Take a walk on the sell-side

In June, we announced that we are acquiring Admeld, a New York-based company that helps large publishers (also known as the “sell-side” by people, like me, who live and breathe display advertising) maximize their revenues from online advertising. We’re pleased that the U.S. Department of Justice has today cleared this deal. We’ll close the acquisition in the coming days and then start the real work—building improved products and services that help our publisher partners to make more informed decisions across all their ad space, and to grow their revenues.

The opportunity for major online publishers is huge...and growing. People are spending more and more time consuming online content across numerous devices, advertisers are running more online and mobile campaigns to reach them; and ads continue to get more engaging and relevant. This represents an unprecedented moment for publishers. We believe that improved technology and services can help publishers seize it and make online advertising work much better.

For now, it’s business as usual—Admeld’s products will operate separately to Google’s existing solutions (such as DoubleClick for Publishers and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange). But over time, there are opportunities to bring the best of both businesses together in a variety of ways; and to develop entirely new solutions, too.

As we do this, Admeld and Google are guided by some core shared beliefs:

• We want to give publishers more control over their ad space, and offer more flexible ways to manage and sell it. Publishers’ businesses should influence the technology they use; not the other way around
• We believe that publishers can make better decisions to maximize their revenues when they have better insights at their fingertips
• We envisage a much simpler system that enables publishers to manage and sell their ad space—across desktop, video, mobile, tablets and more

The content produced by Google’s and Admeld’s publisher partners is the lifeblood of the Internet. We can’t wait to start building the next generation of tools and services that will help them grow their businesses.

Update December 6, 2011: Our acquisition of Admeld has now closed.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display Advertising

(Cross-posted on the DoubleClick Publisher Blog)

America’s oldest flour company finds success on the web

From time to time we invite guests to post about items of interest and are pleased to have PJ Hamel, web producer for education and community at King Arthur Flour, join us today. In this post, PJ talks about the unlikely story of a small flour company based in Vermont that’s made it big with the help of the web. -Ed.

This is the story of a small, regional company that sells… flour. Yes, flour. It’s the story of how King Arthur Flour, a centuries-old company, used the web to grow into an international business, devoted to spreading the pure joy of baking throughout the world. Thanks to the web, it’s a story that will stretch far into the future.

Now America’s oldest flour company, King Arthur Flour began in 1790. George Washington had just become the United States’ first President. Despite the recent Revolution, Americans missed their English flour. So Henry Wood, a Boston entrepreneur, began to import flour from England. (Import from England—our arch-enemy? Even then, King Arthur Flour wasn’t afraid to make a bold move.)

Over the next two centuries King Arthur grew, in its own small way. The business gradually moved beyond the Boston area, and sold its flour throughout all of New England (we also moved our HQ to Vermont). In 1990, King Arthur launched The Baker’s Catalogue, a mail-order catalogue selling flour, tools and baking ingredients. Over the next five years, the catalogue helped introduce King Arthur Flour to markets outside of New England.

By 1996, King Arthur Flour was selling like hotcakes, with flour in supermarkets across the U.S. The World Wide Web was also growing in reach. That’s when we decided to make another bold move: taking our business online. We could see the power of the web—how it would enable us to reach customers and markets a small company like ours would never have had access to in the past.

King Arthur’s first site, in retrospect, was crudely designed and very, very basic. It featured five recipes, information about our flours and a bit of our history.

Since then, however, we’ve ramped up our presence on the web—and become tech savvy. Today, we’ve published more than 2,000 recipes online, all tested by bakers in our test kitchen. Over 75 percent of our catalogue sales now come in through our e-commerce site, which we built in 1999. We now connect directly with our customers through our blog, ratings and reviews and the social web.

Customers new and old find us via Google search, through both organic search results and targeted ads; we manage 2,000+ baking-related keywords on Google AdWords. Email marketing, and the spread of our recipes and content throughout the web, have established us as a true resource to millions of people who love to bake. In fact, during the peak of the holiday baking season, we receive almost 2 million site visits and 10 million pageviews per month.

