this announcement we highlighted some significant improvements to some of the Revenue Center's core components.

First, we profiled an expanded set of features for our DART Sales Manager (DSM) workflow and finance management tool that further reinforce DSM's position as a powerful "quote to cash" solution for media sellers of all sizes. We also announced Historical Basis forecasting capabilities for our DART for Publishers (DFP) ad serving platform which will help our publisher clients to better manage and monetize seasonal and repeating traffic patterns and account for recent traffic fluctuations. The innovative DART for Publishers Dashboard also entered full production with an expanded catalog of widgets that will further enhance campaign visibility for our DFP clients.

Moving further into 2008, we expect that audience fragmentation will become an increasing challenge for many of our publisher clients. To that end we made an announcement earlier this week regarding the formation of a team dedicated to providing the technology and services to address this issue. The group's initial solution, which we plan to launch in the second half of 2008, will provide a new partner management platform for publishers. This new product will combine tools for network management and financial reporting and a full-featured portal for partner sites. Most exciting for our publisher clients is the fact that we will offer seamless integration with our existing DART ad serving platform. ClickZ ran a great article on Monday highlighting this new initiative.

Yesterday I was excited to announce DoubleClick's support for the Silverlight 2.0 framework at the Microsoft Mix conference in Las Vegas. As I said at the conference, Microsoft and DoubleClick are competitors in many ways, but we share a commitment to enabling advertising in rich video experiences.

DoubleClick In-Stream is our framework for serving, targeting, forecasting and reporting on in-stream video advertisements. Over the past six months there's been a steady increase in publishers looking to move their legacy Windows Media video players over to Silverlight, and in the months prior to the announcement of the 2.0 framework's beta release we worked closely with Microsoft's team to port our technology to this new technology.

We expect to make Silverlight 2.0 support available to clients in Q2 2008.

Congratulations to our very own David Fall, vice president of product management, search technology, for his second term on SEMPO's Board of Directors! David will be serving as Treasurer and Co-Chair of the Metrics and Standards Committee this year, and plans to continue to play an active role over the next two years.

DoubleClick's participation on the Board provides opportunities to contribute in discussions about better advancement of search advertising, streamlining the process, and educating and informing the search community at-large.

Yesterday, we released a new feature called HD Video that makes it possible for a rich media ad to expand into a fullscreen video ad in HD quality. We worked with Adobe on this release to incorporate their latest Flash technology into our fullscreen capabilities.

Epson is the first advertiser to use this feature. A special thanks goes out to them and their creative agency, Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners (BSSP) for being innovative clients. Jordan Kretchmer, BSSP's associate creative director, shared with us why HD Video made such a good fit for the campaign. He said, “Throughout this campaign, we aimed to present Epson printers with a human touch and personality. DoubleClick Rich Media with HD Video was exactly the type of solution that helped us achieve our goal. HD Video lets us deliver our creative in a way that reflects the high quality of Epson products. Consumers aren’t used to seeing such pristine video online, so we expect the new HD technology to capture peoples’ attention like a standard video unit never could.”

To learn more about HD Video and to watch Epson's ads, visit our HD Video Page. Also, read more about it in the Adotas article titled, “DoubleClick Goes High-Def in Bid for Consumers’ Attention.”

As of today, members of the Writers Guild of America, which has been on strike since Nov. 5, 2007, are going back to work. The guild voted late yesterday to end the walkout after agreeing with Hollywood's producers on compensation for TV shows and movies streamed on the Web.

Previously on DoubleClick's Web site, we asked visitors, "What month will the writer's strike end?" Almost 150 people responded.

Here's how you replied:

January: 5.63%
February: 28.17%
March: 27.46%
April: 9.86%
May: 13.38%
June or later: 15.49%

Congratulations to the 28.17% of you that accurately predicted the future!

We are pleased to announce that several major enhancements were rolled out on our DART for Publishers (DFP) platform this past weekend in conjunction with our Winter Release. These included several important tools to help our publisher clients increase efficiency and visibility and drive revenue. Our new Historical Basis forecasting feature will provide a greater level of forecasting flexibility and accuracy by allowing our publisher clients to use up to 15 months of historical data in their forecasts. The popular DFP Dashboard, first announced in fourth quarter, also entered general availability. To help our publishers ensure worry-free ad delivery, we also proactively introduced tools to help combat the recent rise in malware-infected creatives.

We are pleased to announce that Ad Kit 4.0 is now available for download! Previously, support for Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS3) was only available through the beta version of Ad Kit 4.0. This recent release has now been moved out of beta and into production, giving you all the power and convenience of the DoubleClick Rich Media Ad Kit in Adobe's latest authoring environment.

You can download the Ad Kit by going to www.doubleclick.com/products/richmedia/adkit.aspx. Make sure you choose the correct Flash version, OS, and language in order to download the appropriate version.

IMPORTANT: Please read the following instructions before downloading Ad Kit for Creative Suite 3.

