Be among the first to see what we’ve been working on here at Google. Tune into the live stream of Google I/O 2012 to see the kickoff keynote on June 27th at 9:30am PST at http://g.co/ioLIVE2012.

We are excited to share the live stream from Google I/O, our annual developer conference where we release our newest innovations in web, mobile and social technologies. Google I/O features a keynote with product announcements, demos and a few Easter Egg surprises that’s a must-see for anyone who wants to stay on top of the latest technology.

Watch last year’s keynote and the highlights video to get a sense of what’s coming. And mark your calendars because you can watch all of I/O at http://g.co/ioLIVE2012 and read about it as Christian Haas, Executive Creative Director at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners live blogs from the floor of I/O at the Moscone Center on Google Creative Sandbox.

Last week, at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the global advertising community gathered to celebrate and honor the most inspiring creative work from around the world. We are committed to working with our agency partners to enable and inspire this continued creative magic. Below are a few initiatives and projects that we discussed last week, designed to do just that: 

• Project Re: Brief, the film: Earlier this year, we kicked off Project Re: Brief, our new experiment to re-imagine the future of advertising by taking some cues from its storied past. We’ve brought four of the most loved campaigns of the ‘60s and ‘70s -- Coca-Cola’s “Hilltop,” Volvo’s “Drive it like you hate it,” Avis’ “We try harder,” and Alka-Seltzer’s “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” -- back to life, this time built from the ground up for the digital age, with the partnership of the the advertising legends that originated them. But we think the ads themselves are only part of the story. Behind the scenes of our “Project,” we saw an amazing journey unfold as traditional, classically trained advertising creatives came together with technologists for the first time to collectively push the bounds of what online advertising can be. This journey is captured in “Project Re: Brief: A Film About Re-Imagining Advertising,” which we premiered at Cannes, and made widely available today on YouTube.
  
• The Google+ Winners Circle: In the same spirit of helping share inspiration from some of the world’s best advertising creatives, we're also creating the Google+ “Winners Circle.” This will be a new circle of 50 of the industry’s most honored creatives so that everyone in the industry can meet the people behind the amazing work we’re here to celebrate and see what makes them tick.
  
• Agency Edge, our refreshed training platform for agencies: One of the top requests we get from our agency partners is for more tips and training to help get the most out of the web’s myriad of marketing tools. We initially addressed this several years ago with the launch of AgencyLand, an educational platform designed specifically for our agency partners. But in the years since, the agency landscape, the range of tools available and in fact, the entire ecosystem, have shifted dramatically. So to meet the new and quickly evolving needs of today’s agencies, we unveiled Agency Edge, a place where agencies can get on-demand training, collateral and benchmark data to better serve their clients. 

Cannes is one of my favorite events of the year, precisely because of the amazing mix of innovation and creativity on display. We think, though, that even more dazzling projects lay just over the horizon. Through initiatives like these, we hope to help bring them into view. 


Posted by Torrence Boone, Managing Director, Agency Business Development

It’s no secret that users are spending more and more time on their mobile and tablet devices, and the trend will continue to scale. Mobile devices drive 10% of total Internet traffic, up from 4% just 18 months ago, and an astounding 29% of U.S. adults now have a tablet or e-reader -- up from 2% three years ago. This opens up many new opportunities for advertisers to connect with consumers. However, with this new opportunity comes new challenges to create rich ad experiences that engage and delight viewers; experiences that leverage unique features of the devices and environment in which they’re seen.

To see what mobile ads of tomorrow will look like, we’ve re-imagined four iconic ads from the 1960s and 70s in Project Re: Brief, an experiment we launched earlier this year. Today we’re releasing the Android app for Project Re: Brief, which lets you play with these new ads on your phone and tablet devices. Built on the latest platform for mobile rich media, these ads try to push the boundaries of what can be done with today’s technology.

