Think Display with Google

Since the first online display ad ran in the mid-1990s, display advertising has become a crucial part of the Web - providing useful information for users and funding many of the online services that we all love today such as news, online video, mobile applications, email, and social networks. It has also become a $17 billion global industry though still small compared to the $171 billion spent worldwide on TV.

Today, display advertising finds itself in the midst of its quiet revolution. What started as a world of static banner ads is transforming into advertising that is interactive, dynamic, and extremely relevant. Display ads today are the ads that catch your eye as you browse the Web - interactive video ads, rich media ads with Twitter feeds, and ads that change dynamically based on the content of the page and interactions with users.

Here in Australia, 17 of the top 20 advertisers as ranked by Nielsen have run display campaigns with Google across YouTube or our network over a million publisher sites. And yet, running creativity at scale is still a complex process for advertisers, agencies, and publishers. A single display ad that loads on a website in milliseconds can take hundreds of hours to create, plan, and measure. Google wants to help remedy this.

Last night, 350 of Australia & New Zealand’s leaders in online advertising joined together to Think Display at the first Google Australia display advertising summit.

Google’s Shailesh Rao, Director of JAPAC Media & Platforms:

“Working on display advertising is part of our vision of improving the web as a whole. We want to simplify the process of buying and selling display ads, enable advertisers and agencies to get the best performance from their advertising, and open the ecosystem to even more advertisers and publishers.”

Brad Bender, Google’s director of Product Management for display:

"..bringing the science of search to the art of display."

Henrique De Castro, Google’s vice president for Global Media & Platforms Sales:

“We all know display advertising is more than just clicks and conversions. The very best display advertising creates an emotional connection with us, and we don’t yet have an algorithm for emotion. We want to take the pain out of display advertising so advertisers and agencies can spend more time doing what they do best, and that is really creative engaging and memorable ad campaigns.”

Google serves display ads across the Google Content Network, which contains over a million websites. The vast majority of publishers in the network have opted in to receiving display ads (along with text ads) and a majority of them are currently serving display ads. Google’s network reaches 79% of Australians online according to ComScore. We also offer a variety of display ad formats on YouTube such as video, image and flash ads.

Finally, with our acquisition of DoubleClick we also provide ad serving technology to publishers, agencies and advertisers, which is the infrastructure that enables billions of ads to be served each day across the web. You can find out more about these products on Google for Advertisers.

Posted by Ernesto Soriano, Product Marketing Manager - YouTube & Display