1) Download and install the Adobe Extension Manager v1.8 or higher (from www.adobe.com/exchange/em_download, if you don't already have it (note: if you have an older version of the Extension Manager, please upgrade to the most recent version)
2) Once installation is complete, shutdown the Adobe Flash application
3) Go to www.doubleclick.com/products/richmedia/adkit.aspx
4) Choose the proper Adobe Flash version (CS3), OS, and language. This ensures that you get the correct version of the Ad Kit
5) Download the new version of the DoubleClick Rich Media Ad Kit
6) Launch Adobe Extension Manager and make the appropriate selections to choose your version of the Flash Authoring tool
7) Choose the Ad Kit installer that you just downloaded (make sure you have the right version of the Ad Kit for your environment)

Note: Your creative must be published for AS1 / AS2. Support for Action Script 3.0 will be coming in the near future.

I've been glad to dust off my blogging chops with this new DoubleClick blog lately, and furthering my Web 2.0 street cred, I was just interviewed for a podcast by MarketingVoices, which just went live here. The host, Jennifer Jones, focused the interview on how marketers can effectively reach word-of-mouth influencers, and in my reply I discussed three ways marketers can use blogs to do so: 1) set up a company blog (like this one) themselves, which admittedly is easier said than done well; 2) use next-generation PR tactics to reach out to bloggers in a manner that does more good than harm (again, often still a challenge to traditional-minded PR specialists), and 3) advertising on blogs.

That last point is only still just catching on among marketers, capitalizing on the benefit of the so-called "long tail" of content and ad inventory online, but in fact it may be the most effective of all three strategies, both in terms of reach and influence. For evidence on that point, I cited our research paper "Influencing the Influencers: How Online Advertising and Media Impact Word of Mouth," which concluded that influencers pay considerably more attention to web ads than non-influencers when in the purchase decision process.

As to how marketers can reach influencers through blog advertising, I talked a bit about the emerging trend of publishers forming what are known as "vertical networks" – that is, large web publishers such as Martha Stewart and Food Network reaching out to large numbers of bloggers to form niche networks of content with high-quality small publishers. This trend is really a win-win-win: the publishers extend their reach of relevant content and advertising inventory to keep pace with the rapid growth of industry spending without a huge investment in new editorial resources; marketers can effectively reach influencers in contextually targeted content areas via existing trusted partners, and bloggers can cash in on the value they are creating with their passionate content creation without having to develop expertise in ad sales. Have a listen, you might enjoy it!

For the past two days, I've been the chairperson of the Strategy Institute's Digital Media Measurement and Pricing Summit. Throughout the event it was clear that measurement challenges go hand-in-hand with the increasing number of digital advertising opportunities today. In the 16 sessions of the conference, we covered topics including user generated content, social networking, paid search, in-game advertising, mobile campaigns, three types of widgets, digital signage, in-stream advertising, in-banner video, rich media advertising, podcast advertising and more.

This fragmentation is hitting agencies and marketers, which accounted for about 80% of attendees, the hardest. Their challenge is setting the right media mix across digital and traditional media. One comment on the marketing mix that really stood out is that one marketer was asked to provide a single line of pricing and measurement data to represent all their digital advertising initiatives for the company's media mix modeling analysis. The reality is that 10 or 20 lines of digital advertising data could be used.

I've noticed at the event, and day-to-day in my role at DoubleClick, that agencies and advertisers are very aware that one form of media affects the other. One attendee shared that they noticed a decrease in search results when they lowered their display spending. We do quite a bit of work in our research department to provide clients with insight into the correlation between search and display. We've also built advanced reports into DART to provide insight on topics like these. For example, our Exposure to Conversion report shows how media exposures beyond the last click or impression affect conversions. We're hoping to share some of this work at future events such as this one.

Talk about synergy! We announce a new capability, Spotlight for Rich Media, our client pepperjam blog about it and the benefits it offers to their clients, and we blog about them blogging about us! It's the new economy!

Thanks for the mention Kat.

On January 23rd, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), along with the Media Ratings Council (MRC), will be hosting a webinar that will take you through the recently released Rich Media Measurement Guidelines. DoubleClick has been heavily involved in this project from its outset and are big supporters of the IAB and their leadership role on measurement. In the webinar, George Ivie of the IAB and MRC will present learnings on the point at which rich media advertising impressions should be counted. Attendance is free, simply register in advance here.

Webinar: IAB Rich Media Measurement Guidelines Webinar
Date: January 23rd, 2008
Time: 4:00 - 5:00 EST

This webinar is for anyone whose company hosts, sells or serves internet advertising and is especially relevant to clients of DoubleClick Rich Media, as our metrics our both IAB-compliant and MRC certified. In related new, read about our most recent accreditation.

My latest byline from iMedia takes on widget marketing.

