Introducing the DoubleClick Ad Planner Marketplace

Today we're excited to announce the beta launch of the DoubleClick Ad Planner Marketplace for advertisers and agencies using DoubleClick for Advertisers. The Ad Planner Marketplace is a new solution connecting buyers and sellers of online advertising to make the process of traditional online media buying simpler and more efficient.

Buying online media can be incredibly inefficient with 28% of total media spend going to administrative costs, according to ThinkEquity. And in terms of planning media, it can be hard to access data to find the best sites that attract your target audience and to get detailed information on a site’s available inventory.

At DoubleClick, we're further developing Ad Planner with these challenges in mind. Ad Planner is a good resource for site research, providing robust data on sites and their available ad placements. The launch of Ad Planner Marketplace takes this one step further by offering additional information about publisher inventory including the availability of inventory, audience profiles for inventory and the ability to place order requests for inventory.

Still in beta, Ad Planner Marketplace is just the first step in building out a completely streamlined media planning and buying solution on the DoubleClick for Advertisers platform.
Currently with the Ad Planner Marketplace you can:

• Search for ad placements that meet your campaign goals
  
• Review information on publishers’ placements including:
  
  • Audience Statistics: Unique Visitors, Demographics, Audience Interests
    
  • Advertising Information: Impression volume, Available ad sizes, Available ad types and formats, and CPM rates
• Send order requests to reserve and purchase site placements directly in Ad Planner from participating publishers in the Marketplace.

The Ad Planner Marketplace beta is currently available to users of DoubleClick for Advertisers. In this beta release, ad placements are only available from publishers selling in US dollars. Expect to be updated in the coming months as we continue to add features and make enhancements to the Ad Planner Marketplace.

If you are interested in signing up for the beta, fill out this form [update 6/1/2011: we are no longer accepting beta requests for Marketplace]. If you are not already on DFA, contact us for more information.

Posted by Seth Demsey, Product Manager

Trends and observations in the September Ad Planner 1000

The September edition of the Ad Planner 1000 offers a few obvious trends as students across the northern hemisphere have returned to school and are putting their thinking caps on.

As the school year gets into full swing, homework and school projects abound and usage of reference sites increases correspondingly. September was a good month for reference.com which was up more than 23%, thesaurus.com followed closely with its 21% increase in the number of unique visitors, wiktionary.org went up almost 18%, merrian-webster.com more than 17% and thefreedictionary.com enjoyed more than a 16% increase in site visitors for the month of September.

The return to school did not seem to bode well for online gaming and entertainment sites as we observed a decline in site traffic with many of these sites. Perhaps much of play time has gone from the online realm to the offline world of the playground.

Battle.net was the most embattled as it saw a huge drop in site visitors (-38%), while 4399.com was not far behind with a steep 35% decline, duowan.com dropped 24%, pcgames.com (-24%), addictinggames.com (-18%), sdo.com was down 17% and nick.com and zylom.com saw 16% fewer visitors to their sites in September. To a lesser extent, miniclip.com (-13%), armorgames.com (-9%) and juegos.com (-8%) also saw drops in visitors to their site during this month.

“Did you catch that season premiere last night?” is likely a common refrain heard around water coolers everywhere. Thanks to the new television season, network sites re-entered the Ad Planner 1000: nbc.com at #679, cbs.com at #712 and abc.go.com at #748. Tvguide.com also benefited with enough of an increase to site visitors to crack the list at #820.

Sports trends have usually shown their mark on the Ad Planner 1000 from month to month and September is no different. In the U.S., football fervor is underway and the biggest beneficiary is nfl.com with a whopping 61% increase in unique vistors to their site. Espn.com fared well (+26%), as did cbssports.com which debuted in the Ad Planner 1000 this month at #672. On the other hand, as playoff contenders emerge in the baseball post-season, the narrowing field of teams to follow seems to have affected mlb.com which saw site traffic go down 16%.

In other trend news, social networking sites Facebook.com remains atop the Ad Planner 1000 this month with a healthy rise in the number of unique visitors of 11%. Twitter fared well too with 12% more visitors in the month of September.

Expect to see more of these interesting observations with your favorite sites when we publish the next update to the Ad Planner 1000 in a couple of weeks.

Posted by Wayne Lin, Product Manager

Congratulations DMACs Award Winners

Congratulations to the winners of the fifth annual Digital Media Advertising Creative Showcase (DMACS) awards! The event took place Thursday October 14 at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles. DMACS 2010 showcased the apex of cutting-edge digital media advertising around entertainment releases over the past year. The most innovative and creative digital media talent in the industry competed in six categories to receive recognition for campaigns executed with excellence. Google's DoubleClick Rich Media Team is the proud sponsor of these awards, and we would like to extend our congratulations to the winners!

Winners of the DMACS 2010 are:

Best Home Entertainment Rich Media Campaign:

Up – Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment and Deadline Advertising

YouTube Creative Award:

The Last Exorcism – Lionsgate and The Visionaire Group

Best Television Rich Media Campaign:

The Fugitive Chronicles – A&E and The Visionaire Group

Best Video Game Rich Media Campaign:

Mass Effect 2 – Electronic Arts and Draftfcb, Sabertooth and Wieden+Kennedy

Best Theatrical Movie Rich Media Campaign:

The Expendables – Lionsgate and The Visionaire Group

Best Multichannel Cross-Media Campaign:

Dante’s Inferno – Electronic Arts/Visceral Games and Wieden+Kennedy, Kamp Grizzly and Emerge Interactive

The event was attended by approximately 150 of the entertainment industry’s leading marketing executives, agency heads, creative directors and designers. In addition to the awards ceremony, the showcase explored leading trends in digital marketing. Presentations included a panel discussion, hosted by Kevin Winston of Digital LA, on the topic of “TV Goes Tech: iTV, 3D & apps” and Eyetracking analysis and trends offered up by Lance Porter of New Media Mind.

Awards presenters included a range of talent and marketing executives from across the entertainment industry including Adam Carolla (comedian, talk-show host, author), Andrew Marlowe & Terri Miller (Creator/Executive Producer and Producer of ABC’s Castle), Janina Gavankar (The Gates, The L Word), Gordon Ho (Business development consultant for iTV and digital media and former EVP of Global Marketing at Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment) and Jamie Byrne (Head of Marketing Programs, YouTube).

Check out the videos and pictures.

Posted by Kate Macevicz, Campaign Manager