AdWords Agency Blog: Luxury Automakers, Ads from Big Game Hit It Big on...

AdWords Agency Blog: Luxury Automakers, Ads from Big Game Hit It Big on...: The YouTube Ads Leaderboard showcases the most creative ads that people choose to watch each month.

Last month’s Leaderboard revealed the ads that were getting the most buzz leading up to the big game. This month we look at those that are continuing to capture consumers’ attention long after the final whistle, including Chrysler and Bob Dylan’s “America’s Import,” Coca-Cola’s “America Is Beautiful” and Microsoft’s “Empowering.” We also welcome some new players to the Leaderboard; luxury automakers grabbed the interest of consumers with the U.S. launch of Maserati’s Ghibli and Hennessey’s demonstration of the world’s fastest legal street car.

See who else made the list and watch the videos on Think with Google.

Ads are determined for the YouTube Ads Leaderboard by an algorithm that factors in paid views, organic views and audience retention (how much of a video people watched). For additional coverage of the YouTube Ads Leaderboard, go to Adweek.com.

AdWords Agency Blog: Does ad tech stack up? How it's working at VivaKi

AdWords Agency Blog: Does ad tech stack up? How it's working at VivaKi: Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertisers blog

Marketers and agencies have countless opportunities to engage audiences with rich formats across channels and devices. But today, organizations are using an average of 4.7 ad tech platforms to execute what should be a seamless experience across search, display, video, mobile, and more.

Many forward-thinking organizations know the real opportunity lies in creating unified, cross-channel experiences that span multiple touchpoints. In a new Think Insights article, Marco Bertozzi, Executive Managing Director at VivaKi, explains the benefits of adopting a unified solution to unlock the full potential of digital marketing. Check out the article on the Think Insights page here.

AdWords Agency Blog: YouTube and TED present Ads Worth Spreading 2014 H...

AdWords Agency Blog: YouTube and TED present Ads Worth Spreading 2014 H...: What makes an ad worth spreading?

For the fourth year, TED’s Ads Worth Spreading and YouTube are partnering to celebrate advertising that goes beyond a simple commercial message. Each year, TED speakers and stars from the advertising industry select 10 ads that tell a story and forge a connection with their audiences, prompting them to share that story with friends and family around the world.
This year, we’ve added a new component that focuses on identifying the ad submissions that are “spreading” on YouTube. We passed the nominees through our YouTube Ads Leaderboard algorithm to determine which of these ads have already caught on with the YouTube community.

See the Special Edition TED Ads Worth Spreading YouTube Ads Leaderboard here and the winning TED Ads Worth Spreading honorees here.

TED’s Ads Worth Spreading is a call to action for all of us who are in the profession of communicating ideas to elevate our game from creating messages that are memorable to those that are shareable.

AdWords Agency Blog: Merge the art and science of brand advertising by ...

AdWords Agency Blog: Merge the art and science of brand advertising by ...: Studio Certified developers, do you want to tell the world that you can create innovative ads designed for users to connect with brands? With DoubleClick Studio's Engagement Ads Certification, you can get certified in building ads that marry the art of brand building with the science of performance display.

Engagement Ads are tuned to user engagement – not clicks, letting brands connect with users through multiple creative formats. Ads are available on a cost-per-engagement (CPE) basis, allowing advertisers to bid and pay only for user engagement.

Watch this video:

Engagement Ads fit in standard display units, allowing them to scale across the web and then expand to a larger format after an innovative two-second hover delay. This delay eliminates nearly all accidental expansions, providing a better user experience and more accurate reporting to advertisers.

With this flexibility, the richness of a campaign using Engagement Ads depends on the story the brand wants to tell and the type of content they want to promote. Creatives can range from rich, interactive videos built in DoubleClick Studio to immersive brand experiences using HTML5, CSS3, and WebGL – all without leaving the ad format on the publisher's website.

Check out an Engagement Ad format in action.

Engagement Ads badge certification gives you:

• A badge that identifies you as a Studio Certified user able to create Engagement format ads
• Promotion as a via DoubleClick Rich Media properties and associated sites

You also receive the benefits of the Studio Certification Program, including exclusive access to betas and product features, DoubleClick hosted events and workshops, and a badge you can use for self-promotion.

Pass the exam and get the badge to demonstrate your expertise in creating rich ads to boost user engagement. Take the Engagement Ads exam and get certified.

Note: You must be Studio Certified in Core Flash or HTML5 to take the Engagement Ads certification exam.