And we’re always looking for new ways to inspire people to try baking. In the past year alone, we’ve implemented:

• a mobile- and tablet-optimized website
• the Google Catalogs app for iPad and Android
• SMS (text message) marketing
• QR codes on our flour bags and our catalogs
• Online baking contests
• Baking Hangouts on Google+ and free, live streamed baking classes

The energy we’ve put into our online presence has produced tremendous growth for the business. Our workforce has quintupled in size, and we’ve built a huge new warehouse to handle the enormous increase in orders and sales. Brand awareness (and flour sales) have reached new heights across the U.S.; indeed, around the world. And significant growth continues year after year, with no signs of slowing down.

King Arthur spent 205 years offline and 16 years (and counting) online. Thanks to the web, this little flour company in Vermont has truly become America’s baking resource. We’re a 221-year-old startup—looking to grow, and loving every minute of it.



Posted by PJ Hamel, Web Producer, Education and Community, King Arthur Flour

The Orabrush story: How a Utah man used YouTube to build a multi-million dollar business

From time to time, we post about how entrepreneurs have used Google tools to build successful businesses—both on and offline. In this post, you’ll read the story of how a Utah entrepreneur used YouTube to build a market for his tongue cleaner product, the Orabrush. Starting this month, CVS/pharmacy will begin carrying the product in stores across the United States. - Ed.

When Dr. Bob Wagstaff invented the Orabrush tongue cleaner, he tried all the traditional business strategies to sell his product. He invested $40,000 into a TV infomercial, approached retail shops to carry the Orabrush in stores and offered to sell his patent to other oral hygiene companies. None of it worked. The infomercial yielded only 100 orders, and people walked past the product in stores without a second glance.

As a final attempt to get his business off the ground, Dr. Wagstaff took the advice of Jeffrey Harmon, a local college student, and started marketing the tongue cleaners on YouTube. With a $500 budget, they produced and posted their first video introducing the Orabrush and offering the product for purchase online.



The quirky, commercial-style video explained that 90 percent of bad breath comes from bacteria on the tongue—hence the solution, the Orabrush tongue cleaner. Shot in a makeshift studio in the neighborhood pool hall (listen closely and you can hear the balls cracking in the background), the video went viral, rocketing to 16 million views.

Building a brand on YouTube
After the explosive reaction to their first video, Harmon took on the role as Chief Marketing Officer and began creating regular webisodes, introducing new characters like Morgan, the dirty tongue. Harmon then used YouTube video ads to reach more people and grow their fan base. The “Cure Bad Breath” videos built a loyal following, and their YouTube channel grew to nearly 40 million views.

After two years, Orabrush had sold more than a million tongue cleaners to people in 40+ countries. The Orabrush brand became so popular that local pharmacy store managers began contacting Orabrush directly, citing requests from customers who had heard about the brand online. This fall, Walmart began carrying the Orabrush tongue cleaners in its 3,500+ stores across the United States. And this week, CVS/pharmacy has added the Orabrush tongue cleaner to more than 7,000 stores across the country. That’s a lot of tongue cleaners!

These days Orabrush is taking a new approach to drive even more sales in stores. One of the first businesses to use YouTube TrueView video ads, Orabrush has created tailored endings to their videos that direct the viewer to the closest CVS/pharmacy carrying the Orabrush.

Elbow grease and a clever mascot
While Orabrush may have taken an unorthodox approach, their success came from old-fashioned elbow grease, perseverance and a bit of ingenuity.

“YouTube has helped normal people like Dr. Bob and a couple of college kids to take an idea, put it in front of people and get an honest response,” Harmon, now chief marketing officer at Orabrush, told us. “We can now play on the same terms as huge companies—and be successful.”

