First, Google is launching a new version of DFA, which it is calling DoubleClick Campaign Manager. It’s the biggest upgrade to the core ad server that in the fifteen years that it’s been around. Google says it “completely re-imagines” ad management and the ad serving process. This will be available to all advertisers globally in the coming months.

Second, Google announced that it is taking steps to integrate Wildfire into the DoubleClick platform. Wildfire is a social marketing platform Google acquired last summer (you know, the company Mark Zuckerberg’s sister Arielle works for).

“Today’s digital platforms play a critical role in helping marketers adapt to constantly evolving formats and channels,” says Neal Mohan, Vice President, Display Advertising at Google. “Today, social is a good example of that; it has changed the way we communicate, share and interact. And not just with our loved ones — 80% of consumers say social interactions with brands influence their purchase decisions.”

“Now, marketers can address a critical part of the customer journey, and do it alongside search, display, rich media, video and mobile as part of the broader DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform,” he says. “This is just the beginning of how we’re incorporating Wildfire’s technology. There are more exciting things to come in this area.”

Google will also soon introduce Cross-Sell in DoubleClick for Publishers. This will automatically manage joint slaes for YouTube partners. They’re also testing some native advertising features with a few publishes, and will soon expand to more. Google also says it is focused on “unlocking new ways of measurement” with the rollout of Active View in DoubleClick for Publishers, AdSense, and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Finally, Google will soon release a tool called Google Web Designer, which it says “will empower creative professionals to create cutting-edge advertising as well as engaging web content like sites and applications.” It will be free, and it will be available in the coming months.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has reportedly been considering opening up a new investigation into Google’s display ad business.

Bloomberg cites sources who wished not to be named, as saying the FTC is in the “preliminary stages” of a probe into whether the company “is using its leadership in the online display-advertising market to illegally curb competition,” but that it “may not expand into a larger probe.” Bloomberg’s Brian Womack and Sara Forden report:

FTC investigators are examining whether Google is using its position in U.S. display ads — a $17.7 billion industry that includes the sale of banner ads on websites — to push companies to use more of its other services, a practice that can be illegal under antitrust laws, the people said.

A similar report has come out from Reuters, who says its source said, “it was unlikely that the Federal Trade Commission had sent out civil investigative demands in relation to the probe, which would be the sign of a formal and more serious investigation.” Reuters reports:

The new line of inquiry focuses on tools acquired when Google bought display ad company DoubleClick in 2007; other firms which specialize in helping Web publishers sell ads to put on their websites are complaining to the FTC, the source said.

The firms have accused Google of leveraging some of its most popular DoubleClick products, such as the ad managing system which has an estimated 80 percent of the market, to push websites to use other products, including Ad Exchange where websites swap ads, the source said.

Google, which is not commenting on the prospect of a new investigation has apparently not been contacted about one.

Google continues to face various antitrust probes around the world, including in Europe, Canada, Argentina and South Korea.

It’s described as a customizable toolkit for building real-time bidding applications, and combines Google Cloud Platform with DoubleClick’s real-time bidding.

Google’s Open Bidder Team says in a blog post, “Currently, companies interested in building their own real-time bidding technology face significant barriers to overcome, including: Development and maintenance of a scalable and secure infrastructure for their bidder; Development of a robust system to apply bidding logic to incoming bid requests; Development of a bidder with sufficient latency at scale to meet real-time bidding requirements.”

“Open Bidder removes these barriers by providing a customizable bidder toolkit with a reference implementation that developers can adapt to plug in their own bidding logic and data,” the team explains. “Additionally, we provide an administration console for managing bidder and load balancer instances within Google Compute Engine. With Open Bidder buyers can significantly lower the latency of their bidders by leveraging Google Compute Engine’s scale, speed, and proximity to DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Now buyers can focus on developing new and innovative bidding logic instead of worrying about the complexity of scaling to over 250,000 qps while responding in under 100ms.”

Google has been working on the project for over year, and has been testing it in the alpha phase, but it’s now it’s ready for beta. If you want in on it, you can apply here.

Documentation for Open Bidder is available here.

Here’s a sample from Google’s blog post on the release:

As digital marketing continues to evolve, we’re seeing a host of new questions crop up around search — the channel that used to be “all figured out.” How can search win the moments that matter and quickly capture the attention of consumers? What is the new definition of an “effective” search campaign? And how do you measure it all?

We travelled the globe and spoke directly with clients to understand what best resonates with them in the constantly-evolving online space, and heard the answer loud and clear: cats.

“Over the past year, we’ve seen tremendous growth in cat-related online activity,” said Amit Varia, Paw-duct Manager for DoubleCat Search. “Cats populate just about every corner of the internet. With DoubleCat Search, we wanted to design a UI that aligns with a tech-savvy user’s natural affinity toward cats, to deliver the most intuitive, LOL-worthy search management experience.”

The offering takes advantage of a new UI:

Google says it will be rolling out additional features in the coming weeks. On the menu: laser pointer alerts, the “maximize cheeseburgers” bid strategy, and the ability to upload paw prints via API.

Google said on Wednesday that it will begin supporting enhanced campaigns in DoubleClick Search in the coming weeks “to help marketers run effective search campaigns across devices, as well as across channels.”

As noted, not everyone is a critic of Google’s move toward enhanced campaigns. We spoke with Larry Kim, founder and CTO of Wordstream, whcih was one of three companies outside of Google that worked with the company on the project in the months leading up to its launch.

“Enhanced Campaigns represent the biggest single change to the basic structure of AdWords campaigns in the past 10 years,” he told us. “The new campaign structure will greatly simplify targeting and bidding for different devices and locations. It’s a win-win for both Google and advertisers.”

You can read more about Enhanced Campaigns here.

Publishers can use internal redirects when delivering a DFA campaign from DFP, “reducing impression loss, improving ad load times and minimizing the administrative overhead of reconciliation,” Google says.

“Custom creatives are useful for delivering bespoke creatives developed in-house or provided by advertisers, Google says, adding, “You can now include mobile impressions – with mobile targeting information – in your data transfer files.”

Google has also added some features for improving the mobile experience. For example, latitude and longitude data can be provided to DFP for geo-targeting precision. You can target and report on whole categories of devices (like smartphones, tablets or feature phones) at once. Additionally, you can deliver a fullscreen video ad in mobile apps on Android and iOS. The video interstitial type includes the option to auto-close the interstitial after the video has completed.

More on recently added DoubleClick features here.

“We know that effective bid optimization starts with clearly defined goals,” the company says in a blog post. “Now, we’re bringing you two new ways to express your goals in a rich language to meet your unique business objectives.”

Those would be the ability to define your goal as a Target ROAS and the ability to select floodlight tags with the Target Spend strategy.

“We now support Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), to target your return in revenue for every $1.00 of spend,” Google explains. “To reach the ROAS target percentage, DS will raise or lower the bid based on how the actual ROAS compares to the target ROAS. Similar to ERS, you’ll be able to define multiple ROAS target goals over a customizable set of Floodlight activities.”

With the Target Spend strategy, Google syas you can enter your monthly budget, along with the KPI you want to maximize, and set your goals for specific Floodlight activities.

The Primary Constraint column provides insights into constraints that might be limiting keyword bids. “If the Performance Bidding Suite is unable to apply the ideal bid, the Primary constraint column explains the rationale, and also displays the percentage of affected spend,” Google says. “This Primary constraint data is shown at both bid strategy and keywords levels. For even greater granularity at the keyword level, we also show the Target bid we would have set, if our algorithms weren’t limited by the primary constraint.”

Google has a whitepaper about bid optimization available here, which you might find useful for getting the most out of DoubleClick Search.

“The last few years have been busy, as we’ve worked to take the best of Invite Media, DoubleClick, and Google to build a demand side platform that helps our agency and advertiser partners buy display better,” says Payam Shodjai, Senior Product Manager, DoubleClick Bid Manager.

The key benefits to Bid Manager, according to the company, are unified, streamlined workflows, powerful targeting, and cross-channel opportunities.

“Marketers have long known that running cross-channel campaigns can yield the best results, but increasing media fragmentation over the years has made it challenging to act on this seamlessly,” says Shodjai. “Thanks to our unified DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, DoubleClick Bid Manager can be a seamless part of cross-channel marketing efforts. Display remarketing from search ads is an early proof point of how marketers can take advantage of powerful cross-channel features on our platform.”

DoubleClick Bid Manager is available globally to international advertisers, and for media buying in over 40 countries.

More on the offering in this blog post from Google.

“You’re no longer restricted by these object’s locations; you can apply labels to any campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords within an advertiser,” the company says in a blog post. “Also, as with labels applied to keywords, you can add multiple labels to one object for even more reporting flexibility.”

Labels are created the same way, by going to “Create Labels,” and once you’ve created them, apply them applicably by finding the page that contains the campaigns, ad groups, ads or keywords you want to add. In the reporting table, select the check boxes next to what you want the label to be applied to, and in the toolbar, click “Labels”. Select the label you want to apply, and click “Apply”.

You can find a summary of reporting stats for labels, as well as stat breakdowns for all objects in the label by object type. You can also filter by labels.

“Labels support multi-level inheritance,” Google notes. “For example, when you apply a label to a campaign, DS will also apply the label to the ad groups in the campaign, as well as to the keywords and ads in the ad groups. DS will also automatically add new keywords, ads, and ad groups in the campaign to the label, and they will appear in all reports and filters that use the label.”

You can see only the labels you’ve applied to objects from the existing Labels column, but there is a new All Labels column as well.

The tool includes site content monitoring to help highlight potential issues with ads. It will analyze content at the URL level for each page that your ad is served upon. It uses 18 classifiers for “unsafe” content categories. Among these are: gambing, adult, drugs, profanity, etc. It does this across 11 languages.

“In addition, we also allow you to customize content profiles so you can define for yourself the kinds of sites that are okay or not safe, and place them accordingly on a white list or flagged list,” says product manager Aaron Nelson. “Geo verification is available to help identify ads serving outside your preferred geo.”

“It’s as simple as signing in to DFA and navigating to the reporting interface to start using DoubleClick Verification. There’s no need to implement another tag or sign another contract to get started,” says Nelson. “DoubleClick Verification not only provides a seamless experience for clients, it’s enabled across all ad impressions and campaigns in DFA today. In the future, as part of DoubleClick Digital Marketing, it will cover the entire scope of your display buy across the platform.”

More info about the product is available in this downloadable fact sheet (pdf) Google has released.