Read: iMedia Connection: The ins and outs of widget marketing

Today I'm happy to announce the release of Spotlight for Rich Media, a powerful new report for DART for Advertiser (DFA) clients that allows you to correlate how specific creative elements inside your DoubleClick Rich Media ads (i.e. videos, games, exit links, etc.) turn into purchases or conversion on your Web site. The report helps you answer questions like:

• How do interactions directly tie to results?
• Are users who watch the complete video more likely to come to our site later?
• Which drives more conversions, the "buy now" or "learn more" links?
• Are expanding ads worth the extra expense and creative cost?
• Does a video play change user behavior?

Starcom USA is one of the first agencies to use this reporting feature. For more information, you can read about the insights Starcom gained or learn more on our Web site. Also, clickZ's Fred Aun has written a great article about the report.

We have a major announcement coming out Monday that's related to Spotlight tags. In light of this, I'd like to offer up some tips and tricks to using them.

1. Woody Allen's advice that "80 percent of success is just showing up" applies surprisingly well to Spotlight tags. Any advertiser with the smallest direct response goal should be using Spotlight tags to gain insight into their campaign effectiveness. Advertisers should make sure that Spotlight tags are "showing up" on their Web site(s).
2. The more tags the merrier. The use of multiple Spotlight tags provides more opportunities to understand how audiences respond to your campaign. An easy mistake to make is to use a single Spotlight tag to measure a single response goal, such as purchases. There's plenty of other Web site activities that indicate a response, such as visiting a specific page or filling out a form. Implement as many tags as you need to track all possible responses to a campaign.
3. It's the little things that count. As a best practice, take a detailed look at Spotlight tag implementation from time-to-time. Check that the code for each Spotlight tag is at the top of the page it is coded for, but not in the tag. Don't use line breaks in the code. If you want an apples to apples comparison of one Spotlight tag to another, make sure they are setup in the same way. Make sure to setup Spotlight tags under the right Advertiser in DFA. A campaign running under one Advertiser can't take advantage of Spotlight tags setup under another Advertiser.
4. Put it to the test. DART for Advertisers makes it easy to test and monitor Spotlight tags. If DART finds an error in a tag, an error message will be displayed on the Navigation and Status bar under the Advertiser tab in DART. Be sure to check this tab after implementing new tags and on an ongoing basis to monitor existing tags.

Have Spotlight tips of your own? Let us know at doubleclickblog@google.com.

Earlier today, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) cleared Google's acquisition of DoubleClick. This is obviously excellent news for both companies. The FTC's decision publicly affirms what we and numerous independent analysts have been saying for months: the acquisition does not threaten competition in what is a robust, innovative and quickly evolving online advertising space. In fact, we firmly believe the transaction will increase competition and bring substantial benefits to consumers, web publishers and online advertisers.

If you would like to read Google's analysis on the FTC's clearance statement, click here.

One of our clients, Collective Media, recently did something very innovative with our DART Adapt optimization solution – they used it to optimize a brand campaign. One of their largest packaged goods advertisers wanted to drive more user interactions with their expandable DoubleClick Rich Media creative. Collective Media used DART Adapt to increase user interactions with that campaign, ultimately driving an 87% lift against control! You can see more details in the case study here.

At DoubleClick we are starting to see more and more brand marketers realize the power of tools like automated optimization and the campaign above is a fantastic example of this. Increasingly, the line between "direct marketers" and "brand marketers" is blurring into a new group of "brand response marketers" – brand marketers who really understand the power of metrics like interaction rates and who are leveraging the power of the Internet to the fullest.

I read a blog post recently that gives advice to advertisers looking for an SEM. The blogger insists that in today's world an SEM firm must have a solid background in global equity markets and hedge funds. The article states, in so many words, that a minimum requirement for an SEM should be that it has a former Wall Street executive on staff.

Now, I've got a bit of advice for all of you SEMs out there. Before you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire a VP from Wall Street, consider the following free advice:

• Know your advertiser's objectives. Does the advertiser want to increase brand awareness? Does the advertiser have an ROI objective? Does the advertiser have a set budget, or is the sky the limit as long as the ROI target is being reached? Finding clarity regarding goals and objectives with your client is essential to building a successful online marketing program.
• Break campaigns into focused Ad Groups. Make sure that the ads in each Ad Group are appropriately paired with the keywords. Start with the advice provided by your search engine representatives, and adjust from there, based on performance and ingenuity.
• Develop and maintain relevant ad copy and landing pages. Bid management is only one factor among several which affect ad ranking. Build compelling, relevant copy that attracts consumers to click on your ads. Keep the content up-to-date. Test copy variations in distinct Ad Groups and compare performance. Make sure that the landing pages are relevant to the copy and to the keywords.
• Use the Geo-Targeting tools provided by the search engines. Make sure the ads are appropriately targeted towards geographic regions. Don't waste budget targeting ads towards geographic regions which don't match your target audience.
• Use match types intelligently. Explore broad, phrase, and exact match types. For each keyword, test the various match type options. Some keyword/match type combinations may result in too many clicks that don't convert well for you -- identify these combinations and eliminate them from your program. Also use negative keywords to filter out irrelevant matches.
• Study the interaction between keywords and conversions. Just because a consumer searches for "flight to Vegas" doesn't mean he or she will book a flight to Las Vegas. The consumer may end up purchasing a bus ticket to Yonkers. Know the profit margins associated with the various conversion types so that you can set CPA or ROAS goals accordingly. If there are wide variances in profit margin in your product mix, make sure you are using a bid management system that allows you to assign goals based on the conversions as well as the keywords.
• Make sure you are using a tracking, reporting, and bid management tool with a data accuracy policy. You need good data to make good decisions. Your technology provider should give you timely and accurate click and cost data, taken directly from the search engines. Make sure your technology provider does not use unreliable referrer data for bid management calculations.