Hear more about Orabrush’s journey to success in this video:



Posted by Lane Shackleton, Product Manager, YouTube

Think Insights with Google is out of beta and packing a data punch

Quick pop quiz:

1. Based on search history, consumer demand for pretzels peaks in what month of the year?
2. How much (in $) does search add to the world’s GDP?
3. In 2011, what percent of people dreamed and brainstormed about their next vacation?
4. What percent of the daily queries on Google.com have never been seen before?

These are just a few questions that can be answered* on the new Think Insights with Google, our information and resource hub for marketers. The site is fresh out of beta and sporting a playful new look, helpful tools, more studies, the latest trends and exciting videos. We invite you to visit the site, take a look around and see what’s new.

If you only have a few minutes to spare, try playing with our new Real Time Insights Finder tool. With just a few clicks you can spot emerging trends and gain valuable consumer insights, all in real time. For example, the most popular video in common among males 25-34 in Italy and the U.S. is the Official Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 game trailer.

Although we’ve made a lot of enhancements to Think Insights based on initial user feedback, we’re always trying to iterate and improve. So please don’t be shy! Join the conversation by adding the Think with Google page on Google+ to one of your circles, or stay tuned for updates by subscribing to our newsletter.

Think Insights is forward-thinking and rooted in data. We hope you’ll use it as a one-stop shop for consumer trends, marketing insights and industry research.

*Answers to pop quiz (they can all be found on Think Insights in less than 60 seconds):

1. December, Real Time Insights Finder Tool
2. $540 billion directly to global GDP, The Impact of Internet Technologies: Search Study, Jul 2011
3. 50%, 5 Stages of Travel Interactive Infographic
4. 16%, Search Fact & Stat

Posted by Laura McClung, Ads Marketing

Increasing transparency and choice with ads on search and Gmail

Our advertising system is designed to show the right ad to the right person at the right time. Because ads should be just as useful as any other information on the web, we try to make them as relevant as possible for you. Over the coming weeks, we’re making improvements to provide greater transparency and choice regarding the ads you see on Google search and Gmail. Soon, you’ll be able to learn more about these ads by clicking the "Why these ads" link next to ads on Google search results and Gmail.

“Why these ads” gives you transparency
The perfect search ad answers your query and gets you what you’re looking for quickly. When you click the “Why these ads” link, you’ll find information about why you’re seeing a particular ad and how it’s personalized for you. If you’re searching for a local restaurant while you’re on vacation in Hawaii, you would see ads for restaurants that are nearby, rather than restaurants in your hometown. Or if you’re researching flat-panel televisions, and performing a series of similar searches in quick succession, you could see ads based on the query that you just entered, or based on a few recent and related queries within a single browser session. By considering the language you’re using, your geographic location and various other indications, we’re able to show you the best ads possible. We’ve been showing ads in this way for years as a way to help you quickly find what you're looking for.

Ads Preferences Manager gives you choice
You can also go to the Ads Preferences Manager to make changes that improve the ads that you're seeing, including blocking specific advertisers you’re not interested in or turning off ads personalization entirely (of course, you can change your mind at any time). Here’s a video from our lead software engineer, Diane Tang, with more background:



We regularly experiment with new ways to improve our ads to make them more relevant and to help marketers grow their businesses. When we run these experiments, we’ll continue to explain why the ads are showing when you click the “Why these ads” link.

As we’ve done with display ads, we’re committed to giving you notice and control over the ads that you see. We’re always working to deliver the perfect ad, and we know that it’s important to have a choice about the kinds of ads that are shown to you. If you don’t wish to see personalized ads, the choice is yours.

To find out more, visit the Inside AdWords blog and the Help Center.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, SVP, Advertising

Mo-mentum: what’s new with mobile search advertising

Mobile search helps people find what they need in a snap. Whether they’re choosing between two restaurants, shopping for a new watch, or buying a movie ticket, people make better decisions when they have access to more information. Search ads are information—answers—and on mobile devices, they’re able to connect people and businesses in new, useful and relevant ways.

Today, we’re unveiling new mobile search ad formats and some new details about the ways many different businesses are benefiting from mobile advertising.

