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MALE SPEAKER: So no December conference would be complete
without some resolutions for next year.
And our show is no different.
Up next, five New Year's resolutions for display
advertisers.
I'd like to invite up Google's Dan Taylor, the head of the
Google Display Network.
Dan.
DAN TAYLOR: Hi, everybody.
Thanks for having me in today.
So I'm going to leapfrog the most pressing holiday right in
front of us and jump right to New Years.
And I really wanted to use my time here today to talk about
five New Year's resolutions that we're thinking about as
we get into 2012.
The resolutions I'm going to suggest ARE actually informed
by the things that ad agencies spend a lot of time on, and
that we spend a lot of time on as well at Google.
Online display.
76% of you, according to strata survey, are doing
online display as part of their day, more
than anything else.
The other things that we're going to talk a lot about in
terms of online display is how to integrate social, video,
and mobile into that.
So increasingly we're seeing that those different
strategies are not independent of each other.
And the degree which we can leverage one off of another is
really important.
So it's an exciting time for display advertising for me.
I'm sure it is for you as well.
So last year, our chairman Eric Schmidt made a bold
prediction that within the next 10 years, we're going to
be a $200 billion industry.
I consider that job security for everyone in the room
because it's a very fast growing business.
And I think that what we really need to do to make that
happen is to get a lot further along than where we are today.
I think in order for display to get to that size, we need
to really concretely make display and digital work for
both brand and direct response objectives.
I think we've done a great job thus far with direct response.
We have a lot more things to prove with regard to the brand
space and how we incorporate things like social and video.
So with that in mind, the five resolutions that we're going
to talk about today are--
I'll be strategic in how I use remarketing or retargeting.
I'm going to fuse my social media with display.
I'll endeavor to use video to its fullest potential online.
I'll go mobile with my display campaigns.
And sort of the uber resolution on top of it, is go
with the belief when you're doing your planning, your
buying, and your executing, your optimization, that there
is a perfect ad for everyone.
And we need to figure that out.
So first, I'll be more strategic in how I use
remarketing.
Looking at the survey results and just talking with a lot of
agency partners day to day, we manage a lot of remarketing
campaigns inside of this room.
Obviously, it's a key strategy for reaching bottom level,
sort of lower funnel customers, to
try and convert them.
We've come to their site, but maybe not taken
the required action.
But I think that where we really need to be more
strategic with regard to our remarketing is how we move
beyond that simple a to b.
Let's go ahead and recapture and reengage those customers
who came to our site.
And let's do it a little bit more intelligently.
The example that's shown up on the screen is one of the
marketers that we work with quite a bit, Blue Nile.
And essentially what we've done in this case is we would
take a remarketing list of someone that had maybe been to
Blue Nile's website but didn't make a purchase or didn't get
far enough along into their inquiry.
And we layered on some demographic targeting
right on top of it.
And so really doing something just as simple as adding
another piece of audience information to a remarketing
campaign can yield tremendous results, again getting closer
to that perfect ad for everyone.
In this case and several like it, we saw an increase
clickthrough rates of almost 300%, just based on tailoring
demographics to the creative message.
Taking that a step further, one of the things we do
especially within the retail vertical is we spend a lot of
time working with marketers to deploy, remarketing pixels
across their site, passing through dynamic values, and
then also establishing a feed, so that if they are selling
something online, we can pull product information directly
into the ad in real time.
Again, if we can show something much more relevant
for each individual user, we'll be that much better off
as marketers in trying to deliver a sale when we're
doing a display campaign.
So in this example, fragrance.net on the left hand
side is a pretty generic ad, about straight up discounts,
70% off, click here to see more, et cetera.
And we can show that let's say to someone who visited the
home page and left.
Or you can just do that in terms of a general
conceptually targeted campaign.
What we've done in other instances is if they've
shopped down and drilled down into individual specific
product level pages, we can pull exactly the product that
they viewed in addition to a few others that we know that
people who viewed that product would have a propensity to
look at or purchase in the future, and really kind of
tailor that message even further.
We're seeing tremendous results.
And Google obviously isn't the only one
doing that in the space.
There are several really excellent players in the space
that are employing dynamic creative and pulling that into
the message based on remarketing signals.
Expanding the sources of your remarketing list. Right?
So especially, if you're not necessarily a high traffic
site, but you want to be able to go out and find people who
are engaging with your brand elsewhere, you can work with
the different publishers to have a collection point for
data as well.
So in the example of YouTube, which is a publisher that we
own and operate, you're able to gather a remarketing list
of users that have visited your home page-- our homepage
and interacted with your ad.
Or visited the landing page of your campaign.
And so really sort of tailoring different sources
for your remarketing is a great way to sort of increase
the amount of people that you can put into your lower funnel
marketing techniques.
So the next resolution is about using video to its
fullest potential.
Now, obviously working side by side with YouTube and with
DoubleClick, we've done a lot with regard to the
video in the space.
And we see it only increasing it more as the year goes on.
So
Using video to its fullest, I think really requires that I
have a good understanding of YouTube as a
platform for brands.
A good place to start here is something that we just
unveiled late last month, which is the new YouTube user
experience.
It's all sort of anchored around the homepage right now.
But I think the big change with regard to what's happened
in previous iterations of the home page that we are
centering it around channels.
And we're centering it around social.
So you don't necessarily get a great--
looks blurry for me.
But over on the left hand side, we're now orienting the
entire website around channels.
And so you'll be able to see any video--
any YouTube video that's been shared with you, whether it be
on Twitter or on Facebook or on Google Plus or people that
you subscribe to or friends that you have on YouTube
connected, what videos that they're viewing and looking at
and sharing with you.
And it really enables you to take sharing a video to the
next level.
We've also reoriented around our brand channel.
So if your brand has a presence on YouTube, I
encourage you to go back in, have a look at it, and see how
you can recreate and orient a much more continual and
pleasant viewing experience that sort of takes a lean back
posture, as opposed to someone hunting and finding individual
links around the web.
I think YouTube is built around sharing individual
video links.
And what we're really seeing is that people are spending
more and more time watching multiple videos.
And so a lot of our efforts are centered around presenting
the right videos, whether they're focused on looking at
a brand or whether they're focused on looking at how to
videos or just straight up entertainment.
We've also apply that to the practice of advertising.
How can we use video to more of a full extent from an
advertiser's perspective?
And one of the things that we're really proud of this
year is that we deployed the TrueView suite of video ad
formats, which is available on YouTube and then also all the
publishers across our network.
And it really allows an advertiser, an agency, to
create video ads in minutes, have them distributed across
the web in contextually your audience-specific formats, and
pay only for what's being viewed.
And what we've really found over the course of this year
is that people are choosing to view videos.
And it's not just about delivering
the impression anymore.
And we're seeing much more engagement, much more repeat
visitation, et cetera as a result of this format.
And so I think that enabling that to be easy for you to
spread your video assets is going to be really important
as we move forward.
Taking that to the next step.
Even more creative flexibility with regard to rich media,
including video, including interactive elements to your
advertising, is increasingly important.
And I think taking advantage of rich media is really going
to help with that brand side of the equation, really
engaging with audiences more as opposed to simple
FlashMedia assets.
Just as an example of that, using rich media and video,
we're seeing, drives tremendously, a higher brand
impact, brand recall, engagement with the ad, than
simple Flash alone.
Which is rather intuitive, but I still don't think that as an
industry, we're doing enough in rich media today to really
establish digital as a place for brands.
I'll fuse social media with display.
So that's sort of the next resolution there.
And I think that every day we're all doing that with
regard to our media planning and how are trying to execute
campaign, trying to figure out let's get the straight up
display going, and let's figure out how to get social
really involved in that.
And I'm really focused here not on having a social
strategy and a display strategy, but how those two
are going to fit together.
So I'll talk a little bit about Google Plus, since
that's something that we debuted earlier this year.
And just last month, we launched
Google Plus for Business.
And this is the ability for a business to create a branded
page on Google Plus in addition to their Facebook,
and their Twitter, and also their own website environment.
And really the opportunity with regard to creating a
Google Plus page for your business is it helps link all
of the other ways that our users are interacting with
Google Plus.
It integrates with our search results.
It integrates with our display ads.
It integrates with mobile campaigns and also websites.
And so really what we're really trying to create with
our users, and also the advertisers and publishers as
well, is the ability to engage that social sharing that's
going on between your circle of friends and circle of
connections, so you can see what people are engaging with
and sharing.
So if someone visits Macy's page on Google Plus, and +1's
it, which is sort of like a vote of confidence or a like,
we'll see that.
When someone does a search for clothing and Macy's shows up
in the results, we can see that Mary also +1'ed this.
And adding that sort of social layer into our search results
is really important to us.