Not Studio Certified? No worries! Get Certified today. We have these Studio Certification badges available:

1. Core Studio Certification exam for Flash and HTML5 developers
2. Integrated QA Certification
3. Advanced Badge Certification for Dynamic creatives, VPAID creatives, and YouTube Mastheads

Learn more about Studio Certification in the Rich Media Gallery.

Posted by Paige Birnbaum, Program Manager, DoubleClick Studio Certification

AdWords Agency Blog: Get Your Business Online Week starts today

AdWords Agency Blog: Get Your Business Online Week starts today: Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog 

Since getting online, Green Mountain Bee Farm in Fairfax, Vt. experienced a 5x increase in sales, and Christine Fitzpatrick Hair and Makeup in Birmingham, Mich. attracted 50 percent more clients. Getting online can make a big difference for small businesses—and stronger businesses makes for stronger communities. Online businesses are expected to grow 40 percent faster and create twice as many jobs as those that aren't online,* but more than half of America’s small businesses currently don't have a website. That’s the inspiration behind Get Your Business Online Week, when we come together with local partners to get businesses in our communities online and growing. Starting today, we’ll broadcast free virtual workshops for business owners, available to anyone with an Internet connection. Here’s a glimpse of what you can look forward to:

• Conversations with businesses that have prospered online, like Barkbox, GoldieBlox and Dollar Shave Club
• Step-by-step demos on building a website and getting found on Search and Maps
• Interviews with small business experts like SmallBizLady Melinda Emerson
• Workshops on Google tools for businesses (Google Apps, Google Trends, Google Alerts), online advertising (AdWords), and measuring your success online (Analytics)
• Free help and advice from experts over Helpouts by Google

We’re also teaming up with small business organizations across the country including local chambers of commerce, Small Business Development Centers and SCORE chapters to host live broadcasts of our trainings. You can find a screening closest to you on our website. We’re excited to welcome small business everywhere to join us for this special week. Even if you don’t own a business, we encourage you to take part by spreading the word and inviting your favorite businesses to sign up.

See you on the web!

Posted by Amber Shapiro, on behalf of the Get Your Business Online team,

*Source: BCG Report, "The Connected World: The $4.2 Trillion Opportunity," March 2012

AdWords Agency Blog: Introducing the YouTube Creator Playbook for Brand...

AdWords Agency Blog: Introducing the YouTube Creator Playbook for Brand...: Ever wonder why Smosh gets millions of views on every video posted to their channel? Or howMichelle Phan is able to attract and retain an audience of more than 6M subscribers who tune into her videos every week?

To demystify what makes these top channels tick and help you better understand how to create a successful strategy for your brand on YouTube, we developed the new YouTube Creator Playbook for Brands. Similar to the Creator Playbook, which has helped over 2 million of our creators grow their audiences, the Creator Playbook for Brands walks you through the steps to help you create, plan, and implement a YouTube content creation strategy; from tips on how to create videos to video promotion.

To dive right in, download the full playbook here. But to give you a taste of what you'll find, we thought we’d do some myth busting on the five most commonly misunderstood fundamentals about creating content for YouTube:

Myth #1: Virality is the only measure of YouTube success. The most successful creators release episodic series to generate high sharing and viral activity, as one video will often break out and then introduce massive audiences to the entire series.

Myth #2: I can only be successful on my own. While you should optimize your own channel for discovery, authentic collaborations with YouTube creators can be a hugely impactful way to help new viewers discover your brand.

Myth #3: All videos must provide utility. Don't get us wrong, how-to and informational videos play a key role in a content strategy, but tapping into the cultural moments and memes that your audience is a part of on YouTube is an integral part of reaching new viewers.

Myth #4: People will watch my video where I want them to. In reality, a significant percentage of your audience will discover your video from a social feed, search result, or a related video placement. You’ll know you’ve done your job when every episode of your show can be fully appreciated by a first time viewer.

Myth #5: To keep viewers interested, I need to constantly reinvent my videos. Most top creators agree that consistency is crucial to success on the site. Stay true to who you are and be consistent - in format (a recurring series), elements (intros and outros), and voice. This will set a clear point of view that accurately reflects your brand and keeps your fans coming back for more.

Check out Think Insights for more tips on how to build your audience and engage them over time.

