AOL says the pick-up will bring further scale to its suite of ad tools for advertisers, agencies, and publishers, and that it will specifically be used in AOL’s "Project Devil" display ad format. 

Project Devil ads feature all functionality within the ad, so users don’t have to leave the page, and can include rich media content. "Devil Pages" have only a single ad on a page to give advertisers "complete ownership".

"Pictela is an outstanding fit for AOL as we re-imagine the intersection of content, advertising and the consumer experience," said Jeff Levick, AOL’s President of Global Advertising and Strategy. "Pictela’s product development team is best-in-class, and its beautiful, content rich, media display formats meet Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Online Publishers Association (OPA) standards that run across AOL Media properties and other publisher sites. We’ve taken one important step towards spotlighting quality ad content with Project Devil on AOL Media properties, and now we’re taking a second by bringing Pictela into the AOL Advertising family."

"We believe that joining AOL is an outstanding opportunity to combine with a company that is as committed to redefining brand advertising on the Web as we are," added Greg Rogers, Co-Founder and CEO of Pictela. "As one of the world’s premium publishers, AOL will not only be one of our biggest customers, it will also be our greatest resource with the scale, technology and commitment to world-class content to help realize the true potential of the online environment."

Pictela will remain a separate group within AOL Advertising, and will continue to provide its products and services to outside partners. Financial term of the acquisition were not revealed.

Facebook led all online publishers in Q3 with 297 billion display ad impressions, representing 23.1 percent market share. Facebook’s market share has increased 13.9 percentage points from 9.2 percent in Q3 2009. Yahoo Sites ranked second during the most recent quarter with 140 billion impressions (11.0 percent), followed by Microsoft Sites with 64 billion impressions (5.0 percent) and Fox Interactive Media with 48 billion impressions (3.8 percent).

“The U.S. online display advertising market exhibited considerable strength in the third quarter with nearly 1.3 trillion ad impressions delivered,” said Jeff Hackett, comScore senior vice president.

“Just one year ago we were still in the midst of an advertising recession, but several growth drivers have contributed to sustained improvements over the past few quarters. The ability to buy specific audiences is enabling a greater number of display ads to be delivered on target, display formats are improving at a rapid rate, and the quality of creative is getting better every day. As publishers prove the value of online display ad campaigns, digital should continue to carve out a bigger piece of the advertising pie.”

AT&T ranked as the top online display advertiser in Q3 with 21.1 billion impressions, accounting for 1.6 percent of display ads. Scottrade ranked second with 14.9 billion impressions (1.2 percent), followed by Verizon with 14.6 billion impressions (1.1 percent).

UK Internet users received more than 221 billion display ads during the third quarter, marking a 34 percent increase compared to a year ago.

“Following the ad recession that occurred from late 2008 through most of 2009, we are now seeing a strong resurgence in the online display ad market,” said Mike Read, SVP and Managing Director, comScore Europe.

“A key driver of this growth is the retail sector, which increased over 300 percent in terms of impressions delivered since last year. In the run up to Christmas with consumers searching for gifts, the growth in online advertising is likely to continue its ascent.”

Facebook had more display ad impressions than any other online publisher during Q3 2010 with more than 68 billion display ad impressions, representing 31 percent market share.Microsoft sites ranked second with nearly 14 billion impressions (6.2 percent), followed by eBay with 8.8 billion impressions (4.0 percent) and Google sites with 8.2 billion impressions (3.7 percent).

Virgin Group, primarily featuring ads for its media brands, was the top online display advertiser in Q3 2010 with 4.4 billion impressions (2.0 percent of UK display). Telefonica Europe held the second position with 2.9 billion (1.3 percent), followed by BSkyB with 2.6 billion (1.2 percent) and BT Group with 2.3 billion (1.0 percent).

"With the strongest first half on record, 2010 has so far indicated that Internet advertising is back, and better than ever," says PwC Assurance partner  David Silverman. "While the recession clearly affected short term growth in 2009, with double digit growth in both search and display during the first six month of 2010, the long term prospects continue to be strong."

"Consumers’ appetite for immersive online experiences is limitless as technological innovation and creativity give rise to new forms of entertainment and information in the digital age," says IAB President and CEO  Randall Rothenberg. "This report highlights marketers’ ongoing adoption of interactive media to build brands—and that’s only going to continue."

Display-related advertising (including banners, rich media, digital video and sponsorships) totaled over $4.4 billion in the first  half of the year. That’s up 16% from the same period in 2009.