Coca-Cola: “I’d like to buy the world a Coke.” (mobile ad)
The mobile ad lets you send a free Coke with a text message to a stranger across the world, who can receive it on special vending machines. The recipient can then record a message from the machine and send it right back to your phone. The ad uses the phone’s GPS location to show a customized video of your message flying through clouds, Google Maps and StreetView images.

Volvo: “Drive it like you hate it.” (tablet ad)
This ad lets you follow the unique story of Irv Gordon, a loyal Volvo owner who's on his way to putting three million miles on his 1966 P1800s. You can watch relevant videos and hear audio clips about stories from his journey so far, follow his Google+ feed, see his mileage and location in real-time, and explore features of the latest Volvo cars. The ad shows different copy and video based on the tablet app in which it is seen. Simply swipe the screen left or right to see how the ad behaves in different apps.

Alka-Seltzer: “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.” (mobile ad)
You can follow Ralph on the day “he ate the whole thing” through a series of 1970’s sitcom-like episodes that are customized to the viewer based on the device, app, time, weather and location. From the ad settings menu, you can select various options to see how a video might be customized to a viewer based on this information. Then, simply tap the display ad to launch the customized video.

Avis: “We try harder.” (tablet ad)
A user can write about his or her experiences with Avis rental cars in natural language, i.e. spoken English, provide some details about the rental car, and within seconds, his or her story is turned into a one-of-a-kind film, which can be shared on the web - all within the ad. The pre-roll animation of the ad changes based on the app. Swipe the screen left or right to see how the animation varies in different apps.

If you don’t have an Android device, you can play with the desktop versions of these ads on projectrebrief.com, and watch videos of the mobile versions. We’re also working hard on an app for your iOS devices.

These are just some examples of what can be done with mobile ads, when you marry big creative ideas with the latest technology platforms. We hope they inspire the advertising community to create even more beautiful mobile experiences.

Posted by Aman Govil, Product Marketing Manager, Display Marketing

Join us on Tues, June 19th at 4pm ET/1pm PT, for a 45 minute LIVE conversation with Wook Chung and Nate Racklyeft of Google's Mobile Product Team!

Wook and Nate will discuss the key technology issues around Mobile and strategies for creatives to drive success now.

Creatives worldwide can join Hangout on Air: youtube.com/creativesandbox

There's a special opportunity for a maximum of 8 leading creative agencies who have done work in Mobile or are planning a special push in the arena, to reserve a spot on screen in the Hangout with Wook and Nate, available on a first come basis. Contact Jeff Sundheim to check availability.



Posted by Jeff Sundheim, Creative Platform Strategies

One of the requests we get most often from our agency partners is for tools that help them put our tools into action to make the web work for them. We listened, and are today introducing Agency Edge, our new home for agency learning online.

Agency Edge is for agency professionals to get on-demand training, sales collateral, and benchmark data to better serve their clients. Agencies can fully leverage the platform as their own by customizing Google and agency materials into “course packs” and assigning them to employees for a globally scalable training platform.



We have consolidated and refreshed agency-specialized content from multiple Google content portals, which are now available for on-demand self service, including: Search, Display, Mobile, YouTube, Think Insights, Google Research, Learn with Google, and Engage content.

Agency Edge is available in English today, with more language support coming. Contact your Google rep for more info about how to get set up!

Posted by the Agency Edge team

When H&M produces hot new collections, the Swedish fashion retailer knows just how to get the word out. With around 2,500 stores spread across 44 markets, not only does the company engage in traditional forms of marketing, but also integrates its social media with other communication activities. An early adopter of Google+, today H&M has more fans on the platform than any other retail brand – over 940,000 followers.

Unique, exclusive content wins followers
Instead of replicating the experience of shopping in the store or on the website, their page supplies a steady stream of interactive content tailored specifically to the Google+ audience. H&M publishes unique coverage, including a captivating range of exclusive collection previews, contests and behind the scenes footage, such as a Vogue editor preparing for an H&M photo shoot. Their most popular posts are the ones for their top collections with Beckham, Versace and Marni.

