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...

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.”

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.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)

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

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 blog@doubleclick.com.

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.

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.

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/.

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.