Google ad exchange launches

Google unveiled details of its ad exchange to agencies and publishers in July (nma 23 July 2009), allowing buyers and sellers to trade ad inventory in real time. It allows Google to strengthen its position in the display market.

Publishers will have control over where their ads appear and the ability to block specific advertisers, networks and formats.

Laurent Cordier, DoubleClick Ad Exchange European sales director, said, “With its complexity and measurement difficulties, many advertisers aren’t bothering with display ads. In turn, publishers aren’t getting as much revenue as they could, which isn’t good for the web. Our display advertising business, which includes the Google Content Network, YouTube and DoubleClick, is designed to grow the display advertising pie for everyone.

“Our goals are to use our technology, infrastructure and advertising expertise to simplify the system for buying and selling display ads, deliver better performance that advertisers can measure, and open up the ecosystem allowing users, advertisers and publishers to participate,” he added.

Louisa Wong, head of network advertising at Sky Digital Media, said, “The recent emergence of ad exchanges is an interesting development in our advertising ecosystem, serving both buy and sell sides with complementary propositions. For buyers, they provide access to remnant inventory for the purpose of delivering direct response campaigns. From a publisher’s point of view they help us to monetise remnant inventory while controlling buyer access.”

Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1bn in April 2007 and this is the first major overhaul of the latter’s ad exchange since the acquisition.

Customers working on the old exchange will migrate to the new version from this week.

News of the launch comes after new media age revealed Jeannie Gammon, head of media platforms at DoubleClick, is to leave the company at the end of the month (nma.co.uk 15 September 2009). Cordier refused to comment on who is to replace Gammon.

Last month Google opened up its AdSense ad network to third-party networks for the first time (nma.co.uk 28 August 2009).

This story first appeared on newmediaage.co.uk