Posted By Vanessa Pappas, Global Head of Audience Development, YouTube

AdWords Agency Blog: YouTube Brand Channel Leaderboard

AdWords Agency Blog: YouTube Brand Channel Leaderboard: The YouTube audience is more than just viewers—it’s fans. While viewers sit back, fans lean forward, forming passionate communities around their favorite channels. As brands continue to blur the line between advertiser and creator, we want to recognize those brands that regularly publish content—paid or otherwise—to build an engaged fanbase. That’s why we’re excited to launch the first-ever Brand Channel Leaderboard. Want to see which brands made the cut? Check out the standings on Think With Google.

AdWords Agency Blog: What’s next for Shopping campaigns and retailers

AdWords Agency Blog: What’s next for Shopping campaigns and retailers: In February, we made Shopping campaigns available to all Product Listing Ad (PLA) advertisers and, in March, we released AdWords API support to help you manage your campaigns at scale. Shopping campaigns offer the ability to browse your inventory directly in AdWords, report on your performance down to the product-level, and bid competitively with new metrics like benchmark data and impression share. We’ve received great feedback from you so far and are excited to share what’s next:

• Size your opportunity with Bid Simulator To provide more actionable insight into your PLAs, we’ve been rolling out a Bid Simulator that’s now available in all Shopping campaigns. With a Bid Simulator, you can now estimate how bid changes could impact your impressions, clicks or costs.
• Options to create a Shopping campaign

In the coming days, we’ll be adding some options to help you get started. You would be able to create a Shopping campaign from scratch or, for many of you, use one of your regular PLA campaigns to create similar product targets, negative keywords or promotional text.

• Multiple ad groups for advanced retailers
  While many of you will be happy with your Shopping campaign as is, we’ve heard from advanced retailers that they’d like to create multiple ad groups. It’s now possible to do this within a Shopping campaign.

Continued Retailer Success

Since we made Shopping campaigns available to all PLA advertisers, we continue to hear many examples of how it helps you manage PLAs and effectively grow your business. Here are a few:

JumpFly	“The benefits of Shopping campaigns can’t be overstated – the ease of setup, the transparency of data, the ability to group products into logical categories and manage to the product level make it a must. All of these contribute to our clients’ ROI almost tripling, and there’s still room to improve.”
Exclusive Concepts	“The new Shopping campaigns allowed us to achieve a much higher-level of profitability, cutting costs by 13% and increasing return on ad spend by about 22% on average. Not only that, the new campaign type trims about 2 hours of setup time.”
Wiggle	“We used the product-level data from our Shopping campaign to fine-tune our bidding strategy, focusing on the products that acquired the most traffic & lowered the ones that are less important. This helped us increase visits 25% & ROI by 16%.”
White Shark Media	“Shopping campaigns effectively reduced the time spent setting up product-specific bids and optimizing in half. We can now invest even more time into each client, and the results we’ve seen have been no less than amazing. A client selling home accessories saw a 301% increase in revenue after only one month. As a result, we are now changing our agency standards within PLAs to only use Shopping campaigns.”

Future of Shopping campaigns and retirement of regular PLA campaigns

Shopping campaigns offer a truly retail-centric and seamless approach to PLAs. We're very excited by the positive feedback we've heard so far and will continue to build tools and features into this new campaign type. Thus, we'll be retiring the regular PLA campaign type and asking all PLA advertisers to upgrade to Shopping campaigns by late August 2014, at which time all remaining PLA campaigns will be automatically upgraded. Over the next few months, we’ll share more information and release more tools to help you upgrade your campaigns and manage them at scale. We encourage you to start planning your upgrade to Shopping campaigns today to take full advantage of the new features as soon as possible.

For additional help, here are a few resources:

• Tutorial Videos to help you get started
• AdWords Help Center for more detailed information on Shopping campaigns
• Learn With Google Webinar (April 15) for upgrade tips
• Learn With Google Webinar (May 15) for more advanced upgrade best practices
• AdWords Ads Developer page for more AdWords API documentation

Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping

AdWords Agency Blog: What March Madness Trends Mean for Marketers

AdWords Agency Blog: What March Madness Trends Mean for Marketers: The country has been going mad for college hoops over the past few weeks. This year, we saw an 80% jump in mobile use for college basketball news searches during March Madness. As the Final Four prepare to duke it out, Think with Google takes a look at the latest trends they’re seeing in Google and YouTube data and explores what they mean for your next event strategy in a new infographic. As live events increasingly lend to mobile use, make sure your related content is easy to access on all devices.

AdWords Agency Blog: Beyond the Cable Box: The New Face of TV Viewershi...