On top of that, there's some--
publishers have-- or advertisers have been doing
this for quite some time, with regard to how they can
integrate social into their display campaigns.
One primary way is using the social media link as the
primary destination, as Budweiser did on YouTube.
A second way is to make a social media opportunity
within the added sell.
So the example that we have here is Bacardi, you can write
a toast, and then you would hit the Make the Toast button.
And inside the rich media ad, you get a little bit of an
experience there.
But then that would also be shared
right directly on Facebook.
And so it's really kind of a great way to integrate rich
media assets along with the social recommendation.
The third way, and this is something that we've been
doing on the Google display network for the back half of
this year, is we've started to overlay among all of our
display ads the ability to include a +1 Link.
And so this is primarily for users who are logged in to
Google Plus, and have had friends who have +1 this
advertiser.
It wouldn't necessarily have to be the ad.
It could be they could +1 the Google+ page.
They could have +1 the website, if they had it
embedded on the site.
And really again, just adds that social recommendation
layer on top of a traditional display asset.
And we've seen interaction rates, when we've concluded
this in the ad, through the roof as a result.
And then finally, something that we've also experimented
with over the course of this year, and encourage you to do,
is to have more dialogue within the context of an ad.
So something that we did at a conference earlier this year
was talk about something that we were doing live, and then
as you could see the advertising, you could reply
in real time to our @Google display handle, and really
have a one-to-one dialogue with consumers.
It works especially well in the B2B space.
So the fourth, I will go mobile
with my display campaign.
So I've been at Google for about 5 and 1/2 years.
And for many years, we're saying OK, this is going to be
the year of mobile.
I think actually 2011 was the year of mobile in many ways.
And I think that one of the things that we need to make
sure happens is that it's also the year of mobile
advertising.
And 2012 continues to be so.
This is sort of a quick look at how we're seeing mobile
usage across platforms. So it follows a pretty predictable
pattern, where usage on smartphones and usage on
tablet devices spikes in the evening, where those are
really like your constant and your entertainment companion.
Whereas during the day, it's primarily focused on desktop,
your administrative work horse when you're at work.
I think that a good way to look at this is your users are
not siloed into using one screen.
And to the degree that you can make that happen across
screens as well, we shouldn't be siloing our marketing
campaigns either.
And we know that this works.
So this is a sample study we did with Volvo recently where
we compared their TV-only executions against combining
TV with PC, video, phone video, and tablet video.
So take those creative assets that you're using on
television and deploy them across screens.
And among those audiences, we saw a 50% lift in brand recall
as a result.
So again, a lot of that is based on frequency.
But the degree you can break down the barriers between the
different screens that you're using to execute your
advertising campaigns, I think will be extremely important as
more and more usage takes place on screens.
We try to make that as easy as possible with regard to the
Google Display Network and on YouTube.
We obviously have the ability to target based on whether
you're using a smartphone, whether you're based on using
a tablet, time of day, what kind of provider you're using,
whether it's iOS or Android, carrier specific targeting if
you want to promote only to Verizon or Sprint users.
We can do contextual, time of day, and obviously audience
targeting in much of the same ways that you've become
accustomed to on desktop.
We take that a bit further with regard to smartphones
specifically.
One of the things we've seen at Google is that several, the
majority, of our queries that take place on
mobile are geo related.
And so the degree that we can bring together what is unique
to the mobile device and integrate that into your
mobile advertising campaign is really important.
So we focus that obviously on video.
I think is an Urban Spoon app that we're showing here, where
you shake to find a recommendation.
Click to Call, Click to Map, making sure that we know that
users are basically out and about with their mobile phones
and their geographic location really matters when they're
going to the web.
So the final resolution really takes into account all four.
And I think it's really around finding the perfect
ad for every one.
So Neil Mohan, the director of our display advertising
platforms across Google, has really rallied all of our
product and development teams around this.
And it's really a simple formula that we put together.
And it's about reaching the right person, which you can do
through audience targeting, reaching them at the right
time, which we can do with context and based on the
time-- not just time of day, but also the types of websites
or the types of environments or even the types of devices
that they're on--
and then finally with the right message.
And we talked a little bit about tailoring based on
remarketing signals, or tailoring based on audience
demographics.
And what we see is that we have developed this very
simple message with very sophisticated technology to be
able to really have much more one-to-one specific tailored
marketing campaigns that you'll work with for each
individual.
So to wrap it up, we wanted to focus again.
Five resolutions for 2012.
First, be strategic in how you use remarketing.
Second, fuse social media with display.
