The past (and future) of display advertising according to Google

This week marks two years since Google completed its acquisition of DoubleClick. What’s its vision for online display advertising going forward?

Susan Wojcicki, Vice President of Product Management at Google, explains on Google’s blog that the first online display advertisement — a simple, clickable image — appeared online over 16 years ago.

Nowadays, internet users are likely to see display ads — image, text, video and rich-media formats — on most of the websites they visit.

“These ads are crucial to the internet,” explains Wojcicki. “They provide information about thousands of products, services and businesses. They help to fund the web content and services that we all use. And they enable large and small advertisers to reach new customers, increase sales and grow their businesses.”

Most of all, they make up the most lucrative advertising business thee world has ever seen. It was display ads, after all, that signaled the beginning of the digital marketing era.

Wojcicki says, “I’ve watched display advertising evolve from a series of simple, static images, to the incredible creative units that we see today.”

She explains that the best display ads today are often like mini-websites with complex animations, stunning graphics or videos, interactive and social elements.

As technology enables better ways of matching ads, display advertising is becoming more relevant to the audience that views them and the website that hosts them. In addition, they’re bought and sold across the web more seamlessly than ever before.

“Our belief in the potential of display advertising has spurred our investments in this area,” says Wojcicki. “We started investing seriously nearly six years ago, by offering display ad formats on our AdSense partner sites in the Google Content Network (which now comprises over a million online publishers). About three years ago, we acquired YouTube and began to offer various display advertising options.”

And two years ago, Google acquired DoubleClick, a leading provider of display advertising technology. Since then, the search giant has been busy integrating the DoubleClick and Google technologies, and unveiling new features to improve display advertising for users, advertisers and online publishers alike.

By combining Google and DoubleClick technologies, Google has made significant enhancements to advertising on the Google Content Network.

Wojcicki says that Google is now also working to provide an integrated solution that enables advertisers and agencies to plan, buy, create, serve and measure display ads across the web, in a single interface.

For the longest time, getting a display ad campaign up and running has been inefficient and cumbersome, she explains.

In September 2009, Google launched the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange. The Ad Exchange is a real-time marketplace that helps large online publishers, ad networks and agency networks buy and sell display advertising space. The new Ad Exchange is a major step towards creating a more open display advertising ecosystem for everyone, according to Google.

 “AdWords advertisers can run ads on sites in the Ad Exchange, using their existing AdWords interface. This gives AdWords advertisers more high quality sites to run display ads on. Similarly, our AdSense publishers are benefiting from more high-quality display advertisers coming through the Ad Exchange,” says Wojcicki.

She concludes with, “Our work in recent years is really only the beginning of what’s possible in this area.”

Stay tuned.