AdWords Agency Blog: Beyond the Cable Box: The New Face of TV Viewershi...: It’s been called the “New Golden Age of Television,” but today’s TV ecosystem differs greatly from that of the era of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone. People now turn to their laptops, smartphones, and tablets to view trailers and research cast information before tuning-in, to use social media for real-time conversations about their favorite programs, and to binge watch episodes on demand. In fact, 90% of TV viewers also visit Google and YouTube, signaling the shared audience between both digital and television.*

In an effort to identify how digital has impacted viewer behavior in this new era, we analyzed search queries, video views, and engagement metrics from a sample of 100 cable and network television shows. From this analysis we published a new report called “The Role of Digital in TV Research, Fanship, and Viewing,” which outlines how online behavior is a clear indicator of a show’s popularity.

To view the full report, visit Think with Google. At a quick glance, here are a few of the key findings from the study:

• TV related activity is growing on Google and YouTube. Searches have grown by 16% and 54% YoY* on Google and YouTube search respectively. We’ve also seen a rise in video views, watch time and engagement on YouTube around TV-related content, suggesting that TV viewers are increasingly using these platforms to interact with other fans and engage in a show - in fact, watch time on YouTube for TV-related content has grown 65% YoY.
• Mobile and tablet searches are spearheading growth. Searches for TV content on Google and YouTube have increased 100%+ YoY on mobile devices, where users are looking for quick bits of information like premiere-date, plot, and cast-related information, and on tablets where users are looking for watch-related information.
• Activity on Google and YouTube is correlated with tune-in. Our analysis of Google searches, YouTube searches, and YouTube video views show positive .72, .74 and .67 correlations with “live plus three day” viewers, respectively.*
• The YouTube “community” actively creates TV-related content. In 2013 for every piece of content uploaded by a show’s network on YouTube in 2013, there were more than seven pieces of community-generated content related to a show. Some fan favorites far exceed that benchmark: Game of Thrones, for example, had 82 community-generated videos per video uploaded by the network and The Vampire Diaries had 69.
• Subscribers are vital to driving awareness for new content. TV networks have been gaining subscribers for their official YouTube channels at a blistering rate, with an average per channel subscribership increase of 69% from the beginning of 2013 to the end of the year. These subscribers are vital to spreading content on YouTube.
• Catching-up on seasons is on the rise, and drives tune-in. We found that 70% of viewers catch-up on prior episodes before tuning-in to a new season. And this intent appears to be on the rise - catch-up related searches on Google in the pre-premiere timeframe have grown by 50% YoY. For people who catch up on past seasons of returning shows, about half will start more than two months in advance. Analyzing behaviors around catch-up are important, since 4 in 5 viewers say they are more likely to tune-in to a season premiere after catching up on prior seasons*.

In summary, today’s TV audiences use Google, YouTube, and digital overall to extend and inform their TV-watching experience.  To learn more, download the full whitepaper from Think with Google.

Posted by Mahlet Seyoum, Industry Analyst, Media and Entertainment

AdWords Agency Blog: Step Inside AdWords on April 22 and be the first t...

AdWords Agency Blog: Step Inside AdWords on April 22 and be the first t...: Cross-posted from the Inside Adwords blog.


It’s an exciting time to be a performance marketer. When we combine the creative magic of marketing with technology that’s available anytime, anywhere, and on any device, we can connect with customers in more innovative and relevant ways than ever before. 

We are constantly working to improve AdWords, and on Tuesday, April 22, 2014 at 9am PT, Jerry Dischler, VP of Product Management for AdWords will share a brand new set of innovations with you live on the Inside AdWords blog. Register for the livestream here.

Building on the success of enhanced campaigns, Jerry will announce a number of new features that help you use context to reach customers in even more effective ways. We’ve designed new tools so you can increase awareness and engagement everywhere your customers are online – from the web, to the mobile web, to mobile apps. And when it’s time to manage your campaigns and measure performance, we want to help you do so efficiently in AdWords with new functionality designed for the multi-screen world.

These AdWords innovations are the result of countless conversations we’ve had over the past year with advertisers, both large and small. Based on your feedback, hundreds of product managers and engineers worked hard to build these new products. Simply put, we built these new products for you.

We hope you’ll join the April 22 livestream of our announcements featured here on the Inside AdWords blog.Register for the livestream here. Until then, follow us on our +GoogleAds page for sneak previews of what’s to come. Use hashtag, #StepInsideAdWords, to join in on the conversation.