Using ripples to understand trendsetting
H&M has a very high rate of shared posts. Their team can “View Ripples” to see who has shared content and what has been said. In this way, the ripples feature lets H&M see how posts spread across Google+, who’s sharing and resharing the content and whose opinions matter. The feature can be used to identify influencers and see how communities form around content. The larger the circles in ripples, the larger the reach they might have.

Social extensions to integrate their social strategy into search
Another feature H&M uses are social extensions in its AdWords advertising. Social extensions help the company obtain a higher number of brand recommendations, +1’s and direct traffic to their Google+ page, effectively increasing their number of followers by doing so. On average H&M has achieved a 22% CTR uplift on all their AdWords campaigns thanks to implementing social extensions.

It’s all adding up...

All of this has contributed in great levels of engagement from fans with the following results so far: 

• Average number of +1’s per post: 72 
• Average number of reshares per post: 11 
• Average number of comments per post: 22

To learn more about H&M’s inspirational example, read the full case study here.

Posted by Natalia Cano, PMM Google+ for Businesses

Today we’re kicking off a partnership with GroupM Next, the innovation unit of GroupM, called Spark, a series of custom, co-programmed events focused on delivering unique education and innovation experiences for brands – specifically, clients of GroupM media agencies. We created this initiative together to cultivate education and dialogue for verticals that are under-represented in the broader digital media space in terms of data, research and opportunity. This partnership is the first of its kind for both Google and GroupM, in that it’s a series dedicated to client-focused education and is designed to address topics that directly impact brand opportunity and performance.

The first event, Spark: CPG, is taking place this afternoon in New York with nine leading CPG companies in attendance. In addition to discussions led by Google and GroupM Next execs, Kantar, Buzzfeed and Amazon are joining us as we, collectively as marketers, share insights, research and digital opportunities brands in the consumer packaged goods category can take advantage of.

A quick rundown of discussions on the docket at Spark: CPG in the context of marketing for CPG brands includes:

• Making the web work for CPG brands – our take on how the consumer, and world around us, has changed
• The digital enhanced path, exploring the ever-changing connection between consumers and brands and opportunities that exist through understanding new consumer behaviors and the role of technology
• Marketing and messaging innovation across multiple screens
• The power of video and building brands with the power of sight, sound and motion
• Developing ‘content gifts’ in the social world and capturing opportunities by engaging your brand’s super sharers
• How mobile commerce can connect shoppers to the places and CPG products they love
• Fostering fluid innovation across marketing and process to enable agencies and brands to meet the pace of change in consumer dynamics and technology

In most cases, Spark will provide brands with insights and education they wouldn’t have access to elsewhere. Additionally, through ongoing collaboration between our companies, GroupM agencies and clients, we’ll identify areas of interest and need for brands across digital media, and foster opportunities as they emerge.

Today, at the DoubleClick Insights conference, we’re unveiling DoubleClick Digital Marketing: the first modern ad platform built for the modern digital world. The improvements we’re announcing today represent the biggest ever overhaul of our DoubleClick ad platform and are the result of a great deal of hard work over the last few years. This fully integrated, unified platform and its components will be rolling out to partners over the coming months.

You can click here to watch a livestream of the event:



A platform for today
Today’s consumers work, play and share, moving seamlessly between formats and devices. However, for agencies and advertisers, the process of connecting with consumers is anything but seamless. It’s hard to reach the right audience at the right moment with the right message when every channel requires its own system and you’re patching together, and switching, between ad platforms that aren’t in sync. In fact, in a recent survey of 300 clients, marketers and agencies, they told us their team members are spending almost two days a week working across various digital platforms, often on manual workflow tasks. They estimate an integrated digital platform could liberate a third of that time. That’s an extra month every year that each team member can invest in other campaigns and new business.