I could go on and on, but I think you get the point. Search marketing is complex, but that's not a good excuse to abandon common sense.

Good Luck and Happy Holidays.

Henry Blodget and the Silicon Alley Insider team recently announced the people recognized in their first Silicon Alley 100 list. We're pleased to see such a list return – it's been awhile since the last similar list ran in the now-defunct magazine Silicon Alley Reporter – and SAI's effort has resulted in a solid roundup of some of the leading business and technology movers and shakers in New York City.

DoubleClick's own CEO David Rosenblatt is listed at #15, and we're proud that he's included. We're also pleased to see a handful of notable DoubleClick alumni in the mix. Former DoubleClick team members who made the cut include Adam Benjamin and Roger Jehenson, Wenda Harris Millard, Jonathan Shapiro, Mike Walrath, and 2007 "up and comer" Court Cunningham. Kudos to all involved!

Who do you think the most important people are in the world of online marketing and advertising? Email me the people you'd put on your list.

We are pleased to announce beta support for Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS3). Utilize all the power and convenience of the DoubleClick Rich Media Ad Kit in Adobe's latest authoring environment.

You can download the beta version of the Ad Kit, by going to www.dartmotif.com/downloads. Make sure you choose the correct Flash version, OS, and language in order to download the appropriate version.

IMPORTANT: Please read the following instructions before downloading Ad Kit for Creative Suite 3.

1) Download and install the Adobe Extension Manager v1.8 or higher (from www.adobe.com/exchange/em_download, if you don't already have it (note: if you have an older version of the Extension Manager, please upgrade to the most recent version)

2) Once installation is complete, shutdown the Adobe Flash application

3) Go to www.dartmotif.com/downloads

4) Choose the proper Adobe Flash version (CS3), OS, and language. This ensures that you get the correct version of the Ad Kit

5) Download the new version of the DoubleClick Rich Media Ad Kit

6) Launch Adobe Extension Manager and make the appropriate selections to choose your version of the Flash Authoring tool

7) Choose the Ad Kit installer that you just downloaded (make sure you have the right version of the Ad Kit for your environment)

Be aware that during the beta period, .mtf's with a video component created in Ad Kit 4.0 beta must be trafficked through betadfa.doubleclick.com.

Note: Your creative must be published for AS1/AS2. Support for Action Script 3.0 will be coming in the near future.

On Monday, we made an official announcement regarding the availability of the DART for Publishers (DFP) Dashboard. This new interface leverages the latest Web 2.0 technology to provide greater visibility and flexibility for publishers in managing their advertising operations. The DFP Dashboard is fully integrated with the DART for Publishers platform and is included at no additional cost to all existing DFP users. Fred Aun, at ClickZ wrote a great article that highlights some of the key benefits of this new release.

If you liked our post about Cyber Monday, join DoubleClick Performics next week on December 4th at 2 p.m. Central for our Web event Holiday ’07 Reality: Early Lessons and Learnings from Black Friday and Cyber Monday with guest speaker Lauren Freedman, president of the e-tailing group.

DoubleClick Performics regularly partners with online retail expert Lauren Freedman to provide our advertiser and publisher clients with valuable insight into best practices. Lauren will share some preliminary findings from the e-tailing group's 10th Annual Mystery Shopping study and her thoughts from a review of a few affiliate publisher sites.

So, yesterday was Cyber Monday. Next Monday will also be Cyber Monday and so will the Monday after that and the one after that. The big story about Cyber Monday this year seems to be how not big Cyber Monday is when considered with the entire holiday shopping season. At DoubleClick Performics, we've been emphasizing that every Monday between Thanksgiving and Christmas is, in fact, a Cyber Monday.

We recently issued a news release highlighting what we consider to be the holiday shopping seasonal arc. DoubleClick Performics has found that, although weekend online sales might be slow, they pick up on Mondays when people return to work and research the items they didn’t purchase over the weekend. As the week progresses, consumers turn back to search and arm themselves with product information for weekend shopping.