Digital video reached its highest half-year performance ever, up 31% from 2009. Search advertising accounted for the largest percentage of overall interactive spend at 47 %. It accounted for  $5.7 billion for the period, up 11.6% from 2009.

"Interactive advertising revenue is on a strong upward trajectory," adds Sherrill Mane, SVP, Industry Services, IAB. "Nearly all types of ad formats are showing positive movement and marketers across all advertising categories, most notably consumer packaged goods and pharmaceuticals, are increasing their investment in digital media."

This is on top of all of the organic search marketing and social media marketing companies are participating in. 

In short, these principles are: making life more efficient, total revenue management, more insight and control, betting on openness, everything is going to be "display".

To me, there are two particularly interesting nuggets within this post – "immediate ads" and a server dedicated to automatically learn where and when a given ad will get the best response. Following are a couple quotes from the piece.

"Things like new standards for video ad serving and systems that connect buyers and sellers are helping publishers support the most engaging and creative ads across their sites. But there are quantum leaps to come in this area, for small and large publishers," says Google Director of Product Management Jonathan Bellack. "Think of a political candidate who is seeking donations on his or her website—the candidate can receive money in seconds. Imagine if publishers—even the smallest website—had tools that enabled advertisers to click a button on their site to upload an ad, let them pay for it with a credit card, and then deliver this ad—through the publisher’s ad server—within minutes. This sort of ‘immediate ad’ will become possible as ad serving technology continues to simplify the process of buying and selling ad space."

"There’s no question that delivering the right ad to the right user at the right time delivers better results," says Bellack. "We have years of experience in doing this with search and text ads; we’re now bringing that experience to the world of display. This means investing in a smarter ad server that can automatically learn where and when a given ad will get the best response, as well as manage delivery to deliver those improved results for publishers. This new ad server can even anticipate a publisher’s future events and adjust delivery accordingly—for example, if traffic drops off every weekend, the ad server can automatically speed up during the week to keep everything moving smoothly."

Other topics mentioned are Google’s variety of tools designed to provide data, reports, and controls, etc. It also talks about open APIs enabling the building of apps that cater to "advertising apps".

Give the post a read if you’re interested in the strategies Google is focusing on with regards to display advertising.

"These ads appear only on Google Images, and they let you include a thumbnail image alongside your lines of text," explains Google Images Product Manager Nate Smith. "we hope they’re a useful way to reach folks who are specifically looking for images."

Advertisers can review specific performance metrics for their ads on Google Images. They are priced the same as standard AdWords ads with cost-per-click pricing.

Advertisers can create the ads using Google’s Display Ad Builder. They can use a template to pair relevant ad text with targeted images.

To create an Image Search Ad, simply go to your AdWords account, select the campaign or ad group where you want to create it, click the Ads tab, select Display ad builder from the "new ad" drop-down menu, then select "templates for search" and choose Image Search Ad.

Google recommends that advertisers create a new ad group so that they can target keywords, adjust bids, and track performance for ads specifically on Google Images.

To provide a little background info: Omnicom Media Group is the media services division of Omnicom Group, which has over 5,000 clients in 100 countries.  It includes three full service media networks, and can, in other words, definitely live up to this commitment.

As for the specifics of said commitment, Emily Steel wrote earlier this morning that Omnicom "is expected to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy display ads for its clients through Google over the next two years, said a person familiar with the situation."

Then, "In return, Google will work with Omnicom to build a global ‘trading desk’ that allows the company to buy display ads more easily on Google’s ad exchange, an auction-like system that matches ad buyers and sellers to advertising space across large groups of websites."

Which isn’t a bad deal at all from the search giant’s perspective.

The arrangement could benefit Google in other ways, too, since additional advertising agencies are likely to follow Omnicom’s example.

Microsite Effectiveness

I wondered if that particular finding couldn’t be construed as a call to improve a campaign’s message overall, if its message isn’t clear before the customer views the microsite. 

"I think the finding speaks more to the strength of microsites than to a weakness in the campaign’s ads—that 7.8% can be compared to the average impact of display and video ads, which typically drive an additional 2.3% of people to become aware of a campaign’s message," Eule tells WebProNews. "Consumers who enter a microsite are generally more open to hearing what the brand has to say, and tend to spend more time engaging with the brand than someone simply served a display ad while performing other activities on a webpage."

Microsites normally utilize online ad formats such as display and video to drive traffic to them, of course. 