Search ads, meet mobile apps
We’re bringing the worlds of search and apps together with mobile advertising in a few ways:

• Search ads in mobile apps: Lots of mobile apps give people the ability to search for information—like an app that lets you search for a restaurant nearby. Today we’re announcing Custom Search Ads for these apps. These ads provide useful and relevant answers, for people searching within a mobile app. Custom Search Ads will also help app developers earn more money to fund their apps and grow their businesses on mobile.
  
  
  
  Custom Search Ads in mobile apps
  
  
• Click to Download: Not surprisingly, many people use Google to search for information about mobile apps. This ad format helps consumers right when they're searching for information about an app, linking them directly to the App Store or Android Marketplace to download. We’ve recently enabled app developers to include app icons and information about the app in their ad unit so that people can make more informed decisions about whether they want to download the app.
• Mobile App Extensions: This new, beta ad unit enables businesses to use mobile search ads to direct someone to a page within a mobile app already installed on their phone. For example, if someone searches for sneakers on a mobile device, they might see an ad that takes them directly into a cool shopping app they’ve installed on their phone.

Local search ads—so hot right now
Building local context into mobile ads makes them more useful both for both consumers and businesses. Here are a few specific examples:

• Click to Call: We introduced these ads for high-end smartphones less than two years ago and they're now driving millions of calls per week to hundreds of thousands of businesses around the world. Click to call ads have been very effective in generating leads for businesses of all sizes, across many verticals—more people can call an Enterprise Rent-A-Car near them for rentals and more potential customers can connect with ADT Security for alarm system expertise, for example.
• Hyperlocal search ads: Launched a year ago, these search ads contain useful local information like phone numbers, driving directions, a number to click and call a business directly, and also show people how far they are from specific business locations. Roy’s Restaurants’ efforts with this format led to a 40 percent increase in call volume—and lots more full tables!
• Proximity as a factor in mobile search ads ranking: The distance between a person and an advertiser’s business location is now a factor in mobile search ads ranking. This means an ad for a business with a physical location close to to a consumer may perform better in AdWords—driving more mobile traffic at a lower cost. The feature will be effective only when consumers opt in to share their device location for mobile searches. It will make our hyperlocal format more useful for businesses and users—advertisers can get started with this by creating Location Extensions for their mobile campaigns. Particularly this holiday season, when consumers are using their mobile phones to find a nearby store for last minute gift purchases, this new feature will help connect customers with storefronts.
• Circulars: We began testing this new ad format with Best Buy and Macy’s earlier this month. When someone clicks on a search or display ad (on desktop, mobile or tablet devices), they may see these engaging ads which contain photos of relevant products and special offers. With a few simple clicks, people who are at their desk can email that circular to their mobile phones, and later walk into their local store, flash their phone and redeem the offers.

Macy’s Circular ads on mobile

The exciting thing for mobile users and businesses is that the possibilities for mobile search advertising are nearly endless. We’re looking forward to helping businesses and consumers alike take advantage of this brave new (mobile) world.

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Senior Product Manager, Mobile Ads

What makes an ad worth spreading? TED to recognize 10 prime examples

Today we bring you a guest post from Ronda Carnegie, Head of Global Partnerships at TED, a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Carnegie explains how TED and YouTube are teaming up for the second year to present a challenge called 'Ads Worth Spreading.'

Last year, TED kicked off a challenge to the advertising industry called Ads Worth Spreading, our global search for innovation, ingenuity and intelligence in advertising. The winners can be seen on the front page of Show & Tell, YouTube’s gallery of clever and effective creative marketing.

This year, we are delighted to announce that we’re now accepting entries to TED’s Ads Worth Spreading initiative through a channel on YouTube. The YouTube channel will help promote and showcase submissions, as well as spark conversation. Even if you’re not an advertiser, you can visit the channel and comment on your favorite campaigns. Which ads are thought-provoking, funny, honest, warm, informative or creatively brilliant? We want your feedback, and the channel is our medium for hearing your voice.

