300 ad execs attend Google ThinkDisplay at MCA

Google ismaking a play for a bigger slice of the $17bn global display advertising marketwith a range of new tools offering asingle solution for planning, creating, serving, and measuring theironline ad campaigns. About 300 Australian and New Zealand online advertisingexecutives gathered at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Monday afternoon tohear the strategy outlined at Think Display, Google Australia’s displayads summit.

Google servesdisplay ads across the Google Content Network, which contains over a millionwebsites, as well as a variety of display ad formats on YouTube such asvideos, images and flash ads. Following its acquisition of DoubleClick,Google also provides ad serving technology to publishers, agencies andadvertisers, which is the infrastructure that enables billions of ads to beserved each day across the web.

BradBender, director of product management, said Australians spend one-third of their media time online but only one-sixthof marketing dollars was spent online.  Last SeptemberGoogle launched DoubleClick Ad Exchange in the US and Europe and expects tohave it available in Australia by the end of the year. It workslike a stock exchange with prices for display ads and ad space are set in areal-time auction, with advertisers only paying what they want for any givenimpression.

“We’realready starting to see it take off in the US and the volume of transactions isgrowing rapidly. In fact, the Ad Exchange already conducts more transactionsevery day than all the stock and bond trading floors on all the world’sexchanges combined – that is billions of transactions,” said Bender. “Theaverage price a publisher receives for ad space sold through the Ad Exchange isover 130 per cent higher than the average price of ad space sold directly to adnetworks.”

In March,Google launched a tool called remarketing, which allows advertisers to targettheir ads by audience, as well as by context, geography, and website category.It’s also a way for advertisers to interact with potential customers that havevisited their website as they browse sites on the Google Content Network. Thiswas used by Kogan, an online electronics retailer here in Australia, to reach usersthat had previously browsed their site with a Mother’s Day promotion. Theycreated a remarketing campaign to reach these users as they visited other sitesacross the Google Content Network. The campaign, which ran for a month, achievedclick-through-rates three times the industry average for traditional bannerads.