By TANZINA VEGA
September 9, 2010

Google is rolling out a new advertising campaign on Thursday for its display advertising platform. The campaign, called Watch This Space, will run in advertising trade magazines and in other print and online media. The “space” to watch makes reference to the blocks of display advertising users see on the Web pages they browse.

Google has not kept its display advertising business a secret but this campaign represents the company’s first effort at marketing the platform at this scale. A video for the campaign highlights the different features of the advertising platform like its targeting technology, which allows advertisers to serve specific ads to specific users, its ability to support a variety of creative elements like rich media and video, its measurement analytics, its tools that simplify media planning and buying online and its open advertising exchange that allows marketers to bid on advertising space in real time.

“With years of significant investment, display is now very much a core business for Google. As an industry, display is at the beginning of an unprecedented growth spurt. We wanted to explain how we’re focused on making it even better, and to show agencies and marketers how many new opportunities there are for them today,” said Rob Shilkin, a spokesperson for Google.

The campaign uses Google’s primary color scheme with blue, yellow, red and green advertising “spaces” and their related pixel sizes like 300 x 250 or 728 x 300 in the upper-right-hand corner of each box.

In a blog post, Neal Mohan, the vice president for product management for Google, said the display advertising efforts were focused on three areas: simplifying online display advertising for marketers, delivering better performance and making display advertising more accessible to businesses of all sizes.

According to the blog post, 40 percent of the ads Google shows are non-text ads, not counting the ads that run alongside search results. Google’s display network consists of over 1 million partner sites including YouTube. The Ad Council, Hawaiian Airlines, Lipton and Quaker Oats are among the case studies Google has highlighted that have already used the advertising model.