Third, use video to its fullest potential.
Four, go mobile with your display advertising campaigns.
And finally endeavor to find a perfect ad for everyone when
you're doing your planning, buying and optimizing.
And I think I have a couple minutes left for questions if
there's any.
Yes, sir?
AUDIENCE: You mentioned that you can do audience buying on
mobile the same way that you're going to do it on the
web as display.
How are you executing that today, if you're not dealing
with the same cookies across devices?
DAN TAYLOR: Yes.
So the question is around how are we executing mobile
audience buying campaigns, since the process of
collecting data and figuring out what those audiences are
are not the same.
It's a problem we're actively trying to solve right now.
They are a bit siloed, with regard to remarketing and
audience-specific training.
We're not able to reconcile a desktop cookie
with a mobile cookie.
But it's something we're actively focused on improving.
AUDIENCE: So are you doing that within just the mobile
channel today, whether it's retargeting on mobile or
audience within mobile, forgetting about trying to
reconcile with the desktop user?
DAN TAYLOR: Well, we're not forgetting about it, but we
haven't achieved it yet.
So yeah, you can execute a remarketing campaign that
works across mobile devices as well as desktops, but it
doesn't necessarily take into account duplication.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
DAN TAYLOR: Yep.
Yes, sir?
AUDIENCE: So when it comes to buying through audience and
bypassing publishers and the content, do you fear that to
some extent, it's sort of like what we saw in the mortgage
industry, where you bundled a bunch of crappy mortgages and
passed it off as high quality assets?
Like don't you need still to put a bit more focus on the
publishers and the content, and not just focus solely on
audience, because it seems like it's
hard to control quality?
DAN TAYLOR: Yeah, we do.
So the question was around focusing exclusively on
audience, don't we sacrifice the quality content during
that process, where if we're only focusing on audience,
we're not conscious of the environment.
One of the things that we did earlier this year at Ad Tech
is we did a whole presentation and analysis around where we
really think that display campaigns are working best are
when we combine both audience and contextual.
And I think that goes back to finding the right person, but
also the right time.
And within the right time, we also include context there.
So I'm a huge believer in contextual targeting, and
being in the right environment to reach someone.
So I'm not sure if that answers your question
specifically, but yeah, audience targeting in a vacuum
is obviously lacking.
And what we will often see is that the higher quality
publishers will also, when targeted, with an audience,
layer on top of it are also the ones that perform well.
So we do endeavor to head towards that direction.
And I also think that the publishers have been very
pleased about with regard to the revenue that we bring to
them as partners, when we are utilizing audience targeting.
Because, in many ways, they're that much closer to a lower
funnel purchase, and that much more valuable to the
advertisers in place.
We've also been focused on making those audience
targeting tools available to our publishers through DFP, so
they can in turn package up their own audience buying
within their direct selling efforts.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Melinda Gibson.
I'm actually with Digiday.
That was a really great overview of the
Google brand strategy.
The piece that I'm grappling with to understand a little
bit more than all of the other pieces is how +1 would work
for a brand in the context of these other things that
they're doing?
Can you give us a best practice concept for how you
would go into +1?
I mean you have to have a separate database.
You're running a campaign that is pitching people
to Google Plus you.
I mean, how would that work?
Because I've never seen it yet.
DAN TAYLOR: So the question is what's the best practice in
utilizing Google+ for brands.
And I think it's fair to say that we're
still learning as well.
One of the things that we just launched last month is we're
partnering with about six different social media
providers that essentially-- you know, like Buddy Media and
the like, where they figure out the best way to deploy
social across platforms.
And I think right now that Google Plus--
the way that we're looking at it initially is a way for all
of Google's products to work more beautifully
together for our users.
So we want someone if they're doing a search to have their
results informed by their social circles.
We want someone in Gmail to be able to share with their
social circles when they get an email from someone that's
about a party this Saturday.
With regard to brands, I think in these early stages, as
you're developing your own media strategy, I think it's
important to have Google Plus as one of those strategies.
But with regard to what are the best practices that have
developed there, I think to the degree in which you can
include social into your marketing
efforts is really important.
I know that managing multiple destinations--
and maybe that is the question.
Is it like should we have a separate destination for it?
Should we embed it in our site?
Those sorts of things.
I think that as the Google Plus user base continues to
develop, we'll be able to iterate on that
in interesting ways.
Anyone else?
OK, great.
Well, Happy New Year.
Keep those resolutions.
Thanks.