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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.