Retailers however, have certainly gotten on board with this first Cyber Monday of the season and looking around it appears as though "Free Shipping" is the incentive of the day or a "Cyber Monday Sale" on specific products. It's fantastic to see retailers using Cyber Monday as online promotional fodder, but what can be done in the next few weeks as we approach Christmas?

While reviewing some of the press coverage on Cyber Monday this year, I stumbled upon a non-scientific CNN Money poll that stated 39% of respondents (at the time of this writing) plan to do most of their holiday shopping online. Add the 7% who plan to do all their shopping online and we've got almost half looking to do most or all their shopping online.

Most of these people probably did not complete their holiday shopping yesterday. If they are anything like me, they are waiting till the (almost) last minute. We encourage our retail clients to manage their budgets accordingly and prepare for the weekly and overall arc that takes place during the holiday season: allocate a larger budget in early December, don't set your caps too low, and adapt copy for to each phase of the season; early in the season focus on research, price and selection and late in the season focus on closing the sale as well as shipping/delivery issues.

Sales, so far, appear to be steady in spite of greater economic concerns. The jury is still out but search certainly remains a dynamic marketing vehicle that consumers continue to turn towards.
Alright, anyone for Cyber Tuesday? Wait! I mean, get back to work!

In the last month-plus, I’ve been lucky to participate in two conferences that are worth commenting on – and shortlisting for your potential attendance next year.

In early October, I participated in Forrester Research’s 2007 Consumer Forum. The agenda focused heavily on social media and potential applications for marketers and advertisers. I was particularly intrigued and inspired by Josh Bernoff’s call for a strategic approach to social media, Richard Edelman’s perspective on the role of corporate communications in the Web 2.0 world, and Henry Jenkins’s comments on convergence culture. Luckily, Forrester is offering online video segments from the event, so you can explore some of the ideas yourself.

More recently, I spoke at the 2007 Word of Mouth Research Symposium, which was hosted by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. While there, I presented our report Influencing the Influencers, and I sat in on most of the other sessions over the course of the day.

Of special interest was “Measuring the Ripple: Creating the G2X Relay Rate and an Industry Standard Methodology to Measure the Spread of WOM Coversations and Marketing," which was presented by Matt McGlinn of BzzAgent and Dr. Walter Carl of ChatThreads. They’ve gone far to calculate the iterative effect of word-of-mouth marketing campaigns. I was also impressed by “The Effects of Word of Mouth: An Agent-Based Simulation of Interpersonal Influence in Social Networks,” which was presented by Dejan Duzevik, a complexity scientist at Icosystem. By modeling various marketing activities, you can gauge the potential impact of word of mouth.

While I wasn’t able to stay in Las Vegas for the following WOMMA Summit, I got several ideas while at the research symposium and spent quality time with peers in the industry – some of whom I’ve known for years but never met. If you’re interested in word-of-mouth marketing, the state of the research backing it up improves every year.

DoubleClick Ad Exchange recently hosted two roundtable dinners to engage with publishers, agencies and marketers, foster direct dialogue between buyers and sellers of online display media, and learn more about issues on the minds (and budgets) of disparate members of the advertising community. We invited Forrester's Shar VanBoskirk to present. (Visit our Web site to see Shar discussing the future of online media, among other topics).

Among the ideas that Shar presented at the two dinners:

• New media advertising, which now accounts for 8% of total ad spend, will become more important as younger consumers become mainstream. Across all channels (SEM, display, emerging, video, etc.), CAGR through 2012 projects to be 27%, with video at nearly 80% CAGR over the same time period.
• Marketers expect interactive effectiveness to increase, and their budget projections and plans over the next three years reflect this.
• Interactive continues to serve marketer needs more effectively, from selling products and services online to driving Web site traffic to lead-gen and relationship building.
• Exchanges will drive the next generation of sales – what is a relatively new concept now will become a core component of media buying and selling in the future.

If you're heading to Vegas next week for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association's Word of Mouth Marketing Summit, be sure to check out Heath Row, DoubleClick's research manager speaking at the Research Symposium on Tuesday about Influencing the Influencer: How Online Advertising and Media Impact Word of Mouth. It's based on a popular research paper of ours by the same name.

Heath's one of DoubleClick's best public speakers. He's also fun to schmooze with, if you get a chance, a former journalist of many years for Fast Company magazine and an avid blogger in his own right. We'll make sure he gives a quick write-up of the event when he gets back.

There's a good overview of my recent keynote at Streaming Media Europe on the Streaming Media blog. During my presentation I was worried that I was going to be blogged -- and I guess that worry came true!

Our own Rob Victor, Product Manager for Emerging Tech, spoke to About.com on mobile and other subjects. Worth a watch...

Our innovation lab worked hard with Digitas to help produce the Stress-Free Travel with American Express rich media campaign. The banners let the user choose a city then see a live webcam shot of that city directly within the banner ad. Pretty cool stuff!