One of the most common questions we’re asked about Ads Worth Spreading is: “Why? Why does TED support an initiative around advertising?” TED’s Curator Chris Anderson explains it this way -- “TED’s mission is ‘ideas worth spreading.’ The dream behind this initiative is to find companies that want to communicate ideas to their consumers in the same way that TED wants to communicate with its audience. What makes ideas powerful is that they have a life of their own; an idea can reset someone’s worldview and even begin a domino effect as they pass it on to friends.”

TED will curate a final selection of ten campaigns from 2011. The results will be announced at the TED2012 conference in Long Beach, Calif. in March, and showcased on TED.com and YouTube.

If you’re an agency, brand, producer or individual who’s created an ad worth spreading this year, now is your chance to have your work recognized. Visit the Ads Worth Spreading channel and upload or add your YouTube video to the channel before December 31, 2011.

We’re looking forward to finding 10 new winners to celebrate.

Ronda Carnegie, Head of Global Partnerships at TED, recently watched "Matt Cutts: Try something new for 30 days."

Ads are just answers

When CafePress first started printing shirts in 1999, online retail was still a nascent industry and Google had yet to sell its first ad. Soon CafePress started selling products through search ads on Google, and their business took off. Today, CafePress hosts millions of shops online where customers can choose from more than 325 million products on nearly any topic, from wall art to phone cases.

Just as CafePress has broadened its offerings over time, we've also worked to improve and expand our search advertising products. What started as three lines of simple text has evolved into ads that are multimedia-rich, location-aware and socially-amplified.

Today CafePress uses Sitelinks to direct people to specific pages of their website, helping customers find what they’re looking for faster. On average, ads with three rows of links, or three-line Sitelinks, are more than 50 percent likely to get clicked on than ads without Sitelinks. More than 200,000 advertisers have joined CafePress in using Sitelinks in at least one campaign.

Monday at Advertising Week in New York City, I’ll be talking about how advertisers have been quick to adopt these new formats since we first began experimenting nearly two years ago. Businesses from the smallest retailer in Idaho to the largest Fortune 500 company in New York have seen how these innovations in search advertising can help grow successful businesses. In fact, roughly one-third of searches with ads show an enhanced ad format.

Here are a few ways these new ad formats are helping people find valuable information faster:

Visual. Not only can you find theater times for a new movie, you can watch the trailer directly in the ad. Media ads put the sight, sound and motion of video into search ads. With Product Ads, people can see an image, price and merchant name, providing a more visual shopping experience. Because this format is often so useful, people are twice as likely to click on a Product Ad as they are to click on a standard text ad in the same location, and today, hundreds of millions of products are available through Product Ads.

Local. More than 20 percent of desktop searches on Google are related to location. On mobile, this climbs to 40 percent. Location-aware search ads can help you find what you’re looking for more easily by putting thousands of local businesses on the map—literally. More than 270,000 of our advertisers use Location Extensions to attach a business address on at least one ad campaign, connecting more than 1.4 million locations in the U.S. via ads. And, with our mobile ad formats, not only can you call a restaurant directly from the ad, you can also find out how far away the restaurant is located and view a map with directions.

Social. With the +1 button people are able to find and recommend businesses with their friends. Since introducing the +1 button earlier this year, we now have more than 5 billion impressions on publisher sites a day. If you’re a business owner, the +1 button enables your customers to share your products and special offers easily with their network of friends, amplifying your existing marketing campaigns.

We're continuing to experiment with search ads to help businesses like CafePress grow by connecting with the right customers. Starting today, you can drop by our site to check out what’s new with search ads and learn about all the improvements we’ve been working on recently.



We’re developing ads that provide richer information to you because we believe that search ads should be both beautiful and informative, and as useful to you as an answer.

Posted by Nick Fox, Vice President of Product Management

New tools to help publishers maximize their revenue

What do a celebrity blog, a video interview on a newspaper site and a cable channel’s smartphone app have in common? They’re all supported by advertising...and they’re all examples of how the lines between media formats are blurring.

