BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Google Wants To Own Your Mobile Moments

This article is more than 8 years old.

For a few months now, Google has been pushing a new vision of advertising in the mobile age: Advertisers, it says, must capture the "micro-moments" when peripatetic consumers land on an app, a video, a website or anywhere else.

That's increasingly important because despite today's "mobile first" mantra among tech companies and publishers alike, the fact remains that people use all kinds of devices throughout the day to find what they're looking for online--their phone, their tablet, a laptop, a desktop computer, even an Internet-connected TV. What's more, these people are often open to commercial messages for only short periods of time in just the right context: the age-old right-place, right-time, right-message but faster and more fleeting than ever.

And so Internet publishers and their advertisers need to reach not just faceless audiences but actual people, or at least detailed profiles attached semi-anonymously to real people. This "people-based marketing" is something Facebook has made huge coin on, and even companies such as Google are playing catch-up.

So today, Google is aiming to close some gaps in its powerful but (in the mobile age) rather less dominant advertising system. At its annual DoubleClick Leadership Summit for its biggest advertiser, agency and publisher partners, this year in Key Biscayne, Google is announcing several additions to its DoubleClick suite of advertising services that it says will help advertisers and publishers reach people in those micro-moments--and allow the results to be measured across all the devices they use with more precision. (You can watch the livestream of the keynotes starting at 9 a.m. Eastern.)

"The consumer day consists of a number of these micro-moments--checking box scores, shopping, watching video--some of which are relevant to advertising," Neal Mohan, Google's vice president of display and video advertising (who is not leaving the company for Dropbox, as rumored recently), said in an interview before the confab. "Advertisers need these tools" to craft and show messages in the right context of those moments, he said.

First, Google is bringing the ability to measure the results of ads across multiple devices a particular consumer may use to all its DoubleClick services for advertisers. For almost two years, the company has offered this kind of "cross-device measurement" inside its AdWords system, for its own ads on search pages and its display-ad network of 2 million partner websites. Google estimates the conversions from collected, anonymized data from a sample of users who have signed in to Google services.

Google claims that marketers are getting up to 16% more "conversions," adspeak for sales or leads, by tracking a consumer across devices rather than on just one. An iconic example is knowing that someone who saw an ad for running shoes while reading a news site at work bought it several days later on her tablet.

Now, with the ability to do this on other DoubleClick services besides AdWords, advertisers can measure those conversions across devices for all their ads on the Web, not just those for Google ads. It's a bit like Microsoft's old "embrace and extend" strategy but for DoubleClick, which is essentially an operating system for advertisers, so this kind of addition helps make DoubleClick all the more useful, and indispensable.

Second, in a play for more support from online publishers, Google is starting to support so-called native ads in DoubleClick. The term has grown more amorphous in meaning over time, but native ads can include everything from those that look like Facebook posts in its news feed to a video that plays between levels of a mobile game instead of a display ad plastered at the bottom while they're playing.

The problem with native ads is that they're all a little different on each site or app, making it hard for publishers to offer a standard format that advertisers can run in the many different places where they want to reach prospects. The new capability in DoubleClick allows publishers to create their own native ad formats more easily. And advertisers can use standardized native ad templates that adapt to each app or site so they can buy across many sites and apps more easily. "We're making it so native advertising is a first-class citizen in AdWords and DoubleClick," Mohan says.

Finally, Google is introducing a new way to automate ad placements, which it calls "programmatic guaranteed," that harks back to older methods of placing ads. Known more generally in the industry as "programmatic direct," it's a way for brands and publishers to do private deals for premium placements of ads--think the front page of YouTube or the New York Times' business pages--like they used to do over three-martini lunches in the Mad Men days.

But today, that can be done in the same kind of automated fashion they do with display ads bought and sold on ad networks and ad exchanges that have come to dominate online advertising. Unlike buying and selling done automatically on exchanges, these deals are done directly between agency or marketer and publisher, often at rates agreed upon in advance.

Mohan says Google's programmatic guaranteed buying will take as little as four steps to complete, compared with as many as 40 steps using more traditional methods, let alone the phone calls, emails, and even faxes still used by many agencies and advertisers today. Just as important, he says, Google's early experience with this indicates it can net ad rates 15 times the open market rate--answering a key objection of publishers to programmatic advertising, the lower prices such open auctions bring.

Like many online advertising companies, Google has been angling for years to get a greater share of brand advertising budgets that mostly get spent on television. They've been slow to get those dollars, however, because of TV's enduring power to reach mass audiences with engaging messages--namely, video. A program launched a year ago called Partner Select allows advertisers and publishers to do direct deals to run video ads on prime online real estate. Google said today that it would enable those deals to be arranged using DoubleClick.

Mohan says that he's hopeful that offering improved ways to reach people in receptive moments will be especially appealing to those big advertisers. That's because the more flexible messages in the right context at the right time could, in Google's view, prove as effective as TV ads at getting consumers to consider a brand and then pull the trigger on a purchase. "Context resonates with brand advertisers," Mohan said.

Eventually, that eternally springing hope might click with advertisers.

Follow me on LinkedInCheck out my website