We were happy to see the ad honored with the Bronze award at the Mixx awards last week in New York. Congrats to everyone involved.

We are happy to announce an exciting set of enhancements to the Motif Ad Kit. Ad Kit 3.5 will be in available in BETA starting Monday, September 10th. This version will roll into production in approximately six weeks (end of October, 2007). You can download a Beta ad Kit here.

The biggest change in the Ad Kit is the inclusion of a specialized video component that allows you to create powerful and complex video ads.

The complete feature list includes:

• New video component included with the Ad Kit
• Include .flv's with the rest of your creative assets as child files (in your .mtf package)
• Traffickers can now upload video files directly into DART and change those files without repackaging
• Traffickers can change videos settings from progressive to streaming and from auto-play to user-initiated, all within DART
• The 300k file size restriction has been removed. .MTFs can now include up to 10Mb of files
• Dramatically improved performance during the .mtf package creation to save time
• .MTF files are no longer encrypted so you can examine their contents from your desktop

Please contact us with any feedback on the beta.

Integration of SEMDirector Paid Insight and DoubleClick’s DART Search Offers New Method of Implementing and Monitoring Paid Search Campaigns

SES SAN JOSE (SAN JOSE, Calif.) AND NEW YORK, – August 21, 2007 – SEMDirector, the leader in search marketing automation software, and DoubleClick Inc., the premier provider of digital marketing technology and services, announced today at the 2007 Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, Calif., the formation of an alliance to deliver comprehensive paid search execution capabilities to large advertisers. Through this alliance, large advertisers can now get a closed loop system to launch search campaigns through DART Search and gain complete performance visibility through SEMDirector’s Paid Insight technology.

"Both DoubleClick, through DART Search, and SEMDirector, through its Marketing Action Platform, focus on building scalable solutions for managing the world’s largest paid search programs," said Craig Macdonald, vice president of marketing, alliances and product management for SEMDirector. "Through our integration with DART Search, SEMDirector can automate the collection of data necessary to devise global strategies around paid search advertising within SEMDirector’s Paid Insight product, and then make those strategies operational within DART Search."

This fusion of DoubleClick and SEMDirector technologies enables customers to leverage the DART Search paid search campaign management processes while automatically tracking all performance data within SEMDirector Paid Insight™. Through SEMDirector Paid Insight, advertisers can analyze campaign performance by geography, product, agency, platform or language. Strategies developed via SEMDirector Paid Insight are then executed through changes to bid strategy within DART Search across search engines globally. This process is in production now at a large high technology manufacturing organization where the search campaigns are managed by DoubleClick Performics, the performance-based marketing division of DoubleClick.

“The complexity of large search programs, like those targeted by DoubleClick and SEMDirector, demand the type of technological integration we are launching today, “said Dave Fall, vice president of search product management for DoubleClick. “Our best in class, scalable search campaign management technology, combined with SEMDirector’s expertise in search marketing automation, make this integration a must-have for all our joint customers.”

The combined solution from SEMDirector and DoubleClick is now commercially available.
For more information on SEMDirector Paid Insight, please visit http://www.semdirector.com/productsEnterprise.shtml. For more information on DoubleClick’s DART Search, please visit http://www.doubleclick.com/us/products/dart_search/.

Wait, wrong football! We're talking American football from the NFL, with in-stream video ads baked in courtesy of DoubleClick In-Stream. Check out NFL Video.

ClickZ is posting an interview with yours truly. I discuss mobile, rich media, video, widgets, a little bit of everything...

Here's one more example of DoubleClick's unparalleled level of integration with the search engines. MSN has just issued an online collaboration tool called SPOCK, which is exclusively for the purpose of facilitating communication between MSN and DoubleClick. Based on Microsoft's Sharepoint application, SPOCK will facilitate sharing of information about the AdCenter API, product releases, new features, and the like. It allows DoubleClick employees to ask questions and discuss client issues. DoubleClick is the first company to which MSN is making this type of customized application available.

We are pleased to announce the release of the latest version of DART Search on Saturday, July 14th, 2007. In this release, we will upgrade DART Search with the following new features:

Yahoo Geo-Targeting in DART Search

DART Search users can now use geo-targeting at the campaign level for Yahoo. This feature allows you to target prospective customers in the geographic locations that your company supports. By default, your geo-targeting preference is set to display ads to your entire market, which is the country or multi-country region in which you are advertising. Yahoo Geo-Targeting lets users take control of their targeting with three distinct types of geo-targeting:

• Your entire market
• Your State, Territory, or Province
• Your City or Surrounding Area

Additional Reporting Columns

We added the following columns to the DART Search Account, Campaign, Group, Type, and Category reports:

• Cost Per Action Fee
• Cost Per Order Fee
• Average Position

Along with the features outlined above the DART Search team has made great strides enhancing the UI speed, Data Processing capabilities and the Scalability of DART Search. For more information about this product release, please visit the DART Search website.

It's not just the last click – or is it?

A number of studies have highlighted a growing concern that the logic of attributing conversions to only the last click just doesn’t always hold. With some claiming it’s not only the last click but the last search click that matters when evaluating user intent, it’s become increasingly difficult to parse truth from fiction and, more importantly, understand how to buy, plan, and optimize digital media.

With these concerns in mind DoubleClick has developed the Exposure to Conversion Report (E2C). A new advanced report, available in DFA’s ReportCentral, the E2C will allow customers to view up to 10 exposures leading to a conversion. Exposures will include display (Rich media, video and standard) views and clicks as well as DART Paid Search clicks. Information available for each exposure can include campaign, site, site placement, creative and timing details. You will also be able to select up to 20 spotlight activities to designate as conversions to evaluate user pathways (ad exposures) driving to each.

The E2C offers the opportunity to gain better insight into the way your media allocation strategy drives conversions. You will be able to determine for yourself whether it is display, search and display, or just search that is in fact driving your customers to convert. Ultimately, the E2C affords deeper understanding of how search and display influence conversion for your campaigns and how you can optimize your media spend to maximize ROI.

The Exposure to Conversion report will be available in DFA’s ReportCentral beginning July 21st. For pricing and enablement information please contact your Account Manager.

Eric Enge recently published an article called "Are Bid Management Tools Still Useful?" on ClickZ Search Engine Watch (http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3626132). The article reviews a session at the recent Search Engine Expo conference about whether or not bid management is dead. According to Enge, "The panelists ultimately agreed that bid management is a useful tool, but that in today's advertising environment you need to do much more in addition to what the bid management tool can do."

We couldn't agree more. That's why we continue to make DART Search a comprehensive search management platform. Bid management is a core component, certainly, but there's much more to our product. Here are a few of the features in DART Search in addition to automated bid management:

Geographic Targeting -- Currently supported for Google (Yahoo! support is coming soon).

Budget Management & Reporting -- Get budget alerts via email, change multiple budgets at once automatically, and monitor your spend versus your budget. Fully supported for Google, Yahoo, MSN. Also, ask your DoubleClick representative about the daily offline Google Budget Cap Alert Report.

Match Types -- Supported for Google, Yahoo! and MSN. This gives you another dimension to work with as you drive the most relevant traffic to your site.

Content Targeting -- A great way to drive traffic to your site is to advertise on Google's AdSense network. DART Search offers full support for AdSense via Content Targeting. Site Targeting is also available -- it's currently in beta.

Ad Trafficking & Synching -- Via the APIs of the major search engines, DART Search allows you create multiple ads per Ad Group and have the ads automatically trafficked to the search engines. We also synchronize each ad nightly to ensure the status of your ads (live, paused, etc.) is accurately reflected in the interface.

Yahoo! Ad Quality Score -- To help you manage your ads on Yahoo's new relevancy-based platform, we collect and display the quality score for each Yahoo ad managed via DART Search.

Google Quality Based Bidding -- DART Search collects Google's quality minimum bids every day to help you keep your programs live.

De-duplication with Display Advertising -- Paid search marketing is one piece of your larger online media mix. It's important that your conversions be attributed to the appropriate ads. If you are using DART for Advertisers for your display advertising, your conversions are automatically deduplicated -- the ad (search or display) with the last click "wins" the attribution.

Click Fraud Monitoring -- DART Search collects the daily count of clicks directly from the search engines. DART Search also counts every click that it redirects. These are called "visits" to distinguish them from search engine clicks. DART Search reporting allows you to compare visits to clicks directly so that you can estimate how many fraudulent clicks are removed by the search engines.

There's much more to search marketing than bid management. That's why there's much more to DART Search, too.

DoubleClick Inc., the premier provider of digital marketing technology and services, today announced that Pepperjam, an Inc. 500 company and industry leading full service Internet marketing agency, has selected DoubleClick's integrated DART® platform to meet the digital marketing needs of Pepperjam and its clients. Pepperjam is a rapidly growing agency that specializes in search-engine marketing, affiliate marketing management and online media buying and planning. The agency serves clients in the fashion, entertainment, education, retail and consumer packaged goods industries, such as The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, 1-800-PetMeds (PETS: NASDAQ), and Sesame Street.

Click here to read the full article

Earlier this month, DoubleClick achieved Support Center Practices (SCP) Certification for the second straight year. SCP Certification measures the effectiveness of customer support based upon a stringent set of performance standards and industry best practices. DoubleClick is the only digital marketing company that has earned this recognition.

This certification further demonstrates our dedication and commitment to our clients and their support needs.

To read the complete article Click Here

Keyword bidding on pay-per-click search engines is extremely complex.
The Bid Management module in DART Search removes the complexity from keyword bidding by bidding on keywords automatically, based on a straightforward set of rules that you provide.