Based on what we’ve heard from our customers, we challenged ourselves to re-invent ad buying with a unified platform:

• Can we build an ad management platform that’s comprehensive, so that clients can manage all channels in one place, across all formats and devices?
• Can we build a seamless platform, so that clients can easily optimize, tailor, measure and compare all elements of their campaigns, using a common language and interface?
• Can we ensure that it’s customizable, so that marketers can easily plug in their own technology, data and third-party suppliers?
• Can we make ad buying faster, to dramatically speed up data analysis and slash manual campaign management activities?

A platform that works better together
DoubleClick Digital Marketing is our answer. The new platform comprises the following components, which will be fully integrated and work together to enable seamless ad campaign management for agencies and advertisers:

• DoubleClick Digital Marketing Manager, our upgraded DoubleClick ad server, used by thousands of marketers and agencies worldwide to manage directly bought ad space.
• DoubleClick Bid Manager, our new demand-side platform, rebuilt on our DoubleClick technology, making it faster and more flexible. Many Invite Media customers are currently in the process of being upgraded to the new DSP. Last year, spending on Invite Media grew by about 50%, and we believe these new investments will create even more momentum for the exchange ecosystem.
• DoubleClick Search, our cross-engine search management platform that was completely rebuilt last year and is natively integrated into the DoubleClick platform. DoubleClick Search is used by 6 of the largest 10 agencies, and is creating efficiency gains of up to 65%.
• DoubleClick Studio, our rich media creative solution, now with Teracent’s dynamic creative technology built in, which powers engaging and intelligent ad units. In 2011, rich media ads accounted for 10% of all display ads, doubling in volume over 12 months.
• Finally, Google Analytics, which will enable attribution modelling, conversion reports and site traffic reporting to be incorporated seamlessly into ad campaigns.

We’ve invested significantly in this area, because we believe that such a system would dramatically improve digital marketing—growing the pie for publishers, funding great online content for users, and helping marketers grow their businesses.

What are we making possible?
With the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, we’re enabling:

• Smarter creative that works with your media buy and that dynamically responds in real-time, with the audience in mind.
• More responsive campaigns that can “learn” the channels where consumers interact and quickly respond with the most appropriate creative, message and offer across all screens (for example, using a single set of frequency capping, remarketing and creative optimization signals across the entire campaign, helping to deliver the right ad as users move through the marketing funnel—from awareness to conversion).
• Creating greater value for your business and campaigns, enabling a better understanding across channels and formats (e.g., how does rich media perform versus video?); and facilitating real-time, smarter optimization decisions to reduce cost and increase campaign performance (for example, should you reduce bids on your search keywords and exchange buying while increasing your bids to run more video ads?).

A big step forward
We’re often asked about the future of digital advertising. We’re passionate about this industry. It’s the fuel that powers the digital world and a powerful engine of growth and employment. Over the last decade, a remarkably successful industry has been built via humble web banners, repurposed pre-roll video ads, desktop computers and a patchwork of ad buying tools. However, for marketers, the combination of re-imagined creative tools, reinvented measurement solutions and re-vamped ad buying platforms can propel digital advertising into a $200 billion industry that funds and supports great content.

In the coming days on this blog, and on the DoubleClick Publishers blog, we’ll provide more details of the new buying platform and discuss other announcements from our DoubleClick Insights event, including new solutions for our DFP and Ad Exchange partners.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Display Advertising

There has been explosive growth in ad technology over the last 20 years. From each of our perspectives -- whether you are an agency, an advertiser, publisher or a technology provider -- we can all still see unprecedented opportunities as the digital world continues to grow and diversify.

We believe that as an industry, we’re on a common digital journey and that the next wave of innovation in ad tech will come from us all working better together.

However, like all great opportunities, there are challenges and questions, such as:

• How do we unlock the next $50 billion of opportunity for digital advertising? 
• How do we deliver those immersive, interactive experiences to today’s empowered consumer demands? 
• What do we, as part of the ad tech ecosystem, need to build to create even more value for our clients and consumers?

