For the first time, Google will give advertisers the ability to buy programmatic native advertisements in DoubleClick Bid Manager across smartphones, tablets, and desktop. The ads will match the look, feel and style of their surrounding content on a publisher’s Web site.
The news, announced Tuesday at the annual Google DoubleClick Leadership Summit, follows the theme of creating better and faster ad experiences for mobile-first on smartphones and tablets. Addressable television could become a possibility for the future, but it's not a primary focus for this launch.
Advertisers will upload headlines, images and copy, the components of the native ads. The DoubleClick platform will automatically assemble each piece to fit the context and format of the publisher's site or the format of the mobile app in which the advertisement will serve.
The technology will automatically render the ad in native ad positions.
"Some publishers moved faster toward streamlining user experiences in mobile, and in some cases our ads have not accelerated at the same rate to adapt," said Dan Taylor, managing director of Google display.
For publishers, Google now offers a complete native ads solution in DoubleClick. Publishers can make all their Web and app native ad inventory available programmatically or through traditional direct sales.
The platform launches with Time Warner, an entertainment brand, as Google's initial global partner. DoubleClick will work with all of Time Warner’s businesses, networks and brands, such as "Game of Thrones," "Silicon Valley," "Harry Potter," the NBA and CNN, as well as their agencies, for programmatic buying, ad serving, and measurement globally.
Time Warner is not alone when it comes to increasing investments in programmatic.
In 2015, programmatic video revenue for TV and media companies rose more than six times on DoubleClick for Publishers. Video spend from advertisers using Programmatic Direct on DoubleClick Bid Manager grew more than seven times. The number of Programmatic Direct deals on DoubleClick AdExchange tripled, per Google stats.
Google also said it is making progress in helping companies improve the performance of their Web sites through the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project. Its research shows the average mobile site takes 19 seconds to load, but mobile sites that load within five seconds can earn up to two times more revenue than those at the average.
To help make the mobile web faster for users, Google joined a global community of publishers and other tech companies to launch the open sourced project AMP. Early analysis shows mobile Web pages that use AMP HTML load four times faster and use 10 times less data on average than non-AMP mobile web pages.
While AMP continues to make a difference for a variety of publishers, such as The Washington Post, speeding slow-loading pages isn't enough.
Google also recently launched AMP for Ads, and AMP for Landing Pages. "Now that we see success with publishers AMP-ready pages loading four times faster and using 10 times less data, it's time to turn our attention to improve ads," Taylor said.