Posted by Your Inside Adwords Team

AdWords Agency Blog: Who Made the Cut? March YouTube Ads Leaderboard

AdWords Agency Blog: Who Made the Cut? March YouTube Ads Leaderboard: March 2014 had no shortage of great ads with big talent, with Keira Knightley vamping for Chanel and Terry Crews going wild for Old Spice. But there’s only room for one at the top of our YouTube Ads Leaderboard.

See who made the top 10 and watch the videos on Think with Google.

Ads are determined for the YouTube Ads Leaderboard by an algorithm that factors in paid views, organic views and audience retention (how much of a video people watched). For additional coverage of the YouTube Ads Leaderboard, go to Adweek.com.

AdWords Agency Blog: How Search Insights Can Shape Your Event Strategy

AdWords Agency Blog: How Search Insights Can Shape Your Event Strategy: The Olympics. Bonnaroo. “Adele Dazeem.” Events and key moments from these events take on a life of their own in the digital realm. Every search, social post, website visit, download and video view provides a window into consumer interests and needs. Think with Google looks at how analyzing search data before, during and after an event can help guide marketers towards a thoughtful event strategy. Read the full article.

For tips on how to harness more search-driven insights, check out the full collection on Think with Google.

AdWords Agency Blog: New upgrade option for Shopping campaigns

AdWords Agency Blog: New upgrade option for Shopping campaigns: Earlier this month, we shared a few success stories on Shopping campaigns, our new campaign type for Product Listing Ads (PLAs), and that the regular PLA campaign type will retire in late August 2014.

To upgrade to Shopping campaigns, we encourage you to create a Shopping campaign from scratch and then customize your product groups and bids from there. That way, you can choose how granular you’d like to get and ensure all your inventory is included in your Shopping campaign.

However, if you would like to base your Shopping campaign on a regular PLA campaign, we’re introducing an option today to help you upgrade.

After setting up your Shopping campaign, you’ll be taken to a new page to create ad groups. Here, you’ll see two options: the ability to start fresh with one ad group or create one or many ad groups based on a regular PLA campaign.

Note that some parts of a regular PLA campaigns aren’t transferable to a Shopping campaign, like product targets that use AdWords labels or groupings. If none of your PLA campaigns are transferrable, you might not see this option.

Keep in mind
With Shopping campaigns, you no longer need to create separate ad groups or product targets to track your impressions, clicks and cost. You can analyze and report on your PLA performance by product attribute or by individual items in the Dimensions tab, regardless of your campaign structure.

As a reminder, all PLA advertisers will need to upgrade to Shopping campaigns by late August 2014, at which time all remaining regular PLA campaigns will be automatically upgraded. Over the next few months, we’ll continue to share more information and tools to help you upgrade your campaigns and manage them at scale.

To learn more about Shopping campaigns and how to upgrade, here are a few resources:

• Upgrade guide
• Learn With Google Webinar on May 15
• AdWords Help Center

Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping

Introducing the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite: A smarter, faster, product-centric layer to search management

Tuesday, February 4, 2014 | 11:13 AM

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertisers blog Here at DoubleClick Search, we’ve been focused on developing tailored solutions for retail advertisers  -- delivering the scale, performance, and speed our customers need to maximize revenue for their businesses. Today, we’re excited to introduce the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite, a robust toolset offering a smarter, faster, product-centric layer to search management. The suite is comprised of solutions that help you automatically create and update text ad and PLA campaigns based on your product catalog, leverage real-time data to optimize against your product or category-level business goals, and measure it all with flexible, product-based reports.

Putting “product” at the core of commerce investments

We designed the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite with products at the core, letting you efficiently build, manage, and optimize campaigns by seamlessly integrating with your existing product investments. As the only platform directly integrated with Google Merchant Center, we make your product inventory visible and accessible within DoubleClick Search -- meaning there’s no need to navigate a separate interface, manage a manual upload, or wait for a separate team to deliver product feed data. Instead, anyone on your marketing team can act on live updates, as they happen.

For example, inventory-aware campaigns uses this live product information to automatically create and update text ads, keywords, and bids based on real-time changes to your Google Merchant Center feed -- inclusive of updates to pricing, availability, product descriptions, and more -- with no extra work, and at no extra cost to set up.