On June 5th we’re hosting DoubleClick Insights to start exploring some answers to these questions. Senior leaders from top agencies, advertisers and publishers will help lead the conversation -- and you’re invited to join via the live stream! Register here.

The agenda will include topics such as:

Adapting to the Empowered Consumer:
Neal Mohan, Vice President, Display Advertising at Google will be joined by David Kenny, Chairman & CEO, The Weather Channel Companies, and James Pitaro, Co-President, Disney Interactive Media Group, to discuss how technology is being used to deliver new content and advertising experiences to consumers.

If We Build It, Will They (Consumers) Come?
Terry Kawaja, CEO and Co-Founder, Luma Partners (and creator of the now legendary LUMAscape chart) will lead a conversation about the ad tech ecosystem, and what it needs to do next to add value for agencies, publishers, marketers – and ultimately consumers. Terry will be joined onstage by:

• Omar Tawokol, Chief Executive Officer, BlueKai
• Greg Stuart, Global CEO of Mobile Marketing Association
• Kurt Unkel, President, VivaKi 
• Shishir Mehrota, Vice President of Product Management, YouTube

Outside the Box: Technology = Creative Friend or Foe?
Technology is supposed to make the life of a marketer easier. For our final conversation, we’re going to focus on the question of: Is this technology exploring resulting in better marketing? Or, is it just resulting in mediocre creative and complexity for both consumers and marketers? Karim Temsamani, Vice President - New Products and Solutions, Google moderates the conversation with leaders from creative agencies, iconic brands and publishers including:

• Brad Ruffkess, Global Connection, Coca-Cola
• Mike Lowenstern, Managing Director of Digital Advertising, R/GA
• Peter Minnium, Head of Digital Brand Initiatives, IAB 
• John Caldwell, Chief Digital Officer, National Geographic

The live stream will start on June 5, 2012, at 9:00 am PDT, and you’ll be able to watch from your computer, tablet, or mobile device. To learn more about our highlighted speakers go to the Speakers page on our site.

Please register for this virtual event by visiting the DoubleClick Insights Live Stream page.

DoubleClick Insights
Tuesday, June 5th 2012
9:00am - 1:00pm PST
Set event reminder today

Following us on Google+ or Twitter (@DoubleClick and @DoubleClick_pub)? Use the #dclkinsights tag as you're watching the event to ask questions or share comments during the event?

Posted by Stephen Kliff and Scott Brown, DoubleClick Marketing

We hope you can join us on the Think with Google Google+ page on Thursday June 7th at 4:30pm EST/ 1:30pm PST to learn from mobile thought leaders Time Warner Cable and their partner agency Leapfrog Online to understand how a well executed mobile search marketing campaign helped grow Time Warner mobile revenue from 0% to 10% of total digital sales in just 3 months. Google’s Andy Miller, Head of Global Mobile Search Sales and Strategy, hosts Rob Roy, VP and GM of e-Commerce and Interactive Marketing at Time Warner Cable, and mobile guru Cass Baker, EVP of Leapfrog Online, as the three of them explore insights from Time Warner Cable’s phenomenal success in acquiring new customers through mobile.

Tune-in for tips and strategies on putting together a winning mobile marketing campaign, how to best take advantage of click-to-call, Time Warner Cable’s latest mobile success metrics, and the latest Google has seen in mobile search momentum. We’ll be releasing a full case study here on our blog that you can read to learn more. We hope you’ll be there. Details on how to tune in:

In order to view the Hangout on Air, visit the Think with Google Google+ page at 4:30pm EST on June 7th, look for the stream post, and click to tune in. Don’t forget to be signed into Google+!

On June 7th, look for the Hangout on Air post like the image above on the Think with Google +page and click to tune-in!

Posted by Kevin Otsuka, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads