Google announced the launch of the Audience Extension feature in DoubleClick for Publishers

“Audience extension enables you to reach your audience across other publishers, bundle these impressions with your own inventory, and resell those packages to your direct advertisers at a premium,” explains business product manager Sean Harvey in a blog post. “Audience extension inventory comes from the vast pool of brand safe inventory via publishers on DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Audience Extension can be used without leaving DFP; flight dates, targeting and bid parameters are set directly within your core ad server.”

“Audience extension is best suited to publishers with high value content channels within their owned and operated inventory that are consistently sold out, or who have defined audiences onsite that have a value to advertisers that transcends the context of their own site,” explains Harvey. “It’s also used by publishers looking to reach a critical mass of users from a given geo-location.”

Among the key benefits to the Audience Extension, Google says, are having a single place to manage, execute and optimize buying across owned/operated and external inventory, bid management capabilities integrated in the core ad server, integrated data management, cross-inventory performance reporting and complexity hidden from the sales team and ad operations.

The feature was announced at the London ATS Trading Summit today.