For ATG Stores, an ecommerce company for home goods, the ability to directly interact with Google Merchant Center data in DoubleClick Search was crucial in allowing the team to quickly iterate across their four million SKUs. “Inventory-aware campaigns have been a game changer,” says Tom Heffernan, Search Marketing Manager for ATG Stores. “It’s impressive to see that what would previously have taken a full week to do is now being updated in the system in less than an hour.” In addition to time savings, this smart automation also helped the team take advantage of broader long-tail keyword coverage to widen reach and uncover incremental revenue. As a result, ATG Stores tripled their return on ad spend (ROAS) for their inventory-managed campaigns.

Today, we’re extending the power of this product-centric automation with two new capabilities for Product Listing Ads (PLAs):

• Dynamic Product Listing Ads creation, an extension of inventory-aware campaigns, lets you automatically generate and update PLA campaigns in real time, based on your Google Merchant Center feed.
• Product Listing Ads optimization with intra-day bidding based on the freshest data lets you react quickly to changes in the market -- executing bids to meet your ROI goals on both high-volume products, as well as the long tail.

Dynamic Product Listing Ads creation

In addition to your text ads, you can now dynamically manage your PLA campaigns using the same, seamless workflow you use for the rest of your campaigns  -- ensuring you’re always up to date, maximizing coverage, and driving better ROAS and volume.

Already, advertisers are seeing the benefits. “The ability to auto-generate PLA campaigns from existing product inventory drastically simplifies our setup process,” said Carissa McStay, Associate Manager at global marketing firm The Search Agency. “I was able to generate new PLA campaigns with over 1000 ad groups by product type in a matter of minutes -- not only saving us hours of time, but ensuring that our new customers see the most compelling ads that are relevant to them.”

Product Listing Ads optimization (beta)

Our Performance Bidding Suite offers the flexibility to optimize from a variety of signals and conversion sources including formula columns, external data (like calls), and Google Analytics goals; now, these same powerful bidding algorithms extend to your PLA campaigns. With more product-level information available, DoubleClick Search bid strategies can fine-tune bids on high-volume products to drive the most revenue, as well as handle the long-tail products that may receive less traffic.

And like with the rest of DoubleClick Search bid strategies, PLA bid strategies benefit from access to the same real-time data, with bids based on up-to-the-minute conversions to capture every new opportunity. This allows advertisers to respond to market changes at the drop of a hat -- even during the busiest holiday shopping days like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Valentine’s Day.

As the global leader in performance marketing, iProspect understands that speed is often the difference between seized and missed opportunities for retail clients. "Real-time is the future of retail, and DoubleClick is leading the way with the ability to optimize from real-time conversion information,” says Jeremy Hull, Director of Bought Media at iProspect. “With fast, accurate data, DoubleClick Search offers clients the tools they need to optimize throughout the day as traffic shifts occur.”

Just the beginning

This product-centric focus will continue to guide our feature development, helping us quickly innovate additional tools that will drive revenue for the ecommerce business. To learn more about upcoming DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite developments in easy workflows, insightful reporting, and new technology integrations and partnerships, stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog, or follow us on Google+.

“Making mobile work” for the advertising industry

Monday, February 10, 2014 | 7:30 AM

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertisers blog

Today, almost 50% of the US population has a smartphone* and one in five webpage views now occur on mobile devices.** Even though consumers have quickly incorporated these devices into their daily routines, advertisers haven’t necessarily followed suit. While a few of the savviest advertisers are taking advantage of the multiscreen opportunity, it’s time that the entire industry think critically about how to make mobile a first class citizen in their campaigns.

One key aspect of “making mobile work” is using mobile-compatible ad creative; HTML5 creative works on smartphones, tablets and desktops, allowing advertisers to build a single ad unit that can run across all screens. By using HTML5, advertisers open the door to cross-screen branding opportunities, as well as enable publishers to monetize their highly-trafficked mobile properties.

To call out this need, the IAB today published an open letter, signed by Google, 16 US publishers and six UK publishers, asking marketers to use HTML5 for their ad creative so that their campaigns can show up properly across screens.

This plea to marketers is the first step in a larger “Make Mobile Work” Initiative, in which the IAB, supported by Google and the other publishers, will provide additional resources to marketers to educate them on how to implement successful mobile campaigns.

By fostering the conversation and educating marketers, we hope the “Make Mobile Work” Initiative will invigorate the production of mobile-compatible campaigns, enable marketers to take advantage of the mobile opportunity, and provide publishers with the inventory they need to monetize their mobile properties.

Posted by Bonita Stewart, VP Americas Partner Business Solutions, Google

*source: eMarketer “US Mobile Phone Internet Users and Penetration, 2012-2017.”
**source: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-monthly-201012-201312