These increasingly blurry lines are not only resulting in highly engaging forms of content for users, but many new revenue opportunities for publishers. A wave of innovation and investment over the past several years has also created better performing ads, a larger pool of online advertisers, and new technologies to sell and manage ad space. Together, these trends are helping to spur increased investment in online advertising. We’ve seen this in our own Google Display Network: our publisher partners have seen spending across the Google Display Network from our largest 1,000 advertisers more than double in the last 12 months.

With all these new opportunities in mind, we’re introducing new tools for our publisher partners—in our ad serving technology (DoubleClick for Publishers) and in our ad exchange (DoubleClick Ad Exchange).

Video and mobile in DoubleClick for Publishers
Given the changes in the media landscape, it’s not surprising that we’ve seen incredible growth for both mobile and video ad formats over the past year: the number of video ads on the Google Display Network has increased 350 percent in the past 12 months, while AdMob, our mobile network, has grown by more than 200 percent.

Before now, it’s been difficult for publishers to manage all their video and mobile ad space from a single ad server—the platform publishers use to schedule, measure and run the ads they’ve sold on their sites. To solve this challenge, we’re rolling out new tools in our latest version of DoubleClick for Publishers that enable publishers to better manage video and mobile inventory. Publishers will be able to manage all of the ads they’re running—across all of their webpages, videos and mobile devices—from a single dashboard, and see which formats and channels are performing best for them.

A handful of publishers have already begun using the video feature and it appears to be performing well for them: we’ve seen 55 percent month-over-month growth in video ad volume in the last quarter. In other words, publishers are now able not only to produce more video content, but to make more money from it as well.

Direct Deals on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange
Another way publishers make money is to sell their advertising via online exchanges, like the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, where they can offer their ad space to a wide pool of competing ad buyers. This has already proven to generate substantially more revenue for publishers, and as a result we’ve seen significant growth in the number of trades on our exchange (158 percent year over year).

However, publishers have told us that they’d also like the option of making some of their ad space available only to certain buyers at a certain price—similar to how an art dealer might want to offer a painting first to certain clients before giving it to an auction house to sell. So we’re introducing Direct Deals on the Doubleclick Ad Exchange, which gives publishers the ability to make these “first look” offers. For example, using Direct Deals, a news publisher could set aside all of the ad space on their sports page and offer it first to a select group of buyers at a specific price, and then if those buyers pass on the offer, automatically place that inventory into the Ad Exchange’s auction.

Looking back at that blog, news site and app, we’d like them to have one more thing in common—being able to advantage of new opportunities to grow their businesses even further. These new tools, together with the other solutions we’re continuing to develop, are designed to help businesses like them—and all our publisher partners—do just that, and get the most out of today’s advertising landscape.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display Advertising

Update on YouTube’s Promoted Videos

Update: As of December 1st, 2011, you will start to see Promoted Videos referred to as TrueView in-search and TrueView in-display.

In November of 2008, we began to dabble with a feature that you and advertisers could use to make videos easier to find, since at the time you were uploading 13 hours of video every minute. The feature was Sponsored Videos, and we soon changed the name to what you know today as Promoted Videos. Flash forward to 2011—we're talking about 48 hours of video uploaded every minute, and Promoted Videos have now reached one billion views globally.

Whatever your search, companies and creators across all genres are using Promoted Videos to bring content to your attention. Maybe you’re a little self-conscious about your breath and Orabrush can help you out using Promoted Videos to demonstrate their tongue cleaners. Perhaps you’re a skater and Original Skateboards are bringing you the latest in longboarding technology. Or maybe you’re seeking the infinite grilling wisdom of the BBQGuys, and their Promoted Videos around the Superbowl can bring you the perfect smoked brisket recipes.



If you're interested in learning more about Promoted Videos, we recently announced some updates so hop on over to the Inside AdWords blog for the full details.

Jonathan Goldman, YouTube Software Engineer, recently watched “The Grand Rapids Lip Dub (New World Record).”