"A display ad can also say only so much within a 300×250 or 728×90 unit compared to a microsite which has a full page or multiple pages of real estate to leverage," she adds. "It’s worth noting, however, that a media plan can potentially reach 100s of times as many people as a microsite, so while the percent impacted favors microsites, the number of people impacted may still be higher with display or video ads."

Dynamic Logic says that data from 182 of its studies (conducted globally), reveal that microsites have a substantial impact on consumer awareness and perception of a brand. According to the firm, microsite visitation leads to significant increases in all standard brand metrics.

Encouraging User Engagement and Driving Purchase Intent

The firm finds that the site attribute that determines the largest branding impact varies by the campaign goal.

"We’ve seen lots of creative content on microsites," says Euele. "This can include originally produced videos, games, contests, or forums that generate discussion between consumers. While those activities certainly incorporate the brand in some way, I think the best microsites are ones that don’t focus on the brand directly, but on a topic that consumers feel passionate about."

"This approach is riskier because the connection between the brand and the topic needs to be obvious to consumers, but if the linkage makes sense, more consumers will come to the site and spend more time with it when they feel that the brand is relevant to their interests and values," she adds. "That connection can be extremely influential at the time of purchase."

The firm says that in terms of costs, an effective microsite requires a decent investment towards production of the site as well as media for traffic drivers.

Last summer, Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested that display ads would be Google’s next big billion-dollar business. According to BusinessWeek, a Barclays Capital analyst says display ads will account for about 4% of Google’s total sales in 2010. This would be a 40% increase from their contribution in 2009. BW’s Douglas MacMillan reports:

Sales of video and banner ads on YouTube, the world’s most popular video site, are expected by analysts at Barclays to contribute the bulk of Google’s display revenue this year, about $700 million. And with DoubleClick, Google acquired a technology that handles the placement of display ads on sites across the Web. "Display is now a key business for us," says Susan Wojcicki, Google’s vice-president of product management and one of the company’s earliest employees.

Neal Mohan, the executive in charge of Google’s display business, says Google will draw on its strength in search-related advertising to expand in display. It became the leader in search by using algorithms to help it know which ads to place where. "Our goal is to bring the science of search to the art of display," Mohan says.

Advertisers will probably not be shy about getting on board with that. "Research has shown that exposure to both search and display ads from the same advertiser results in a 22 percent increase for conversion rates over search alone," Rich Kahn, CEO of display ad provider eZanga told WebProNews last year.

Back in November, Google announced its acquisition of Teracent, a provider of "intelligent dynamic display advertising". It provides machine-learning algorithms, which can create customized display ads based on thousands of different creative elements.

Google says the one on the right was created with Teracent’s technology.

"Teracent’s technology can pick and choose from literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad in real-time — tweaking images, products, messages or colors," Google said. "These elements can be optimized depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads."

Before that announcement, Google launched a tool to measure the impact of display ad campaigns across the Google Content Network called Campaign Insights, which Google says can give reliable data about how a campaign has raised brand awareness or active user interest in a particular product or service. Google has also repeatedly added new templates  for advertisers to use when constructing their creative.
 

Related Articles:

> Does Size Matter in Display Advertising?

> Google Launches New Display Ad Measurement Tool

> Google Launches New Templates for Display Ads

Teracent provides machine-learning algorithms, which can create customized display ads based on thousands of different creative elements. The infrastructure Teracent brings to the table allows for real-time assembly of dynamic ads. It’s designed to determine the optimal selection of each ad element and return it based on the objectives of the campaign.

"As you know, we’ve been busy releasing new features and products to help improve display advertising on the web for everyone," Google says. "We believe that Teracent’s technology fits neatly into these efforts."

Google says the one on the right was created with Teracent’s technology.

"Teracent’s technology can pick and choose from literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad in real-time — tweaking images, products, messages or colors," the company adds. "These elements can be optimized depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads."

"The infrastructure, opportunities and technical depth that Google will provide for Teracent customers means a future of product innovation for Teracent’s dynamic ad optimization platform," Teracent says in their own announcement.

Google says the technology can help advertisers get better results from their display ad campaigns, while enabling publishers to make more money from their ad space.

Teracent’s technology will be available to all Google advertisers running display ads, including DoubleClick clients. The deal is expected to close this quarter, subject to various, but unnamed closing conditions.

Integration details will be announced after the deal is officially closed. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Related Articles:

> Does Size Matter in Display Advertising?

> Google Launches New Display Ad Measurement Tool

> Google Launches New Templates for Display Ads