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.

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.

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.

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...

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.