We've recently published a comprehensive overview of our bid management technology, called DART Search Bid Management Overview. It's available to current clients in our award winning Knowledge Base. The overview describes the types of rules available, how the rules interact, and how frequently bidding takes place. It also addresses when and how you should manually intervene with automated bidding.

So, not only have we taken the complexity out of bid management, we've also taken the mystery out of our technology :)

Contact your DART Search Technical Account Manager if you have any additional questions.

Current customers click here for the full article

Click fraud is a type of internet crime that occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad's link.

Online advertisers have been inundated with the term “click fraud”. Articles continue to try and help advertisers understand the level of fraud online as a percentage of total online advertising, but few talk to what they are doing to combat this growing problem.

DART Search leverages the multi-level click filtration of the search engines and imports their numbers directly into it own reporting, giving our users a clear advantage in fighting “click fraud”. Click here to find out how we continue to enhance DART Search in the battle against invalid clicks.

At DoubleClick, we're always on the lookout for ways to make search engine data as accurate as possible - and to deliver that accuracy to our clients. With that in mind, DoubleClick announces the 99% Data Accuracy Policy for DART Search (click link to download the 5-page whitepaper).

What does this mean for you? As a DART Search customer, you should expect less than a 1% discrepancy in your DART Search reporting data when compared to reports in Google, Yahoo, AOL, & MSN. If you notice discrepancies that amount to more than a 1% difference between the reports you run in DART Search and the reports you run on the search engines, we invite you to contact your DoubleClick Technical Account Manager (TAM). Your TAM will work with you to attempt to resolve the discrepancy.

With better accuracy comes substantially improved decision making. The DART Search technology is the only search product to be able to claim this level of accuracy across all the above-listed engines.

Better accuracy is only one of the many features and benefits our technology delivers. The DART Search feature set also includes geo targeting, negative keyword lists, Content Targeting, Site Targeting and Image Ads. As always, we will continue to add features and enhance our product to meet your growing needs. Feel free to email us at doubleclickblog@google.com to offer any comments, suggestions or questions!

DoubleClick announced last week that their DART Search^SM application is compliant with Google’s AdWords API terms and conditions. Through the AdWords API program, DART Search provides agencies and advertisers with improved options and flexibility by offering additional campaign management tools and functionality.

DoubleClick’s DART Search application is a complete search engine marketing technology solution providing clients with robust keyword management, bid management and reporting tools. Built on DoubleClick’s proprietary DART® platform, the industry leading ad management platform, DART Search enables clients to manage the execution of their paid search campaigns and creates efficiencies by allowing clients to track display, rich media and search advertising in one centralized location when using DoubleClick’s DART for Advertisers.

DART Search, which powers DoubleClick’s full-service Performics® search offering and is also offered as a self-service solution, currently leverages Google’s AdWords API to offer a variety of other features to search engine marketing agencies and advertisers. For example, DART Search loads actual search engine performance data such as impressions, clicks and click costs for reporting and automated bid management. DART Search supports Google’s Quality Score by notifying users when keywords are not being served due to a low minimum cost-per-click (CPC). In addition, DART Search delivers email notifications to users when submitted ads have not met the AdWords editorial guidelines.

Performics, the country's largest Search Engine Marketing firm (Source: JupiterResearch 2006 Search Engine Marketing Agency Constellation) and the performance marketing division of DoubleClick is the largest worldwide user of the DART Search technology.

“We are delighted that DART Search is compliant with Google’s AdWords API. This means even more value and flexibility for users of DART Search,” said Stuart Larkins, vice president of Search at Performics. “Performics’ relationships with search engines such as Google are a major benefit to our clients and offer unparalleled access to emerging technologies and high-growth opportunities. Integration with Google’s AdWords API represents just such an opportunity and allows clients to take advantage of the additional features and functionality of the Google offering.”

In order to comply with the Google AdWords API terms and conditions, DART Search added several enhanced features, including:

• Geo-Targeting – Advertisers using DART Search can set their ads to appear when customers are searching for results in (or located near) the regional areas or cities selected. This is an enhancement to the country targeting options previously available in DART Search.
• Negative Keywords – The negative keywords feature allows advertisers to develop a better targeted keyword list ensuring that more relevant ads are displayed.
• Content Targeting enhancements – Advertisers can create separate content targeting campaigns as well as bid separately on content targeting traffic.
• Site Targeting – Advertisers using DART Search can set up site-targeted campaigns in addition to keyword-targeting campaigns. Site Targeting is designed for advertisers who want to place their ads on specific content sites within the Google network.
• Image Ads – The new image ads feature provides an option to upload image ads (including Adobe Flash files) through DART Search to be displayed on content sites within the Google network through site-targeting campaigns or keyword-targeting campaigns.

Compliance with Google AdWords API terms and conditions means DART Search is now tightly integrated with Google AdWords, providing additional Google campaign functionality for search engine marketing.