Google’s DoubleClick announced its new vertical network solution – DoubleClick Network Builder – for large publishers who are using Dart For Publishers (DFP) and looking to juice revenues, leverage their brand name and harness the Long Tail.
The “Help” section gives us the lowdown on the new GOOG tool:
“In addition to providing network users with the tools to create and maintain their own networks, DNB (DoubleClick Network Builder) also contains a portal for you as a partner to add and maintain your own information for sites within the network. The Partner Portal feature enables partners belonging to a network to maintain their own users, manage their ad slots, and view reports detailing both the performance and financial data for their sites.”
Though the reporting function appears to be a nice-to-have feature along with integration into DFP (Google’s steely grasp on the publisher tightens!), it would be great to see some sort of optimization element in the product where performance is measured and, consequently, modifies campaign budgets on the fly depending on yield opportunity whether for the network owner or for its partner sites.
Rany Ng, senior product manager for DoubleClick told MediaPost that “The idea is to provide a ‘one-stop shop for advertisers.'” Hmmm… gonna take a lot more than this to become a one-stop shop.
Of course, what would be even better is if the product optimized for the advertiser where, for example, advertisers could move media buys out on specific, smaller partner sites based on performance – but that’s where the ad exchange model will need to come to the rescue as advertisers use overlays such as Media Math or Invite Media to buy on exchanges across thousands of sites with relevant audiences. For Google, optimization would involve data capture, which might provide near term “privacy” complications for its long term exchange goals.
Ad Exchange Next?
In the past year it appears that the Google product pipeline is inching toward an ad exchange end game as it concentrates on getting publishers into “line” with new products. Last year, Google released the Google Ad Manager which allows publishers to manage ad serving. Today, it’s DoubleClick Network Builder.
Is the Google Ad Exchange next – as an enhanced DoubleClick AdX? – or as an AdSense/AdWords combo on exchange-roids?
